The Introduction gives an overview of the book’s most important findings and contributions. Since international relations are anarchical and international legal norms are incomplete or in tension with other norms, there is potential for contestation whenever a general norm is applied to specific situations. The reactions of others to proposed norm interpretations can alter norms and their strength. The second section describes the book’s rhetorical approach, and the third section summarizes the main theoretical contributions. First, the "alternate endings" typology shows that it matters whether dispute parties (dis)agree on the norm frame or behavioral claim. Frame agreement is an internal source of stability. Moreover, the typology can guide assessment of how contestation affects norm strength. Second, I describe the focus on audience reactions, argumentation, and speakers (including delegation to agents) when analyzing extrinsic influences on the persistence of norm interpretations, and thus of alternate endings. The fourth section discusses the main contributions to the existing literature on norm strength, the dual quality of norms, legal argumentation and interpretive communities, and delegation to courts and other relevant agents. The Introduction then discusses the research design and methodology, before concluding with an overview of the remaining chapters.

This chapter compares the short-lived norm recognition in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war with the persistent norm recognition in the 1267 sanctions regime. Delegation to agents – weapons inspectors (Iraq) and the Ombudsperson (1267 sanctions regime) – played a significant role due to its consensual and potentially ongoing nature. The chapter thus focuses on how delegation affects the relative stability of norm recognition. The different problem structures both agents faced made the Ombudsperson more effective in managing norm contestation than the United Nations (UN) weapons inspectors: Certainty over the output legitimacy of its work and compliance constituencies that exert social pressure on the UN Security Council (UNSC) to continue delegating have made it easier to build a reputation as credible and effective. While norm recognition persists, the indirect costs of delegation for the UNSC have led to tensions in the delegation relationship, rendering resolution of the claim disagreement between the UNSC and European Court of Justice (ECJ) unlikely. Moreover, the chapter shows that contestation over the 2003 Iraq war reduced the clarity, and thus the social strength, of chapter VII norms, but contestation increased the social strength of due process rights in targeted sanctions. The effect on relative norm strength is more difficult to determine due to the claim disagreement.

Scholars often conflate the concepts of pooling (how states make collective decisions) and delegation (authorizing an international body to act) in examining the authority of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). We clarify the difference by showing how states “soft pool” decision-making through informal intergovernmental organizations (IIGOs) without creating legal obligations or delegating authority. IIGOs such as the G-groups are growing in prevalence and importance because soft pooling allows states to make collective decisions that are politically binding in nonlegal ways. We examine organizational characteristics of IIGOs that allow states to minimize sovereignty costs while cooperating through soft pooling – including the use of consensus to express shared expectations through declarations and memoranda of understanding and administrative structures such as rotating chairs to avoid delegating to an independent secretariat. We review these understudied organizational alternatives, explaining how soft pooling makes IIGOs authoritative even as states retain sovereignty.

Chapter 3 identifies the numerous strategies the contemporary liberal states have pursued to navigate the cross-pressures engendered by the migration trilemma during the post-Cold War period, and especially since September 11th. Contesting scholarly claims that the liberal states cannot avert unwanted immigration, its main argument is that they have considerably reconciled the tensions inherent in the trilemma by enlisting and coopting non-central state actors at the intersection of human mobility and security. Specifically, they have forged bilateral and multilateral policy agreements and devolved many of their responsibilities for implementing immigration and human mobility policy to international, subnational and private sector actors. In pursuing this multifaceted course, the immigration policies of states have converged, and their burdens in managing their immigration-related responsibilities have been partially alleviated. But in doing so, the liberal norms inspiring their once steadfast commitments to maintaining relatively open borders and safeguarding citizen and immigrant rights have been compromised.

In this chapter, I lay out a theory cataloguing the conditions under which international courts may be expected to issue audacious rulings. This theoretical framework relies on previous literature and insights gathered from interviews with experts in and around the Court. The necessary condition for audacious courts is a wide discretionary space within which they may act without fearing repercussions from states. Yet, such a wide discretionary space is not always given; when it is given, states might still attempt to influence courts through direct or indirect means. Such means include closing down courts’ discretionary space and widespread negative feedback, as well as related threats. International courts, in turn, are compelled to realign their priorities to react to or pre-empt such measures. This is a form of trade-off whereby courts adjust their behaviour to ensure continued access to resources and to preserve their reputation and public image. The chapter also introduces additional factors that increase the likelihood of audacious rulings (i.e., proposed new understandings’ congruence with changing societal needs, legal developments external to the regime, and civil society campaigns).

From the earliest weeks of the pandemic, courts and commentators turned to Jacobson v. Massachusetts for guidance. The 1905 Supreme Court case upheld a statute authorizing local boards of health to make smallpox vaccination compulsory if, in the board’s opinion, it was necessary for the public health. Led by the Fifth Circuit, many courts interpreted Jacobson as dictating a highly deferential “suspension” standard for judicial review of public health emergency orders – a throwback to the standard commonly applied to any constitutional violation in 1905. Judges relied on Jacobson to uphold infringements upon abortion rights, voting rights, and freedoms of worship, assembly, association, and movement. In a November 2020 decision, the Supreme Court majority apparently rejected the Jacobson suspension standard, at least for Fourteenth Amendment claims. This chapter parses the fractured opinions in Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo and subsequent lower court opinions for indications of Jacobson’s continued vitality as a lodestar for public health powers. The chapter rejects the Jacobson suspension doctrine in favor of a broader reading that provides guidance for judicial review on separation of powers and federalism questions as well as individual rights. Jacobson offers enduring and flexible guidance on the two tensions at the heart of public health law and policy, which have been brought into stark relief by the pandemic but will continue to be litigated long after the COVID-19 threat has subsided: first, the tension between individual rights and the common good; and second, the tension between bureaucratic expertise and democratic accountability.

Leadership in crisis response has traditionally been strongly centralized and hierarchical. Top-down command and control is popular, because a strict hierarchy and clear lines of command enable rapid decision-making and coordinated actions. Critics, however, have argued that centralization is both impossible and undesirable during crises, because leaders lack situational awareness and cannot control frontline responders from a distance. They argue that operational personnel should take charge to ensure an adaptive frontline response, potentially at the cost of efficiency and speed. The operational dilemma of crisis leadership revolves therefore around the tension between centralization and decentralization. To deal with this dilemma, it is useful to study how influence is exercised and power circulates during crises. Rather than a static authority structure, different types and phases of crises require different forms of leadership. Authority structures have to be tested and adjusted throughout the response, so they can be continuously co-constructed by frontline responders and operational leaders, as the complex and dynamic crisis situation evolves.

Do our solutions to create credibility make a difference? Yes. This chapter and the rest of the book show how support for a clean energy transition increases when lawmakers make policies more credible and provide local economic benefits. We draw on various surveys and interviews to test our solutions for how credibility can be enhanced. For example, we demonstrate how laws rather than reversible promises can enhance credibility and garner more support. We also show how revealing the national consensus behind assistance to transitioning regions can reduce expectations of policy reversal. We also feature interviews with a range of energy firm executives and lobbyists, which complement our surveys of members of the public and local elected officials.

This chapter demonstrates the need for new and more precise concepts to make sense of early modern households. First, it questions the usefulness of the three-sector model with the argument that many households were active across sectors and their main employment can be hard to identify. Second, with the help of early modern letters, it shows that reliance on several sources of income was not necessarily a sign of vulnerability as it applied to both wealthy and less wealthy households. Third, using work activity data it indicates that the male breadwinner model does not fit with early modern realities. Married women and men were active in most types of work and their authority and responsibilities made them similar to each other and different from the unmarried. Fourth, it argues that it is misleading to conceptualize the household as a closed unit characterized by patriarchal hierarchies. Households had to be open to the surrounding society. Fifth, it demonstrates that, to take advantage of the many links to the outside world, household heads were prepared to delegate and deputize. As a result, economic agency was more dispersed in the population than is usually acknowledged.

Health services are organized in remarkably diverse ways and yet manage to produce comparable outcomes. Countries should build on the strengths of their own systems, rather than feel pressure to adopt health service organization models imported from elsewhere. Most countries have centralized and decentralized elements that coexist and generally are embedded in a wider governance and political economy context. Efforts to use decentralization to improve health outcomes succeed when they build organizational capacity to exercise newfound decision rights and ensure robust accountability systems. The private sector encompasses a diverse set of actors that play a critical role in delivering health services but that are often inappropriately neglected in public policy and planning efforts. There is no one perfect model of care, the best ones are adaptable and evolve to address shifting epidemiological patterns, emerging threats such as pandemics, and climate change. Addressing the organization and management of health services inevitably involves a focus on supply-side factors, but demand-side considerations play a critical role in improving health outcomes and cannot be ignored.

To answer the question of what responsible AI means, the authors, Jaan Tallinn and Richard Ngo, propose a framework for the deployment of AI which focuses on two concepts: delegation and supervision. The framework aims towards building ‘delegate AIs’ which lack goals of their own but can perform any task delegated to them. However, AIs trained with hardcoded reward functions, or even human feedback, often learn to game their reward signal instead of accomplishing their intended tasks. Thus, Tallinn and Ngo argue that it will be important to develop more advanced techniques for continuous high-quality supervision – for example, by evaluating the reasons which AIs give for their choices of actions. These supervision techniques might be made scalable by training AIs to generate reward signals for more advanced AIs. Given their current limitations, however, Tallinn and Ngo call for caution when developing new AI: we must be aware of the risks and overcome self-interest and dangerous competitive incentives in order to avoid them.

In this chapter, I apply the theory of the reasoning state to re-interpret the progressive era rise of the administrative state. Three forces combined to activate the concerns articulated in the theory. First, the economy became far more complex and interdependent after the Civil War, changes that both called for state intervention and also made it highly challenging for the public to effectively audit those interventions. Second, economic power and hence the ability to influence the democratic organs of government became far more unequal, further setting the ground for public distrust of policy outputs. Third, a media revolution occurred around the turn of the century. Changes in print technology and the rise of new media forms, notably the muckrakers, altered the information environment to shed light on abuses of the public trust. Together, these forces spurred (justified) distrust of the prevailing Madisonian form, and led to the rise of progressive era administrative bodies.

In Chapter 5 the definition of political institutions drives us to a discussion of the main ‘institutes’ that constitute them. Individual and atomistic political norms and rules are so many over space and time that a detailed discussion is impossible. While norms/rules identify micro political institutions, with the term ‘political institute’ I identify those clusters of norms-rules that preside over the solution to a functional political problem, namely: norms and rules of selection, responsibility, inclusion, representation, decision, competence, accountability, devolution and redress. In my view, these nine institutes cover and exhaust the field of political normativity. Each of them is discussed analytically and historically in the chapter.

This chapter presents the main theoretical argument of the book. It starts by discussing the role of representation in the Madisonian baseline. It then argues that several assumptions that may have held at the founding no longer held by the turn of the (last) century, giving rise to an acute problem of trust between the electorate and representatives. A partial solution to this problem, the chapter contends, is for the legislature to delegate authority to administrative bodies and to constrain their actions through administrative law. Under this scheme, the legislature establishes objectives (e.g., fair and reasonable railroad rates), and administrative bodies establish the means in publicly credible ways. Delegated authority thereby tends to improve the public’s welfare, as well as to serve the electoral interests of representatives who suffer under less suspicion. The appendix to this chapter presents a formalization of this argument.

This chapter lays out the core claims of the book and situates the theory in the literature. It emphasizes the limitations of the common view about expertise as a rationale for the administrative state and begins to substantiate the case for viewing credible reasoning as its distinctive feature. The chapter also contains a roadmap of the remainder of the book, previewing the argument, case studies, empirics, and normative and doctrinal conclusions.