Corporations and other powerful contemporary institutions take decisions that increasingly impact the possibilities for well-being not only of those who work or live within them and are governed by them but also of distant people who are deeply affected by their functioning. This democratic deficit raises the question of whether the workers and others who are so affected should have a say in the policies that set the basic conditions for their own livelihoods and flourishing. This chapter sketches an understanding of the scope of the All-Affected Principle, taking it as an important addition to the “common activities” principle that requires democratic rights for the members of an institution or community. It proposes that both principles require democratic management (or “workplace democracy”) within firms, and suggests that the All-Affected Principle is especially apt for addressing the exogenous effects of decisions on people beyond the firm, or on distant people impacted by the institutions of global governance. The chapter goes on to consider applications of the All-Affected Principle for other labor rights under capitalism, including the right to form unions, support for care work, and for the unemployed.

This chapter reviews the first generation of sharing economy regulations and proposes an approach for developing the second generation of regulations. In the first section, the chapter argues that first-generation sharing economy regulations rely on legal categories and assumptions that have been used to address business operations that have developed over decades (sometimes centuries), but that such legal approaches are at times ill-suited to regulation of the sharing economy. In the second section, the chapter argues for a new regulatory approach that directly addresses core principles or values in the sharing economy. The chapter focuses in particular on four core principles that ought to serve as foundations for the next generation of sharing economy regulations.

Chapter 1 offers historical context and an overview of the intellectual and political history of Classical Liberalism during the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the region. The focus of the chapter is on how classical liberals approached questions of despotism, civil freedoms, rights and democracy, and on how they have conceived of political change. These questions have been ignored within most of the academic literature, which has tended to focus on these intellectuals and politicians’ pan-Arabist and nationalist agendas instead of on their liberal and democratic outlooks. Overall, the chapter provides an essential historical and analytical background about the region’s earliest liberal intellectual and political history; it shows that liberal concepts were not “foreign concepts” imposed suddenly on an unsuspecting public. The chapter informs the rest of the study and sets the boundaries of the movement.

Judicial review is central to the Constitution-in-practice, and in the American system of vertical precedent this necessarily gives the Supreme Court, because it is the final voice in the primary American process of articulating constitutional law, the most important role in solving constitutional problems. It does not follow, however, that all constitutional questions are to be answered by the Supreme Court or that all constitutional answers are the ones that a majority of the justices think are correct in the abstract. The practice of constitutional law involves a web of principles, doctrines, and practices that make the perspective from which one is addressing a question a significant factor, much of the time, in the reasoning the constitutional lawyer should employ.

This chapter examines how internal self-determination applies to populations of states. It argues that populations have a right to internal self-determination amounting to democratic governance. But this is not all. What democratic governance means is a contestable topic, and the very concept of democracy encapsulates many things. Also, states can promote internal self-determination as a continuing right which legitimizes pro-democratic intervention, if necessary. In short, to understand internal self-determination as a right of a population is an important task, but such an understanding carries implications which need to be noted.

This chapter explores the democratic promise of “democratic governance” and finds it to be a lie. With a particular emphasis on how the economic system has cut itself adrift from legal regulation and, in the process, re-configured its relationship to the law under the sign of “governance”, we explore the logic of a key substitution: the market principle that was understood as the principle subtending the transactional nature of private law as distinct from public law, gradually becomes the arbiter of the separation itself and guarantor of the circulation (“balancing” in the preferred idiom) of public goods. Governance is imported to lend a vocabulary to these significant shifts, celebrated by its exponents as signifier for plasticity and “experimentalism”. The chapter explores the suggestion that governance might be thought of as an “empty signifier”, in that it performs a function that is typically “hegemonic”: it immunises itself by absorbing and re-defining (across its semantic range) any opposition to it. Through a series of substitutions, it performs a self-referential operation that has internalised all its criteria in order that governance be able to define for itself what is democratic about it.