This chapter addresses the question of how the International Seabed Authority (ISA) discharges its environmental mandate in DSM. First, answer to this question hinges largely upon the composition, powers and functions and decision-making procedures of its organs and subsidiary bodies, in terms of both law and practice. Then, it identifies six categories of powers and obligations of the ISA relating to its environmental function. Namely, the powers to adopt rules, regulations and procedures, issue technical and administrative guidance to contractors, ensure compliance of the contractor while administering activities, issue environmental emergency order to the contractor for preventing (risk of) serious environmental damage, as well as the obligations to apply the precautionary approach, and encourage and promote marine scientific research. It argues that the ISA has changed to results-based environmental regulation. Finally, this chapter comments on the drafting work of Exploitation Regulations by the ISA and suggests ways for the LTC to assess the current state of marine scientific knowledge on a continuing basis.

Chapter 2 surveys the system of courts that emerged around the early Tudor monarchs. Examining ordinances for the organisation of the royal Council from the late medieval period, it reveals earlier precedents for prioritising justice-giving, particularly to poor suitors, within the central administration. Further procedural models are identified in the established central Court of Chancery, its procedure under English bills and its reference to conscience in decision-making, and in the arbitration of disputes by regional magnates. Turning to royal conciliar justice, the chapter outlines the administrative and judicial capacities of the councils in the North and in the Welsh Marches. Finally, it sets out the development of two offshoots of the royal Council by the very end of the fifteenth century: the council or court in the Star Chamber at Westminster and the Court of Requests within the attendant royal household.

Chapter 6 reconstructs the process of petitioning to the king, once a dispute had set in and the decision to litigate before the highest authorities had been taken. Firstly, the chapter establishes the extent of knowledge and understanding about royal justice among Tudor subjects. Returning to some of the themes set out in Chapter 1, it explores the wider culture of complaint with which all prospective supplicants were familiar, provides evidence for growing awareness of the format required for petitions to the king, and surveys the range of professional legal advice available to produce these documents. The contents of the petitions that litigants and their counsel put together is further explored, with some consideration of the potential for the plaintiff’s ‘voice’ to break through the formula. Finally, the chapter sets out the practical steps required to reach the royal household and to seek out the king himself. Throughout this analysis, bills of costs submitted by Requests’ litigants facilitate further scrutiny of its accessibility, and particularly whether its shift from itinerancy to settlement at Westminster negatively affected its poorest suitors.

Chapter 9 finally turns to the results of litigation in the courts of royal justice. Analysing the well-preserved books of orders and decrees made by the Court of Requests, this chapter asks how far this tribunal’s determinations met the expectations of petitioners, acknowledged the arguments of defendants, and subscribed to existing legal norms. It first surveys the changing circles of men who passed judgment in Requests, and considers the extent of their legal and judicial expertise. It then sets out the general formula of decrees recorded in this period, and what they can reveal about the processes of decision-making in this Court, the evidence it examined, and the awards within its gift. Finally, the chapter turns to the longer-term significance of rulings made within this burgeoning jurisdiction: assessing the signs of increasing caution about the scope of Requests’ powers, on the one hand, and the future utility of written royal decrees once they were in the hands of winning parties, on the other. In all, this chapter demonstrates that making the extraordinary powers of the Crown more ordinary meant balancing litigants’ demands with practical limitations.

Chapter 7 turns to the recipients of petitions for royal justice and their initiation of litigation. The chapter begins by weighing up the evidence for direct royal involvement in these judicial processes, with particular attention paid to a set of documents signed by Henry VII and Henry VIII personally. Otherwise, based on a survey of the signatures and annotations scattered across the Court of Requests’ early Tudor archive, this chapter identifies the men who delivered justice in this tribunal day to day. Mapping onto the evolutionary trajectory set out in Chapter 3, the overall impression is of transition from a diverse and changeable group of bill handlers within the royal household under Henry VII, followed by a spell in which the household clergy oversaw all business in Requests, and culminating in a smaller quorum of legally trained judges and Masters of Requests by the end of the period. The chapter then spells out the procedures followed once a petition was in the hands of this frontline personnel, and the measures they took to preserve the traditional prioritisation of the poor litigant.

Readers of this chapter might be left with doubts whether England had a constitution in the fifteenth century and whether, if there was one, it underwent any significant change over the century. Difficulties in governing the realm, ambiguities about power and authority, and a fundamental lack of consensus about what constituted and who had a legitimate right to rule persisted from the opening years of the period through to its end. The only notable progress recounted here was in procedures and practices in parliament. This difficult century left England with a hunger for new assertions of power and authority in the succeeding one.1

This chapter considers the close relationship between child rulership and innovative political and administrative adaptation between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Cases of child kingship prompted adaptations to some of the tools of governance, but the boy king’s presence and active contribution were often still crucial. The chapter turns first to the documentary evidence and the diversity of administrative experimentation before focusing on the enduring significance of children’s participation in rule. The third and final section examines practical adjustments to and contemporary representations of counsel, a fundamental instrument of royal rule which could be even more crucial when a boy was king. Overall, the chapter presents an alternative narrative of child rulership which stresses aspects of innovation, adaptation and co-operation. Considering shifts in documentary culture, royal government and consilium by the thirteenth century also reveals the extent to which many of the practical solutions adopted during a period of child kingship differed much more profoundly across time than they did geographically.

The Homeric poems depict a broad spectrum of political behaviors practiced in two organs for collective deliberation, the agorē “assembly” and the boulē “council.” Nuanced representations of collective deliberation reflect the Homeric tradition’s general interest in mechanisms of social cohesion and discord.