Many readers have seen Piers Plowman as a poem of crisis, a poem that fractures under the weight of its own ambivalence. I argue here that the demonic ambiguity of debt offers a plausible explanation of the conflicting impulses at work in this text. For Langland, monetary exchange, along with the careful accounting practices it demands, as long as it is conducted honestly and fairly, serves as a metaphor of penitential exchange, not paradoxically, not in spite of its corrupting power, but because it is conducive to balance and order, to the practice of virtue and the ethical habits of self-regulation required for true and effective penance. On the other hand, for Langland, the unpayable and infinitely reproducible nature of debt, manifest precisely in the ascesis instituted by grace, produces a troubling limitlessness. The ascesis of debt is, in this way, self-undermining. The debt that cannot be repaid correlates to needs that cannot be measured, and thus to desires that cannot be checked and boundaries that cannot be known.

Details the investigation of the Ukraine scandal by the House of Representatives, the decision to impeach Trump, and the debates over the nature and scope of the articles of impeachment.

Though the Islamic waqf is defunct, the Middle East now features modern organizations known also as waqfs. The modern waqf is essentially a philanthropic or charitable corporation. It is self-governing and has a perpetual existence. Along with other autonomous nongovernmental organizations known under different names, the modern waqf provides the institutional basis for a vigorous civil society. Yet across the Middle East civil society remains weak. This is due to two factors, both legacies of the Islamic waqf. First, a century is a short time to develop the civic skills that the Islamic waqf left uncultivated for a millennium. The region is still learning how to build politically effective NGOs. And second, the anemic civic life engendered by the Islamic waqf provided fertile ground for the repressive regimes of modern times. The region’s autocracies try systematically to keep civil society politically weak. From the standpoint of liberalization, a hopeful sign is that the region’s current NGOs, unless captured by the state, are serving as founts of civic education. Promoting a culture of bargaining and compromise, they are teaching how to communicate ideas and form coalitions.

Discusses the origins of the Armstrongs and Vickers firms and their shifts into armament production. In trying to make domestic sales Armstrongs and Vickers encountered three main challenges in dealing with the British Government. First, the primacy of laissez-faire ideology within the Government, especially in the Treasury and the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service. Second, the class prejudices of the southern elite dominating the British Government. The governing elite’s distain for trade made it difficult for armament firms to get any help, though the Admiralty and sometimes the War Office needed their products and so dealt with them. Third, departments such as the Foreign Office and Diplomatic Service were disinclined to deal with trade, preferring to focus on high politics. In response, Armstrongs and Vickers developed strategies for the domestic and international markets: building and maintaining relationships with British elites, including through exchanging personnel with the government and supplying intelligence; building and maintaining relationships with foreign elites, including using agents for diplomacy, and bribes to facilitate sales; excluding competitors from the domestic market; if exclusion failed, then cooperating and colluding with other armament firms; diversifying when sales were scarce; providing finance to secure international sales; and innovating to generate sales.

Over the century considered here there were two overriding problems for Armstrongs and Vickers in doing business with the Ottoman Empire. First, the Empire’s constant indebtedness; they always needed loans to buy weaponry and had a habit of falling behind in payments. Second, the British Government followed its own diktats and would annoy the Ottoman rulers. Therefore Armstrongs– and later Vickers– despite pursuing independent policies, were often disadvantaged by being seen as British firms, showing the limitations of the firms’ independent diplomacy and marketing. Armstrongs through its alliance with Ansaldo– accidentally– discovered a route around the problem of guilt by association, and for a short time profited handsomely from that strategy. Having battled with Germany to secure plum contracts, on the eve of the Great War the British Government thwarted Turkey by commandeering the Sultan Osman I and the Reshadieh dreadnoughts built by Armstrongs and Vickers. This affected relations with Turkey until she joined the Allies in World War Two, after which she got British Export Credits. Postwar Turkey was granted American military aid, closing the market to Vickers-Armstrongs.

British armament firms operating in Latin America and elsewhere got very little help from their home government; they were on their own. They were also operating in very changeable political conditions, with many states in the region experiencing regular internal power shifts, including naval revolts and coups. There was also a lot of interstate rivalry, presenting many sales opportunities. The inhibitor to making arms sales was Latin American indebtedness. States needed loans to buy weapons but also often defaulted on them. Bribery was also a necessary lubricant of trade in the region. The Latin American market was therefore an exhilarating mix of risk and reward for Armstrongs and Vickers. Sales began in the 1880s with a controversy over the Chilean Esmeralda when war broke out with Peru. The British Government detained the ship, though Armstrongs had broken no rules. Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru all became important Armstrongs’ and Vickers’ customers until the Great War saw the firms focus on British needs, ceding the market to America. There were few British armament sales in the interwar years. After the Second World War Vickers-Armstrongs and the British Government worked together on arms sales, ignoring the “Gentleman’s Agreement” with America.

The common types of poor lawyering include bribery, receiving private fees, forgery, theft of clients’ money and obtaining property by deception, all with themes of greed and laziness. But there are also failures of lawyers’ regulation not just of lawyers’ character, with little discipline of the largest law firms involved in corporate scandals. Choosing a ‘good’ law firm is therefore important for all law students’ futures, and it is important to ask firms about many issues, including their attitude to pro bono work and whether they have a written policy on handling ethical issues. More fundamentally, if the public interest in ‘good’ lawyering is to be supported across Greater China, then better legal ethics education is central to change and social stability. This chapter examines key procedural rules about investigating lawyer misconduct in each of the PRC, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and provides the different definitions of what is misconduct, lists of penalties, details of complaints processes, reviews and appeals. Finally, we set out a table of key ethical rules affecting legal professional conduct in each of the Pthree jurisdictions, including those related to fees and costs.

A robust global legal regime holds business firms accountable for engaging in corruption. This chapter explicates that regime. This chapter also puts forth a business case for not engaging in corruption. Corruption imposes real costs on businesses, and degrades the quantity and quality of relationships into which they might enter. The chapter concludes with a discussion of measures that all businesses should take to mitigate the likelihood that persons associated with them will engage in corruption. Before discussing any of these topics, however, this chapter first discusses the definition of corruption and describes the harms corruption inflicts.

This chapter first provides a broad definition of corruption and discusses why it is so toxic to effective governance. We then address how corruption has emerged as a key issue in the development process after being ignored for many decades. We explore the ways in which, without proper vigilance, government and corruption can become intertwined and feed off each other, destroying the foundations of human prosperity and the very purpose of governance. Existing efforts to tackle corruption at the national, regional and global levels are reviewed, and additional ways forward, particularly as regards the role of economic policies in developing the right sorts of incentives and institutions to reduce the incidence of corruption, are presented. Finally, proposals are put forth for the establishment of an International Anticorruption Court (IACC) to greatly strengthen and better implement a range of legal instruments that are already in place, but that have had limited success in checking the growth of multiple forms of corruption across the planet – affecting developing and developed countries alike. The setting up of an IACC is seen as a necessary adjunct to existing tools to check the spread of what many now regard as a global epidemic.

In the late eighteenth century, Swiss Cantons had been ruled by privilege, inequality, and conflicts; yet thirty years later a modern political nation was born that quickly caught up with developed England. Was this an internally-driven miracle or the most successful improvement in governance known in history following an external intervention? Chapter 1 deconstructs the transformation of Switzerland during the French Revolution and Empire, to inquire why a similar Napoleonic ambition seems to have met with less success in our own times.