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Ch. 10 summarized the main proposals for reform that have been argued in this book, briefly restating the moral framework linking justice, legitimacy, and self‐determination that grounds them, and noting that implementing the proposed reforms probably would require significant changes in international law regarding armed intervention. The aims of this chapter are (1) to explain more fully why a new legal framework for armed intervention is needed for successful legal reform, (2) to examine the advantages and disadvantages of the major types of strategies for achieving the needed reform in the law of armed intervention, from the perspective of both feasibility and morality, and (3) to show that the most promising strategy for reform may be the creation of a treaty‐based, rule‐governed liberal‐democratic regime for armed intervention that bypasses the current UN Charter‐based requirement of Security Council authorization and that does not depend upon the US to act as the world's policeman. In addition, it is argued that although the most promising strategy for reform may require violating existing international law, it is nonetheless morally justifiable. The more general point made is that under certain conditions a willingness to violate existing international law for the sake of reforming it can be not only consistent with a sincere commitment to the rule of law, but even required by it. The six sections of the chapter are: I. The Need for Reform regarding the Law of Intervention; II. Three Types of Strategies for Legal Reform; III. The Morality of Illegal Legal Reform; IV. The Commitment to the Rule of Law; V. Moral Authority; and VI. Conclusions.

This introduction provides an overview of the extensive work of legal reform in the later sixteenth century. Through close readings of Nicholas Bacon’s parliamentary speeches, the topic is organized into efforts to ‘perfect’ the law and to administer or ‘execute’ it. As Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper for two decades, Bacon repeatedly emphasised the importance of the law’s perfection through the reform of its form and content and the surveillance and correction of the officers in charge of the law’s execution. While Bacon’s speeches illuminate the proper targets of reform, establishing priorities and speech patterns for his successors, the literary works that are subsequently examined develop the problematics of legal reform in practice.

This chapter sketches state-reformist initiatives in the late Ottoman empire, considered as systemic transformations in a global context of modern state forms with associated forms of social engineering and state intervention in culture and law-making. It proposes that the consequence of these changes and transformations were secularising, intended as well as unintended. The chapter discusses the beginnings of educational and cognitive transformation, the rise of a new class and type of senior bureaucrats, the emergence of a modern intelligentsia, the appearance and spread of new forms of dress. Also discussed are counter-vailing, conservative reactions, both by religious institutions, resistant to reform and the attrition of authority, and conservative milieu more broadly. The issue of women’s education, dress and public visibility emerges as a site of contestation.

This chapter explains that the General Law on Disappearances in Mexico is a legal change achieved by a broad mobilisation of families of victims of disappearance in a challenging context of persistent violence in the country. The Law helps to improve the relevant standards related to searching for disappeared persons, guaranteeing the rights of the victims’ families, furthering the investigation of forced disappearance caused by the government and/or individuals, as well as creating the institutional structures focused on the search for persons. Despite this, the law’s innovative advances coexist alongside previous institutional mechanisms that perpetuate practices contrary to the rights of victims and their families, which risk neutralising the Law. Accordingly, the chapter focuses on the promotion of legal mobilisation strategies in countries, such as Mexico, which accept normative and institutional changes without worrying about their enforcement, since, in practice, new provisions clash with previously created structures that have similar legal authority but greater decision-making power, and are, thus, better able to exercise that authority.

This chapter focusses on the interaction between law-making and the implementation of new reform models. The main focus of the chapter is on the decade following the passage of the 1997 National Water Law and on the process through which a diversity of actors participated in making a key component of the law operational: a pricing system for water use in which river basin committees would play a central decision-making role. Ambiguities in the 1997 law meant that pricing could not work without further legal reform. By creating new organizations, such as the National Water Agency, and by investing in a pilot experience in water pricing, the coalitional prospects for passing such legislation changed. Although the concrete results were frustrating from the perspective of water management, the process demonstrates the interconnections between organization building, experimental practices and law making.

This chapter explores South Carolina’s developmental policy and reform agenda in the post-War of 1812 era, arguing that public works and the labor of state slaves were part of a broader project seeking to produce both the state as well as liberal subjectivity. As the chapter argues, while South Carolinians were influenced by broader governing trends throughout the Atlantic world, their experience was directly shaped by the everyday practices of the state’s enslaved majority, who they absolutely relied upon. Subsequently, leaders broadened their vision of the state to accommodate the violence required for its maintenance.

Beginning with a summary of the dark economic picture that confronted the presidential election of 2008, this chapter covers the election of Barack Obama and its relevance to the Middle District of Florida. The Obama Justice Department and the selection of new justices and magistrates as well as their backgrounds are covered. Middle Florida district judges, magistrate judges, and bankruptcy judges often joined other American jurists who participated in international symposiums and conferences sharing elements of American jurisprudence with those attempting to establish the rule of law in former totalitarian countries. The highlights of these activities are covered. In the early 2000s the Middle District developed and implemented historical and other important initiatives, such as developing courthouse exhibits and understood the publication of an historical book. These initiatives are chronicled in this final chapter.

This chapter examines the role of Spanish Santo Domingo in the early years of the Haitian Revolution, focusing principally on the advent of emancipation in French Saint-Domingue in the summer and fall of 1793. The chapter argues that critical events of this period in Saint-Domingue, such as the disastrous “revolt” of the free-colored businessman-turned-activist Vincent Ogé, the August 1791 slave rebellion, and the piecemeal legal reforms of Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel leading to general emancipation, were all significantly influenced by a deep history of interactions with Spanish Santo Domingo. In presenting a political and intellectual history of the coming of emancipation to Hispaniola, this chapter makes a case for the centrality of the political discourses of certain key freed military leaders—preserved in extant governmental and personal correspondence—in enabling the first French Republican slave emancipation.