Nearly fifty years have passed since the federal government adopted its policy of tribal self-determination, and tribes remain subject to extensive federal regulations. For example, the United States still holds land in trust for tribes. The federal government holds title to trust land, so tribes and Indians cannot engage in activities on trust land without prior federal approval. Obtaining the requisite federal approval can take more than a year. Apart from the bureaucracy, trust land is inalienable, making it difficult to use for collateral. Indian trader laws are another uniquely Indian country regulation. The laws were originally enacted in 1790 on the theory Indians were too incompetent to trade with whites. To this day, the laws forbid “white persons” from trading with an Indian without first obtaining federal permission. The federal regulations extend to virtually all economic activity in Indian country, from natural resource development to Indian gaming.

The separation of powers is not a theory of mechanical checks and balances or counterforce. Any sufficiently complex organization will have competing interests or sub-units; most do not have a separation of powers. This chapter identifies the conceptual and normative core of the separation of powers as a particular kind of institutionalization of the rule of law. It is an attempt to guarantee a separation of general rules from applications to particular persons by keeping them apart not only in time but also in personnel and institutional space. The chapter further argues that the idea of the separation of powers as articulated by Montesquieu joined that understanding of the rule of law to bodies and estates of the mixed constitution, relying in particular on independent and high-status nobles to defend the law against the political demands of the executive monarch equipped with coercive force. The democratization of the separation of powers in the American founding stripped away that social independence, and left the separation of powers weaker than has generally been noticed. The chapter concludes with considerations of the modern executive branch, and suggests that separation of powers reasoning might need to be applied internally to it.

This chapter offers three historical accounts from the post-World War II flows of manufactured products and raw materials, but also the machinery of such flows, i.e., marine transport, focusing on the role that four international organisations played in these processes. The three histories are: liberalisation of telecommunication networks and services, the rise of open shipping registries in the transport of raw materials, and the mass logging of tropical forests. The chapter argues that these three histories, but also the broader history of international organisations since the mid-nineteenth century, embeds impersonal struggles between two modes of organizing capitalist social relations: laissez-faire and state capitalism. While the former is grounded in de-territorialised capitalist expansion, the latter is geared towards territorially confined regimes of accumulation – itself a reaction to the peripheralising effects of laissez-faire capitalism.

Shelley’s poetry was shaped not only by his formal education and privileged position as a member of the Whig-supporting landed gentry class but also by the architecture of his family home and the farming environment of rural Sussex. The paradoxes of his early experiences (unconventional family members coexisting with the conventional moral training of a young patrician; his father’s mildly progressive politics combining with corrupt practices; security at home intercut with violent bullying at school) formed his early conceptions of tyranny and his mission to oppose it. Ossified and limited school and university curricula that nevertheless provided opportunities to pursue areas of knowledge lying outside it together with encouragement to write and freedom to read anything he wanted – these experiences co-mingled to make him at once scholar, gentleman, revolutionary, and philosopher.

Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Symposium as The Banquet, composed with great speed over ten days in July 1818, radically transformed the poet’s thoughts on love, translation, originality, and ancient philosophy. Shelley became Shelley through Plato. Rather than an arbiter of forms and banisher of poets from his ideal republic, Shelley’s Plato is himself a poet, as he claims in ‘A Defence of Poetry’. Through his reading and translation of the ancients – and particularly Plato – philosophy and poetry become concomitant for Shelley. Ultimately, Shelley is indebted to the philosopher’s use of literary forms over any straightforward adoption of his philosophy of forms. This chapter looks before and after Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Symposium to trace the poet’s reading of the ancients from 1812 until his accidental death in 1822, revealing the lasting, shifting influence of ancient philosophy on Shelley’s poetry.

Governments and regulatory agencies make policy through a range of instruments from soft-law guidelines and executive orders to executive rules with the force of law. Based on her book, Democracy and Executive Power, Susan Rose-Ackerman’s essay highlights the link between cross-country differences in rulemaking practices and underlying constitutional frameworks. Based on the US, the UK, Germany, and France, the chapter illustrates how these countries’ disparate constitutional structures help to explain their divergent rulemaking practices. She stresses the existence of policymaking accountability under the rulemaking provisions of the US APA and its absence from the other cases. Nevertheless, whatever the legal framework, the author argues that bureaucrats should take account of outside input as they implement statutory language to make policy choices. The organization of the executive branch should encourage public input and promote bureaucratic competence. Contemporary pressures may indeed be moving all of these countries toward more accountable procedures – not just to protect individual rights but also to enhance the democratic legitimacy of executive rulemaking.

This chapter provides an overview of the state of the art in constitutional and political theory with regard to the topic of central banks. Central banking, I show, is a highly political domain of policy making that raises thorny and under explored normative questions. I challenge accounts of central banking as involving limited discretion and distributional choices in the pursuit of low inflation, as well as the narrow range of normative questions that such accounts raise. I then ask what to make of central bankers’ political power from a normative perspective. As I argue, some delegation of important decisions to unelected officials is almost unavoidable, often desirable and by itself not undemocratic. I conclude by explaining that we should nonetheless be reluctant to allow for extensive central bank discretion by highlighting six crucial issues that are currently not sufficiently understood: the central bank’s actual level of autonomy from governments, the effectiveness of accountability mechanisms, the effects of depoliticizing money on the broader political system, the effects of democratic insulation on the effectiveness of central banks, the specific practices of deliberation within central banks and the scope for coordination with elected government.

This chapter considers the aesthetics of the mixed style in Rabelais, Montaigne, and Shakespeare as anticipating Rancière’s rereading of Kant’s third critique, and it tries to show what is distinctive about Auerbach’s account by contrasting him with a better-known definition of the Renaissance by his friend Erwin Panofsky.