This chapter is based upon an extensive examination of US statutes, regulations, and executive orders from 1994 to 2021 containing US blacklists against Cuba. The chapter discusses the effects of the listing on individuals or targeted entities. Because many of these targets are Cuban government officials or state-owned enterprises, the listing of these persons and entities has the effect of interfering with sectors of the Cuban economy. The chapter also discusses the secondary impact on Cuba’s trade partners in general, and the consequent “chilling effect” that interferes in Cuba’s overall ability to import and export goods, and attract foreign investment.

United States sanctions undermine Iran’s ability to import critical agricultural products, especially wheat. Despite long-standing exemptions for humanitarian trade, sanctions have fragmented Iran’s wheat-supply chain, deterring major commodities traders, interrupting payment channels, and delaying shipments. While Iran does continue to import wheat to meet its food security needs, commodities traders can extract a higher price from Iranian importers, citing the unique challenges of exporting to the country. In this way, sanctions contribute to structurally higher prices for wheat in Iran. The country’s growing dependence on wheat imports, driven by demographic changes and worsening climate conditions, has made these disruptions more acute. Efforts to mitigate these effects, such as humanitarian trade arrangements launched by multiple US administrations, have largely failed due to bureaucratic inefficiencies and financial sector overcompliance. As a result, Iranian households have had to contend with significant food inflation, even for staples such as bread. Considering that the negative humanitarian effects of sanctions are both persistent and systemic and have been long known to US officials, it is difficult to conclude that the effects are truly unintended.

The complexity of international economic sanctions, breach of which can carry severe penalties, is well known to cause banks and other financial institutions to “de-risk” in relation to sanctioned countries. The practice of denying financial services to entire classes of people prevents those who need to transfer funds to or from sanctioned countries from accessing traditional banking channels, often leading them to rely instead on Informal Value Transfer Systems (IVTS). Where IVTS service providers are not properly licensed, customers increasingly risk being targeted by law enforcement agencies under wide-ranging civil forfeiture laws. The chapter considers how this state of affairs has developed, with a focus on members of the Iranian diaspora who seek to transfer money between Iran and the UK and US. Two individual case studies are considered and the authors address the treatment of those caught in the crosshairs of sanctions and anti-money laundering measures and some of the remedies available to them.

This chapter examines how copyright reversion mechanisms developed in US copyright law. It traces the history of such provisions to its present day iteration (an inalienable right for creators to terminate copyright grants after around 35 years). As with the study of British reversionary rights, the chapter highlights how the US provisions have often been rendered ineffective through the behaviour of rightsholders (both before and after reversion mechanisms have been passed). It focuses on how the current termination scheme operates, highlighting its considerable problems: for example, uncertainty over whether sound recordings are covered, and the sheer difficulty of meeting the formalities necessary to exercise the statutory rights.

Chapter 10 questions whether law should widen its lens to address general appearance discrimination too. Would a protected characteristic of appearance offer viable legal rights to the many millions of us who do not have a disfigurement but are less-than-beautiful in some way? For example, is appearance objective enough to be adjudicated in law? Is a clear distinction between mutable and immutable aspects of appearance important – or even possible given increasing medico-cosmetic opportunities to change the way our bodies look? Do we have an unobjectionable nomenclature to describe appearance and attractiveness in legal terms? And could we swallow well-meaning employers’ attempts to measure the attractiveness of their staff for the purposes of diversity monitoring? The discussion draws on examples of comparative laws in France and America. Both countries have adopted wider conceptions of appearance equality, and America’s laws have seen a recent period of growth, with Binghampton, New York, the latest to vote such a law onto its statute books in 2023. However, both sets of laws remain little used so far, despite evidence showing that appearance discrimination remains prevalent. How could we ensure that a protected characteristic of appearance in the UK avoided a similar fate?

Chapter 5 traces the dynamics of our argument about the causes and consequences of IO withdrawal with three qualitative case studies: the US’ withdrawal from the ILO from 1977–1980, Japan’s withdrawal from the IWC in 2019, and the UK’s withdrawal from the EU in 2020. The cases show how states often think of withdrawal as a negotiation tool and highlight states’ long-term striving for “better” institutional arrangements through other mechanisms of “voice” before exit. In each case, we use archival research and media sources to document that the desire for IO change prompted exit, that states used withdrawal threats for negotiation, and that negotiation prior to withdrawal happened but fell short of the state’s goals, leading to withdrawal. In the cases of the ILO and IWC, negotiation continued while the state was a non-member and led to its return in the case of the ILO. The case studies also underscore the effects of withdrawal: Each of the withdrawing states suffered negative reputational and cooperative consequences and sometimes material consequences from withdrawal. International actors chastised withdrawing states, and the withdrawers then engaged in rhetorical stigma management to try to lessen the impact.

Governments and regulatory agencies make policy through a range of instruments from soft-law guidelines and executive orders to executive rules with the force of law. Based on her book, Democracy and Executive Power, Susan Rose-Ackerman’s essay highlights the link between cross-country differences in rulemaking practices and underlying constitutional frameworks. Based on the US, the UK, Germany, and France, the chapter illustrates how these countries’ disparate constitutional structures help to explain their divergent rulemaking practices. She stresses the existence of policymaking accountability under the rulemaking provisions of the US APA and its absence from the other cases. Nevertheless, whatever the legal framework, the author argues that bureaucrats should take account of outside input as they implement statutory language to make policy choices. The organization of the executive branch should encourage public input and promote bureaucratic competence. Contemporary pressures may indeed be moving all of these countries toward more accountable procedures – not just to protect individual rights but also to enhance the democratic legitimacy of executive rulemaking.

Considers the international law and practice around asset recovery. Starts with UNCAC Chapter 5 and its genesis, and covers what human rights bodies have said on asset recovery and return. Summarizes the national law of major asset-holding states on recovery and return, and looks at four different models for returning assets to states where they were stolen while avoiding those same assets being re-stolen. Considers some of the complications of asset return where the same networks responsible for stealing them are still in power.

Abolishing states would not be the end of the matter; the country’s leaders would have to make a number of fundamental secondary decisions. Someone would ultimately have to decide which of the essential functions currently performed by state government should be nationalized, which ones should be localized, and, as to the latter, how the various local functions are to be further distributed among the many different species of local governments – municipalities, counties, townships, special purpose districts, and unincorporated areas. Who should select the decision-maker? Decisions would also be needed as to the processes and responsibilities for replacing the states’ current roles in national elections, in supplying the bulk of the country’s judges, and in the constitutional amendment process. This chapter considers the options for filling those voids. In the process, it offers a portrait of what a unitary American republic might look like without state government.

Histories of international law more or less follow the epistemic position of the jurisdiction in which they arise. The parochial anglophone student of the comparative literature in the history of international law instantly sees a version of this phenomenon in action. With notable exceptions, even sophisticated work in the history of international law in the US is importantly different from English-language work in the same field that has begun to pour out from scholars based in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere. In this chapter, I propose that this is because US scholars since at least the Second World War have taken up the history of international law through a set of questions and presuppositions structured by a standpoint inside the leviathan. The most powerful player on the international stage – the United States – has exerted a gravitational pull on scholars writing the history of international law and on the functions that such histories serve.  In recent years, however, the cross-border professionalisation of the field is helping produce histories increasingly further afield from, or at least in a newly complex relationship with, the epistemic domination of the hegemon.

From Brexit to the rise of China, the deterioration of the special relationship with the United States and the return of war to Europe in Ukraine, this chapter will explore how the UK’s position in the world has faced both challenges and opportunities over the last fourteen years. The analysis will focus on how different Conservative premierships used or wasted these global changes, and how it has affected UK foreign policy and Britain as a whole (particularly Brexit’s influence on domestic policy and politics).

This chapter discusses the challenge for entrepreneurs brought about by value conflicts. Value conflicts bring about a major challenge for entrepreneurs, both within a country and between countries. This type of challenge might come from the government or the public. The failure of the airship industry is a typical example where the entrepreneur was caught between the United States and Nazi Germany. This chapter emphasizes that serious value conflicts have always existed between China and the United States but were obscured by the good wishes of both sides in the past. As opposing values have manifested themselves, entrepreneurs of both China and the West face bigger challenges than they have over the past 40 years. The entrepreneur may fail not because their products are not accepted by consumers but instead blocked by the government and nationalism.

Early language exposure is crucial for acquiring native mastery of phonology, and multilingual exposure results in enhanced phonetic/phonological learning ability in adulthood. It remains unclear, however, whether early language exposure has lasting benefits when the quantity and quality of speaking drop dramatically after childhood. We investigate the production and perception of Arabic in fifteen early-interrupted exposure (i.e., childhood) speakers and fifteen late-exposure (i.e., novice) speakers. We compare the production of both groups to that of a control group of fifteen early uninterrupted exposure (i.e., native monolingual) speakers. The experiment included tasks addressing language proficiency, word production, and speech perception. Early-interrupted exposure speakers outperformed late-exposure speakers on all tasks of the language proficiency diagnostic, while also displaying more native-like perception and production. Our study adds further support to the body of work on the measurable long-term benefits of early language experience for an individual’s phonetic and phonological skills, even when language experience diminishes over time.

This study investigates the effect of changes in voice onset time (VOT) on heritage speakers’ perception of Korean intervocalic stops (i.e., /p, t, k/), and compares their results to those of Korean monolinguals and second language (L2) learners of Korean who are L1 speakers of American English or Mandarin Chinese. A discrimination task using five synthetic /C1V1C2V2/ stimuli that differed in VOT of C2 was created to test inter-group differences. While the L2 learners display categorical awareness of VOT variation, Korean and heritage speakers perceive the two consonants to be the same for most stimuli regardless of VOT values. This unexpected lack of attention to VOT variation among heritage speakers suggests that they may switch their language mode to Korean and activate Korean phonology in discriminating non-phonemic VOT differences. However, their responses are not uniform or robust, with some showing a pattern similar to that of L2 learners, revealing strong individual differences among heritage speakers.

This chapter takes an individual-differences perspective on the dual sound systems of American heritage speakers (HSs) of Mandarin Chinese. Based on detailed socio-demographic data and production data on segmentals and suprasegmentals, we build holistic demographic and phonetic profiles for HSs, as well as native speakers and late learners, to explore how different aspects of their two languages (i.e., Mandarin, English) may develop in relation to each other and how individual variation in production may be related to socio-demographic factors. Using multiple factor analysis (MFA), we describe the range of these profiles, identify clusters of variation defined by different socio-demographic factors, and argue that some factors (e.g., age of arrival, language(s) spoken at home) have more predictive power for phonetic profiles than others. Overall, our results suggest a significant, if limited, link between socio-demographic factors and production, but only in Mandarin. We conclude by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of group-based and individual-centered approaches.