Percy Shelley was a poet of fiery politics who recognised the power of language to surprise and even shock. Across three centuries and around the globe, politicians and activists have turned to Shelley’s poetry for help furthering their political causes. With specific attention to poems like ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, ‘Song to the Men of England’, ‘England in 1819’, and ‘Ode to the West Wind’, as well as to critical prose pieces like ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ and ‘A Defence of Poetry’, this chapter situates Shelley’s views on revolution and reform in their historical context and takes some tentative steps towards exploring why Shelley’s poems have so frequently been put to political purpose.

This chapter addresses the relationship between Shelley’s epic theory and practice with reference notably to Laon and Cythna and “A Defence of Poetry”, as well as Queen Mab and Prometheus Unbound. The essay shows how Laon and Cythna breaks with epic tradition – and exceeds Shelley’s own theoretical account of the genre – in finding creative solutions to the problem of how to link past, present, and future, as well as the local and the universal, without didacticism or what Shelley in the ‘Defence’ calls the ‘gross’ sense of prophecy: a foretelling of the future. I contend that Shelley’s epic poetry does not seek to recuperate past moments of social coherence to guide and unify the present or predict the future so much as to leave space for not knowing what will come. Shelley’s experimental epics regard a hopeful uncertainty as, paradoxically, the only certain means of reform.

This chapter takes the example of the International Criminal Court’s ‘Independent Expert Review’ (IER) of 2020 to reflect on the theory and practice of expert reform work. Taking actor-network theory’s prompt that systems – like international organisations – are neither static nor fixed, but ‘in a perpetual state of forming and reforming’, I read reform neither as rational science nor as a mere reproduction of hegemony, but as the expert reassembly of the ICC’s context, problems, resources, and priorities. In the IER example, the expert work of reform and reassembly effected nothing less than the recalibration of the relationship between the Court and its states parties. Through their work, experts knit together ideas of autonomy and accountability, their training, investigatory processes, documents, and resource and time constraints to centre the efficiency concerns of wealthy states parties in the judicial and prosecutorial function. In this way, expert reform work illustrates the power of expert articulation by putting abstract expectations, ideas, ‘realities’, constraints, and materials into organisational action in deeply distributive ways.

This and the following chapter look at how infusing corruption into areas of human-rights related practice could make a difference. Here I consider transitions from dictatorship or internal armed conflict, and in particular how transitional justice has dealt with corruption. I focus on 3 emblematic transitions from different recent time periods: South Africa, Tunisia and Colombia, and add in some lessons from prior discussion of Guatemala. I find that failure to vet and control military intelligence officers, economic privatization and decentralization, and lack of attention to judicial selection and to auditing, tax and other controls contribute to the emergence of powerful alliances of corrupt officials, organized crime and predatory elites.

The United States, despite its generally favorable rankings on international indices, has significant corruption problems. Those issues cannot be ignored, but neither should they be exaggerated or oversimplified. American corruption is not any one single problem: contrasts are apparent among the states, across regions, and at different levels of the federal system. Some are illegal, but other types are legal – or not clearly against the law. While corruption is a significant issue in the context of law enforcement, race relations, environmental policy, and public health, its sources, consequences, and context differ from one sector to the next. Inequalities along racial and class lines add further complexities and significantly affect the prospects of reform. Checking corruption and dealing with its consequences will be a matter not only of enacting and enforcing sound laws but of how well we govern ourselves within a large, complicated, multi-level, but fundamentally democratic constitutional framework.

This chapter summarizes the findings of the book, indicates future directions, and provides a list of high-level considerations for reformist governments seeking to regulate automated decision-making.

Observing judges in action in the Florence, Tel-Aviv, and London first-instance courts, we find that settlement-related transplants that could be interpreted as broadening the judicial role and providing meaningful modes of dispute resolution for disputants in fact often constrict the judicial role, causing both the courtroom and court-related ADR processes to become forums for efficiency-based negotiation. In England, the disintegration of the judicial role is most apparent, as the promotion of settlement has led to obligatory measures preceding the filing of a claim, leaving judges only a marginal percentage of disputes to deal with. We show that the three observed legal systems may be viewed in general terms as presenting three sequential stages of the judicial role, with a possible trend toward disintegration. In addition, the legal systems may offer three transitional views of the tension between efficiency and justice and the way it unfolds. The research provides insights on the role of legal transplants and the impetus for their transformation, and the ways they affect and are affected by the surrounding legal culture.

Archdeacon Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory VII (r. 1073–85), is associated with a radical and swift change in the Roman Church. The vision of a Christendom jointly administered by emperor and clergy, the famous model advanced by Pope Gelasius II (r. 492–96), was transformed into a new order where regnum and sacerdotium occupied separate stacked spheres, with the spiritual claiming superiority. Unlike tenth-century reform movements, the later eleventh-century Roman reforms centered on the papacy. Popes assembled a curia featuring more professional officials, legates, councils, and other technologies of power. The reformed Church cultivated trained lawyers and sympathetic lay leaders. It has been credited with launching a legal “big bang,” the invention of propaganda, the creation of a semi-institutionalized public sphere, and the formation of a persecuting society. Closer examination of institutional changes helps reveal the achievements and limits of this “new world order.”

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

The Cambridge History of the Papacy is organized to provide readers with a critical–historical survey of the structural development of the papacy as an institution and as an actor in Church history, and in world history. It is hard to imagine a sphere of human activity over the past two millennia that has not been influenced by, and influenced in turn by, papal action – be it in the domains of religious belief and practice; social, cultural, and political thought; art, science, medicine, ethics, diplomacy, and international relations. Four questions – each addressed throughout the three volumes of the present work – have framed that vision across vast chronological and geographical expanses: the pope’s centrality within the Catholic Church, the primacy of papal power as an instrument of governance, the papacy’s cultural influence in society and culture, and the implications of secularity for its place in the lives of believers and non-believers alike. Each question – and the search for answers – converges around the fundamental question of papal authority: its original claims; the ebbs and flows of its effective reach; and the numerous ways in which claims, and expressions of papal authority and supremacy, have been contested within the Catholic tradition, and from without.

Before the 1950s, there was no ideologically coherent conservative movement in the United States to speak of, and no single party up to that point had a monopoly on conservatism as either a political expression or an ideological framework. The roots of American conservatism, however, stretch back to Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution, John Adams’s contributions to the Federalist Party, and John C. Calhoun’s defense of southern regionalism, among other sources. During the nineteenth century, conservatism functioned in two registers: as an argument against precipitous social change and as an attitude in favor of the social and institutional hierarchies handed down through history. The tension between conservativism’s attitude in favor of hierarchy and its argument against change animates Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), and Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857). These three novels test arguments for social change – women’s rights, abolition, and interracial marriage, respectively – against attitudes in support of hierarchy, ultimately bringing conservatism into a reckoning with its own fundamental assumptions about history and authority.

Among Americans in the nineteenth century, literary interest in the image, idea, and practice of “community” extended beyond any conventional historical understanding of national togetherness. The abiding conception of community that obtained in the United States between the American Revolution and World War I was also informed by an emergent theory and practice of communitarianism. This was especially the case for those contemporaries who regarded the changes to an increasingly modern society and economy from a collectivist, and typically socialist, perspective. Across a range of early national, antebellum, and postbellum phases of the communitarian experiment in the United States, American writers gave expression to communitarianism’s unique reformist program through a variety of genres and political positions. Among the former were works of fiction, nonfiction, and polemic. Among the latter (in both book and short-form formats) were writings by several generations of authors and journalists that reveal a complex array of interpretive positions and ideologies, ranging from advocacy at one end of the political spectrum to skepticism at the other. The differences in their politics notwithstanding, many of the era’s communitarian-minded writers shared a desire to shape the course of events in American life with their work.

In the epilogue, the editors reflect on the series of conversations. They revisit the definition of ‘legal innovation’ and what they have learned about it through the discussions. Their perspective on legal innovation is twofold. On the one hand, technology transforms the reality of law and fundamentally changes the way we access and experience law and justice. On the other hand, law evolves, adapts to changes in society, but can also facilitate and implement innovation. They conclude by considering what it takes to initiate legal innovation.

Since 1985, when China’s first Patent Law came into effect, China has established a legal protection system for utility models. At present, after four revisions of the Patent Law, China’s utility model patent legal system has also been improved. However, among the authorized utility model patents, those that fully meet the necessary conditions of novelty and inventive step might be in the minority. Of course, this phenomenon is not unique in China. The purpose of this chapter is to illuminate the ongoing optimization of the Chinese utility model patent system in the context of the development of China’s overall patent system. Accordingly, Part Ⅰ traces the emergence of China’s Patent System, including the Chinese utility model patent-based subsystem. Part Ⅱ centers on the basic contours of the Chinese utility model patent system. Part Ⅲ then summarizes existing deficiencies of the Chinese utility model patent system and future development trends. It concludes with a discussion of potential implications of proposed revisions to the Chinese utility model patent system.