As part of the major premise of the Declaration’s syllogism and of a general theory of rightful government, it is unlikely that the main ideas in the Declaration’s second paragraph exist as separate, free-floating nuggets of indeterminate meaning. My task in this essay is to reconstruct the theory of rightful government contained in that paragraph in order to progress toward fixing meaning for those ideas – equality, rights, liberty, and others – that have been so important to the self-understanding and political aspirations of Americans from 1776 on.

From the late sixteenth century, foreign engineers promoted new hydraulic technologies in England. Yet, their techniques were not alone sufficient to implement wetland improvement at a grand scale. Drainage projects generated local controversy almost everywhere they were proposed. Disputes pivoted on thorny questions about who was empowered make decisions about the management of water and land, and by what means. Under the early Stuarts, the crown and its ministers began to act as instigators and facilitators driving forward fen projects. The use of increasingly coercive methods to suppress and circumvent local opposition became entangled in wider constitutional controversies about the limits of royal authority and definitions of the public good. Wetland communities were active participants in debates about the economy and morality, environments and justice, consent and legitimate authority. Customary politics proved a powerful force, unravelling a litany of proposed projects in the early seventeenth century. This impasse was broken when Charles I launched the first state-led drainage project in Hatfield Level in 1626, yoking coercive authority to transnational expertise.

Chapter 6 follows Scott’s army through 1847 during its advance toward Mexico City. It considers how the army sought to pacify the Mexican people by paying for what it took and explains the (sometimes violent) consequences for Mexican women. Although women made a vast array of choices in response to the US invasion, from seizing economic opportunities to armed resistance, regulars insisted that women welcomed them – an interpretation that still predominates in military histories. This misconception had strategic benefits. To the extent that army protection of women was real, martial law and army money maintained sufficient order to allow US forces to secure foodstuffs and supplies to continue military operations. To the extent that protection was rhetorical, the army used its claims of legitimacy to make levies on occupied areas (and women), fund operations, and harshly punish those who threatened military interests. The US Army found both strategies, the real and the rhetorical, critical to its invasion of Mexico.

The popes of the first decretal age addressed uncertainties about baptism, but left long loose ends for popes of the second decretal age to tie up.

Chapter 2 theorizes the relationship between culture and politics in a manner that explains the Turkish case and can also be applied more generally. I begin by discussing scholarly approaches to the role of culture in contentious politics before offering my conceptual framework for furthering these approaches. How does culture matter in the creation of oppositional identities and political mobilization? Most often, scholars have answered this question by emphasizing structural conditions, movement frames, or personal narratives. Instead, I focus on dispositions. I draw from practice theory to rethink issues of consent and social movement resistance, and I draw from the concept of "practice" to study the processes through which powerful actors cultivate symbolic oppositions within individuals in the form of dispositions. But the implications of this process for movement mobilization have been undervalued. The chapter makes the case that shared dispositions between mobilizing agents and their constituencies produce collective practices among otherwise dispersed individuals and secure consent on the alternative cosmology. While laying the groundwork to establish specific dispositions may take quite some time, once this groundwork has been completed, mobilizing agents can more easily convince people to "hear" insurrectionary messages as well as act on them.

Clinicians navigating the legislation when working with young people and their families in the United Kingdom (UK) may need to use several relevant frameworks of legislation at the same time. This may appear complex in practice. Clinicians need to consider how a young person’s development across multiple domains, for example, cognitive, emotional, moral, social and so on, can have an impact upon their decision-making. Clinicians who work with children and young people often also work with parents or their local authority statutory equivalents, as well as other statutory and non-statutory agencies, to help find the best outcomes for children and young people (CYP). This requires good knowledge of legal frameworks, competence in working within complex multi-agency systems and being able to understand and work with different perspectives around an issue.This chapter specifically discusses aspects of the law in relation to children and adolescents (all those under 18 years) including the Human Rights Framework, Mental Capacity Act 2005, Children Act 1989 (amended 2004), Mental Health Act (amended 2007), and Criminal Justice Act (2003) within England and Wales. We have not addressed the differences in legislation in Northern Ireland or Scotland but have commented on distinct issues where relevant.

The Conclusion discusses the unsuccessful attempt by James VI and I’s government to create the “Imperial Crowne” of “Great Brittaine” out of the kingdoms of Scotland and England in 1604–08. It examines union treatises by Thomas Craig, John Hayward, and David Hume of Godscroft that struggled to reconcile sovereignty discourse’s stress on historical narrative, legalistic precedent, and jurisdictional independence with a proposed merger of equals. Indeed, in the Atlantic Archipelago only the combination of crises that resulted in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms created the circumstances for revolutionary political thought about sovereignty that dispensed with arguments from a historical sequence of precedents. In this way, the conclusion reflects on the enduring effects that conceiving sovereignty in terms of the recognition of superiority had on premodern writers despite a long series of attempts in England and Scotland to envisage political relations differently.

This chapter covers the problems with current norms in the participants we recruit for psychology experiments, and how to solve some of these problems by taking a Big Data approach. Specifically, many psychology experiments use very restricted and similar samples – such as American college students. However, this sample differs greatly from the global adult population, in many ways described here. The chapter then discusses how we can move toward more representative groups using Big Data, while also highlighting caveats that we will never be able to make a perfect sample, and sometimes we may want to intentionally restrict the people we recruit. The chapter finishes with a look at the big ethical questions surrounding participant recruitment, and discussion on imbalances in the demographics of psychology researchers themselves.

Hume criticized the idea that all legitimate government rests on consent of any sort, tacit or express. He did not deny that some governments originated that way, or that it was an admirable way. But he thought it absurd to claim that legitimate government authority is contingent upon each subject’s consent. To say that it is so is contrary to common opinion and, moreover, simply shifts the question to that of the bindingness of promises. That bindingness must rest on the idea of necessity, and so it is needlessly indirect to appeal to promises when government can be justified directly by its necessity to prosperous and secure society. Hume, however, also made a positive contribution to the social contract tradition. He described how a convention, or common practice, can coordinate expectations and behavior without the need for any express agreement or contract. Later theorists make use of Humean convention in order to connect the idea of hypothetical consent to the actual circumstances of life. In short, government is legitimate where there is a convention of conformance to a social contract that would, hypothetically, be approved by clear-minded individuals.

This chapter explores how international law and its legitimacy could be improved and made more aligned with the demands of justice. It focuses on two types of requirements. First, there are the principles and accompanying procedures on the basis of which actors ask their agency (and their rights) to be recognized by international law and its culture of legitimacy. These principles are consent, justification, accountability, consistency, representation and participation, and non-abuse of power. Second, there are the topics around which this quest for the recognition of agency (and rights) takes place. They are better universality of international law, human rights as a benchmark of the legitimacy of sovereignty, compliance/enforcement/accountability, and human rights supported by public goods. These two kinds of requirements have been at the center of the efforts to make international law more inclusive as well as more legitimate, and they need to be taken more seriously in the future.