The hunger strike, however, only paused the trial: it resumed as soon as Rudnik and Moiseenko were healthy again. As in the first phase of the trial, the couple was hostile to the court and refused to answer questions. They yelled, interrupted, and objected to the evidence brought against them, but in the end the court unanimously recommended conviction and sentenced them both to life in prison.

This chapter explores the efforts of the Comintern to find and confer new identities on the couple that would allow them to claim extraterritoriality. One of the lawyers from the couple’s firm traveled to Europe to secretly obtain these identities, and brought them back to Shanghai. Rudnik then told the Shanghai Municipal Police director that he and his wife were actually the Swiss citizens Aloise and Marie Beuret, reciting passport numbers and other critical information. But once again the Shanghai Municipal Police worked in concert with SIS and MI6, and were able to disprove the Beuret identities. Since the couple could not claim Swiss or any other protected nationality, the court ruled they would be handed over to the Guomindang military authorities.

This chapter is about Rudnik and Moiseenko’s arraignment at the Shanghai Special District Court in August 1931, where it became clear that the Guomindang government was going to use any and all measures to ensure the couple was turned over to them for punishment. Their lawyer, a European with a lot of experience in the Shanghai courts (whose fees were paid for by the Comintern), grew increasingly pessimistic about his ability to protect them from this fate.

This chapter is devoted to the imperial eunuchate and begins by looking at the place of eunuchs in the life of the empire prior to 1658. This is followed by an examination of the rising presence of eunuchs in Aurangzeb’s princely household and the central role eunuch loyalists played in helping ‘Alamgir consolidate his power post-1658. Despite ‘Alamgir’s concerns about the existence and trafficking of eunuchs, he also appreciated the strength and usefulness of the imperial eunuchate, and contributed to its growing power. This chapter also evaluates Khidmatgar Khan III, the most powerful eunuch in Mughal history and the head of the imperial eunuchate from the early 1690s to his death in 1704. Such power did not come without resistance from uncastrated men who were jealous of the eunuchate’s wealth and power. This included ‘Alamgir himself, who, despite heavy dependence on imperial eunuchs, tried to maintain some checks on them, even if these weakened toward the end of his life.

The goal of this chapter is to provide the reader with broad guidance on the many points of intersection between child abuse, diagnostic imaging, the legal system and the radiologist.

The radiologist’s involvement begins before the report in setting up department protocols and supervising the acquisition of images. Communication of important and unexpected findings should occur before finalization of a report. The radiology report is a medicolegal document – the report should be correct, complete, conclusive, cogent and clean. Issues related to reporting are addressed in detail.

Radiologists have a duty to educate other members of the healthcare team and trainees about the diagnostic imaging of child abuse and its differential diagnoses.

Child abuse cases produce an uncomfortable intersection of medicine and the law for the involved radiologist. This chapter provides guidance on all aspects of preparation for possible court testimony. The importance of preparation cannot be understated. In court, the role of testifying radiologists is to provide reputable information and to educate the court.

This chapter provides a comprehensive framework for pediatric and other radiologists serving as witnesses in criminal and civil child abuse cases around the world. The authors clearly and explain key concepts including understanding expert witness qualifications, participating in discovery and pretrial preparation, developing courtroom communication skills and techniques, and effectively anticipating cross-examination. The chapter critically examines the role of evidence-based medicine in the courtroom, highlighting the increasing importance of legitimate peer-reviewed research, consensus statements and statements defining ethical testimony issued by medical professional associations. It also explores contemporary problems, such as courts’ misunderstanding and misuse of unwarranted and medically unsupported alternative explanations for abusive infant and child injuries.

Overall, the chapter aims to equip radiologists with the knowledge and skills to provide accurate, effective, and ethical courtroom testimony. The authors’ overarching goal is to facilitate evidence-based legal decision-making in civil and criminal child abuse cases. The chapter contributes to the growing body of literature on medicolegal collaboration, arguing that radiologists play a crucial role in ensuring fair and accurate judicial outcomes in child abuse cases. It also advances the view that effective expert testimony not only serves individual cases but supports a better public understanding of science and medicine and enhances public health initiatives focused on child abuse prevention and education.

Based on extensive in-depth interviews and primary documents, Chapter 5 presents a case study of a middle-performing county in central China to illustrate the core arguments of the book. It shows how the local state reassigns rural land rights in an effort to drive urbanization and industrialization. It provides data on how local officials respond to performance targets by using land to attract investment in both real estate and industry. The chapter also provides data on the county’s debt-fueled infrastructural development employing land-backed LGFVs and presents data on economic activity and fiscal revenue. The chapter illustrates the nature of popular dissatisfaction over the reassignment of land rights and how local officials use law to deflect discontent and conflict away from the state itself, while exacerbating conflict between villagers and village collectives and among neighbors. It shows how villagers, unable to effectively challenge the state, seek to exclude others from sharing in land-taking compensation funds by using contested ideas about household registration (hukou), marriage, village charters, and land contracts. Villagers manifest legal consciousness, including awareness of legal aid, and engage in legal mobilization, including negotiation, mediation, petition, litigation, and protest.

How is monastic law practised in modern-day Sri Lanka? How do contemporary monastic jurists reckon with multi-legality? This chapter draws on archival and ethnographic research with Sri Lanka’s third-largest monastic community, the Rāmañña Nikāya, to answer these questions and explore the operation of monastic law today. It introduces readers to the Rāmañña constitution, court system, judicial training materials, jurisprudential texts and other features of monastic legal practice. It argues that monastic judges practise legal pluralism in ways that both resist and embrace the parallels between monastic and state law, engaging in a form of ‘double speak’ that, on the one hand, places monastic law ‘on the scale’ of Sri Lankan law while, at the same time, highlighting its superior, more-than-human status.

How should scholars and policymakers think about legal pluralism? In this Conclusion, I reflect on that topic, insisting that analysts should move beyond the question of whether laws, themselves, are or are not compatible. Instead, they should look at the practices of legal pluralism that make such compatibility seem natural or permissible, exceptional or impossible. I argue that inter-legal harmony is not a technical feat, but a social, political, and emotional achievement – one that is often precarious. Legal pluralism, therefore, implicates more than just the ‘stuff’ of law, but involves the shifting and recursive processes that help us to assemble normative worlds, reckon with diverse obligations, and find meaningful pathways forward through a changing and complex life.

How did colonialism affect the content and practice of Buddhist monastic law? This chapter answers this question from the perspective of colonial legal sources, considering the ‘practices of legal pluralism’ employed by British officials starting in the early 1800s. Drawing on colonial correspondence, court decisions, draft laws, government transcripts, and newspaper reports, I explain how and why the British concretised legal concepts, such as ‘ecclesiastical succession’, ‘Buddhist temporalities’ and ‘temple lands’, while also generating new bodies of law: a body of civil-court case law governing monks called Buddhist Ecclesiastical Law; and an influential ordinance regulating the use and administration of ‘Buddhist properties’, called the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance. I show how colonial jurists mapped Buddhism onto particular spaces, issues and communities, such that Buddhism acquired, in law, English-style qualities of jurisdiction across three dimensions: territorial jurisdiction, subject-matter jurisdiction, and personal jurisdiction.

Sri Lanka is the only Buddhist-majority country in the world without an official state-recognised monastic legal system. This is in spite of the fact that an entire section of the county’s constitution is dedicated to such a venture. How can one explain this? And why does Sri Lanka remain in this impasse? This chapter answers these questions by tracking a significant (and ongoing) series of attempts made by Sri Lanka’s leading intellectuals, educators, politicians, monks and legislators to ‘legalise’ monastic law (S: nītīgata kirīma) by creating some form of statute, tribunal or legal body that could blend monastic and state legal authority. Drawing on an un- and under-studied body of political and legal documents, it explains how a particular approach to legal pluralism – one motivated by a ‘purist’ approach to law – both motivated and sabotaged successive efforts to formally recognise monastic courts and constitutions in state law.

What is monastic law for? This chapter explores the goals of monastic law, beyond its concerns with regulation and governance. Drawing on ethnographic, archival and survey research, it examines the various ‘nonpositivist’ aims pursued by monastic jurists: preserving unity and unanimity (sāmaggi) among monks; maintaining discretion and protecting reputations; avoiding (further) conflict and identifying the root causes of strife; minimising judicial prejudice by eliminating the mental defilements (kilesa) that give rise to them; restoring offenders to the community by applying therapeutic sanctions; aligning the conduct of monks with the concerns of local laity and temple donors; and, most importantly, shortening saṃsāra and hastening nirvana. This chapter highlights the intertwining of positivist and nonpositivist elements in monastic law, shining light on a legal order that not only enforces standards of conduct but also impacts karma, saṃsāra and the path to nirvana.

What is Buddhist monastic law? How should one think about its key texts, institutions and principles? This chapter answers these questions in the context of Sri Lanka and other parts of South and Southeast Asia, focusing especially on ideas of unity and diversity in law. The first part of this chapter summarises key ideas and principles found in the ancient code of monastic law, the Vinaya Piṭaka, which is thought to be the cornerstone of monastic legal texts and practices. The second (longer) part of this chapter introduces readers to a range of monastic legal sources outside the Vinaya Piṭaka, which also play key roles in the practice of monastic law in contemporary Sri Lanka. These sources include commentaries, constitutions, handbooks, judicial manuals, statutes, case law, social expectations and other normative sources produced by monks, state officials and Buddhist laypersons.

Why do similar conditions of legal pluralism lead to conflict in one setting and compromise in another? This chapter addresses this question by approaching legal pluralism not as an empirical condition – a multiplicity of legal orders that individuals navigate – but as a set of practices that bring order, structure and meaning to the obligations, codes and norms that one confronts. Drawing on three relatively recent case studies, this chapter demonstrates how the same set of normative artefacts – the same texts, norms, institutions, and authorities – can be assembled, interpreted, and mobilised in profoundly divergent and even agonistic ways. The first case study involves a monk’s attempt to gain a driving license. The second involves the issuing of identity cards for Buddhist nuns (bhikkhunīs). The third relates to a parliamentary bill designed to recognise monastic constitutions (katikāvatas) in law.

How does the encounter between monastic law and colonial law look from the perspective of Buddhist monastics? The chapter offers an alternative legal history of the nineteenth century, drawing on a largely unstudied archive of Sinhala- and Pali-language legal sources written by Buddhist monks. Using these sources, I highlight the creativity and productivity of Buddhist monastic lawmaking during the nineteenth century. A close analysis of monastic legal texts from this period also reveals key differences in the ways that monastic jurists understood and enacted legal pluralism when compared with colonial officials. Rather than treating the laws of the Buddha and the laws of the Crown as conflicting, as the British tended to do, monastic jurists purposefully aligned them. Rather than hardening legal boundaries between monastic and colonial regulation, monastic jurists pushed in the direction of integration, borrowing and exchange between local and imported laws.

While later medieval England enjoyed an increasingly sophisticated array of governmental institutions that helped kings to rule, kingship itself remained a fundamentally personal and personality-driven enterprise. Consequently, space was needed where the ‘personal side’ of politics could take place and where each monarch’s domestic needs could be met. It was the royal court and household that provided space for both of these things. Despite the importance of each, defining them, and their relationship to one another, is not easy. The royal court (not to be confused with the courts of law, discussed in Chapter 6) has proven particularly problematic to historians because it lacked a clear structure or boundaries.

Chapter 5, Dull Instead of Light, examines regular practitioners’ increasing efforts to disambiguate “medicine” and “quackery” in the wake of the 1868 formulation of the Hicklin test of obscenity. The first section explores how medical groups experimented with using obscenity laws as alternatives to the Medical Act (1858) to regulate medical practice. These actions’ impact on the book trade is debatable, but regular practitioners’ tireless efforts to collapse quackery and obscenity influenced new legislation governing medical advertising. The rest of the chapter examines parallel efforts to professionalize medical publishing. In advocating for limitations on medical book advertising, the use of dry, technical language in medical writing, and other changes to medical print culture, regular practitioners further sought to disambiguate “medicine” from “quackery.” The lines between popular and professional medical works had previously been blurry. The changes examined in this chapter helped cleave a growing chasm between the kinds of sexual knowledge accessible to medical and non-medical audiences.

The US-driven and NGO-mediated prosecutorial approach to address trafficking prioritizes efforts to convict the accused and foregrounds victim-witness testimony as the central piece of evidence to do so. Though training rescued women to testify against alleged traffickers is thus a key component of donor-driven NGOs’ efforts, the author’s ethnographic research revealed that this is a rare occurrence. This chapter explores the multiple and complex reasons why most rescued women don’t testify, by situating them in the broader Indian sociolegal context. In juxtaposition, it tracks the case of a trafficked woman, Sunaina Das, who testified for the prosecution in a New Delhi trial court, to also explore the constellation of factors that lead some women to testify and the challenges they face. It follows Sunaina’s encounters with the Indian criminal justice system and the support she received from both NGOs and Indian legal actors. Finally, it explores how an NGO-led training session for Indian judges impacted her case. Through these contributions, this chapter challenges prevalent assumptions in global anti-trafficking campaigns about the victimhood of Global South sex workers, about criminal justice necessarily benefiting trafficked sex workers, and about the Indian criminal justice system necessarily lacking the ability to address sex trafficking.