This chapter addresses symmetry’s implications for expressive freedom and religious liberty. Symmetry supports maintaining First Amendment law’s current focus on neutrality, notwithstanding emerging critiques that this approach lacks a strong historical foundation and unduly limits governmental regulation of offensive or dangerous ideas. At the same time, symmetric interpretation counsels against expanding the emerging “First Amendment Lochnerism” that threatens to extend constitutional protections for free expression into areas of economic and workplace regulation. A preference for symmetry also supports protecting religious groups, when possible, through more general protections for freedom of expressive association rather than through religion-specific constitutional doctrines. Although religious liberty may once have been a symmetric principle, today religion-specific protections risk placing constitutional law on one side of a fraught political divide over religion’s place in public life.

The search for the causes of disease is an obvious central step in the pursuit of better health through disease prevention. In the previous chapters we looked at how we measure health (or disease) and how we look for associations between exposure and disease. Being able to identify a relation between a potential cause of disease and the disease itself is not enough, though. If our goal is to change practice or policy in order to improve health, then we need to go one step further and decide whether the relation is causal because, if it is not, intervening will have no effect. As in previous chapters, we discuss causation mainly in the context of an exposure causing disease but, as you will see when we come to assessing causation in practice, the concepts apply equally to a consideration of whether a potential preventive measure really does improve health.

“Dream Defenders and the Inside Songs” explores the extent to which Percy Shelley's poetic legislation is able to counter racial divisiveness and antiBlackness in “our” communities and universities. It enlists Fred Moten’s poem “barbara lee” and Benjamin Zephaniah’s characterization of Shelley as the “original dub poet” to claim that what is “wholly political” about the semantic and sonic relays activated in Shelleyan songs is their capacity to disrupt the associational logics undergirding white-body supremacy and literary Anglo-Eurocentrism. Tracking the process enacted in “barbara lee,” by which reliance on “the inside songs” enables Representative Lee to vote against President Bush’s military authorization act, the chapter proposes some pedagogical and creative-critical revisions to Shelley studies that might effect a similar “inside outward opening” of Shelley. Leftist celebrations of “Red Shelley” have emphasized the collective and street-performative dimensions of his then-unpublished protest songs. The chapter probes the salience of a “black” Shelley by recasting two familiar Shelleyan devices. One emphasizes sound’s activation of embodied knowledge that circumvents the priority granted to textual literacy. A second accentuates association as a process that expands the affective-cognitive connections mobilized by a word and by encounters with another person. In other words, the intimacy between who we know and what we know is an underacknowledged fact of scholarly method. Diversifying one is key to diversifying the other in an ongoing cycle. Cultivating the two promises to transform “defenses” of poetry into live performances of antiracism.

Bromley and Santos make a cultural argument that situates nonprofit organizations within the broader context of organization itself. Due to the ascendancy of organization as an emergent category of social structure, the authors suggest that all types of organizations (government, business, nonprofit) are becoming increasingly similar. As the divisions between them (e.g., for-profit organization vs. nonprofit organization, etc.) become less prominent, the sector in need of explanation is the organizational one, writ large. Thus, rather than explaining the nonprofit sector, per se, the authors argue that the nonprofit sector is just one manifestation of organization and that it is organization that deserves our attention. In this sense, sector theory as traditionally understood (as narrow attention to the nonprofit sector in comparison to other sectors) diverts attention from more fundamental sociocultural developments. The authors argue that one can only understand nonprofit organizations vis-à-vis government and for-profit organizations by first understanding this broader context.

Does cannabis use play a causal role in subsequent violence? The available research suggests an association between cannabis use and risk of being a perpetrator of violence. Indeed, cannabis users are at increased risk of carrying out severe violence, including aggravated assault, sexual aggression, fighting, and robbery. There is also evidence on the association between cannabis use and subsequent victimization (e.g., intimate partner violence). Individuals with severe mental disorders also show an incremented risk of violence, considering their higher rate of cannabis use compared to the general population. Possible mechanisms underlying this association involve (1) the neurobiological effect of the substance after acute use, but also during abstinence and withdrawal, and (2) social factors, such as the violent/criminal lifestyles of cannabis users. However, it is important to acknowledge the limitations of the current literature. Most available studies are cross-sectional and retrospective, so it remains difficult to disentangle the direction of the association. Despite that, cannabis use may be a useful preventive intervention target, particularly among at-risk groups such as psychiatric patients.

Turning to more ceremonial, less habitual actions in which a young heir’s active participation could be vital, this chapter stresses the political community’s wider investment in children as political actors. Royal children were both enablers and facilitators of diplomacy rather than merely pawns in the diplomatic and political games of adults. Children’s participation could be decisive to acts of association and diplomacy, and thus vital to readying the realm for their succession and rule. The chapter first examines attempts to secure magnate loyalty to children through oaths of fidelity and performances of homage. The earliest stages of the male life cycle had unique attributes in regard to demonstrations of loyalty, and there were substantial benefits in securing oaths to children when they were so young. The chapter then turns to focus on children’s incorporation within performances of cross-kingdom diplomacy, an important aspect of children’s education. The final section foregrounds the chanson de geste Le couronnement de Louis to examine the importance of children’s dynamic contribution at coronation and the wider political community’s investment in boy kings.

This chapter considers the relationship between antitrust law and the First Amendment as those topics relate to workers’ collective action. It asks why the US Supreme Court has remained unwilling to accept First Amendment defenses in cases involving potential antitrust liability for strikes and boycotts, even as it has expanded the scope of First Amendment protections available in analogous situations. The chapter begins by reviewing foundational cases regarding antitrust liability for strikes and boycotts. It then discusses subsequent developments in First Amendment doctrine related to commercial speech, free association, and civil-rights boycotts. Finally, the chapter turns to the 1990 US Supreme Court case, Federal Trade Commission v. Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association, showing how First Amendment principles that are uncontroversial in other contexts could have driven a different outcome. The chapter closes with observations about the modern Supreme Court’s views of the purposes of the First Amendment, and difficulties workers and unions are likely to encounter thereunder.

Certain universal and more or less perennial aspects of human perceptions of the night influence the representation of nightlife in ancient texts. But beyond the stereotypes, we may recognize tensions between conservative perceptions and a continually changing reality. In the Roman empire, we may observe certain recurring elements of a ‘nocturnal koine’, the result of general trends. The factors that shaped nightlife in the Roman empire include the diffusion of voluntary associations and their convivial activities, the donations of benefactors for nighttime activities (baths, gymnasia, public banquets), the prominent place of nocturnal rites in cults with a soteriological or initiatory aspect, and efforts to increase the safety in cities during the night. These factors should be considered within a broader context—that of the gradual and continuous colonization of the night with the activities of the day.

This chapter describes and analyzes how British pluralists in the early twentieth century critiqued the fusion of nationality and statehood that had hitherto provided a conceptual foundation for political science, and how their critique exposed the discipline to the problem of social order. The chapter also treats the contemporary critical reception of British pluralism in America.

Americans know the story of democracy: how the Framers built a government with branches that would check and balance, that would derive its authority from sovereign citizens, filtered and refined by their elected representatives. Americans may refer to our system as “democracy” but the representative republican framework provided by the Framers ensured the safe democratization of our country over time. This well-rehearsed story frames American democracy as a bequest from the Framers. Yet this powerful founding story is a victor’s tale, designed to erase from collective historical memory a very real battle with a robust alternative model of democratic theory and practice that was flourishing – much to the Framers’ consternation – in the early nation. This alternative democracy originated in the daily practices of ordinary colonists. Their vernacular democracy generated and motored revolution; and though the political elite embraced this participatory and equalitarian practice, they later pulled away, seeking in their words to “tame” the democratic enthusiasm and power of ordinary American citizens even as they drew on that power (renamed “sovereignty”) to authorize the representative federal republicanism they offered as a containment device. Knowing about vernacular democracy enables readers to see its record in the literature of the early United States.