This chapter studies doctrines that consolidate different real-world resources into different res in property law. Some such doctrines classify individual real-world resources as separate res; others consolidate several resources into single res in law. The requirements for natural property rights, namely, claim communication and productive use, provide satisfying foundations for thing design doctrines. The doctrines are then implemented in law and policy via practical reason. This chapter studies doctrines associated with accession, specification, confusion, fugitive or fugacious minerals, the ad coelum maxim, the ratione soli maxim, and fixtures. This chapter also studies how property in land, water flow, and chattels all limit one another. This chapter also studies contemporary policy debates about hydraulic fracturing, including property in oil and natural gas trapped in shale or “tight” rocks.

Chapter 6 moves further into the postarrest setting, using as a springboard the findings and recommendations of the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Task Force for the state of Florida, which I chaired. At the time of our report, twenty-two people had been released from death row on the ground they had been wrongfully convicted. Relying on an analysis of caselaw, studies, news reports, and interviews, we described the flaws in Florida’s death penalty law and practice that contributed to these injustices. This chapter summarizes and updates the findings of the Task Force in several areas: the analysis of scientific evidence; the conduct of prosecutors; the qualifications, reimbursement, and competence of defense attorneys; the decision-making process of judges; the structure and decision-making process of capital sentencing juries; the clemency process; the system’s reaction to the race of the victim; and the treatment of people with mental disability. This chapter also documents that the failings it recounts – including incompetent forensic labs, prosecutors intent on winning at all costs, underpaid and overwhelmed defense attorneys, juries uncertain about their roles, and judges and governors driven by the next election – afflict many other state systems, in noncapital as well as capital cases. The recommendations of the Task Force, also reported here, would significantly improve the accuracy of criminal adjudications across the country.

Constitutions set out fundamental principles of political morality that bind institutional action and assign strong political rights to individuals. At surface level, the principle of proportionality is a methodological device. It operates as a doctrinal heading under which courts scrutinize state interference with individual liberty and assess the scope of their own authority. According to the orthodox understanding of proportionality, this scrutiny takes the form of balancing rights against public interest, which raises questions about the legitimacy of judicial review. This chapter argues that, contrary to the orthodox view, proportionality is primarily about the normative foundations of constitutional rights and the duty of courts to pursue, through principled legal reasoning, the moral truth about individual rights. On this rival account of proportionality, rights are equality-based moral norms constraining state action and no actual balancing takes place by courts. If we are to take seriously both the idea of fundamental rights and the principle of proportionality, we must abandon the misleading metaphor of balancing and the problems of incommensurability and judicial scepticism to which it leads.

The distinct prohibitions of torture and other forms of ill-treatment have crystallized as customary international law as the chapter discusses. In the specific case of torture, its prohibition is also a peremptory (jus cogens) norm of international law – a rule that is applicable in all circumstances and in any place. The chapter also discusses the geographical, material, personal, and temporal jurisdiction of the prohibitions of torture and other ill-treatment under international law more generally.

This chapter addresses the theme of ‘Death and Burial’, focussing on what little is known about prestigious burials in Roman churches, including various popes and the emperor Otto II.

I analyse Shelley’s fraught relationship with Byron’s self-monumentalising, flippantly self-mocking poetics and personal pride, arguing that Shelley’s notion of a ‘Promethean’ poet who catches the strains of general human ‘sympathy’ tenses productively against what he saw as Byron’s narrow drive to create an elevated poetic ‘self’. Shelley, though he admired Byron’s poetics in many ways, also saw his friend as being at risk, poetically and personally, of the sort of inflexible remove that the Promethean poet might fall into if their overreaching ambition comes to render them ‘cold’ and removed from their historical moment. Though acts of intertextual intimacy with Byron’s work, Shelley explores various forms of ‘coldness’: some Byronic laments for the trials of human mutability, some distinctively Shelleyan forms of ‘coldness’ that strive to regenerate, through defamiliarisation, the very ‘ashes and sparks’ of creativity that the poet, with their largely unavoidable removal from the world, risks disdaining.

This chapter lays out one way through the argument of Capital Volume 1, with the intention of showing that we have now fully entered the realm of the actualization of philosophy. Marx does not impose any preordained dialectical schema or procedure, but shows in detail how the exploitation of workers that commodity production under capitalism requires leads to the expropriation of the expropriators, and thereby to communism. In doing so, he performs the critique of political economy, not as the critique of some field of study, but through the concrete demonstration of how things function, and thereby how they are to function.

I derive the important equation that relates the time derivative of a vector computed in one frame to that computed in another frame. I make the point that we must understand the distinction between frames and coordinates to appreciate what the equations are saying. That discussion leads naturally to the concept of centrifugal and Coriolis forces in rotating frames. I use the frame-dependent time derivative to derive some equations for robotics, and finish with a wider discussion of the time derivative for tensors and in fluid flow.

What does it mean to treat people as equals when the legacies of feudalism, religious persecution, authoritarian, paternalistic and oligarchic government have shaped the landscape within which we must construct something better? This question has come to dominate much constitutional practice as well as philosophical inquiry in the past 50 years. The combination of Second Wave Feminism with the continuing struggle for racial equality in the 1970s brought into sharp relief the variety of ways in which people can be treated unequally, while respecting the formalities of constitutional government. In the first part of this chapter, I focus on efforts to reframe the theory and practice of constitutional equality in light of demands for sexual and racial equality. I then show that analytic philosophy has also come to recognise the various non-reducible dimensions of equality in ways that reinforce the claims of critical legal theory, even as philosophers highlight their disconcerting consequences. If equality has multiple irreducible dimensions, conflicts between the legitimate demands of equality are unavoidable features of law and politics, even in the best possible world, and are likely to be particularly painful when set against a background of historical injustice. The chapter concludes with the challenges to democratic constitutionalism, and the scope for constructive responses to those challenges, which the rapprochement between critical and analytic thinking on equality suggests.