The chapter discusses the comparative constitutional theory of parliamentary and presidential government as well as various hybrids. It suggests that the much-discussed perils of presidentialism, to the extent that they exist, may largely be due to the kind of personalism that results from directly electing a fixed-term president. When the comparative study of executive formats goes beyond the standard trichotomy of parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential systems, we can see that the branch-based separation of powers can be analytically and practically separated from executive personalism. Hybrid systems such as “assembly-independent” government in Switzerland or “semi-parliamentary” government in Australia can be understood as efforts to reap the benefits of powers separation while avoiding the perils of executive personalism. Cogent arguments for the direct election of a fixed-term president are hard to find, despite the widespread belief that it is inherently more democratic.

Ostensibly, all British former servicemen received a new wardrobe. In reality, this was reserved for British- and Irish-born veterans and denied to those from Britain’s colonies. This chapter foregrounds a ‘mutiny’ by West Indian RAF personnel in May 1946. British officials, alarmed by a ‘colour problem’ they ascribed to Black men’s excessive sensitivity to racist slurs, worked to repatriate veterans of colour, regardless of their wishes and British status. Repatriated West Indian veterans received just a promissory note. This cash entitlement varied from island to island. Enraged by racialized injustices, West Indian airmen demanded redress, staging a protest as the SS Bergensfjord transported them from Glasgow to Trinidad and Jamaica. This chapter places their demonstration within two larger frames: a wave of transnational veteran militancy in late 1945 and 1946, in which grievances over clothing were interwoven with larger imperial injustices; and a proliferation of ‘double crossings’ after the war, trans-oceanic passages in both directions, as people were removed or elected to move. Many West Indian veterans soon returned to Britain on the Windrush and other vessels.

Results of previous chapters come together here in the equations that model a vehicle’s position and attitude given a knowledge of, for example, its angular turn rates. These equations can seem perplexing at first glance, and so I derive them in careful steps, again making strong use of vectors and the frame dependence of the time derivative. I end with a detailed example of applying these equations to a spinning top.

Chapter 2 confronts another common police practice, often called “caretaking,” that involves searches purportedly carried out to provide aid to citizens. Because these searches can be used as pretexts to carry out illegitimate and sometimes deadly agendas, this practice too needs to be curtailed. The seeds for doing so are found in Caniglia v. Strom, the recent Supreme Court decision rejecting a freestanding caretaker exception to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement. Properly construed, Caniglia would significantly limit police-initiated searches and seizures for benign or “regulatory” purposes unrelated to criminal law enforcement. This interpretation also provides doctrinal support for the fledgling movement to de-police those government services that, whatever might be the tradition, do not require the intervention of armed individuals trained to fight crime.

Percy Shelley seemed anathema to the modernist movement. Yet the persistence of Shelley in the imagination of twentieth-century poets meant his presence never faded away. Even for his detractors, Shelley’s ghost is not exorcised. This chapter traces Shelley’s influence in twentieth-century poetry to suggest ways of reading the many strands of Shelleyan influence. Focusing on several twentieth-century poets, such as Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, and Hart Crane, and through Sylvia Townsend Warner and Laura (Riding) Jackson to Wallace Stevens, this chapter views Shelley as inspiring a variety of (anglophone) poets in the early to mid-twentieth century. What Shelley offers his twentieth-century poet-readers is a series of possibilities, ways of reading, and means to become inspired, by a poet of unrivalled intensity.

Chapter 7 contends that, as implemented in the United States, adversarialism is a significant cause of many of the systemic flaws recounted in Chapter 6. It is thus also a significant cause of wrongful convictions, unjust sentences, and errant acquittals. Empirical evidence recounted in this chapter suggests that these errors could be significantly minimized if we modified the American practice of allowing the prosecution and the defense to dominate evidence production by adopting the hybrid inquisitorial regime found in some European countries. This chapter proposes the integration of three inquisitorial mechanisms into American trial procedure – judicial control over the adjudication process, nonadversarial treatment of experts, and required unsworn testimony by the defendant – and defends the proposals against constitutional and practical challenges. While other scholars have suggested borrowing from overseas, these three proposals have yet to be presented as a package. Together they could measurably enhance the accuracy of American criminal trials.

Pepys’s diary was first published in 1825, in a highly selective version edited by Lord Braybrooke. This was a starkly different journal from the versions read today, cutting most of Pepys’s personal life, his details of everyday London and (with the exception of some court scandal) all the sex. This chapter investigates how the diary came to be published, including the shrewd tactics of the diary’s shorthand transcriber John Smith and its publisher Henry Colburn. On release, the diary drew influential admirers such as the novelist Walter Scott and the historian Thomas Macaulay. Early responses focused on the diary’s value as entertainment, on censorship, and on the questions that it raised about historical value. The chapter considers how the diary changed – or did not change – ideas of the Restoration period, the diary’s influence on the writing of social history, and the extent to which its publication followed Pepys’s plans for his library.

In democracies based on elections, representation brings a novel kind of freedom to the fore, one that does not need to be associated with the citizen’s direct action or presence in the place where decisions are made, as is the case in direct democracy. It enlarges the space and meaning of politics in ways that cannot easily be reduced to electoral authorization and consent, and it invariably connects with both the lawmaking institution and the citizens’ voluntary participation, their equal right to define the political direction of their country but also claim, vindicate, and monitor their representatives. This chapter analyzes “political representation” in its actors, components and processes and compared it to other forms (as statistical sample and embodiment) and finally discusses the implications of the mixture of representation and democracy in contemporary politics.

Chapter 1 offers an overview of the protohistory of the concept of parameter. The first part mainly focuses on the theoretical foundations of Generative Grammar, as laid out in Chomsky (1965). The discussion then turns to those works which paved the way to the parametric approach in Generative Grammar, with Chomsky (1973) introducing a first set of universal conditions on grammatical rules, and Chomsky (1976) being the generative work in which the term ‘parameter’ is used for the first time. The outcome of Rizzi’s (1978) and Taraldsen’s (1978) pre-parametric inquiries is then reviewed, as they shed new light on the systematicity of linguistic variation. Finally, focus is put on the explicit formulation of the concept of parameter and the consequent shift toward the systematic study of cross-linguistic variation, a problem previously addressed by Greenberg (1963). In this respect, the major advancement introduced by Chomsky (1981a) is the hypothesis of the existence of implicational relations among individual parameters. How the term ‘parameter’ is used in Chomsky and Lasnik (1977) in conjunction with the concept of core grammar is also discussed.

Revisiting selected passages from Siegfried and Parsifal, this chapter argues that the archaic surface of Wagner’s late counterpoint – the result of contrary motion, constructed symmetries, stepwise motion and rhythmic uniformity – relies less on historical styles than on a musical ‘laboratory situation’. Through a combination of nineteenth-century counterpoint pedagogy and historical and contemporary models (including some of Wagner’s own earlier works) with aspects of memory studies and Adorno’s ideas on late style, the chapter shows how a composed image of ‘counterpoint’ creates acoustic and analytical conditions that draw attention to the constructive elements of Wagner’s late style.