This chapter deals with all manner of state-derived prohibitions. Ancient states prohibited a broad variety of behaviours, threatening punishment for those who would transgress boundaries. The logic of prohibition was wide-ranging: from the marking of spaces, objects and officials as somehow distinct from the rest of ‘society’, leading factions within ancient states sought to preserve and protect their individual prerogatives. They also sought to reinforce their claims to leadership by incentivizing subjects to settle their disputes in state-sanctioned venues. The evidence for such prohibitions is extensive, but did they add up to something that we might legitimately call ‘social control’? Did ancient states succeed at inducing subject populations to accept their claims to rule? If so, how? This chapter suggests that the logic of prohibition was a site of contestation for both statecraft and subject-craft.

Zakat returned to Middle Eastern political discourse in the 1930s, through modern Islamism. It became one of two concrete initiatives distinguishing an Islamic modern economy from economies ostensibly corrupted by secularists and colonialists. The other was Islamic finance. In both cases, the focus was more on the symbolism of Islamizing a secularized sphere than on solving actual economic problems. Islamism tacitly stripped zakat of all but one of its original functions: poverty alleviation. Sidelining zakat’s role in public finance and the protection of property rights, it frittered away golden opportunities to draw from Islam’s rich history universal lessons for economic progress and rule of law. Focusing on the functions that made zakat a pillar of Islam would have initiated a dialogue with secularists inclined to dismiss Islam as a source of backwardness. A similar scenario has played out in relation to Islamic finance. Nowhere has a categorical ban on interest, which is absent from the Quran anyway, been enforced. In any case, it is unfeasible. In making Islamic finance seem interest-free through euphemisms and accounting tricks, Islamism reduces economic transparency and institutionalizes dishonesty. Weakening rule of law, it also compounds mistrust.

One of the easiest ways to reduce crime is to shrink the footprint of the criminal law. The most obvious candidates are the parts of the criminal infrastructure that I have been calling the criminal legal system: pretrial detention, the war on drugs, parole and probation revocations, repeat offending laws, and so on. The best way to shrink the criminal legal system is to change the law so that violations of essentially regulatory rules do not lead to incarceration.

Constitutional law is a problem-solving activity. All problems in constitutional law, without exception, can be analyzed in terms of one or more questions, and all constitutional law questions, without exception, fall into one of two distinct categories: Does the Constitution authorize this governmental action? and does the Constitution prohibit this governmental action? This twofold logic of inquiry into authorization and prohibition guides the constitutional lawyer’s analysis of the problem in a constitutional controversy and provides the intellectual skeleton for constitutional law argument and decision. This chapter will first discuss how the logic of inquiry is used, and then will explain how the two questions are the product of the way the written Constitution is worded and of certain background presuppositions about its purposes.

In this Chapter, I use American mass incarceration and the War on Drugs to draw conclusions about the increasing use of the criminal justice system to combat the abuse of non-human animals. I conclude that expanding criminal sanctions will result not just in increased incarceration, but in net-widening and deprivation of civil liberties. Furthermore, such negative effects are likely to be unequally distributed, falling most heavily on communities of color.

The relation between neutrality and the use of force is better to be kept within the law of armed conflict rather that the law on the use of force between States. This means that the right of self-defence cannot be the indispensable legal basis for the use of force between belligerents and neutrals. On the contrary it appears that neutral due diligence has been relied on as a basis to expand the scope of the right of self-defence. The latter is admissible as the basis for resort to force only in the case of resistance of a neutral State to repel belligerent violation of its territory or by a belligerent that fully complies with its duties under the law of neutrality.

Crminal law cases in the Court typically arose out of the enforcement of Prohibition and mostly dealt with issues about searches, though the Court did issue one important decision on the general part of criminal law delineating the scope of the entrapment or government misconduct defense. With Prohibition discredited and repealed early in the decade, the Court’s decisions ordinarily found that the searches at issue were unlawful. Prohibition led to the rise of organized crime, and some of the Court’s decisions addressed and usually allowed legal strategies aimed at organized crime, although one important decision struck down a New Jersey statute penalizing membership in criminal gangs. The decisions sometimes led the Court to consider how the law should respond to technological innovations -- airplanes for one, but wiretapping a more important one. One theme surfaced on occasion: the importance of porfessionalism in the administration of criminal justice.

This chapter tells the largely untold story of the political economy of international drug regulation in the 1950s. It will tell the story of producer country efforts, led by Turkey, Iran and India, to agree an international quota system for opium and thus to divide up the licit global market. It examines the simultaneous efforts to suppress the global illicit market and minimise the numbers of producers to a small select few who would enjoy an enforced oligopoly. It highlights the quiet diplomatic pressure placed on countries viewed as epicentres of the global trade and a conscious ignorance of strategically important states – for example the US State Department refusing to criticise French Indochina and Mexico. Further, it tells the story of Harry Anslinger’s efforts to incorrectly portray Communist China as the world’s leading narcostate. It concludes with a look at the breakdown of multilateralism over the 1953 Opium Protocol, a treaty which few accepted but was rammed through by the US and some select allies. It was this Protocol which ultimately galvanised moderates and producer states around the need for a Single Convention to roll back the excesses of the 1953 Protocol.

This chapter outlines the early development of UN CND and how it progressed towards its first new international treaty in 1948. Emerging from the tense post-war negotiations the key uncertainties for CND were: how it would operate in practice; how it would fit into broader UN and geopolitical streams; and whether it would function as a talking-shop or, as per the US vision, a tool to enforce regulations and publicly bludgeon member states as needed. The first three meetings of CND in 1946– 1948 would be pivotal. The first two served to sound out the political context within which CND would operate and how the structures would function in practice. Following this, a major political push occurred around the Third Session, first concluding a new Protocol and then spring boarding into discussions on a new production limitation convention and even advocating a new ‘single convention’ to unify all previous drug treaties.

This introduces the topic of multilateral drug control, its contemporary relevance and the areas under examination within the book. It highlights the key themes grouped by three overarching focuses: historical, contemporary-legal and international relations theory. It examines the major debates under way in UN drug control and their direct relation to the historical-legal regulatory discussion encapsulated within the book. It outline existing historiography on international drug control and examines more recent developments. It points to continuing gaps in historiography, international relations, legal and policy literature which this book will fill. In particular it highlights the extensive literature on international legal fragmentation and its relevance for drug control debates. It offers an overview of regime theory and international relations approaches, suggesting a new and emerging framework based on evaluating drug control as a ‘regime complex’ in a similar lineage to climate change and intellectual property regimes, which will be covered in a more breadth in the Conclusion.

At the outbreak of War in 1939 the drug control system stood as a mixture of contradictions and uncertainty. On the one side were the strict control advocates, led by the United States. On the other side were producing states, agrarian countries whose economic, cultural and political systems were entwined with the very drugs the system sought to limit. In the middle were the old colonial powers, recognised the role opium played within many their colonies. The outbreak of war would fundamentally reshape international drug control. Moreover, it was driven by US-led bilateral efforts, utilising its wartime leverage, while other states were confined to rear-guard defensive actions. The reshaping of control during wartime was in many ways the result of aggressive wartime diplomatic manoeuvring by Harry Anslinger and key members of the Washington drug control lobby. The most radical wartime departure occurred in 1943 when Britain and Holland promised to adopt a policy of total prohibition of opium smoking and monopolies in many of their colonial territories. This shift, enabled Anslinger to bring new pressure to bear on the traditionally recalcitrant states such as Iran and Afghanistan to impose stricter controls and prohibitions.

This chapter examines the legal legal of the Single Convention and its successor treaties. The passage of the Single Convention represented a high-water mark in the international regulatory system. While it contained little in terms of innovation, it streamlined the complex array of drug treaties, while moving the terrain of control forward marginally. It essentially solidified an economic regulatory framework for a global licit commodity market in certain essential medicines. To enforce this market it mandated certain action around controlling and prohibiting non-medical production and manufacturing. Key questions around dealing with ‘addiction’ and suppressing non-medical consumption were left largely unanswered. The US may have lost the battle around the Single Convention and control of the system in the 1960s but they would enter the 1970s ready to refight many of these battles, beginning with the declaration of the ‘war of drugs’ and an aggressive new round of bilateral drug diplomacy. Ultimately the ‘war on drugs’ was not an inevitable outgrowth of these documents, but instead represented a specific set of interpretations, bureaucratic and normative trajectories and member state implementations.