Interviewing retired cigarette smugglers

Based on my experience of conducting an ethnographic study with the Kurdish community in a town in the North East of England I offer a reflection on interviewing three retired cigarette smugglers, who operated in Greece in 2002 and 2003. A reflection on my experiences in this research process is provided with a reference to the absolute and relative value of the (data from the) interviews conducted.

隐私的价值独特性:个人信息为何应受保护?

要想准确理解已经开始施行的《个人信息保护法》,就必须恰当回答“个人信息为何值得保护”的问题,而这个问题的答案经常与“隐私”的价值关联在一起。但是,对隐私的理解,主要被一种“隐私并不具备独特价值”的化约论所统治;因此,只有击败化约论,才能最终证明隐私的价值独特性,也才能最终说明隐私为何值得保护。击败隐私化约论最主要的理由是,如果认为隐私不具备价值独特性,那么对任何特定个体而言,就只能提供“我是我”的对待,而这种对待将会带来贬损、甚至否认“我是人”的结果,这将会严重损害人的尊严。     

Critical justice consciousness: Social injustice and the criminal justice system

In this essay I examine the importance of social justice to my identity and the changing interpretation of my “justice consciousness” resulting from changes in my work life. Drawing on my academic experience as well as my experience as an attorney, I describe the meaning that social justice has for me. I also examine the connections that I see between social injustice and the operation of the critical justice system.     

非常的夫妻财产制问题研究

非常的夫妻财产制是相对于普通的夫妻财产制而言的一种在特殊的情况下适用的财产制度,在世界许多国家的婚姻家庭法中都有规定。我国由于有关夫妻财产制的立法的不完善性,因此,在婚姻法中没有这项制度的规定。鉴于市场经济条件下夫妻财产关系与社会交易安全的密切联系,本文在借鉴世界三个有代表性的国家的立法的基础上,对我国设立非常的夫妻财产制的必要性、可行性进行了探讨,并就此提出了有关的立法设想。     

Home: A Vehicle for Resistance? Exploring Emancipatory Entanglements of ‘Vehicle Dwelling’ in a Changing Policy Context

This article begins with a reflection on Phil Thomas’ work, as well as on the way in which the Journal of Law and Society has pioneered scholarship in this field. Drawing on my own experiences as a researcher and campaigner, and my ‘insider’ status as a van dweller, I articulate why many have sought alternative modes of living, reflecting on ideas about freedom and anarchism, the importance of ‘home’, cultural preference, and escaping the housing crisis. I note that Wales and other European states, such as Portugal, provide a much warmer welcome and space for diverse Travellers; some are already planning their escape routes before the consequences of Brexit and new trespass legislation unfold. In an already hostile and rapidly changing context, it appears that the ontological security of vehicle dwellers is increasingly under threat. As well as giving a voice to these communities, the article also represents a much-needed call to action.     

Dialogues of the War on Drugs: towards restorative reentry initiatives

The injustices of mass incarceration and the ‘War on Drugs’ are a much debated topic in the United States. My project engages this thematic field by examining how formerly incarcerated people discuss the War on Drugs and mass incarceration. I analyze the narratives of 17 formerly incarcerated men who volunteered to participate in: (1) life story interviews, (2) focus groups and (3) semi-structured interviews. Both restorative justice and reentry have been criticized for failing to consider the social, structural, and historical inequalities for marginalized groups. I contend that my subjects’ engagement with historical and autobiographical narratives contributes to an innovative practice borrowing from restorative justice in the context of reentry. The preliminary results confirm that for those who were on the frontline of the War on Drugs, narrating their life story was a cathartic experience and discussing collective memories of slavery and Jim Crow in a group setting became an educational moment and reaffirmed the need to rethink this history. I found the older generation believes the past should be remembered and racism still exists, while the younger generation subscribes to a colorblind view of society and wants to move on.     

The Two Faces of Law and Inequality: From Critique to the Promise of Situated,Pragmatic Policy

Over the course of my career, I have navigated a research agenda that moves between scholarly and policy‐oriented research. Building on this experience, I argue that it is time for law and society scholars to take seriously a commitment to engaged scholarship that speaks to a wider audience of stakeholders and policymakers. Three themes frame my proposal to get back in the game of advocacy and policy. First, I consider why we need to rekindle this commitment at this historical moment: inequalities in wealth, income, and social mobility and the rise of mass incarceration and its collateral consequences diminish the foundation required for effective democratic governance to thrive. Second, what our scholarship has to say is key to the framing of pragmatic policy: law and society's focus on law in action and the culture of law are key to understanding the ways in which most policies tend to deliver unintended consequences. Finally, we need to consider how to go about the next step to make our work visible to a wider audience of stakeholders?     

Searching for coherence in the law of involuntary manslaughter: The English experience

B.A., Cornell University 1970; J.D., Duke University 1970. I am indebted to my colleagues Carolyn Hamilton and Janet Dine, as well as to Andrew Ashworth of King's College, for their useful comments. That in the final analysis I may not have followed some of their suggestions does not detract from their value in helping me to formulate my ideas.     

Face to Face with Child Abuse: Towards an Ethics of Listening

This paper is concerned with faces. It is concerned with the face of a sexually abused seven years old child -- with my face -- and with the marginalisation and violation of children’s own subjective experiences of abuse by the law. Drawing upon my own subjective experience of sexual abuse as a young child, silenced for twenty-five years, I interpret my own sexual abuse as a profound experience of ‘homelessness’. To be homeless is to lack a primal place in the world, to be in a permanent state of disorientation, to be displaced. To be homeless is not necessarily to be emotionally insecure, but to be voiceless. Accordingly, the subject of sexual abuse is an emotionally dislocated subject and I interpret my own abuse in terms of an enduring experience of the violation of place. In other words, I would argue that the physical act of sexual abuse is less important than the site or place of abuse. The significance of sexual abuse is that it reveals the homelessness of our own sojourn and the poverty of our own subjectivity. Given this interpretation, I find the 1989 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child problematic and I attempt to think child sexual abuse in ethical terms. Following Emmanuel Levinas, I present sexual abuse in terms of the ethical significance of the face-to-face relationship and I argue that rights-based advocacy must listen to what children say. It must think through what listening to that voice entails in ethical terms. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

What's So Special about Specialized Courts? The State and Social Change in Salt Lake City's Domestic Violence Court

The nationwide growth in specialized or problem‐solving courts, including drug courts, community courts, mental health courts, and domestic violence courts, among others, raises questions about the role of the state with respect to social change. According to social control theories of the state, especially theories of technocratic or rationalized justice, law is increasingly about efficiency, speed, and effectiveness. Specialized courts, however, take on a social problem approach to crime, seeking to address crime's “root causes” within the individual, the society, and the larger culture in ways more characteristic of social movements. Are specialized courts about social control or social change? This study examines state action in a specialized court in domestic violence in order to examine this question. I focus on a domestic violence court that arose in February 1997 and four years later employed full‐time judges, prosecuting and defense attorneys, and numerous other staff to handle all misdemeanor domestic violence cases in Salt Lake County, Utah. I ask how legal, political, and community officials justify the court and its operation in order to examine some important issues about the role of the state and social change. Ultimately, I suggest that my findings about the complementary roles of social control and social change within domestic violence courts have implications not only for critical theories of technocratic justice and for the battered women's movement but also for democratic theories of the state.     

About Legal Philosophy

In this article I will take into hand the ideas, which contain the principal political and ethical requirements of our time, which require the special attention of the jurists. To summarize these requirements I will use the term “humanitarianism”. I am aware of the fact that some shades of meaning of this notion do not reflect that what I have in my mind. Therefore, I will not attempt to give a strict definition of humanitarianism as I understand it. A more precise definition will be left for the moment, when the ideas embraced by this definition will have obtained more precise contours. For the first draft of concept I will observe at the beginning that the notion of humanitarianism is strictly linked to the notion of reason. It means that in all cases, when a man today and in future is concerned, we have to establish a philosophical disposition carefully, according to our best understanding, under the stimulating guidance of conscience, responsibility and all-embracing care. At the same time this responsibility means the denial of every “intellectual immolation”, false compassion, sanctimonious devotion and false amicability. (This is a shortened article from the original.)     

The experience of civil partnership dissolution: not ‘just like divorce’

Between 2012 and 2014 I interviewed some of the earliest civil partners to dissolve their partnerships about their experience of dissolution. When I presented my findings, most family lawyers responded that dissolution was ‘pretty much like divorce’. And so it was, in many respects; but I thought that such comments missed an important difference. This article focuses on the legal understandings of gays and lesbians who have undergone dissolution of their civil partnerships, and on their experiences of it. This seemed to me significant for three reasons. First, the experiences of lesbians and gay men have historically been marginalised, pathologised or absent from legal accounts and the dominant legal consciousness. In this research they would be put centre-stage. Second, the institution of civil partnership – transient though it may turn out to be – deserves study as the point of entry into legal recognition and regulation of same-sex couples’ relationships in the UK. And, third, it is this precise history that makes it different from marriage, and dissolution different from divorce, whatever the similarities in legal treatment.     

Outsiders and justice consciousness

The foundations of my justice consciousness lie in two books that share the name “outsiders.” I was introduced to S.E. Hinton's novel before I was a teenager and it was my first real contact with the “Greasers,” the “Socs,” and a world of juvenile delinquency divided by social class. Written by a 16‐year‐old girl around the time I was born, I think it was this book that initially sparked my fascination with juvenile delinquency and the study of crime. I pursued this interest in college and became concerned with inequality and the ways in which our social surroundings shape our choices and our life chances. Reading Howard S. Becker's classic statement of labeling theory in his version of Outsiders changed my perspective again and I have never looked at the world in quite the same way since.     

Some remarks on the Gu\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{agu\underset{\raise0.3em\hbox{ibhedabha\dot nga chapter in Udayana's ātmatattvaviveka

But under the requirement of philosophic consistency, and the impact of the perfectly valid reflection that experience is always my experience, and never part of some object independent of me, the world shrinks to the extension of my experience only, and I am left with bundles of my sensations. What are the natural consequences of such an epistemological sophistication? One plausible and natural reaction is what one might call the ‘Indian’ one. It runs roughly as follows: my experience of the world is, alas, only my experience. It is not ‘the real’. Moreover, the world disclosed in my experience is one of misery, precariousness, insecurity, which ends in old age and death and within which no secure, reliable, undeceptive goods can be found. The flux and precariousness which make it so unhappy a place, also make it most ill-suited to be an object of knowledge. — E. Gellner (1974: 114)     

Responsibility and Global Justice

The two traditional ways of thinking about justice at the global level either limit the applicability of justice to states—the only distributions that can be just or unjust, strictly speaking, are within the state—or else extend it to all human beings. The view I defend in On Global Justice (Risse 2012 ) rejects both of these approaches. Instead, my view, and thus my attempt at meeting the aforementioned challenge, acknowledges the existence of multiple grounds of justice. My purpose here is to explain what my view has to say about responsibility. First of all, I explain what my view implies about the responsibilities of the state for the realization of justice. Then I explain that in addition to obligations of justice, my view also gives rise to obligations of account‐giving. I end by sketching what all this implies for institutional reform at the global level.     

Community perceptions of a public sex offender registry introduced in Western Australia

Abstract

Publically accessible information about sex offenders through an online registry of sex offenders has been a polemic issue for governments, police and the wider community with debate largely driven by community expectations of police ensuring the safety of children and women from sexual predators. In October 2012, Western Australia became the first and currently only state or territory in Australia to allow public access to a three tiered register via the Community Protection Website (CPW) that would be monitored by West Australian Police. The introduction of this website triggered significant debate across the country. A survey was developed to capture the opinions of members of the public who had accessed the online registry to understand their views of the online tool and its purpose as a form of community safety. Findings from the survey reveal that the community lacks understanding of the prevalence of child sexual abuse and the fact that a child is more likely to experience sexual victimization within the family unit. There is also a need for greater community education and awareness about the purpose and limitations of the CPW as many believed that all sex known sex offenders are publicly registered, therefore creating a false sense of security.     

浅析司法会计的侦查与鉴定在诉讼活动中的作用

司法机关在经济案件侦查阶段,由于案件的需要对有些案件涉及财务凭证,会计资料的检查和鉴定时就必须要有专门知识的侦查人员或有专门资格的鉴定人员对案件的某些证据进行司法会计侦查和司法会计鉴定,这是案件诉讼过程中的部分程序,但是司法会计侦查及司法会计鉴定具有各自不同作用及其职能,在我们实践过程中往往要混淆其职能和作用,因此作者通过几年的工作经验在此阐述司法会计侦查及司法会计鉴定的作用。     

Agency,Coercion, and Global Justice: A Reply to My Critics

Mathias Risse, Andrea Sangiovanni, and Kok-Chor Tan have offered some subtle and powerful criticisms of the ideas given in my Justice and Foreign Policy. Three themes in particular recur in their critiques. The first is that the arguments I make in that book rest upon unjustified, arbitrary, or contradictory premises. The second is that the use of coercion in the analysis of distributive justice is a mistake. The third is that the global institutional set represents, contrary to my arguments, an independent first-order site of justice. I address these criticisms, and try to vindicate the methodology of Justice and Foreign Policy in the face of these objections.     

The Juror,the Citizen,and the Human Being: The Presumption of Innocence and the Burden of Judgment

In this essay, I suggest that the criminal trial is not only about the guilt or innocence of the defendant, but also about the character and growth of the jurors and the communities they represent. In earlier work, I have considered the potential impact of law and politics on the character of citizens, and thus on the capacity of citizens to thrive—to live full and rich human lives. Regarding the jury, I have argued that aspects of criminal trial procedure work to fix in jurors a sense of agency in and responsibility for verdicts of conviction. Here, I draw on those ideas with respect to the presumption of innocence. I suggest that the presumption of innocence works not primarily as legal rule, but rather as a moral framing device—a sort of moral discomfort device—encouraging jurors to feel and bear the weight of what they do. I offer an account of character development in which virtues are conceived of not merely as modes of conduct developed through habituation and practice, but also as capacities and ways of being developed in part through understanding and experience. The criminal trial, framed by the presumption of innocence, can be an experience through which jurors and their communities, by learning what it means and feels like to carry a certain sort of moral weight, may engender a certain set of moral strengths—strengths valuable to them not just as jurors, but also as citizens, and as human beings.     

长江三角洲城镇社区建设的三大取向

城市社区建设是 2 1世纪中国城市现代化的中心议题 ,长江三角洲地区自90年代以来在全国率先迈开了城市社区建设的步伐并取得了明显的成效。本文总结了以上海、南京、杭州等城市为代表的长江三角洲地区社区建设的基本历程和主要经验 ,并就当代城市社区建设的三个突出内容——社区组织与管理的自治化、社区人口与空间范围的合理化以及社区文化的多向度发展进行了理论探索和展望