“... had won the war, and so on. For his underlying allegation, that the queen is forbidden by ancient laws from acknowledging any authority superior to or other than her own, is a commonplace among the most learned Brexiteers. In fact, they often go much further back than 1689. Sir John Redwood, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and long-time Tory MP for ...”

“... thing. For this reason, although he favoured the easing of certain restrictions in the dietary laws (arguing that the peacock was kosher), he fanatically opposed the drinking of wine produced by non-Jews, invoking the ancient Mishnaic prohibition against imbibing wine which might have been used by pagans in devotions to ‘strange gods’. Many strictly ...”

“... hundred years of worrying about corporate responsibility has produced an enormous patchwork of laws and regulations trying to define it – and a vast army of lawyers and accountants trying to redefine it – but there has been little progress in understanding what goes on inside the black box of the corporate mind. What does Uber want? We could still be ...”

“... not an axion in sight.Others have wondered whether taking account of dark matter requires that the laws of gravity themselves be altered. For more than a hundred years, physicists and astronomers have tried to make sense of the universe by using Einstein’s general theory of relativity. It explains all the phenomena we associate with gravity – from the fall ...”

“... that there is a small but committed band of hyper-realists out there, resolved to respect the laws of chance at all costs? If so, they are behaving in a very irrational manner. The National Lottery, as we all know, operates on a pool system, with the jackpot shared every week among all the winning ticket-holders. When 1 2 3 4 5 6 finally does come up (as ...”

“... gain their political freedom and autonomy.’ Which is to say: size matters. Or, as Kant wrote, ‘laws always lose in vigour what governments gain in extent; hence a condition of sullen despotism falls into anarchy after stifling the seeds of good.’ This is a refrain which sounds somewhere in the background of most thinking about politics: states should not ...”

“... technocrats became adept at presenting their policies as merely the application of the ‘laws’ of economic ‘science’. The racist rhetoric of the 1920s gave way to talk of level playing fields, ‘emerging markets’ and the universal goals of competition, productivity and efficiency. The losers were those who supposedly failed to keep up with ...”

“... plague also discredited the leaders of society, its governors, priests and intellectuals, and the laws and theories supported by them. These elites were obviously failing in their prime social function, the defence of the common welfare, in the name of which they enjoyed their privileges.’19 ...”

“... founder of the Ligue antisémite de France, and other leaders of the seditious movement. New laws designed to curb the influence of militant Catholics, who were rightly perceived as supportive of antisemitic agitation, culminated with the formal separation of church and state in 1905. The following year France’s highest court recognised Dreyfus’s ...”

“... a prophylactic distance. The SDP/Liberal Alliance is judged to have ‘foundered on the pique of David Steel and the pride of David Owen’: it is not clear why a note to this effect had to be appended to this other parody of Woddis’s, for the parody itself implies as much. Or as little, since there are those of us who ...”

“... long and less than two miles wide. Sark has its own parliament, its own taxes and its own traffic laws (permitting only tractors, bikes and horse-drawn vehicles). Its central, fertile plateau is protected by cliffs on almost all sides that rise to over three hundred feet. There are no natural harbours. In 1862, the lords of the Admiralty of the world’s ...”

“... from Louis XVI, troubled Congress: a gift wasn’t necessarily a bribe, but it could become one. Laws governing how much money individuals and organisations could give to politicians were prophylactics, designed – however imperfectly – to prevent corruption by limiting how much money could change hands. Then, in 2010, the Supreme Court ‘effectively ...”

“... political traction since independence.At the heart of the problem were Uganda’s citizenship laws, drawn up when Britain relinquished its protectorate. A clause in the Independence Constitution of 1962 restricted citizenship by birth to those born of Ugandan parents, one of whose grandparents must also have been born in Uganda. My guess is that no more ...”

“... immigrants dropped: when employment increased, so did the number of immigrants. When immigration laws were in prospect, a ‘flood’ of immigrants came in to anticipate the restrictions, and not only adult males but their dependants too. Thus those who had come with the intention of only staying temporarily now brought over their wives and their ...”

“... was anecdotal evidence of abuse of the present system by a handful of asylum-seekers; but, as David Heath MP pointed out, the normal way of dealing with abuse of a system is to put an end to the abuse, not the system. Only the year before, a high-speed process of statutory review by the High Court had been instituted. In the course of an unusually loud ...”