The Introduction examines the emergence and development of law and literature as an interdisciplinary field, while highlighting the ways in which eighteenth-century studies has contributed to and been shaped by the enterprise. Over the past twenty-five years, scholars have examined numerous connections between the era’s legal and literary discourses, emphasizing the formal complexities of both legal and literary texts. The chapters in this volume build upon and extend this body of work, taking up topics including the nature of legal and literary interpretation, the role of legal rhetoric in Britain’s industrial economy, the desire for and resistance to law during public health crises, the regulation of the legal profession, the emergence of the modern judicial decision, the place of law in Britain’s expanding empire, and the role of law in maintaining and rectifying gendered, racial, religious, and class-based inequalities. The Introduction presents an overview of these case studies, reflects on themes running through the volume, and offers suggestions for future work in the field.

Many eighteenth-century theorists of common law attributed its legitimacy in part to its connection to a particular location and history. However, as Britain incorporated Scotland and expanded its imperial reach abroad, British governors often attempted to carry common-law practices to new locations. In his fiction and nonfiction, Sir Walter Scott advocates maintaining Scotland’s common-law system but worries that the very cultural and legal distinctiveness he demands for Scotland prevents Scots from receiving justice under British law. Portraying the consequences of the Norman conquest in Ivanhoe (1819) and internal and external colonialism in Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), Scott demonstrates the difficulties of reconciling the role of custom in common law’s legitimacy with a centralizing imperial state. In both works, the victors’ biases toward their own law mean that history and historical fiction no longer suture past and present, and that law imposes tragedy as well as order.

Chapter 1 introduces the book’s key themes by describing the Buchanan v. Warley case in its historical social-movement context in Louisville and nationally, the legal theory behind the Supreme Court’s invalidation of racial zoning, and the 100+ years in which many subsequent land use policies and practices have segregated American landscapes and perpetuated racial injustice. The chapter provides a multi-dimensional snapshot of racially unjust land-use conditions in the U.S. more than 100 years after the nation’s missed opportunity to embrace an anti-subordination vision of land use. Based on distributive, procedural, and social justice concepts and the insights of the nine core chapters in the book, three major themes are identified: (1) racial inequity is deeply and systemically embedded in American land use in multi-faceted ways; (2) cross-disciplinary scholarly study is essential to understanding race and land use; and (3) American land use is characterized both by the intransigence of systemic racism and by social, legal, and policy changes that advance racial justice.

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.

The brief coda reflects on how the model developed in this book can be applied to later premodern societies.

The conclusion draws together the findings of the book’s fifteen analytical chapters and is divided into six sections. Each section places several individual chapters in conversation with one another. First, we reflect on how the authors engaged with stability, across the four forms we developed in the introductory chapter, before the second section does the same regarding re/politicization. Third, we engage with the running theme throughout the book that stability and re/politicization are not dichotomous but rather interact, and indeed, one can be pursued to achieve the other. Fourth, we explore manifestations of depoliticization encountered within the book and find that, in practice, many regimes pursuing stability are less depoliticized than often assumed. Fifth, we bring in the importance of temporality to our studies, before finally offering concluding remarks on the book’s arguments and suggesting avenues for future research. Throughout the volume, we have presented the antagonism between stability and re/politicization in a deliberately flexible manner, and we hope others will find it – as well as our four novel forms of each approach – to be useful in their own analyses.

The introductory chapter details what is gained by using the concept of social role when studying power relations in Late Antiquity and how it ties in well with ancient ideas about why people act in the way they do. It shows how Late Antique thought and practice conceptualized social hierarchies in moral terms and argues that precisely the expectation that social and moral hierarchies coincide injects the dynamism in social interactions that this book chronicles. It also underscores that society was conceived of as held together by justice and shows how this was intertwined with hierarchical conceptions of society and the cosmos.

This introductory chapter establishes the two prevalent framings of climate governance and politics, namely an antagonism between the pursuit of stability and of re/politicization. The chapter’s first section, on stability, introduces to the field four novel understandings of stability: as the status quo, as engineering lock-in, as policy lock-in, and as long-term emissions reduction pathways. Next, re/politicization is explored, and we likewise develop four forms of re/politicization: as broader sociopolitical change, as partisan competition, as discourse, and as scholarly praxis. In each of the two sections, we illustrate our four novel forms with examples from the book. Finally, the chapter’s concluding section provides an overview of the five thematic parts that structure the volume, which are Movement Politics, Political Economy, Comparative Politics, Global Politics, and Reflections.

This chapter argues that petitions have hitherto been too narrowly studied as bureaucratic acts defined by Roman law and shifts attention to informal petitions, whereby any superior could be petitioned even when they did not have formal power, and to oral petitions, whereby immediate justice was demanded. Petitions then appear as reflecting a culture of entreaty characteristic for a hierarchical society.

Minoritized groups are often portrayed as “hard to reach” by policymakers yet face myriad obstacles in undertaking – and, in particular, shaping – climate action. For many minoritized communities, the pursuit of climate justice is inherently intertwined with achieving other goals, such as economic, gender, and/or social justice. In this chapter, we examine the experiences of climate actors from Muslim communities in the UK, finding that the politicization of climate action may shape the assumptions of policymakers behind the scenes, generating more effective and inclusive policy outputs. However, this strategy faces complex power inequalities, as Muslims face structural inequalities that hinder, or even threaten, involvement. Muslim communities face a higher probability of arrest when participating in political action, alongside worse conditions following such an arrest. Our interviewees tell us that a wider pursuit of societal justice and alternative forms of politicization beyond protests are integral to achieving more representative and effective climate action for Muslim communities.

The sense of duty is a virtue of caring, not directly about the good, or even about justice, but about doing one’s duty. Insofar as doing what one takes to be one’s duty is in fact to do what is good, the sense of duty functions as a backup for the more direct virtues of caring – generosity, compassion, and truthfulness, as well as justice. Being a virtue of caring, the sense of duty can be expressed in emotions: a feeling of satisfaction in having done one’s duties or feelings of guilt or shame at having neglected them. The sense of duty can vary, emotionally, according to how one conceives the authoritative source of duty, on a spectrum from reverence, through respect, to resentful acceptance. Example of the extremes beyond the spectrum are some Hebrew psalmists’ delight in the law of God and the contempt of the utter moral cynic.

Chapter 9 draws on the evidence outlined earlier in the book to evaluate a range of possible legal interventions. Structured according to the five potential equality objectives outlined earlier, the measures include steps to increase the visibility of people with disfigurements in daily life, methods of motivating employers to become appearance-inclusive and changes to influential institutions outside the employment context. They also include a range of legislative reforms to replace the severe disfigurement provision with a better remedial mechanism, such as the creation of a new protected characteristic of disfigurement or the reformulation of the definition of disability.

Leibniz defends teleology or purposive activity against the overly mechanical worldview of Thomas Hobbes, and develops an idea of spontaneity as self-originating action irreducible to mere mechanistic reaction. He links free activity with justice as the enabling conditions for the exercise of freedom, and with the progressive deployment of individual and collective powers. He thus sets the agenda for subsequent idealism, which reconfigures the idea of spontaneity and reflects on the harmonisation of diverse individual efforts as a problem of ongoing juridical reform

Educators within contemporary Australian educational settings are increasingly being called on to enact their pedagogy in multicultural classrooms, yet pedagogies remain oriented towards a narrow learner cohort. Meaningful inclusion of culturally and religiously diverse learners not only focuses on what is being taught or what knowledge is privileged, but is concerned with how it is taught and from whose perspective. Importantly, it prioritises what learners bring to educational settings – their diverse knowledge(s), languages, values and beliefs; all of which are embedded in their ways of knowing, being and doing informed by their cultural and religious traditions. This chapter aims to support educators in enacting culturally responsive pedagogy, including consideration of learners’ world views, knowledge(s) and ways of knowing, as well as respect for identities and backgrounds as meaningful sources for optimal learning, while simultaneously holding high expectations of them all. Educators will be challenged to examine epistemological and pedagogical diversity in HASS teaching and learning, to further develop learners’ knowledge, values and beliefs towards engaged and informed citizenship.

In acts that are properly acts of justice (rather than, say, compassion or generosity), what is good for people is sought under the mediating description what is due them. The virtue of justice is the generalized concern that people get what is due them. Objective justice is the property of states of affairs, actions, institutions, and personal relationships in which people tend to get what is due them. So the virtue of justice is the concern that such objects have that property. When is some good or evil due a person? It is due on at least eight kinds of basis: desert, status, need, current possession, agreement, legality, parity, and freedom. We appeal to these conditions in justifying justice claims. The person who has the virtue of justice is one who is consistently and intelligently concerned that states of affairs, actions, institutions, and personal relationships be objectively just.