Chapter 8 draws on sociological literature in debating whether law – however drafted – is capable of solving the complex problem of discrimination against people who look different. It argues that, although we should not expect too much of law in tackling the complex social problem of appearance bias, strategically targeted laws can sometimes play a part in changing attitudes, norms and behaviours. While prohibitions on discrimination are important for remedial purposes, other types of legal and social reform may be better placed to create the conditions for greater inclusion of people with visible differences.

This chapter delves into the foundational sources and principles underpinning Chinese property law. It defines property rights and highlights their features, emphasising the distinctions between property rights and personal rights in the Chinese legal context. The core of the chapter explores the sources of property law, which include the Constitution, national legislation, administrative regulations, local regulations, judicial interpretations and civil customs. This section underscores the significant influence of Roman law and German civil law traditions on Chinese property law. Next, the chapter discusses the basic principles of property law: the principle of numerus clausus, which restricts the types of property rights to those defined by law; the principle of equal protection, which ensures that state, collective and private property rights are equally protected; and the publicity principle, which mandates that property rights must be publicly recorded to be enforceable against third parties. Finally, the chapter addresses the classification of property, distinguishing between corporeal and incorporeal property, as well as between movable and immovable property.

Chapter 5 explores James’s interest in the relationship between the bicycle and authorial publicity through a close reading of his tale about two cycling journalists, ‘The Papers’. During the 1890s, the bicycle’s fashionable status and prominent appearance in debates about female exhibitionism associated it with questions about the role of the press and the public figure. Due to its potential for physical comedy, cycling also features in what I call the literatures of exposure: the detective story, romantic comedy, and the illustrated newspaper. As I argue, the bicycle’s attachment to the physical ‘figure’ makes it a troubling metaphoric resource in ‘The Papers’, which satirizes the celebrity’s ‘eagerness to figure’ by drawing attention to the authorial work of ‘figuring’ in which the journalists are constantly engaged, and to the creation of the author as a public figure. This chapter also glances at how later writers have employed the bicycle to speculate about Henry James himself. Hemingway’s euphemistic reference to ‘Henry’s bicycle’ in The Sun Also Rises – an allusion to James’s rumoured castration – is one of several portrayals of the author as a cyclist, which draw upon the bicycle’s connotations with exposure to trope James’s aversion to publicity.

Chapter Six explains how Rogers contributed greatly to a media revolution that reshaped American culture in the early 1900s. Beginning in 1922, he reached a vast new popular audience by becoming a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist (first with a weekly column, then a shorter daily one), writing regulary for magazines, making advertisements, cutting phonograph records, and making sporadic appearances in the new medium of radio. He also updated the old tradition of the lecture,regularly traveling throughout the nation to appear before audiences in town halls, lyceums, and churches. Throughout, Rogers deployed his talents as a cracker-barrel philosopher and down-home wit to interrogate America’s move to embrace a new consumer, urban, leisure-oriented culture.

This chapter considers the music publishing industry in Puccini’s Italy, with a particular focus on Puccini’s principal publisher, the Casa Ricordi. The chapter examines the role that publishers played within the wider operatic industry, which by Puccini’s time included managing contracts between composers and opera houses and influencing casting, as well as the more traditional business of printing, publishing, and promoting scores. The particular musical specialisms of the Sonzogno and Ricordi publishing houses are discussed. The author shows how Ricordi elevated Puccini to the position of national-composer-elect towards the end of Verdi’s lifetime and constructed a ‘Puccini myth’. Expensive, sophisticated publicity tools and marketing strategies were used to promote Puccini’s works, not only in Italy but in territories across the globe. The chapter discusses how Puccini’s relationship with the firm changed as a result of the succession of power from Giulio to Tito Ricordi upon the former’s death, as well as the firm’s management of Puccini’s works after his own death.

This chapter considers how Puccini was represented visually, predominantly through the still fairly new medium of photojournalism. The author discusses the marketing strategies devised by the Ricordi publishing house in order to promote Puccini to the readers of its various illustrated magazines as the successor to Verdi. Initially portrayed as a rather Bohemian young student, Puccini soon came to be depicted as the epitome of stylish Italian manliness. Visual representations of the composer – not only photographs but also paintings and sketches – exploited his connections to the Tuscan landscape of his native region, as Puccini was increasingly co-opted into the project of forging a national identity for the recently unified country. Care was taken to represent Puccini as an emblem of modernity and dynamism, and this was an image of the composer that was presented not only at home in Italy but all around the world.

Rawls’s Original Position, the most influential thought experiment in modern political philosophy, cannot be the justification of Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness. The Original Position cannot satisfy Rawls’s own publicity condition, which requires justifications that are accessible to all citizens. I hypothesize that over time Rawls weakened his publicity condition because he saw this tension, but that he could not resolve it. However, Rawls’s work contains a justification for justice as fairness that is publicly accessible: that in a well-ordered society, all citizens can have self-respect. I set up this discussion with Rawls’s critique of meritocracy, which, Rawls fears, sets citizens against each other in a zero-sum competition for self-respect. In a meritocracy, elites display their power and wealth, while the less fortunate may fall into resentment, rancor, and possibly a destructive racial nationalism. A Rawlsian society of self-respect offers a more just and stable model of social unity.

In early 1959, Kanyama Chiume escaped arrest during the Nyasaland Emergency. Chapter 4 follows him in his period of exile, focusing on two pamphlets he wrote in London. These pamphlets provide a way to assess the limits of the newly internationalised global anticolonial world of the late 1950s for this regional-generational cohort. These activists honed their vision of publicity and of the party publicity officer by drawing on the regional specificities of the late colonial state in East and Central Africa. Gender and form were of critical importance to this vision. This cohort joined the conversation around colonial violence in the context of the Algerian War of Independence, discussing ideas about permits, police and imprisonment in and beyond the region, in correspondence, conferences and publications. Charting the development of their ideas about totalitarianism at this apparent turning point helps to explain why the UN was largely out of reach, why activists continued to formulate their critiques in terms that echoed the early 1950s and why they increasingly doubted the efficacy and legitimacy of world public opinion.

This chapter explores the cultural significance of the optical telegraph in Ireland. Following the institution of the Chappe télégraphe in revolutionary France, this long-distance communications technology was widely innovated and subsequently adopted by numerous governments including, briefly, the British administration at Dublin Castle. The chapter begins by discussing the promotion, in the Belfast Northern Star, of the telegraph designed by the ‘improving’ Ascendancy landlord, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. It then considers the politics of telegraphic discourse in Ireland in the years leading up to the Rebellion of 1798, with a particular focus on the associations between telegraphy and the United Irish press. Finally, it suggests some points of affinity between Maria Edgeworth’s tale ‘The White Pigeon’ (1800) and her father’s telegraph. In its connection with competing ideas of Irish nationality, security, and surveillance, I argue, the telegraph offers valuable insights into the relations between literature and technology in late eighteenth-century Ireland.

This chapter looks at the tools and procedures that programmes use to assess claims. Assessing a redress claim involves deciding which injuries to redress and how much money to pay. Those judgements are difficult. Since people will reasonably disagree, good procedure is essential. Enabling survivors to choose how the programme will assess their claims can help protect survivors’ privacy and well-being and make programmes more effective and efficient.

This chapter looks at the tools and procedures that programmes use to assess claims. Assessing a redress claim involves deciding which injuries to redress and how much money to pay. Those judgements are difficult. Since people will reasonably disagree, good procedure is essential. Enabling survivors to choose how the programme will assess their claims can help protect survivors’ privacy and well-being and make programmes more effective and efficient.

Molière’s extraordinary success between 1659 and 1673 was due not only to his virtuosity as a dramatist, his comic talent or his exploitation of current affairs; it was due also to his feeling for an ‘event’ and his ability to capture attention. This contribution studies his unprecedented investment in publicity, which mobilised a multitude of forms and mediums, as well as its reliance on a network of agents with varied motivations. Literary history has long tried to distinguish between Molière’s friends and enemies by relying on their praise or criticism of him. This contribution studies them rather as agents who, depending on the context, opportunity and their own interests, sometimes acted for and sometimes against Molière, without this indicating either personal enmity or ties of affection.

The introduction lays out the major aims of the book.

This chapter develops a selective genealogy of the concept of publicity as it appears throughout the history of political thought, beginning with Plato and ending with Henry Sidgwick. Beyond its intrinsic interest, there is instrumental value to tracing a genealogy of publicity. Two benefits stand out in particular. First, by looking to what the giants of the past had to say about transparency in government, we find a greater diversity of positions than we currently see. Some flatly reject openness in government, embracing opacity in its place. And second, looking to the past shows how the concept of publicity can take on many different forms. Sometimes it refers to being offered justifications for the laws one lives under, sometimes it means that persons must have access to the philosophical theories inspiring the political systems they inhabit, sometimes it is used as a kind of test to probe the morality of public policies, sometimes it means that persons should be able to carefully monitor what public officials are up to, and so on.

On one understanding of the concept, publicity deems it impermissible for public officials to hide the reasons and moral theories that inform their policy choices. As just one example of this, publicity forbids the utilitarian from cloaking her policy recommendations in terms of a moral theory other than utilitarianism. While this might seem like a compelling requirement at first, its proponents have offered little argument for it, as defenders of utilitarianism have been quick to point out. To remedy this, I try to rehabilitate the blanket ban on false rationales demanded by this understanding of publicity, relying on the work of Bernard Williams (himself a fierce critic of esoteric utilitarianism). None of the arguments recovered from Williams successfully rule out secret rationales on the part of public officials. This understanding of publicity, I conclude, lacks compelling justification.

Most democracies are representative. Elected by the people, representatives constitute a legislature and create laws. This is typically done through voting. This raises an interesting question of institutional design: should our representatives vote transparently or by secret ballot? No contemporary philosopher, to my knowledge, has addressed this question. In this chapter I argue that if we take seriously the value of political equality—a normative ideal that nearly all democratic theorists embrace—then voting among representatives in a legislature ought to occur by secret ballot. Representatives should vote just as citizens do in elections. Democratic equality, I argue, thrives in darkness.

John Rawls’s full publicity condition says that persons in the society the philosopher theorizes about must in some sense have access to everything the philosopher says in her theorizing. In other words, everyone living in Rawls’s perfectly just society must have access to A Theory of Justice and related works. This account of publicity is the most difficult to analyze because there are many different interpretations of what, precisely, it requires and also many different arguments in its favor. Not only this, but certain criticisms of Rawls that some deem fatal to his project depend on particular interpretations of this publicity condition that can quite reasonably be rejected. In the current chapter I show that, once again, we face deep trade-offs. Insisting on this account of publicity will change the way political philosophy must be done, but doing so will help achieve normatively worthwhile ends.

Nearly all legal theorists agree that publicity is a key component of the rule of law, but they disagree over what this means. Some mean that persons must know the body of law they are subject to; others say that persons must simply be able to access what the law requires of them, even if they remain completely ignorant of it. Both accounts of legal publicity are deeply flawed, I argue. After establishing this, I develop a new way of understanding what legal publicity means. Legal publicity is not about persons knowing the law or having access to it. Rather, it’s about when persons are held accountable for violating the law. Publicity demands that persons be held accountable for violating a law only if they were aware this law regulated their conduct. This novel account of legal publicity revolutionizes how we should think about the rule of law and also how we should design our legal institutions.