The growing professionalisation of the law and the natural sciences owed much to the spread of the empire – and Cambridge intellectuals would benefit more than most from these processes. Natural philosophers travelled across the empire amassing botantical, geological, and antiquarian collections and expanding scientific knowledge, with much of the credit for their findings owed to local enslavers or enslaved Africans. Britons with financial investments in slave-trading organisations also donated to found professorships. In the case of the law, experts in international law and treaty-making, particularly Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, applied their expert knowledge to cases concerning piracy, plantation holdings, and imperial companies. As with missionary organisations, the problem of enslavement continued to be a source of debate in the eighteenth century, as philosophers of natural law and rights considered the ethical justifications for racial enslavement.

This concluding chapter, “Governing the Unknown: Legal–Scientific Settlements,” offers a new framework to describe the momentary stabilization of scientific facts in and through lawmaking: legal–scientific settlements. From these legal–scientific settlements emerge a range of distributional consequences that have material effects on people’s lives and shape the ability of individuals to survive and thrive despite public health crises.

We highlight the essential role of law and governance in advancing the transformative potential of One Health. While One Health has traditionally focused on public health and zoonotic disease, its broader application encompasses challenges such as biodiversity loss, climate change, and antimicrobial resistance. Despite its potential, One Health remains underutilised in governance and law, with much of its implementation focused on siloed scientific endeavours.

This book addresses these gaps, demonstrating how legal frameworks can embed and sustain One Health principles. It explores diverse themes, including multilevel governance, Indigenous Knowledge systems, environmental law, and emerging legal mechanisms, to showcase the interdisciplinary nature of One Health. Contributors emphasise the need for multisectoral collaboration, enforceable standards, and cross-disciplinary engagement to address governance barriers and ensure holistic, equitable outcomes.

By presenting a vision for the institutionalisation of One Health through law and policy, this volume challenges traditional approaches and offers pathways for integrating One Health into governance systems.

This introduction lays out a core argument of the book: that social movements mobilize law and legal institutions to unsettle expert consensus and alter the distribution of material resources. This chapter describes how feminist activists concerned about women and AIDS sought to reset public health practice on surveillance, diagnosis, risk, and treatment to effectuate feminist goals, including access to public health resources and welfare benefits.

Chapter 1, “‘We Are Not Immune’: A New Branch of the Feminist Women’s Health Movement,” begins by describing the emergence of a new coalition of feminists who turned their attention to the HIV epidemic in an attempt to understand how the virus would impact women. Together they realized that HIV was killing women more often than the those in charge of the AIDS response acknowledged. The failure to recognize and respond to issues facing women with HIV was due, in part, to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention definition of AIDS that did not include gynecological infections. The incomplete definition of AIDS resulted in a lack of data on women with HIV and impacted the Social Security Administration’s determinations of who should receive benefits. Allying with lawyers and fellow activists, feminists set out to challenge the law and science of the epidemic.

Chapter 2, “Litigating Risk: The Law and Politics of Disease in the Administrative State,” turns to the litigation and activism that resulted in the shift in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention definition of AIDS and turned attention to women’s risk of contracting HIV. The chapter tracks how litigation and advocacy were central to the shift in the CDC definition of AIDS. Feminist success would result in many more women being diagnosed with HIV, resulting in a greater ability to access benefits. This life-changing shift would mark a major victory for the feminist women’s health movement.

Drawing on an ongoing conflict over hydrocarbon development in a protected area in Southern Bolivia, this chapter explores resource frontiers as key sites of juristocratic reckoning, where international and national discourses of rights are simultaneously invoked and undermined by violent processes of accumulation by dispossession. A leading example of transformative constitutionalism, Bolivia’s 2009 Constitution defined the country as a “Plurinational State” and recognized an array of new rights for Indigenous, originary, and peasant peoples, including in relation to territory and the environment. Yet state dependence on natural gas extraction has produced a widening gap between legal discourse and practice. This chapter asks: What new forms of politics emerge as communities at extractive frontiers reckon with the possibilities and limits of law and rights to confront ongoing processes of environmental dispossession? The arrival of oil companies in the Tariquía Reserve catalyzed a wave of human rights education in remote rural communities, yet a series of failed constitutional challenges have exposed the limits of law and rights as instruments to counter state-led extraction. Rather than turning away from rights, the chapter argues that community activists in Tariquía see themselves as custodians of the 2009 Constitution against the state. Their embodied praxis of territorial defense points to a form of juristocratic politics from below, in which the state’s monopoly on political and legal authority is called into question.

This chapter brings into conversation two powerful, imbricated forces in contemporary Nigeria: the dramatic rise in fundamentalist religious Christian and Islamic formations that place hope and prosperity in the afterlife, and the proliferation of community-based technology projects that offer ordinary victims and survivors the power of data as a way to make sense of past and future violence. The chapter argues that these trends are imbricated both with one another and with the history of colonialism from earlier periods to the contemporary moment. The chapter raises questions about the extent to which this Nigerian case study foreshadows a more global shift away from long established (western) authorities – in particular, the law and the nation-state – and toward futures where more and more people could turn toward a kind of moral and political vigilantism, taking the tools for creating hope and meaning (back) into their own hands.

Chapter 48 covers the topic of pyromania. Through a case vignette with topical MCQs for consolidation of learning, readers are brought through the management of patients with pyromania from first presentation to subsequent complications of the conditions and its treatment. Topics covered include diagnosis, differentials, co-morbidities, management.

Chapter 49 covers the topic of kleptomania. Through a case vignette with topical MCQs for consolidation of learning, readers are brought through the management of patients with kleptomania from first presentation to subsequent complications of the conditions and its treatment. Topics covered include diagnosis, differentials, co-morbidities, management.

‘Testamentary Drama’ continues to assess the pitfalls associated with the expression of the will by charting the presence that last wills took both as material and virtual stage props. What I term as the testamentary tradition in English Renaissance drama – plays that address both the restorative and destructive outcomes of testamentary execution – begins with Ulpian Fulwell’s interlude Like Will to Like (first printed 1568). This play focuses on the ruinous effect that Lucifer’s fake will and testament has on the destitute and prodigal beneficiaries who are enticed (and ultimately damned) by the property offered within it. The last will, thus, functions to punish wickedness and reveal the futility of willing itself. Like Will to Like sets a precedent for the popular dramatic function of these documents: last wills typically function as vehicles for testators to impose their personal will over networks of beneficiaries; last wills were commonly used as tools of moral instruction and social control to draw attention to the fraught politics of testamentary inheritance; playwrights consistently portrayed acts of will-making to be disastrously prone to being counterfeited.

Chapter 55 covers the topic of forensic psychiatry. Through a short answer question format with topical MCQs for consolidation of learning, readers are brought through the more common aspects of forensic psychiatry. Topics covered include the roles of a forensic psychiatrist, typical preamble given prior to the start of a forensic psychaitry consult, expert witness role, fitness to plead, asssessment for criminal responsbilty, the associatiation between mental disorders and crimes and medical malpractice.