This chapter outlines the workings of the common law. It starts out by providing a historical background to legal institutions, conceptual distinctions, pedagogy and literature constituting the common law tradition before going on to identify and discuss some of the core features of the common law’s method. The chapter also seeks identify factors causing convergences and divergences between the working of the law in many of the jurisdictions all over the world that tend to be classified as common law systems.

This chapter introduces the distinctive character of Spanish reason of state and gives a sense of its broader contribution to the study of political thought. It develops the relationship between reason of state and history, and outlines the relevance of reason of state to recent work on the early modern uses of the past, developments in early modern historical scholarship and methods of coping with so-called ‘information overload’. This chapter introduces how this book explores reason of state in a number of theoretical and practical contexts in the seventeenth-century Spanish monarchy, by focusing on individuals who used the act of organizing information – drawn from classical and recent history, their own experience and analyses of current circumstances – to rhetorically present the condition of necessity. Furthermore, the chapter highlights the paradox that although reason of state as a discourse was closely entwined with political practice, no attempt has been made to systematically trace how the discourse functioned in political action. It also points out that Spain tends to be left out of discussions of seventeenth-century political thought, arguing that the Spanish monarchy’s context is especially valuable for advancing the historiography on the interaction between political ideas and concrete contexts.

This chapter explores ideas about orthodoxy and powerful necessity in Spanish Counter-Reformation reason-of-state discourse. Individual authors engaged in describing pragmatic politics and ways of imagining how to put these into practice, while simultaneously taking care to avoid association with Machiavelli. Through translations of Lipsius’ Latin Politica into the Spanish and Italian vernaculars, the chapter first shows how the translators explored ways to square Lipsius’ thought with the Christian-Ciceronian framework endorsed by Catholic orthodoxy. Lipsius recovered the concept of necessity that Machiavelli had reshaped into necessità, and enlisted it once more as a force that could legitimately overrule human law. The chapter then traces how authors in the Spanish monarchy subsequently conceived of necessity as a concept or tool that could legitimize amoral political behaviour, especially in the discussion about deceit. Necessity depended on circumstances that were impossible to define in advance, and this made it orthodox yet flexible. Both the translators and the authors of ‘true’ reason of state experimented with organizing knowledge and (historical) information, and its potential for creating meaning and legitimizing amoral political behaviour, as they tailored a language of reason of state that was both orthodox, and suited to the realities of the present.

With both the role of professionalization in the second decretal age, and the divergence between canon law and theology, contingency must be given its due, as against an assumption that the separation of theology from a canon law which was professionalized and based on papal decretals was in any way inevitable. Decretals and professionalization were indeed integrated in Western Europe around 1200, and in a different intellectual sphere from university theology, but there was no necessity about it. Without the legacy of the first decretal age, there might never have been a second decretal age, though there would surely have been a system run by academically trained lawyers. Similarly, there was no necessity about the separation of canon law from theology. A change of theological fashion is part of the explanation, but so too is the direction in which the Breviarium of Bernard of Pavia pointed the system. Bernard was the Dionysius Exiguus of his age.

This chapter rounds off the volume in two ways. It deals with, first, the more sporadic interaction between jurists and philosophers in the early imperial period, and second, with the influence of the late Republican interaction on law and philosophy as they are both practised today.

Whereas in the previous chapters the influence of law on philosophy is brought up, this chapter deals the influence of law on philosophy, with regard to method. Already within early Hellenistic philosophy a shift of focus can be discerned from a virtue-centered to an action-orientated approach: in the 3rd century BCE the early Stoics had become interested in questions about the ‘appropriate actions’ that can be derived from these virtues. In the 2nd century BCE, inspired by the Roman jurists, the Roman Stoics became interested in the concrete applications of such actions or – put differently – introduced casuistry into philosophy.

This chapter further develops the case for the novel's usefulness as a fictional reality by examining two claims of Anthony Trollope's Autobiography: that this novel-writing developed out of a paracosmic play practice he called ‘castle-building’, and that he made up his novel plots as he wrote them. Through an analysis of his and the De Quinceys’ games, I point out how the improvisational nature of play – the virtual world is ‘filled in’ and revised over time with little premeditation – as an obvious analogue to Trollope’s construction of the fictional Barsetshire, and to his plotting of individual novels. I argue that the characters of The Small House at Allington behave improvisationally, inventing, revising, and ‘filling in’ their personhoods as they go along, offering an alternative reading of the moral logic and psychology in Trollope’s realism. For Trollope, the novel is distinctive for providing this experience of fictional living, not as ‘mere’ escapism but as it contributes concretely to the reader’s experience of their own world.

A variety of approaches have been developed as a way of ‘doing’ medical ethics. While each model may help illuminate different aspects of ethical cases, each have philosophical or practical limitations that preclude one model’s use in all clinical situations. The methods and approaches are described herein, with a brief description of the emphasis and limitations of each. Each model is illustrated through a basic neurosurgical case, reiterated with model-specific details to illustrate the important concepts for each model.