A combinatorial approach to obstructing left-orderability of Dehn fillings

We introduce the conjugate-slope property of knots, a variant of Nie’s Property (D), which can be used to study non-left-orderability of fundamental groups arising from Dehn filling. We show that this property holds for any knot in $S^3$ admitting a diagram whose negative crossings can be “controlled” in a precise combinatorial sense. The conjugate-slope property also places strong restrictions on the kinds of left-orderings that the knot group can support, and implies that the image of the meridian is generalised torsion in the fundamental group of many of the knot’s Dehn fillings.