A remedy is specific when the plaintiff seeks to get the court to coerce the defendant into doing (or not doing) a particular thing. The word ‘coercion’ is used advisedly. The court orders the defendant to do (or not to do) the particular thing, and if the defendant refuses to comply, the court may use measures such as imprisonment, sequestration and fines to encourage compliance with its order. The two most important examples of specific relief in Australia are the decree of specific performance and the injunction. This chapter will consider specific performance, and the next chapter will consider injunctions. Specific performance relates to ordering the defendant to comply with the terms of a contract, but injunctions may be ordered across private law and beyond. Specific performance is exclusively equitable, and generally operates in relation to a common law cause of action; namely, breach of contract.

This chapter considers self-help remedies, which involve the plaintiff making good her own rights without the intervention of the judiciary. The focus of this book is on remedies that are awarded pursuant to a judicial order. However, an exclusive consideration of judicial remedies would ignore the fact that most disputes are settled outside the courts and that most parties prefer non-judicial settlements. It may be queried whether self-help remedies are really remedies in the strict sense of the word. They do not involve a court order; instead, the court gives permission to a plaintiff to act in a particular way. Nevertheless, in a broader sense, the plaintiff is allowed to redress her grievance by vindicating her own rights. By allowing a plaintiff to redress her rights in this way, the law affirms and reinforces the importance of certain interests. As noted in Ch 13, Varuhas has observed that the interests protected by vindicatory awards are often associated with the torts actionable per se.

Paul Johnson began his relationship with the series with his analysis of Conservative economic policy in The Coalition Effect and will return, with his team, to his conclusions then, analysing not just the first period of austerity but also how Conservative economic policy has evolved through the post-referendum premierships of Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.

Chapter 11 focuses on ancient ‘contracts’, with specific reference to commerce, property and other economic activities for which there is relevant evidence. The chapter begins with urbanization in southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium bce, bringing together archaeological, material and written evidence in order to introduce a broad working idea of ‘contracts’. The next section moves on to a discussion of technical ancient terms and concepts, noting the ‘considerable terminological instability in the common English translations of the original terms’. The following section turns to ‘contracts’ between states, whilst the next develops a comparative analysis of ‘oaths in interpersonal agreements’. The following two sections analyse specific questions surrounding the use of writing and ’the contract of sale’, noting that there is surviving evidence for the use of (different forms of) contacts of sale across every ancient legal system. The chapter concludes by drawing together a set of generalized conceptions of ‘contract’ and briefly suggesting that long-distance trade - among other factors - may lie behind some of the similarities - for example the use of seals - evident across the extant ancient evidence.

Wagner and money is a cantus firmus of his biography. Notoriously broke, he is often regarded as a ‘pump genius’. He always demanded financial generosity from anyone who wanted to call themselves his friend. His pre-March criticism of capitalism has its origins in his completely underdeveloped economic mind. In King Ludwig II of Bavaria, he gained his most powerful and significant patron from 1864 onwards. But contrary to the widespread prejudice, it was by no means excessive sums that the king spent on Wagner. Moreover, in times without copyright and regulated royalty payments, artists were always dependent on patrons and gainful employment. Under today’s legal conditions, Wagner would have been a millionaire.

Making money from plantations meant engaging in the circuit of West India trade regulated through a mercantilist system that protected the interests of the ‘mother country’. Long needed to demonstrate to his metropolitan readership that Jamaica brought great wealth to Britain and that the production of sugar depended on slavery. The circuit of the West India trade connected England, West Africa and the Caribbean through a complex set of relations, at the heart of which sat the merchant house. Long’s Uncle Beeston headed the West India house of Drake and Long in the City of London and Long was well aware of the centrality of merchants and the use of bills of exchange to facilitate the sugar and slavery business. Given the increasing criticism of the conditions of the slave trade by the early 1770s, he attempted to sanitize it. The merchants used legers, accounting and numeracy to distance themselves from the realities of slavery. They controlled the system of credit and debt on which this mercantile capitalist formation depended.

This chapter discusses the role that fiscal policy can play in the transition to a carbon-neutral economy. In other words, it discusses how to design fiscal policy, both on the revenue and on the expenditure side, to reach net zero emissions by mid-century in a credible, growth- and distribution-friendly way. Furthermore, the chapter discusses how decarbonisation is likely to impact public finances, shedding light on what change might be required in tax revenues/expenditures, and if debt sustainability risks might arise from the green transition.

The Introduction defines debt as a financial tool and as a theological concept, summarizing the role of debt in the late medieval English economy and in the sacrament of penance. This dual definition challenges the “separate spheres” interpretive paradigm that dominates literary history. A paradigm in which economics and theology are constitutive of two ideally separate modes, this dominant interpretive approach frames the shift from feudalism to capitalism as a shift from the traditional bonds of hierarchy and communalism to modern individualism and competitive acquisition. Understanding capitalism as an economy of debt makes possible a new perspective on economic change in late medieval England, one that revises Weber’s spirit of capitalism and challenges Weberian periodisation. The image of God as a bookkeeper and the concomitant understanding of sin as a debt that cannot be fully discharged is first elaborated and disseminated en masse in the late medieval flowering of vernacular literature in England and in Europe. This, I argue, is the cultural site where the systematization of the ethical conduct of life is imagined for the first time not only as a possibility for all people, but as a requirement.

Taking a history is an essential part of patient care for all clinicians but there can be a tendency for the social history to be brief, formulaic or even absent. The possible reasons for this and how liaison psychiatry might respond, given that history-taking skills are highly developed in the specialty, are described. The individual in the wider multidisciplinary team who is best placed to take a social history from a patient is considered, reviewing the attitudes of both doctors and nurses alongside evidence from studies where frameworks have been established to take the social history from all patients. The sources of information other than the patient that might be considered are described. Several key aspects of the social history are explored in detail – debt, employment, housing and social isolation. The evidence of impact on physical health and mental health is detailed for each, together with a summary of the evidence of benefit for interventions. Finally, the issue of how the information obtained should be shared and with whom and what can be done to improve patient outcomes is discussed.

Chapter 2 looks at transparency and fintech tools. The premise behind many so-called fintech innovations in consumer markets is to make more personalised financial products available to an often underserved and largely inexperienced cohort. Many consumers are not good at managing their day-to-day finances, selecting optimal credit products or investing for the future. Fintech products, and the applications associated with them, are commonly promoted on the basis they will use consumer data, AI capacities, and a lower cost basis to promote competition and better serve consumers, including financially excluded or vulnerable consumers. Paterson, Miller, and Lyons challenge these premises by demystifying the kinds of capacities that are possible through the fintech technologies being offered to consumers. The most common form of fintech solutions offered to consumers are credit, budgeting, and investment tools. These typically do not disrupt existing service models through the use of deep learning AI. Rather they are commonly enabled by encoding the rules of thumb used by mortgage brokers and financial advisers. They make a return through methods criticised on when deployed by social media platforms, namely on-selling data, targeted advertising, and commission-based sales. There is moreover little incentive for fintech providers to make products that benefit marginalised cohorts for whom there is minimal relevant data and little likelihood of lucrative return. The authors argue that greater transparency is required about what is being offered to consumers though fintech tools and who benefits from them, along with greater accountability for ill-founded and even sensationalised claims.