There are two practices of constitutional review: the diffuse review by the judiciary with supreme courts as the final appellate body in common law countries and the concentrated review by constitutional courts outside the ordinary judiciary in civil law countries. Though we observe a tendency towards a convergence of diffuse and concentrated review, there are still differences. In this chapter, the comparative merits and problems of concentrated versus diffuse review are evaluated. In order to compare the types of apex courts, a normative concept of constitutional review is developed. According to this concept, the most important precondition for legitimate and effective constitutional review is the difference between judicial and political decision-making. Judges who are capable of respecting this difference, enhance social integration by establishing a specific mechanism to correct procedural and substantive injustices. When evaluated by this standard, neither supreme nor constitutional courts are superior. Rather, the problem of both practices concerns a gradual process of a judicialization of politics. More and more political questions are decided by apex courts with constitutional review power, thereby reducing political alternatives. In concluding, a division of labor between judges and legislators is suggested that promises legitimate and effective constitutional review enriching democratic governance.

Referendums trigger both enthusiasm and scepticism among constitutional theorists. The positive case for the referendum emphasises its ability to give the people a consequential voice on salient decisions, its capacity to break political deadlock and enrich the political agenda, its educational civic role, as well its anti-establishment and even radically democratic potential. The negative case, conversely, focuses on the referendum’s divisiveness, propensity to be manipulated by elites, and tendency to produce ill-informed decisions. Between these two poles are various attempts to evaluate the referendum as a complement to rather than replacement for representative institutions, and to stipulate conditions for its proper institutionalisation. The spread of sophisticated disinformation campaigns and the growing interest in deliberative innovations such as mini-publics also raise new questions about referendum design, safeguards, and legitimacy. This chapter takes seriously the democratic case for the use of referendums while revisiting three areas of concern: the ambiguous place of referendums within democratic theory, including its relationship to direct, representative, and deliberative democracy; the complex interplay between referendums as majoritarian tools and minority rights; and the novel opportunities and distinct challenges to informed voter consent in the digital era, not least disinformation and fake news.

The rule of non-refoulement under international law protects a person from being handed over to the jurisdiction over another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that they will be at clear risk of suffering irreparable harm, particularly in the form of killing, enforced disappearance, torture, or other ill-treatment. The version of the rule of non-refoulement included in the 1984 UN Convention against Torture protects a person from return only against the risk of torture. But the broader formulation of the rule that has crystallized as custom in international law also concerns other ill-treatment as well.

If our aim is to pluralise the ‘subjects, methods, and aims’ of the academic study of international organisations, then one fairly obvious route to follow is that of historicisation. Historians of international organisations have elected a variety of avenues to relate the creation and the design of international institutions. Building on their work, this chapter offers another tool to the methodological palette the present volume offers; on the other hand and more specifically, I want to reflect on what international organisations are from the point of view of their making. To do so, I zoom in on one important moment in the history of modern international organisations: the 1865 international telegraph commission in Paris that convened to determine the scope and purpose of the first formal and permanent international organisation, the International Telegraph Union. I approach this case through the lens of micro-politics, combining biographical and sociological methods. Methodologically I study international organisations by means of biographical membership analysis; theoretically I argue that international organisations cannot be fully understood in separation from the situated political motives of their makers.

France, Spain, and Great Britain all claimed footholds in North America by the 1700s. War arose between France and Great Britain, and it eventually transformed into a global conflict. Great Britain prevailed, transforming the political dynamics of North America. British colonists attempted to migrate farther west, but tribal resistance forced Britain to block the American colonists. The land-hungry American colonists declared independence from Great Britain. The United States of America prevailed. While the United States believed tribes were defeated by virtue of their alliance with Great Britain, tribes continued to assert their sovereignty.

Washington’s abrupt cancellation of Lend-Lease after World War II accentuated Britain’s chronic indebtedness to the United States. Redressing Britain’s balance of payments deficit required the orientation of much domestic production for export. Textiles lay at the heart of this export drive. But workers in the cotton and woollen industries, as in the garment sector, were lacking. This chapter analyses the campaign to encourage women to enter the mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire, exploring why women resisted official entreaties. With tens of thousands of Britons emigrating annually, the government turned to displaced persons (DPs) in occupied Germany and Austria. In 1947, the Ministry of Labour launched ‘Operation Westward Ho’ to recruit DPs as so-called ‘European Volunteer Workers’. The majority of female recruits were channelled into textile work. The chapter concludes by exploring the tensions surrounding these female migrants, including a perception that they received too many perks and anxieties over women’s reproductive agency. Unmarried pregnant ‘volunteers’ risked deportation if they sought terminations, or invasive attempts to compel them to marry.

In the shifting context of global policy making, International Organisations (IOs) have become powerful sources of expert authority and central sites for the exercise of power in global governance. While we have a clear understanding of how IOs deploy expertise, there has been relatively little effort among legal scholarship and International Relations to critically examine the processes by which such institutions produce and validate knowledge claims about governance objects and, in doing so, authorise certain solutions as the only ‘viable’. This chapter examines the way in which the World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, and UNICEF acted as central vehicles in defining the contours of ‘hidden hunger’ as a ‘matter of fact’ – or as a medicalised and economised object of governance. It shows how this problematisation largely validated the prioritisation of short-term responses and easily measurable programmes such as food fortification and vitamin supplementation in Global South countries. Rather than addressing the underlying socio-economic determinants of the problem, such responses acted as political analgesics providing temporarily relief. In highlighting how IOs’ ‘ways of seeing’ are connected to the practice of governing, the chapter sheds light on the everyday politics of rule-making.

Chapter 1 provides the contextual and conceptual frameworks shaping the book. It explains the sociolegal context in which the book is situated – in particular, India’s Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA) of 1956, the US-led anti-trafficking regime, and the role of anti-trafficking NGOs. Conceptually, Chapter 1 lays out how the book places postcolonial law in a broader field of neoliberal government including state agencies and foreign-funded NGOs acting upon prostitution. It explains how the book pursues new directions in legal anthropology with an attentiveness to multiple scales of governance and law’s implementation by state and nonstate actors, while remaining deeply rooted in the minutiae of legal practices and spaces. Finally, Chapter 1 shows how the book is in dialogue with interdisciplinary feminist scholars who have critiqued anti-trafficking campaigns and provided nuanced ethnographic insights on the complexities of sex workers’ lives. It explains how, unlike these studies, this book is not an ethnography of sex work, sex trafficking, or even of anti-trafficking interventions alone. Instead, it explores how India’s anti-prostitution law and global anti-trafficking campaigns converge and act upon sex workers, and how sex workers navigate and resist them.

Pepys’s diary has always been regarded as a very strange text. From its first publication, the reasons why Pepys wrote about his life in such detail – and in such embarrassing detail – have puzzled readers, as has why he then preserved his diary for posterity. This introduction outlines Pepys’s life, the episodes from his diary that are the most famous, and the changing estimations of its importance as history and literature. It argues that one of the strangest things about this text is that, despite its fame, very few people have read the original, for Pepys wrote in shorthand with all printed texts being transcriptions into longhand. Answering some of the puzzles of Pepys’s diary means getting to grips with the shorthand, the censored versions in which the diary has circulated, and the strange things that readers have done with it.