This chapter rehearses the standard intellectual history of dignity, which begins in antiquity, then moves to the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola and the eighteenth-century Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, and eventually reaches the twentieth-century development of dignity as a concept that has a prominent place in national constitutions and international human rights law and in the interpretative texts and legal commentaries thereon. In a final section, the chapter revisits Kant, concluding with the thought that it might not be possible to uproot the ideology of race which Kant helped to legitimate without tracing its connections to his ideas about human dignity.

Chapter 5 concentrates on images of the body of Christ, covering a rich terrain of painted and illustrated images and ever more lavishly embellished tabernacles. Here we will see how iconographies that were established prior to the Reformations were visited afresh by the leading artists of the day.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly important in our daily lives and so is academic research on its impact on various legal domains. One of the fields that has attracted much attention is extra-contractual or tort liability, as AI will inevitably cause damage. Reference can also be made to accidents involving autonomous vehicles. In this chapter, we will discuss some major and general challenges that arise in this context. We will thereby illustrate the remaining importance of national law to tackle these challenges and focus on procedural elements, including disclosure requirements and rebuttable presumptions. We will also illustrate how existing tort law concepts are being challenged by AI characteristics and provide an overview of regulatory answers.

In the last few chapters we have considered financial and strategic decisions made within companies, and whether they improve the value of the company. In this chapter we continue examining company decisions, and focus on a particular financial decision—the payout decision, which considers whether a company keeps the cash it holds or gives it back to investors. As we will show, this decision is important because firms can potentially increase their value—and benefit their investors—through their choice of whether to pay out cash to investors. Furthermore, as we discussed in the previous chapter, agency problems may arise when companies hold onto large amounts of cash due to managerial conflicts of interest. Thus, payout can serve an important role in corporate governance.

This chapter focuses on the litigation that followed the tsunami, which hit the Okawa Elementary School. The tsunami resulted in the death of the children visiting the school. The following litigation concerned the question of whether appropriate safety measures had been put in place at the school before the tsunami occurred. The two lawyers leading the litigation for the parents of the children report on how they used innovative approaches in the litigation proceedings. The legal innovation employed concerns the composition of the litigation team, the involvement of the children’s parents, the creation of witness statements addressing the emotional aspects of the disaster, the identification of the entity that should be liable, the doctrine determining liability, digitalisation of litigation and the distribution of risk in modern societies.

The same volume-averaging procedure used in Chapter 2 shows how to transition from the Maxwell’s equations controlling the electromagnetic fields of fundamental particles in vacuum to the continuum form of Maxwell’s equations describing the electromagnetic fields averaged over large numbers of molecules. The Maxwell stress tensor is derived for the body forces acting on the molecules. The macroscopic form of Maxwell’s equations and the associated electromagnetic fields are obtained when the frame of reference is moving with the center of mass of each collection of molecules. The laws of reversible polarization are obtained by time differentiation of the electromagnetic energy density. The law of electromigration (Ohm’s law) is obtained from a nonequilibrium thermodynamics perspective. Conditions are obtained for the neglect of the material movement in the continuum theory of electromagnetism. Electromagnetic continuity conditions are derived and used on example problems. The continuum form of Newtonian gravity is derived. Expressions for the Coriolis and centrifugal forces are derived when the frame of reference is rotating about an axis.

The provision of safe, appropriate and effective vascular access for children is complex and can be very challenging. This chapter will outline the routes available for vascular access, the factors influencing the choice of catheters and devices used and their associated complications. Choosing the most appropriate site and type of vascular access must be specific to each child and to their treatment requirements. The use of care bundles as part of an evidence-based package of care is also discussed.

Contemporary speculative genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror have generated an uncountable number of non-realist plants that can provide new ways of re-enchanting – and returning us to – the real plants with which we inhabit the planet. Depictions of fantastical plants do not, however, always reflect an environmentalist agenda, and the long pedigree of monstrous plants demonstrates considerable complexity, for example in encoding monsterised images of both coloniser and colonised in the figure of the aberrant plant, or, in African-American literature, critiquing the plantation system’s violence against human and non-human bodies. In many serialised works, the plant can serve as merely a novel monster of the week among many interchangeable excuses for action and adventure, while other texts deploy the alien plant in order to imagine different modes of consciousness and being, or offer the promise that we might communicate more meaningfully with plants. The unusual plants to be found in much botanical speculative fiction may cultivate ecological and other-species consciousness in unconventional ways, as we see in texts from authors as different as J. R. R. Tolkien in his mid-twentieth-century epic fantasies and Richard Powers in his 2018 climate change novel The Overstory.

The introduction sets out the central arguments of this study, provides a chapter overview, and surveys the different methodologies and approaches taken by scholars with regard to the question of the visual arts and their relationship to the Reformations.