The rapid development of international law post-World War II also coincided with greater reliance upon treaties as a source of international law. Treaties had always been recognised as a source of international law, and their status was confirmed in art 38 of the ICJ Statute. It was the development of the UN, with its emphasis upon international law and focus upon treaty-making as a means of not only peaceful resolution of disputes but also multilateral agreement between States on matters of common concern, that was the catalyst for a greater reliance upon treaties in the conduct of international relations. This chapter begins by examining the growth of treaty-making, before considering what a treaty is, including the nature of 'instruments of less than treaty status'. It then covers treaty negotiation, creation and entry into force; reservations, objections and declarations to treaties; and legal obligations arising once a treaty has entered into force. The chapter then turns to treaty interpretation, and then examines how treaties are voided or ended through invalidity, suspension or termination. The chapter concludes with a discussion of amendment and modification of treaties.

This chapter explores Jewish iconography in Late Antiquity, focusing on the evolution of visual representations in synagogue art and everyday objects. Drawing on archaeological remains from ancient Palestine and the Diaspora, it examines architectural decorations, mosaics, wall paintings and interior furnishings. Analysis of these remains reveals that Jewish iconography was not static but evolved dynamically in response to broader Graeco-Roman and early Christian artistic traditions. The chapter illustrates this by demonstrating how synagogue ornamentation combined traditional Jewish symbols – such as the menorah, Torah shrine and ritual objects – with motifs borrowed from surrounding cultures, including mythological figures and zodiac imagery. It also engages with the long-standing debate on aniconism in Judaism, arguing that figurative art was more prevalent than previously assumed. Emphasising that Jewish art served both religious and communal functions, the chapter highlights how it reinforced Jewish identity during a period of cultural transition.

Should judges and other legal decision-makers follow the literal meaning of applicable legal rules even if there are compelling reasons to do otherwise? The question of the primacy of plain meaning in legal interpretation is one of the oldest and most persistent problems in the philosophy of law. In this chapter, we argue that new arguments are available in this debate, emerging from recent developments in experimental jurisprudence. We posit that legal interpretation is, to some extent, an exercise in coordination: Judges seek to interpret rules in a way that would match interpretations of their peers, of other legal officials, and of society at large. In such a strategic context, the plain meaning of law often constitutes a focal point around which different legal actors can coordinate – allowing them to promote the uniformity and predictability of law and, ultimately, to sustain the rule of law.

The US Supreme Court routinely purports to resolve statutory interpretation disputes by deferring to the enactment-era “ordinary,” “public” meaning of the statute’s terms (their “OPM”). In recent years, scholars have begun using surveys and experiments to test judges’ claims about OPM in particular cases, and to critique modern textualist theory and practice more generally. This chapter argues that surveys and experiments can provide highly probative evidence of OPM, whether one favors the more populist conception of OPM on which the modern Supreme Court frequently purports to rely, or the more thoroughly stylized conception that some scholars favor. Drawing on the handful of published survey-experimental efforts to date, and responding to scholarly criticisms of them, the chapter suggests that surveys and experiments may prove too probative for comfort. If modern textualists were to spell out ex ante their conception of OPM with sufficient precision to render it capable, even in theory, of resolving the hard cases they claim it resolves, then survey-experimental data might reveal that the theory produces disappointing results – not just in discrete cases, but across the board.

Legal language is often ambiguous. Consider: “Only cars and trucks with permits are allowed.” Does [PP with permits] have “wide scope” over the entire series [NP cars and trucks] or “narrow scope” over only the closest noun, [trucks]? Judges often choose narrow scope, citing a legal canon, the “Last Antecedent Rule.” But they sometimes choose wide scope, referencing the “Series Qualifier Canon,” which assigns modifiers to a series. Though judges claim to want to use “most people’s” interpretations, these conflicting choices led us to ask “What WOULD most people say?” We ran three experiments to find out.

Overall, wide scope was preferred. With biased PPs, the preference dropped slightly when the bias matched the last noun, “[NP cars and trucks] [PP with trailers],” but not the first, “[NP trucks and cars] [PP with trailers],” where a universal syntactic “No Crossing Branches principle” limits the PP’s domain. With temporal PPs, “People may park [NP cars and trucks] [PP on weekends],” the preference was also uniformly wide scope, not surprisingly, since these PPs can only modify verbs, not nouns. Taken together, our experiments show how experimental psycholinguistics can offer powerful evidence about how “most people” understand legal language, important information for judges and lawmakers alike.

This chapter explores the nature of the legislature and its relationship to constitutional government, focusing in particular on the importance of legislative agency and the dynamics that frame its exercise. The chapter begins by reflecting on the objects of legislative action, arguing that authorising a legislative assembly to legislate changes who legislates but not what it is to legislate. The object of legislative deliberation and action should be the common good and securing this end requires agency. The assembly faces many challenges in exercising agency, which it is structured to overcome, partly by way of its relationship to government, a relationship that goes well beyond acts of legislation. The relationship between legislature and government shapes the character of a constitutional order and bears on the relationship between legislature and the people. The legislature’s duty is to represent the people, which makes self-government possible. The legislature should deliberate and act for the people and be accountable to the people, with legislative deliberation taking its place in a wider public conversation. The legislature’s capacity for agency informs how legislative acts should be understood to change the law and helps explain the moral importance of legislative freedom and the limits on that freedom.

Legal activity in the third quarter-century of the life of the Convention has greatly surpassed that of the first two quarter-centuries. This can be measured in terms of case law and scholarly writing. The interpretation of the Convention’s definition of genocide has remained quite narrow, and is essentially confined to physical genocide, destruction and extermination. There is potential for this to change in such a way as to extend the scope of the Convention to situations where groups are attacked with view to being driven from the territory where they have lived. This would require a degree of judicial activism. Care must be taken because of the danger of uncontrolled expansion of the definition. The phenomenon of politicized allegations of genocide is significant. Although there has been some resistance to the idea of a hierarchy of international crimes, genocide should remain ’the crime of crimes’.

Several provisions of the Convention deal with technical matters under treaty law, including signature, ratification and accession to the Convention, entry into force, denunciation of the Convention, the role of the Secretary-General as depositary of the treaty, and revision of the treaty. There is no provision for reservations but they have been deemed to be acceptable to the extent that they are not contrary to the object and purpose of the Convention. The official languages of the Convention are Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. The Chinese language version has been changed due to dissatisfaction to the original text, prompting protests from Lemkin and others. The status of the official Chinese text remains somewhat uncertain. The Convention also contains a ’colonial clause’, something that is today an anachronism but one that apparently permits States to avoid the application of the Convention in non-self-governing territories over which they exercise control.

In regressions where the dependent variable takes limited values such as 0 and 1, or takes some category values, using the OLS estimation method will likely provide biased and inconsistent results. Because the dependent variable is either discontinuous or its range is bounded, one of the assumptions of the CLRM is violated (that the standard error is normally distributed conditional on the independent variables). This chapter focuses on limited dependent-variable models, for example, covering firm decision-making, capital structure decisions, investor decision-making, and so on. The chapter presents and discusses the linear probability model, maximum-likelihood estimator, probit model, logit model, ordered probit and logit models, multinomial logit model, conditional logit model, tobit model, Heckman selection model, and count data models. It covers the assumptions behind and applications of these models. As usual, the chapter provides an application of selected limited dependent-variable models, lab work, and a mini case study.

This chapter characterizes History as an interpretive discipline, one in which conclusions are drawn by applying critical thinking to the available evidence, rather than one that aims to achieve actionable results from experimental or observational results. It points out that History aims not at reproducible and definitive outcomes but at broadening and deepening inquiry. It seeks to define what kinds of questions historians most value, questions that contribute to and enable such deepening and widening inquiry. Finally, this chapter discusses in greater depth the methodological and epistemological division introduced in the Introduction, between those more attracted to the historicist tradition examined in Chapter 1 and those more attracted to the methods, aims, and epistemological assumptions of social-science theory and of critical social theory. The chapter discusses both the strengths and weaknesses of these competing traditions and the pedagogical benefit of introducing students to both – the unique intellectual flexibility that the study of the discipline of History can cultivate.

This chapter argues for an approach to teaching History rooted in the ethical position foundational to the discipline. That approach is based on respect for our students and for the discipline; in it instructors encounter and learn from their students in the same way that they encounter and learn from historical subjects, and instruction in History, just like research in History, focuses not on controlling outcomes but on engaging in an ethically authentic process. It offers six approaches to instruction that can help build this kind of relationship between instructors and students, and between students and the discipline. These include consulting our students regarding their interests and aims; building instruction around the process of inquiry; making pedagogical use both of the breadth of the discipline and of its complexity, diversity, and epistemological and methodological divisions; focusing on teaching analysis, critical thinking, and interpretation; and bringing students to see their engagement with History not only as a process by which they master specific bodies of knowledge and methods of thinking but also as an open-ended intellectual adventure.

This chapter reviews the perspectives and levels of an analysis that inform how an observation is made. This is done by demonstrating that there are two perspectives (language use and the human factor) and five levels (summation, description, interpretation, evaluation, and transformation) of analysis in discourse analysis. These perspectives and levels can be used to understand the frameworks of established methodologies, such as conversation analysis, critical discourse analysis, and narrative analysis. After reading this chapter, readers will know that the analytic process can combine different perspectives and levels of analysis.

The final chapter draws some conclusions about the nature and status of stylistics as a subdiscipline of linguistics and the many and varied ways in which stylistics can impact on human society and life. The chapter ends with a ‘manifesto’ which makes the case for stylistics developing a clear identity which will allow its connection with other disciplines to be a mutually enriching relationship. The authors hope that both established scholars and those new to the field will find the chapter useful in reflecting on their own practice.

Gadamer’s attitude to Collingwood was marked by ambivalence: while promoting the Englishman on the one hand, Gadamer claimed on the other that the fundamental dimension of “hermeneutical mediation” had simply escaped him. In this paper, I aim both to assess Gadamer’s debt to Collingwood and the prima facie strength of his objections. First, I reconstruct steps by which ideas of Collingwood found their place in Gadamer’s hermeneutics in the 1950s, including the central “axiom of all hermeneutics”: the thesis that “we can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer.” Second, I examine Gadamer’s main objections to Collingwood, the first one being based on a misunderstanding of Collingwood’s stance, while the second one hits home, and I argue in the final section that at issue here is Collingwood’s claim that it is possible to rethink exactly the same thought as that of, say, an historical agent, while Gadamer holds precisely the opposite view, that this is never possible.