[HOME] [BOOKS]
[ORDERING] [JOURNALS]
[ABSTRACTS] [LINKS]
[SPECIAL OFFERS]
Deborah Charles Publications
Abstracts' Library
Authors L
Nicola Lacey, "Mapping Modernities", Law
and Critique Vol.V/2 (1994), 209-218: My paper was an extended review
of Peter Wagner's book A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline
(Routledge 1993). The book gives an account of the development of modem
societies through three distinctive stages of restricted, organised and
extended modernity, and argues that the current developments towards 'postmodernity'
are better understood as a further reinterpretation of the modern tradition
itself. The argument is developed through the analysis of a wide range of
social, political and economic institutions. My review gives a positive
assessment of the book, and attempts to draw out the implications of its
argument for law.
Alessandra Lippucci, "Cybernetic Analysis and Human Agency",
Res Publica IV/1 (1998), 77-116: The concern of this paper is that
the cybernetic method introduced into legal theory by postmodern
theorists such as Niklas Luhmann and Gunther Teubner treats
society as a complex of autonomously evolving systems whose fate human agency
- the basic precept of democracy and human rights - is helpless to affect.
As a function system, the legal system is one of the specialized
social systems (the family, politics, economics, science, religion) that
members of a society have developed over time to facilitate their sociocultural
evolution. Luhmann and Teubner use the biological theory of autopoiesis
developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to explain
how these function systems evolve self-referentially through symmetries
in their communicative networks, even though the original theory
of autopoiesis holds that only individual living systems evolve in this
self-organizing way. The paper argues that because only human actors
have the capacity to alter function systems, their mediating role with respect
to these systems must be incorporated in any cybernetic account of the development
of the legal system. Relying on the work of Eric Jantsch and Edgar
Morin, the paper cites a variety of sources of human agency - including
the capacity for meta-evolution - that enable law and other function
systems to co-evolve in ways that fall between the optimism of existentialism
and the pessimism of postmodernism. e-mail:lippucci@mail.utexas.edu
Alexander Cernera Ljungstrøm, "The
Silent Voice of Law: Legal Philosophy as Legal Thinking", Law and
Critique VIII/1 (1997), 71-95: This paper use the late philosophy of
Martin Heidegger to argue that ethics and justice are present in
our sensitivity to thinking. Law is the law of Ereignis, the event,
a play without rules, and the call of justice is a trans-social responsibility
towards the other, installed by mortality. Legal thinking is a path
not a method, rooted in our listening to the voice of others. This
voice is silent since it has not yet entered language and legal thinking
returns to it and unfolds out of thinking into Being, a nearness
that motivates and structures the event of language. Our nearness
to the other as the happening reflects the basis of legal thinking
as a philosophy of presence. The silent voice of law speaks because
it happens at the limits of language, and gives rise to an ethics
as poetic thinking.
Elena Loizidou, "A Phantasmatic Moment: The Defence of In-Sanity",
Law and Critique VIII/2 (1997), 115-140: The article problematises
the defence of insanity. It re-visits and re-examines debates criticising
the defence and it re-visits and re-examines how the defence defines the
criminally insane. In its re-visitation it opens up the space to read the
defence as a linguistic construction that frames the criminally insane offender.
It reads the framing or the invention of the criminally insane as a process
where criminal law or rather the language of criminal law abstracts the
actions of the insane defender and relocates them into the empty category
of the defective mind. This process is read as a misappropriation of the
generic term of justice for it displaces it to the space of justice as law.
In its conclusion it attempts to re-think this movement, this re-location
and its possibilities; in other words it attempts to imagine how the actions
of the criminally insane could be read by law otherwise, as potentialities
of the accused's subjectivity, as a movement towards an ethical dimension
of law. e-mail address: e.loizidou@lancaster.ac.uk
Andrea Loux, "Idols and Icons: Catharine MacKinnon and Freedom
of Expression in North America", Feminist Legal Studies VI/1
(1998), 85-104: This article re-situates Catharine MacKinnon and her work
on pornography in the particular and peculiar social, cultural and legal
context from which it emerged--the United States. The article asks why MacKinnon's
controversial work is so popular amongst a segment of US women law students,
seeking an explanation in the culture, politics and educational practices
of the self-proclaimed "elite" law schools of the U.S. academy.
The article goes on to examine the Canadian experience of incorporating
MacKinnon's pornography theory into constitutional law and the recent case
brought by the gay and lesbian bookstore, Little Sisters. The article concludes
with a discussion of the lessons that can be learned by British feminists
from the North American experience as we prepare to create a uniquely British
culture of rights with the incorporation of the ECHR.
Anamaria Löwenthal, ""An Indian flaming body" -
citizenship and/or counter culture expression?", paper delivered at
IASL Conference, Såo Paolo, August 1997: In this paper I study the
situation of the Indian people nowadays in Brasil. The legal discourse says
they are citizens but at the same time Brasilian Indian people belong in
fact to a counter culture. Recently some young people killed an Indian who
was sleeping at night in the street. They set him afire and he died. What
is the meaning of this incident? We must rethink the situation of Indian
people in Brasil making a comparison between official-law values and counter-culture
values; official power discourse and social reality.
Laura Lundy, School of Law, Queen's University Belfast, "From Act
to Order: the metamorphosis of education legislation", in "Education
Law", Liverpool Law Review XX/1 (1998), 63-93: Education law
reform for Northern Ireland usually begins at the point where the
legislative process for England and Wales ends. Once an Education Act is
enacted at Westminster, the policy process appears to kick-start across
the Irish sea with the Department of Education for Northern Ireland formulating
similar proposals for Northern Ireland. However, in Northern Ireland there
a number of forces at play which frequently result in the implementation
of distinctively different legislative provisions. A good illustration of
this is the Education Reform (NI) Order 1989, which was intended
to mirror many of the changes introduced in England and Wales by the Education
Act 1988. This article explains the differences between the two education
systems; charts the progress of three specific policy initiatives contained
in the Education Act 1988 (the national curriculum, grant-maintained
schools and open enrolment) after they were proposed for Northern Ireland;
and analyses the factors which contributed to the transformation of the
relevant provisions from identical twins to close (or sometimes distant)
cousins. The article indicates that a key factor in the process of transformation
was the influence of the Northern Ireland churches within
the education system and suggests that, when arguments are presented in
the language of discrimination and minority rights, concessions
can be wrought even from governments who are committed to a particular strategy
of educational reform. e-mail: l.lundy@qub.ac.uk
[HOME] [BOOKS]
[ORDERING] [JOURNALS]
[ABSTRACTS] [LINKS]
[SPECIAL OFFERS]