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International Law in the Long Nineteenth Century gathers ten studies that reflect the ever-growing variety of themes and approaches that scholars from different disciplines bring to the historiography of international law in the period.

Homosexuality and the European Court of Human Rights is the first book-length study of the Court's jurisprudence in respect of sexual orientation. It offers a socio-legal analysis of the substantial number of decisions and judgments of the Strasbourg organs on the wide range of complaints brought by gay men and lesbians under the European Convention on Human Rights. Providing a systematic analysis of Strasbourg case law since 1955 and examining decades of decisions that have hitherto remained obscure, the book considers the evolution of the Court's interpretation of the Convention and how this has fashioned lesbian and gay rights in Europe. Going beyond doctrinal analysis by employing a nuanced sociological consideration of Strasbourg jurisprudence, Paul Johnson shows how the Court is a site at which homosexuality is both socially constructed and regulated. He argues that although the Convention is conceived as a 'living instrument' to be interpreted 'in the light of present-day conditions' the Court's judgments have frequently forged and advanced new social conditions in respect of homosexuality. Johnson argues that the Court's jurisprudence has an extra-legal importance because it provides an authoritative and powerful discursive resource that can be mobilized by lesbians and gay men to challenge homophobic and heteronormative social relations in contemporary societies. As such, the book considers how the Court's interpretation of the Convention might be evolved in the future to better protect lesbian and gay rights and lives.

The public/private distinction is fundamental to modern theories of the family, religion and religious freedom, and state power, yet it has had different salience, and been understood differently, from place to place and time to time. The volume brings together essays from an international array of experts in law and religion, in order to examine the public/private distinction in comparative perspective. The essays focus on the cultures and religions of the ancient Mediterranean, in the formative periods of Greece and Rome and the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Particular attention is given to the private exercise of religion, the relation between public norms and private life, and the division between public and private space and the place of religion therein.

Parliamentary democracy is the most common way of organizing delegation and accountability in contemporary democracies. Yet knowledge of this type of regime has been incomplete and often unsystematic. Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies offers new conceptual clarity on the topic. Taking principal-agent theory as its framework, the work illustrates how a variety of apparently unrelated representation issues can now be understood. This procedure allows scholarship to move well beyond what have previously been cloudy and confusing debates aimed at defining the virtues and perils of parliamentarism. This new empirical investigation includes all 17 West European parliamentary democracies. These countries are compared in a series of cross-national tables and figures, and 17 country chapters provide a wealth of information on four discrete stages in the delegation process: delegation from voters to parliamentary representatives, delegation from parliament to the prime minister and cabinet, delegation within the cabinet, and delegation from cabinet ministers to civil servants. Each chapter illustrates how political parties serve as bonding instruments, which align incentives and permit citizen control of the policy process. This is complemented by a consideration of external constraints, such as courts, central banks, corporatism, and the European Union, which can impinge on national-level democratic delegation. The concluding chapters go on to consider how well the problems of delegation and accountability are solved in these countries. Delegation and Accountability in Parliamentary Democracies provides an unprecedented guide to contemporary European parliamentary democracies. As democratic governance is transformed at the dawn of the twenty-first century, it illustrates the important challenges faced by the parliamentary democracies of Western Europe.

In 1945, Europeans confronted a legacy of mass destruction and death: millions of families had lost their homes and livelihoods; millions of men in uniform had lost their lives; and millions more had been displaced by the war's destruction, and the genocidal policies of the Nazi regime. From a range of methodological historical perspectives-military, cultural, and social, to film and gender and sexuality studies-this volume explores how Europeans came to terms with these multiple pasts. With a focus on distinctive national experiences in both Eastern and Western Europe, it illuminates how postwar stabilization coexisted with persistent insecurities, injuries, and trauma.

I combine newly digitized personnel and public finance data from the British colonial administration for the period 1854–1966 to study how patronage affects the promotion and incentives of governors. Governors are more likely to be promoted to higher salaried colonies when connected to their superior during the period of patronage. Once allocated, they provide more tax exemptions, raise less revenue, and invest less. The promotion and performance gaps disappear after the abolition of patronage appointments. Patronage therefore distorts the allocation of public sector positions and reduces the incentives of favored bureaucrats to perform.

This book is the first to address the multi-faceted influence of the global financial crisis on the national constitutions of the countries most affected. By tracing the impact of the crisis on formal and informal constitutional change, sovereignty issues, fundamental rights protection, regulatory reforms, jurisprudence, the augmentation of executive power, and changes in the party system it addresses all areas of the current constitutional law dialogue and aims to become a reference book with regard to the interaction between financial crises and constitutions. The book includes contributions from prominent experts on Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Portugal, Spain, the UK, and the USA providing a critical analysis of the effects of the financial crisis on the constitution. The volume's extensive comparative chapter pins down distinct constitutional reactions towards the financial crisis, building an explanatory theory that accounts for the different ways constitutions responded to the crisis. How and why constitutions formed their reactions in the face of the financial crisis unravels throughout the book.

Anyone who wants to understand how abortion has been treated historically in the western legal tradition must first come to terms with two quite different but interrelated historical trajectories. On one hand, there is the ancient Judeo-Christian condemnation of prenatal homicide as a wrong warranting retribution; on the other, there is the juristic definition of \"crime\" in the modern sense of the word, which distinguished the term sharply from \"sin\" and \"tort\" and was tied to the rise of Western jurisprudence. To find the act of abortion first identified as a crime in the West, one has to go back to the twelfth century, to the schools of ecclesiastical and Roman law in medieval Europe. In this book, Wolfgang P. Müller tells the story of how abortion came to be criminalized in the West. As he shows, criminalization as a distinct phenomenon and abortion as a self-standing criminal category developed in tandem with each other, first being formulated coherently in the twelfth century at schools of law and theology in Bologna and Paris. Over the ensuing centuries, medieval prosecutors struggled to widen the range of criminal cases involving women accused of ending their unwanted pregnancies. In the process, punishment for abortion went from the realm of carefully crafted rhetoric by ecclesiastical authorities to eventual implementation in practice by clerical and lay judges across Latin Christendom. Informed by legal history, moral theology, literature, and the history of medicine, Müller's book is written with the concerns of modern readers in mind, thus bridging the gap that might otherwise divide modern and medieval sensibilities.

We document that the spread of the Mafia in Sicily at the end of the 19th century was in part caused by the rise of socialist Peasant Fasci organizations. In an environment with weak state presence, this socialist threat triggered landowners, estate managers, and local politicians to turn to the Mafia to resist and combat peasant demands. We show that the location of the Peasant Fasci is significantly affected by a severe drought in 1893, and using information on rainfall, we estimate the impact of the Peasant Fasci on the location of the Mafia in 1900. We provide extensive evidence that rainfall before and after this critical period has no effect on the spread of the Mafia or various economic and political outcomes. In the second part of the article, we use this source of variation in the strength of the Mafia in 1900 to estimate its medium-term and long-term effects. We find significant and quantitatively large negative impacts of the Mafia on literacy and various public goods in the 1910s and 20s.We also show a sizable impact of the Mafia on political competition, which could be one of the channels via which it affected local economic outcomes. We document negative effects of the Mafia on longer-term outcomes (in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s) as well, but these are in general weaker and often only marginally significant. One exception is its persistent and strong impact on political competition.

Police in Paris arrested thousands of men for sodomy or similar acts in the eighteenth century. In the mid-1780s, they recorded depositions in which prisoners recounted their own sexual histories. These remarkable documents, curated and translated into English by Jeffrey Merrick, allow us to hear the voices of men who desired men and to explore complex questions about sources, patterns, and meanings in the history of sexuality. This volume centers on two cartons of paperwork from commissaire Charles Convers Desormeaux. Dated from 1785, the cartons contain 221 dossiers of men arrested for sodomy or similar acts in Paris. Merrick translates and annotates the police interviews from these dossiers, revealing how the police and those they arrested understood sex between men at the time. Merrick discusses the implications of what the men said (and what they did not say), how they said it, and in what contexts it was said. The best-known works of clergy and jurists, of enemies and advocates of Enlightenment, and of novelists and satirists from the eighteenth century tell us nothing at all about the lived experience of men who desired men. In these police dossiers, Merrick allows them to speak in their own words. This primary text brings together a wealth of important information that will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers interested in the history of sexuality, sodomy, and sexual policing.