Rather than occasions for law’s standstill in face of a political decision, emergencies are opportunities for legal, institutional and normative mobilization. The entry lays out the field’s basic areas of concern: the theoretical problem of containment of threats within a particular legal and political order, and the practical problems of definitions, authorizations, jurisdiction and temporality. If indeed the time frames of emergency are long and flexible, multiple and overlapping rather than “exceptional”, then law in emergencies is a constantly shifting space of opportunity in which normatively charged political projects can be manifested. To design legal and constitutional mechanisms that will better respond to threats, we should shift away from theories that perpetuate a static dichotomy between “norm” and “exception”, and study emergency as a dynamic field of legal and normative mobilization.

This chapter studies the property’s analytical structure. The most basic concept for property is the concept of a usufruct. The conceptual model for usufructs describes informal property right and simple legal rights like easements and common law water rights. That model also describes the features of the natural rights that conventional property institutions should secure. Usufructs consist of in rem and immunized claim-rights in relation to separable resources, they possess institutional status, and they are structured to perform the function of facilitating productive use as studied in Chapters 4 and 5. The foregoing definition of a usufruct is a definition in relation to a focal or core case. This chapter contrasts its conceptual claims with exclusion theories and bundle of rights theories.

This chapter explores the idea of opposition. One may make known one’s opposition to specific measures and one may make known one’s opposition to those who hold the office of government. While opposition to those who rule may flourish only in constitutional arrangements that contemplate changes in government, the freedom to make known opposition to measures may obtain and flourish even absent such arrangements. These two different modalities of opposition – to measures and to governments – draw on a reciprocal understanding that those who oppose and those who rule are both committed to the public good. Depending on the design of its system of government, a constitution may enable or empower opposition, with the parliamentary form of government differing in important respects from the presidential. Some constitutional arrangements and proposals award to opposition members in legislatures and elsewhere some degree of authority in exercising the office of government. Whatever the merits of such coalition or consensus arrangements and proposals, they change the function of opposition, for when those who oppose begin to govern, a version of the question quis custodiet ipsos custodes (who guards the guardians) arises: who stands in opposition to the opposition?

Chapter 12 looks at the abolition movement, primarily as it targets prisons but also with respect to its stance on the police. As a foil, the chapter reacts to an article entitled The Dangerous Few: Taking Seriously Prison Abolition and Its Skeptics, in which Thomas Frampton proffers several reasons why those who want to abolish prisons should not budge from their position even for offenders who are considered dangerous. This chapter rebuts each of these reasons. In the process of doing so, it demonstrates why a criminal law “minimalist” approach to prisons is preferable to abolition, not just when dealing with the dangerous few but also as a means of protecting the nondangerous many. It argues that a minimalist regime patterned on preventive justice precepts can radically reduce reliance on prisons and on the police, without the loss in crime prevention capacity and legitimacy that is likely to come with abolition.

The chapter describes how torture has been defined over the last 85 years since it was prohibited in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The core elements are described of severe physical or mental pain or suffering intentionally inflicted for a purpose on someone in your power combine with the role of a State agent to amount to torture. The distinct features of the definition of torture under international humanitarian law are also described.

There are 574 federally recognized tribes. Each has a direct government-to-government relationship with the United States, and each tribe is unique. However, not all legitimate tribes are federally recognized. Which tribes received federal recognition was often a matter of historical accident. To rectify this, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) created the federal acknowledgment process in 1978. The process was intended to provide an objective and efficient means of identifying “real” tribes, but it has failed. The process often costs millions of dollars, takes decades, and produces unpredictable results. Moreover, the process’ seven mandatory criteria are subjective and often impractical. The Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana and United Houma Nation (UHN) are two examples. The BIA recognized the Coushatta in the 1930s, terminated them in the 1950s, and then re-recognized the tribe in the 1970s. While the Coushatta were deserving of recognition, the recognition was driven by the leadership of Ernest Sickey, the tribe’s inaugural chairman. Sickey strongly supported UHN federal recognition, and the BIA has acknowledged the Houma are Indians. However, the BIA has yet to recognize the UHN as an Indian tribe. Without recognition, the UHN has no sovereignty to protect its traditional lands or people.

By focusing on the relations between the polity of Ethiopia and the institutions of international ordering – the United Nations and its predecessor, the League of Nations, chief among them – in this chapter I explore the problem of the ‘global colour line’ in relation to international institutions. In particular, I trace the lofty promises, and resounding disappointments, that the United Nations (as a proverbial White, and male, Knight) offered the racialised peoples of the world – and Ethiopia, in particular – in their attempt to challenge a racialised and hierarchical global order. The result is neither a blind celebration of the United Nations’ anticolonial potential, nor a resolute condemnation of its imperial lineage. Instead, I want to embrace the ambiguities offered by the metaphor of this racialised and gendered saviour trope – especially in relation to the racialised savage non-European other. For in any attempt to overturn the global colour line, the United Nations and its family of international organisations will prove to be both utterly indispensable and insufficient.

The perpetration of torture in peacetime almost inevitably involves the responsibility of a State. Indeed, State responsibility is at the heart of the international human rights law prohibition of torture, which also applies in a situation of armed conflict. In the case of torture as a war crime, a crime against humanity, or genocide, however, an entity other than a State may be directly responsible for acts of torture. Nevertheless, as a matter of general international law, given the seriousness of the violation of a jus cogens norm, in all situations the victims and survivors of torture are entitled to a remedy to help compensate for the harm they have suffered. The same principle should pertain to other forms of ill-treatment even though their prohibition is not also a peremptory rule of international law. The consequences of being tortured for the individual and his or her family can be both devastating and lifelong. Rehabilitation may help to turn a victim into a survivor, but it will never fully dispel the harm that has been inflicted. Some of the techniques developed by dedicated experts and non-governmental organizations to promote physical and psycho-social rehabilitation are referred to in this chapter.

When natural rights justify ownership, the justification is only a prima facie justification. Ownership may justly be limited when it seems unlikely in practice to serve people’s interests in acquiring and using ownable resources. Each of the four elements of natural property rights highlights limits on ownership, and this chapter surveys a range of doctrines illustrating the relevant limits – limits on the scope of property in air columns via aerial trespass doctrine; adverse possession; doctrines enforcing limits on malicious conduct and abuse of right; remedial defenses for undue hardship in property disputes; public commonses; the necessity privilege in tort; rights of way to access public commons; common carrier doctrines; and progressive taxation, welfare, and other public assistance policies.

This chapter discusses Shelley’s complex orientation towards Romantic-period drama and theatre culture. For Shelley, drama provided a key opportunity for generic experimentation that is continuous with his lyrical innovations. These innovations, however, go beyond producing new kinds of Romantic ‘closet dramas’, which were intended for a smaller, more bourgeois reading public. To argue this claim, the chapter attends to how Shelley’s writings on ancient Greek dramaturgical principles resonated with his interest in Romantic-period popular theatre. As shown in his dramatic poetic theory, Shelley attempted to realise his ideal intersection of aesthetics, historical progress, and contemporary social change in works sometimes intended for popular consumption. As demonstrated by his hopes to stage certain plays, Shelley’s dramatic efforts indicate that embodiment and mixed media forms were essential to his broader poetics.

The previous chapter described Earth’s orientation. I now build on that to construct orbital theory with a greater emphasis on vectors and coordinates than is traditional in that subject. I use Euler angles, rotation sequences, and the theory constructed around these in previous chapters to simplify what can often be a confusing barrage of notation in orbital theory. I include two very detailed examples here: sighting an Earth satellite and sighting Jupiter.

A victim is most obviously under the effective control of another where he or she has been formally deprived of liberty by the State and the perpetrator is a legal custodian. But a state of powerlessness may also arise in an extra-custodial law enforcement setting in certain circumstances. This chapter explores that dynamic, addressing the regulation of unlawful extra-custodial use of force by the police and other law enforcement officials, first as a manifestation of torture and then, in the more common alternative, as other proscribed ill-treatment.