In the late 1940s, the Americans and the British made unilateral claims to continental shelves and fishing conservation zones, but tried to apply the brakes to further claims when other countries followed suit. The International Law Commission was given the task of producing draft articles to guide negotiations over a single law of the sea convention, which, they hoped, would rein in future claims. A conference was convened in 1958 under the auspices of the United Nations, at which the essential question, preceding all others, was the breadth of the territorial sea – ‘the base of the pyramid’, one delegate said – on which all other claims stood. Novel concepts were also addressed, such as the continental shelf and the exploitability criterion, the existence of a ‘genuine link’ between ship and state, and the abstention policy relating to high seas fishing. The conference drafted what would become five separate conventions, on the territorial sea and contiguous zone, the high seas, high seas fishing, the continental shelf, plus a protocol on dispute settlement. Yet in the end it failed, as had its predecessor in 1930, to settle the breadth of the territorial sea.

This chapter traces the cultural history of lotus in the Chinese tradition: from its appearance in The Classic of Poetry and Han dynasty rhapsodies to the exuberant wordplay on ‘lotus’/’love” in the popular songs of the Southern Dynasties, from the flower of carnal desires to a symbol of enlightenment in Buddhism, from the neo-Confucian appropriation of the lotus as a sign of moral purity to the name of the most notorious female character in Chinese fiction, lotus is inscribed with various literary, cultural, social, and religious significance. Focusing on the changing and expanding story of the lotus, this chapter suggests that the lotus is a plant of hybridity, a site of contested meanings, and that its botanical and literary lives are intricately intertwined with the social and cultural histories of China.

Throughout his life, Johnson’s heroes were the humanist scholars – Erasmus, Roger Ascham, and above all Joseph Scaliger – who had pioneered the close textual analysis of classical texts. Unlike Swift and Pope, Johnson was not satirical about true scholarship, and he produced two major feats of scholarship in their own right: The Dictionary of the English Language and The Plays of William Shakespeare. The Dictionary’s innovation was that, following the example of the humanist lexicographers of Latin, it was compiled by reading books and recording their use of English words. The book’s most striking feature is its more than 100,000 quotations; its weakest is Johnson’s etymologies. Compiling it helped to Johnson to cement his close knowledge of Shakespeare’s plays, and so to edit them – sometimes proposing imaginative emendations, but with the caution his humanist exemplars recommended. Some of his comments, meanwhile, amount to moralistic mini-essays.

This chapter explains how the researchers talked to young people with cognitive disability, their families, and practitioners. The researchers included people with disability on the research team. The researchers wanted to know what was happening for young people with cognitive disability. They wanted to know about the world in which young people with cognitive disability lived. There was much to be learnt about working well with people with disability in research. It’s important that people with cognitive disability have a voice in the research that is about them.

For 350 years, African and European slave merchants traded with each other on the African coast as equals. Europeans generally recognized and accepted African rules on who could and could not be enslaved. When they did not, then trading relations would break down. The African names database allows the identification of the major slave-trading groups, at least for the nineteenth century. For most parts of the African Coast the ruling authority’s role was not to sell large numbers of people, but rather to provide a secure environment in which slave trading could take place. A wide-ranging database of African sellers shows that while large traders certainly existed, the great majority of sellers sold just five or fewer captives. The chapter evaluates the positions of four major Africanist scholars on relations between Europeans and Africans in light of the new quantitative work. It concludes that only one, John Thornton, has made arguments consistent with the new findings. Also it is now clear that slave traders in Africa, like those in Europe and the Americas, fronted a large labor force for growing provisions, guard-duty, and distribution of trading goods, especially in West Africa. Abolition is not likely to have had economic motives either at the level of the individual or the state.

Kanye West’s plans to build a Yeezy utopia in Wyoming run headlong into an endangered species, the Greater Sage-Grouse, whose protection must trump other development activities.

In this chapter, we argue that while it has often been suggested that utility models are a product of late nineteenth-century German thinking and that they are foreign to the United Kingdom, utility model protection was first introduced to the United Kingdom in the Utility Designs Act 1843. As such, it is clear that utility model protection has a long established (albeit somewhat tarnished) pedigree in British law and that utility model protection came into force in the United Kingdom some fifty years before its German counterpart. In this chapter we highlight the key features of the Utility Designs Act 1843, the way the Act was received, and speculate on the reasons why the Act was forgotten

This chapter attends to the regular presence of grass in poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Walt Whitman and English war poetry to recent work by Oswald and Burnett, the poetry of grass works to articulate, obscure, and heal the marks of contemporary trauma. Grass also shapes the soundscapes and visual form of poetry to the extent that, as this chapter suggests, grass can be said to constitute the contemporary practice of composition itself. Like poetry, the green field works in and through trauma to find again new life after war and conquest, after personal loss. In its seemingly perpetual growing, grass finds in the poet new ways of making and responding.

To survive the city and the war, displaced families and friends needed to keep themselves and each other physically, socially, mentally, spiritually, and culturally safe. This chapter is about this discussion of self-preservation and what this entailed when, to many, the war and displacement risked societal disaster. It explores the debates and projects that were built within new churchyards, evening schools, and social spaces, where men and women argued over what integrity and moral order looked like. Social and cultural projects – from night language schools and clan associations to childcare circles and neighbourhood vigilante gangs – all involved setting out definitions of responsibility and standards. They also raised questions about the practical meaning of being displaced ‘southerners’. In a stressful expensive city and a fragmenting southern war, this chapter explores how people developed different limits of mutual support and kinship, and understood their political community based on different standards of Blackness, shared history, and knowledge.

This epilogue describes the author’s final interview with Severino, a former gang member and one of the principal interlocutors of the project. It describes his circumstances following his exit from the gang and the prospects for his future.

In Denmark, a specific Act for the protection of utility models was introduced in 1992. The regulation of utility models in Danish law has been elaborated in close connection with the Danish patent law. Even though the rules are enacted separately, the wording of the Patent Act and the Utility Model Acts is similar. The interaction between the two systems is built into the design of the Acts. For example, branching-off from a patent application or patent under opposition to a utility model application is permitted. The core area for utility models is the protection via registration of “minor inventions”. These differ from “real patents” mainly by having a lower threshold for “inventive step”. Whereas an “invention” to be patentable must differ “essentially”, a “creation” should only differ “distinctly” from the state of the art. Moreover, utility model protection can be obtained without substantive examination whereas patent protection always requires a full evaluation both of the formal and substantive requirements. The term of protection for utility models is less than that of a patent. Since 1998, there has been a decline in the demand for utility model protection in Denmark.

In France, certificats d’utilité were introduced by the Law n°68-1 of January 2, 1968. According to article L. 611-2 of the French Intellectual Property Code, French certificats d’utilité are regulated by the same rules as French patents, with the main exceptions being a shorter duration, the absence of requirement of a research report for the delivery of the title (certificate), and of the lack of opposition proceedings.