The United States, virtually alone in the capitalist world, never used labor courts during the Interwar period; existing accounts incompletely explain why US labor policy design diverged here. In the early 1920s, the weak labor policy and incoherent labor law of the United States was a widely recognized, urgent problem. The US government was newly strong and economically interventionist. There was ideological consensus on the basic features of an acceptable labor policy, but owing in part to political support for several plausible models, and unsettled partisan and intellectual alignments, the US did not make progress on labor policy in these first post-War years. Controversy over the KCIR, founded as a provocation in this debate, helps make sense of these patterns. The intellectual, legal, and political effects of the KCIR’s failure extinguished American interest in labor courts generally. Position-taking, especially reaction against the KCIR, reveals the emerging alignments that were to be crucial to the design and political realization of the unique labor policy of the New Deal.

This chapter tacks the origin of Qiu Jun’s categories for diagnosing disorder and examining how it arose. His categories can be grouped into six ideological modules: ethicism, especially patriarchal ethics, which Confucians know as propriety and duty; Confucian Legalism, which embraces law, regulation, and punishment; moralism, which is enshrined in the category of personal virtue; rationalism, which entails both primordial principles, general trends, and fluctuating circumstances; ethnocentrism, which highlights the socio-political superiority of Chinese to non-Chinese; and finally institutionalism, which includes rites, political institutions, and social customs, a category which could be said to characterize his entire work. All these six modules were already in the statecraft toolkit by the fourteenth century for Qiu to construct a program to respond to disorder and as well to constitute discourses for that response. In this sense, Neo-Confucian learning is more than a moral philosophy focused on self-cultivation.

This chapter considers how advocacy of press freedom necessarily implicates contested political questions about desirable structures of governance and social interaction. Professor Magarian discusses two political oppositions that strongly influence how the free press functions: objectivity vs. subjectivity and institutionalism vs. populism. First, the chapter describes the late-twentieth-century news media’s heightened commitment to objective reporting. That commitment has strong political resonance with our era’s anxiety about submergence of objective truth in political debates. At the same time, the news media’s push toward objectivity fostered a stultifying homogeneity that prompted dynamic efforts, embodied imperfectly in the Fairness Doctrine, to complicate hegemonic narratives. Present advocates for press freedom must assess which truths the press should propound and which positions it should interrogate. Second, the chapter juxtaposes the institutionalized character of dominant late-twentieth-century news media with the populist fragmentation of news sources in the age of online communication. Institutionalized mass media have inculcated valuable journalistic norms of professionalism and ethics that contemporary online news sources often elide. However, populist mass media present a wider, more diverse range of voices than institutionalized media support. Present advocates for press freedom need to pursue the optimal balance between these opposing virtues.

Chapter 4 is dedicated to the concept of informality as a crucial legal concept for the understanding of trilogues. It begins from a twofold observation. First, the informal nature of trilogues is stated in black and white in a significant variety of legal instruments. Secondly, the role of legal scholarship is to make sense of that unequivocal characterization. Drawing on institutional theory, this chapter argues that informality is a full-blown concept of EU law, and it sets about defining its characteristics. To that end, it compares trilogues with two other informal bodies, namely the Euro Group and the Informal Council meetings. The core idea of this chapter is that the codification of informality translates into legal terms the intention of the institutions to protect certain spaces from an excessive penetration of legal normativity. This intention, in turn, is indicative of the desire to preserve those spaces for the emergence of powerful social frameworks where genuine exchanges among actors may occur; exchanges that should be conducive to compromise.

This chapter offers responses to the question ‘why regulate?’ and ‘why do regulatory regimes emerge in a particular form?’ by examining ‘theories of regulation’. While chapter 1 introduced the readers to the economic justifications of regulation, this chapter delves into the different theories that explain why we need regulation and how public and private actors interact to shape the content of regulation. These theories refer to a set of propositions or hypotheses about why regulation emerges, which actors contribute to that emergence, and typical patterns of interaction between regulatory actors. It discusses theories from several disciplinary approaches, classifying these theories into four kinds: public interest, private interest theories, systems and institutionalist approaches and ‘hybrid’ theories.

Advocates of institutional economics in history have pointed to the adoption of systems of rights inspired by economic liberalism as a major factor behind inequalities of development. This chapter assesses the claim’s validity in the nineteenth century, when legal reforms grounded in liberal economic theory – most importantly the securing of exclusive private property rights – swept first Europe and its colonial offshoots and then the rest of the world. It considers the intellectual origins of such legal changes, their revolutionary implementation in the European world, their enforcement often by means of empire elsewhere, and the retreat from economic liberalism at the end of the century. Theories of development based on institutional economics are right to stress the extent of legal changes ushered in by economic liberalism. But adopting a social and political perspective on the new economic rights of the nineteenth century imposes several nuances. First, outside the anglophone world, liberal economic rights were neither the product nor the precursor of liberal political institutions: the adoption of free market rules was more often the result of revolutions from above or imperial rule. Second, liberal economic rights were granted selectively. Even in the European world, those of women remained significantly restricted, while in colonial worlds a very large share of Indigenous populations was excluded. Third, when faced with some adverse effects of unfettered competition and under the influence of new nationalist and socialist ideas, lawmakers in the last decades of the century began to temper liberal economic rights to protect national producers, small business owners, and industrial or agricultural workers. Contrary to the sanguine interpretation derived from institutional economics, the triumph of liberal economic rights did not entail that of political liberty, it chiefly benefited wealthy European males, and it lasted only a few decades. Private property may not have been theft, but nor was it the infallible elixir of economic development.

This chapter gives an overview of the theory and practice of global climate politics. First, it provides a brief history of the politics of climate change as they play out in the international negotiations on the issue overseen by the United Nations . Second, it looks at the formal organisational and institutional structures that exist to manage the international community’s response to climate change. Third, it reviews the ways in which different theories of International Relations have been applied to climate change, assessing both their potential and their limitations. Finally, the conclusion offers some thoughts on the evolving nature of the ‘global’ governance of climate change.

Chapter 1 sets out the main questions and contentions in the book. It explores the concept of freedom and identifies it as a central concept in Athenian democratic ideology in both the private and public spheres. Scholarly debates on the concept of freedom are outlined, with an especial emphasis on Isaiah Berlin’s notion of positive and negative freedom and its application to Athens in subsequent scholarship. Distinguishing democratic freedom from negative and republican versions, I argue that Athenians understood freedom as the ability to do “whatever one wished,” which I classify as a modified version of positive freedom. The focus on citizen agency in accomplishing his will differentiates Athenian democracy from other constitution types and affects its institutional features. The chapter closes with a brief overview of the rest of the chapters.

In Chapter 1, I frame the book. First, I identify the questions that motivate my book. For example, to whom do we have obligations? On what terms? And why? Second, I rehearse scriptural sources that may guide religious ethicists when thinking about our obligations to severely poor people. Third, given the various intradisciplinary debates in religious ethics about definitions and distinctions, I lead the reader through important definitions in contemporary normative and practical ethics, for example, doing and allowing, agent-neutrality and agent-relativity, and institutionalism and interpersonalism. And fourth, I comment on my methodology, highlighting my commitments to contractualist deontology and the use of thought experiments in ethics.

Chapter 11 turns to a discussion of the competing arguments concerning the new public nuisance law advanced by practicing attorneys, interest group allies, judges, scholars, and law-and-economics professors. Almost all criticisms of the new public nuisance law have been negative, characterizing expansion of public nuisance law as illegitimate and dysfunctional. These critiques are examined through the lens of various categories of criticism: (1) traditional, (2) formal, (3) institutional, (4) rule of law, (5) democratic theory, and (5) law and economics. The critics all draw on negative examples from the mass tort public nuisance cases in the 21st century (lead paint, firearms, opioids, vaping, climate change). At least one commentator, however, has offered tempered praise for the new public nuisance law as the second best solution to community-wide harms. She believes that the development of the new public nuisance law is in the finest traditon of a flexible, developing common law to meet changed circumsatnces. This commentator would permit continued development of the new public nuisance law, enhanced with several guardrails and transparency in proceedings.