The Lydian logos is indebted to tragedy for many features: its large-scale narrative structure and (in its constituent stories) small-scale episodic structure, narrative motifs and themes, even vocabulary. However, Herodotus also diverges from his tragic sources in ways that clarify the nature of his own inquiries. The source of the constraint under which Gyges makes his fateful decisions is not divine (as in Aeschylus), but the will of his king and queen, highlighting a characteristic feature of Eastern monarchy. In the final sentence of the Atys/Adrastus story, the distinctive ethnographic formula that describes Adrastus’ suicidal thoughts marks him as a uniquely Herodotean tragic hero. Croesus’ pyre scene contains both an echo of the Aeschylean Cassandra (the king’s dramatic breaking of his silence) and a defining feature of Herodotean historiē: the citation of a Lydian source for Apollo’s epiphany demonstrates the critical attitude that Herodotus brings to popular and poetic traditions.

Aeschylus’ Persae is an important antecedent for the account of Xerxes’ Hellenic campaign in the Histories, serving as both a source of phrases, images, and themes and a poetic foil for Herodotean inquiry. The tragedian’s presence is palpable in the staging of the king’s decision to attack Greece, although Herodotus shifts the causal emphasis from Xerxes’ personal flaws to coercive political and religious forces. Herodotus’ insistence on the contingency of Greek victory at Salamis marks a telling departure from Aeschylus’ vision of the battle as a great Panhellenic victory, vouchsafed by the gods and undisturbed by the conflicting interests of the poleis allied against Xerxes. In their presentation of Greco-Persian conflict both Aeschylus and Herodotus partially deconstruct the polarity between Hellenes and Persians, encouraging their respective audiences to look beyond cultural differences to common human traits that shaped the course of events before, during, and after the Persian invasion.

This book explores Herodotus’ creative interaction with the Greek poetic tradition from early hexameter verse through fifth-century Attic tragedy. The poetic tradition informs the Histories in both positive and negative ways, since Herodotus adopts or adapts some poetic features while rejecting others as a means of defining the nature of his own project. The range of such features includes subject matter; diction and phraseology; narrative motifs, themes, patterns, and structure; speech types and speech complexes; the role of the narrator – his presence, functions, source(s), authority, and limitations; the manipulation of time (narrative order, rhythm, and frequency); conceptions of truth and falsehood; the construction of the human past and its relation to the present; the relationship between humanity and deity, and the role each plays in the causation of events. In these and other regards Herodotus may use poetic precedent as a model, a foil, or some combination of the two.

Chapter 4 unpacks the reasons why international human rights is currently incapable of adequately protecting the environmental rights of future generations. It begins by explaining that future generations are not legally recognised as people who possess human rights and governments are not obliged to protect them. Even if those rights were recognised, there are no clear pathways for enforcing them. As the chapter explains, international human rights violations can be litigated by ‘victims’, who are people directly affected by an actual or imminent violation. The law does not allow for legal claims on behalf of people who do not yet exist or for harms that have not yet occurred or are not imminent, even though they may be foreseeable. Without standing to bring a legal action, the rights of future generations cannot be litigated and enforced within international human rights bodies. Additional challenges exist in relation to proving a breach of the law and establishing a causal connection when the alleged harm has yet to occur. Finally, the chapter explains the difficult task of balancing competing human rights interests and obligations across generations. After outlining these numerous challenges, the following chapter will offer a possible way forward.

Building on the problems identified in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 presents a new theory and practice of environmental rights which it argues would better protect the rights of future generations. First, it outlines a theory of intergenerational responsibility for international human rights law, drawing on Edith Brown Weiss’s theory of intergenerational equity. The chapter takes the tripartite duties commonly used in international human rights laws (the duties to respect, protect and fulfil human rights) and gives them new meaning through the application of an intergenerational lens. The result is a typology of duties for states which can be used to articulate expectations and standards with respect to the rights of future generations. The chapter also outlines changes which are needed to the rules of standing and causation to enable the litigation of future generations’ environmental rights. The proposed changes are informed by existing principles of environmental law, including due diligence and the precautionary principle, which help to navigate questions regarding risk and uncertainty and enable a more meaningful application of human rights law to threats of future harm.

A survey found that 1 in 6 (16%) of children aged between 5 and 16 years has a probable mental illness. Furthermore, research has shown that most of these disorders have their origins in childhood, even if they are typically diagnosed in adulthood. Childhood represents a critical period of physical, cognitive, psychological, behavioural and social transformation. Identifying risk and protective factors that alter the typical developmental trajectory could have long-term educational, social, societal and economic implications. This chapter will address what is meant by the term risk factor and how these can be identified, provide examples of risk factors thought to be important in child and adolescent psychiatry. It concludes with some case vignettes to highlight the importance of taking a developmental biopsychosocial approach to identifying risk, considering predisposing, precipitating, perpetuating and protective factors.

How can we make up our minds on whether or not international organizations are different from the sum of their parts? Taking a step back from doctrinal analysis, this chapter explores how the challenges that international lawyers have faced in that regard correspond to broader themes in philosophical discourse on ontological reductionism. This chapter suggests that questions of existence are inherently relative in the sense that they only make sense when considered in relation to other entities that are already admitted as non-redundant. Thus, the key to assessing the distinctiveness of international organizations is to first uncover the rationale that international law employs in buttressing their members as ‘real’ entities and then examine whether it can be equally applied to international organizations.

The chapter introduces the idea of using networks inspired by Systemic Functional Grammar to model the relationship between constructions that express a semantic field. The example used in the chapter is Causation. From the work described in chapter 3, 105 verb argument constructions are identified as expressing Causation. A preliminary division is made between causing an action, causing a state, and causing a change in thought or emotion. Finer distinctions within each are then identified, with these distinctions being explained and modelled in taxonomies or Meaning Networks. Finally, the features that contribute to those networks are identified and expressed as independent choice networks, referred to as Systemic Networks.

As this book’s “negative cases,” Chapter 7 unpacks why legal mobilization related to tobacco product liability and the recovery of healthcare costs for treating smokers has had so little impact on legal frameworks and jurisprudence. The chapter highlights the persistence of the Tobacco Business Law in sustaining the tobacco industry’s political power, the role of transnational networks among tobacco companies in resisting stronger regulations, domestic Japanese and Korean judges’ narrow interpretations of standing rules and causation, and the weaknesses of support structures for sustained legal mobilization and advocacy.

Chapter 16 on Causation explores the challenges of proving causation in an interconnected system like the climate, where multiple actors contribute to the overall impacts. The authors highlight the significance of probabilistic approaches, recognising that establishing direct causation can be challenging due to the nature of climate change and the cumulative nature of greenhouse gas emissions. In their exploration of emerging best practices, the authors underscore the growing recognition among courts of the need for nuanced interpretations of causation requirements in climate litigation. They highlight innovative judicial strategies that utilise scientific evidence and expert testimony to assess the contribution of specific actors to climate impacts, even in the absence of direct causation. They emphasise the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration between legal and scientific experts to navigate the complexities of causation in climate cases. By incorporating and further developing these emerging best practices, courts can facilitate an accurate and fair distribution of responsibilities through the cases they adjudicate.

This final chapter, Chapter 8, offers a summation of the major trends of development seen in the preceding chapters, and addresses the key question of causation, looking at the forces that led to the convergence seen across the Balkan languages. Multilateral, multigenerational, mutual, multilingualism (our “four-M” model) is argued to be the leading element in the convergence, with particular focus on the speaker-plus-dialect approach. An assessment of the construct of “sprachbund” is offered, and it is argued that the Balkan sprachbund is not a remnant of an historical state that no longer exists, but rather is very much alive, albeit in more limited contexts than in the past.

Determining proximate causation is crucial for decisions about legal liability, but how judges select proximate causes is a notoriously disputed issue. Knobe and Shapiro (2020) recently argued that the perceived (ab)normality of causal factors explains both laypeople’s and legal experts’ causal selection patterns. While a large body of psychological research shows that people indeed often select abnormal factors as most important, this research has focused on a very narrow set of scenarios: two simultaneously occurring but independent causes that either conjunctively or disjunctively bring about some outcome. We here explore whether normality also guides causal selection in structures that may be more typical of many legal scenarios: successively occurring causes that are themselves causally connected (causal chains). Comparing effects of both statistical and prescriptive abnormality on causal selection in chains, we only find a tendency to select abnormal causes for manipulations of prescriptive but not statistical normality. Moreover, judgments about the counterfactual relevance of causes or about their suitability as targets of intervention were only moderately correlated with causal selection patterns. The interplay between causal structure and different kinds of (ab)normality in people’s reasoning about proximate causation may thus be more complex than is currently recognized.

This chapter offers an example of conceptual instrumentalist analysis. Being instrumentalist in nature, the analysis focuses on the degree to which one plausible doctrinal design or another best advances the underlying social policies sought to be achieved in a given area of law. Unlike classic empirical analysis, however, the social policies at play in conceptual instrumentalist analysis are not concrete practical benefits that might be furthered in the real world, like greater compensation or deterrence, but are instead more abstract preferred outcomes, like greater fairness or the presence of sufficient fault by a certain party before the imposition of legal liability. Of course, appellate court analysis of any particular legal issue might involve elements of both empirical and conceptual instrumentalist analysis.

The focus of the analysis in this chapter is the tort law requirement of causation. The account presented seeks to explain the structure of this long-standing requirement, the meaning ascribed to the distinction between actual and proximate cause, and the rationale underlying the various exceptions to the main rule that have been developed over time.

A distinction between types of methods (understanding and explanation) that generate different kinds of evidence relevant to the psychiatric assessment is characterised. The distinction is animated with both non-clinical and clinical examples and exercises. Scepticism about the distinction is addressed, and three influential systems of psychiatric knowledge which collapse understanding and explanation in different ways are discussed. The argument is made that the distinction (analogous to the romantic/classic distinction) resurfaces and is compelling. However, another challenge becomes important – holism in psychiatric assessment – which the understanding/explanation distinction leaves in an unsatisfactory state.

This chapter studies how property rights are protected and recognized in common law. In doctrine, substantive rights are not recognized expressly but indirectly. Rights are recognized via doctrines that prohibit wrongs to rights. Common law protects rights in this manner for practical reasons. Courts are better equipped to enforce duties between rights-holders and aggressors than they are to work out the full scope of rights, and when the law prohibits wrongs to rights, it leaves to people the freedom to do whatever does not violate the prohibitions. To secure rights, however, legal duties and prohibitions are structured as seems likely to secure rights. This chapter illustrates nuisance and tort suits over train sparks. Both doctrines secure to owners and occupants rights to use land. The harm, interference, and unreasonability elements of nuisance are structured to secure use rights, and sparks doctrine rules out contributory negligence to secure the same use rights. This way of thinking about rights and wrongs goes against contemporary law and economic scholarship, and this chapter contrasts law and economic studies of rights with the approach developed in this chapter.

Reparations for grand corruption: applies a human rights framework based on the UN Basic Principles on Remedy and Reparations to thinking about reparations for grand corruption on a national level. Under restitution, covers social reuse of confiscated property, and land restitution. Compensation is broken down into categories of damages arising from different corrupt acts, with a focus on loss of opportunity damages. The chapter also considers satisfaction, measures of non-repetition, diffuse harms and issues of causation.

Causal parentage has been a central justification for child support law and for expanding parental rights to couples who conceive with donor gametes, including lesbian couples. Like many famous philosophers, courts insist adults incur parental duties when their voluntary acts create a child who needs care. This causation of peril principle, which is familiar to tort law, does generate personal duties. Unlike a stranger with only a general duty of beneficence, someone who helps create an infant has a special duty to ensure the infant receives care. However, this duty is too weak to ground parenthood. If other willing caregivers are available, casual parents are not obligated to raise the child personally. Nor do they have a right to do so. Someone who creates a perilous situation (a causal parent) cannot object if someone else rescues their victim (the child). Nevertheless, causal parentage may ground limited child support from a political perspective. Many theories of distributive justice are sensitive to causal responsibility. A community may conclude causal parents have a political duty to help meet a child’s needs. Unfortunately, in its haste to privatize child-rearing, American child support law compounds rather than facilitates distributive justice.

This chapter surveys influential ideas about scientific explanation. The idea that scientific explanation is a matter of logical deduction from scientific laws has played an important role both as the basis for positive accounts of scientific explanation and as a target of critical arguments spurring the investigation of alternative views. The chapter reviews some of the reasons in favor holding such a covering-law view of explanation and then turn to some alternatives. The chapter also considers a pragmatically oriented account of the act of explaining. Another alternative focuses on the idea that explanations unify phenomena, showing how seemingly different things are manifestations of a single truth about nature. Several approaches emphasize the way explanations indicate what causes something to happen, whether by reference to a process, a possible manipulation, or a mechanism.