De/limiting Emptiness and the Boundaries of the Ineffable

Emptiness (śūnyatā) is one of the most important topics in Buddhist thought and also is one of the most perplexing. Buddhists in Tibet have developed a sophisticated tradition of philosophical discourse on emptiness and ineffability. This paper discusses the meaning(s) of emptiness within three prominent traditions in Tibet: the Geluk (dge lugs), Jonang (jo nang), and Nyingma (rnying ma). I give a concise presentation of each tradition’s interpretation of emptiness and show how each interpretation represents a distinctive aspect of its meaning. Given that Buddhist traditions (1) accept an extra-linguistic reality and (2) maintain a strong tradition of suspicion of language with the belief that language both constructs and distorts reality, this paper responds to an issue that is not so much whether or not an inexpressible reality can be expressed, but rather how it is best articulated.     

Copyright and the Death of the Author in Literature and Law

Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature David Saunders, Authorship and Copyright     

For the Want of Certainty: Vnuk,Juliana and Andrade and the Obligation to Insure

In 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union in Damijan Vnuk v Zavarovalnica Triglav extended the requirement for the owner of a motor vehicle to possess insurance cover where the vehicle is used on a road or other public place to vehicles on private land. Beyond disquiet as to this extension, there remains uncertainty at statutory and jurisprudential levels. According to Fundo de Garantia Automóvel v Juliana, immobilised vehicles stored on private land but which are capable of being driven are subject to compulsory motor vehicle insurance whereas in Andrade v Crédito Agrícola Seguros, insurance is required only where the vehicle is used as a means of transport. Andrade appears overly restrictive and may operate to defeat the protections of the Motor Vehicle Insurance Directives. Clarification is needed, through a seventh MVID or direction from the CJEU, as to the authority of Andrade and the circumstances in which motor vehicles must be insured.     

Identification and Individualization of Lophophora using DNA Analysis of the trnL/trnF Region and rbcL Gene

Lophophora williamsii (peyote) is a small, spineless, greenish‐blue cactus found in Mexico and the southwestern United States. Ingestion of the cactus can result in hallucinations due to its content of mescaline. In the United States, L. williamsii is classified as a Schedule I controlled substance. In this study, we use DNA analysis of the chloroplast trnL/trnF region and chloroplast rbcL gene to identify the individuals of Lophophora. Using the rbcL gene, Lophophora specimens could be distinguished from outgroups, but species within the genus could not be distinguished. The trnL/trnF region split the Lophophora genus into several groups based on the length and substructure of an AT‐rich segment of the sequence. Our results indicate that the genetic variability at the trnL/trnF locus is greater than previously recognized. Although DNA structures at the trnL/trnF region and rbcL gene do not align with the classification of Lophophora species, they can be used to aid in forensic analysis.     

Anaximander's Rhythm and the Question of Justice

My essay examines the oldest fragment ofWestern philosophy, the saying of Anaximander,with respect to its elucidation of justice as arhythmic process consisting of both `law' and`care'. In doing so, I proceed by giving areading of the Anaximander fragment by itself,focusing on the question of its rhythmicstructure and its determination of therelationship between dike (law asjustice) and adikia (injustice). Thispart of the essay includes an excursus onAristotle's transformation of Anaximander'srhythm into a recognizable ethical science. Ina second part I engage the most profoundinterpretation of Anaximander, that by MartinHeidegger (1946). Concentrating on Heidegger'sconcept of Verwindung (a kind of`overcoming') as well as on his emphasis on theoccurrence of the notion of tisis (care)in the Anaximander fragment, I cull fromHeidegger the central idea that dikeand tisis exist in a necessaryrelationship. In the third and final part Iattempt a provisional examination of therelation between dike and tisis todemonstrate the shortcomings of justice-as-law,with a focus on the questions of restitutionand equity as central aspects of the law. Iconclude with an appeal to an integration of`care' into the conceptual thinking aboutjustice. An addendum addresses the question oftime with respect to the Anaximanderianrhythm.     

Comparing the psychological characteristics of un-apprehended firesetters and non-firesetters living in the UK

Deliberate firesetting research predominantly focuses on apprehended populations. In contrast, this paper focuses on the prevalence and characteristics of un-apprehended firesetters living in the UK. Social media was utilized to recruit 232 participants for an online questionnaire. Two hundred and twenty-five people answered a question relating to deliberate firesetting. Forty participants (17.78%) indicated that they had ignited a deliberate fire and were classified as un-apprehended firesetters. Firesetting was most common in childhood and adolescence. Relative to non-firesetters, un-apprehended deliberate firesetters were more likely to report; a diagnoses of a psychiatric illness, a diagnosis of a behavioural problem, having been suspended from school, a history of suicide attempts, experimenting with fire before the age of 10 years old, and having a family member who also ignited a deliberate fire. Un-apprehended firesetters also scored significantly higher compared to non-firesetters on the Fire Setting Scale and the Fire Proclivity Scale [Gannon, T. A., & Barrowcliffe, E. R. (2012). Firesetting in the general population: The development and validation of the Fire Setting and Fire Proclivity Scales. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 17(1), 105–122], the Fire Interest Rating Scale [Murphy, G. H., & Clare, I. C. H. (1996). Analysis of motivation in people with mild learning disabilities (mental handicap) who set fires. Psychology, Crime & Law, 2(3), 153–164], the Novaco Anger Scale and Provocation Inventory [Novaco, R. W. (2003). The Novaco Anger Scale and Provocation Inventory: NAS-PI. Los Angeles, CA: Western Psychological Services], the Boredom Proneness Scale – Short Form [Vodanovich, S. J., Wallace, J. C., & Kass, S. J. (2005). A confirmatory approach to the factor structure of the Boredom Proneness Scale: Evidence for a two-factor short form. Journal of Personality Assessment, 85(3), 295–303], and the Measure of Criminal Attitudes and Associates Scale [Mills, J. F., & Kroner, D. G. (1999). Measures of criminal attitudes and associates: User guide. Unpublished instrument and user guide].     

沦"儿童最大利益优先原则"在中国的确立——兼论《婚姻法》等相关法律的不足及其完善

International documents like the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) propose that in mediating on children issues, the best interests of the child should be the primary consideration. In China, the Constitution and the Law on the Protection of Minors have already set out the terms in principle for the protection of minors, however, it has not been defined in the Marriage Law (2001). In order to enforce the commitment of respecting and safeguarding human rights, the child’s best interest principle should be established in marriage and family law, along with amending related provisions. Chen Wei is a professor of law, and director of the Research Center for Foreign Family Law and Women Theories in the China Southwest University of Political Science and Law. She is in the teachings of civil law, family law, law of succession, the history of civil law and comparative family law for years. During 2003–2004, Prof. Chen, being a visiting scholar, studied foreign family laws in the Faculty of Law, Sydney University. In academic field, she has published over 50 research articles in China and abroad; and her monograph is Research on the Legislations of Marriage and Family Law of China (2000). Further, she has taken charge of editing over 10 books, for instance, A Comparative Study of Family Laws between the Mainland and Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan of China (2002), A Comparative Study of Foreign Marriage and Family Law (2006) and A Comparative Study of Succession Laws among the Mainland, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan of China (2007).     

Procedural Innovation and the Surreptitious Creation of Judicial Supremacy in the United Kingdom

In Re an Application by the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission for Judicial Review, the Supreme Court made unfavourable comments about Northern Irish abortion legislation in a way which showed complete disregard for elements of civil procedure which are a foundation of proper adjudication within the context of respect for democracy. This was but the latest of a number of cases in which the senior judiciary has made unaccountable procedural innovations furthering judicial supremacy in defiance of the sovereignty of Parliament. In addition to Re Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, two other of these cases, Simmons v. Castle and R (Miller and another) v. The Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, will be discussed. These cases reveal an effort to create judicial supremacy by means which we are obliged to call surreptitious.     

Law,Genre and the Voice of the Friend

The article attempts to think friendship in its relation to law and justice and provides some arguments for the importance of this concept in Derrida’s ethical, legal and political philosophy. It draws on early texts such as Of grammatology and reads them in conjunction with later texts such as The animal that therefore I am. The relation of friendship to law and justice is explored by means of Derrida’s notion of “degenerescence” understood as the necessity or law of indeterminateness that cuts across, both limiting and de-limiting, all laws, types and generic partitions, for instance, juridical (natural and positive right), humanistic (human and animal), anthropological (sexual difference), philosophical (physis and nomos). Drawing on Derrida’s readings of “sexual difference” in Heidegger and the latter’s evocation of “the voice of the friend” in Being and time, the article addresses the theme of Geschlecht and articulates the exigency to think sexual difference beyond duality together with the exigency to rethink law and right otherwise than on the ground of nativity and “natural fact” and in terms of what Derrida calls “a friendship prior to friendships” at the origin of all law and socius.     

Adverse Possession and Article 1 of the European Convention

In the post-human rights era the question has arisen on several occasions as to whether the automatic and arbitrary termination of the registered owner’s title through the common law and statutory principles governing adverse possession of land is contrary to the Article 1, Protocol 1 of the European Convention. The matter fell to be decided in J.A. Pye (Oxford) Ltd v United Kingdom ([2005] 3 EGLR 1) where the European Court of Human Rights held that the automatic termination of a registered owners title after 12 years possession was indeed a violation of Article 1, Protocol 1. More recently, the decision of the European Court has been overturned by the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights where the Grand Chamber has held that a squatters’ right to another persons land are not disproportionate (J. A. Pye (Oxford) Ltd and Another v United Kingdom, The Times, October 1st 2007). This short article examines the decision of the Grand Chamber.

The Pure Theory of Law and the Fragile New Democracies of the Developing World

Political and socio‐economic distress invariably accompanies democratic orders in Nigeria. Usually, the people turn to the military, justifying this by reference to a whimsically transferable peoples’ will as Grundnorm (a basic norm, order or rule that forms an underlying basis for the legal system). However, though ‘We the People’ is contained in the Preamble, it is dangerous to so situate the Grundnorm in the will of the people other than that will expressed by them in the Constitution. That said, the Grundnorm is still, for juristic and jurisprudential reasons, to be found in the Preamble.

For new democracies, the Nigerian example illustrates how not to employ the Grundnorm theory if democracy is to survive.     

Feminism and the siren call of law

Feminists have so often declared and celebrated the fecundity of the relationship between feminism and legal reform that critique of legal doctrine and norms, together with proposals for their reconstruction, have become the hallmarks of the modern feminist engagement with law. Yet today the long-cherished ‘truth’ about law’s potentially beneficial impact on women’s lives has started to fade and the quest for legal change has become fraught with problems. In responding to the aporetic state in which feminist legal scholarship now finds itself, this paper offers a recounting of the relationship between feminism and the politics of legal reform. However, in so doing, it seeks neither to support nor to oppose these politics. Instead, it explores the historical contingencies that made this discourse possible. Utilizing Foucault’s concept of episteme, it demarcates the nineteenth century as the historical moment in which this discourse arose, and tracing the epistemic shifts underpinning the production of knowledge, locates its positivities at the interface of the time’s episteme and the discourse of transcendental subjectivity that it engendered.

Culpability and the Politics of Love

In L’amour du censeur, a seminal work published in French in 1974 but as yet untranslated into English, Pierre Legendre uses the Freudian Oedipus complex as a reading grid with which to decipher the libidinal dynamics underpinning Christian civilisations. This paper exposes Legendre’s work, and complements it by elucidating the play of the different modalities of identification conceptualised by Freud in Group Psychology. Horizontal and vertical identifications channel the investments that lend consistency to a political figure, an ideology, a discourse. Legendre’s work reminds us that the primary function of a given civilisation is to institute a workable libidinal economy for its subjects, and that politics names the knot of the social bond.     

Ethics,Justice, and Suffering in the Thought of Levinas: The Problem of the Passage

Emmanuel Levinas is the philosopherof suffering as such: a suffering withoutregard for its causes and justifications thatis manifested to the I in its encounter,``beyond being', with the face of the Other. ``Ethics as first philosophy', however,subsequently passes over to justice in Levinas'thought, and this means that it passes througha violence that is very much in being. The movement from ethics to justice revealswhat this essay calls ``the problem of thepassage'. Using the thought of Levinas as itspoint of departure, the essay attempts touncover this problem in all of its profundity. A characteristic of all thinking in the Westernphilosophical tradition, the passage fromA to B is best understood as a mode ofthinking that clings to the passage assuch – in the form of ``A B' – as itsown special way of persisting in being. At thesame time, however, this means that ethicscannot support or comfort justice withoutdevouring itself, which is to say the self that both ethics and justice seem torequire.     

Insurance Fraud and the Role of the Civil Law

Two UK Supreme Court decisions have considered insurance fraud. The first, Versloot Dredging BV v HDI‐Gerling Industries Versicherung (The DC Merwestone), concerned the use of a fraudulent device being harnessed to support a legitimate claim which, in the view of the majority, was an area of insurance law in need of re‐evaluation. The second, Haywood v Zurich Insurance Co, concerned the use of fraud to increase the settlement paid by the insurer and whether an insurer, which suspects fraud but has nevertheless chosen to settle a claim, is entitled to set aside the settlement under the tort of deceit where it subsequently discovers proof that it was in fact fraudulent. This case note examines not only the legal implications of the decisions and their likely impact on industry practice, it also focuses on the broader issue of the proper province of the civil law and whether general deterrence can be justified as a proper objective where the criminal law is deficient in punishing fraud because of its higher standard of proof.     

Surface Modification for the Collection and Identification of Fingerprints and Colorimetric Detection of Urea Nitrate

Glass surfaces were modified with a combination of dyes and reagents to allow for the potential simultaneous recording of a detailed fingerprint and the detection of the explosive urea nitrate (UN), as a proof of principle of surface modification for simultaneous linking of identity to manipulation of explosives. By coating microscope slides with 9,10‐diphenylanthracene (DPA), p‐dimethylaminobenzaldehyde (p‐DMAB) and p‐dimethylaminocinnamaldehyde (p‐DMAC), a colorimetric change was observed in the presence of UN, while revealing a fingerprint with enough resolution to isolate at least 10 minutiae. This is the first step in creating point‐of‐care devices capable of detecting low concentrations of explosives and drug metabolites and connecting them to a fingerprint.     

Reading for Law and the State: Theaters of Problematization and Authority

Constructing a particular nation, that of early modern England, is seen here as a series of theatrical performances. Shakespeare’s work is taken as a series of thought experiments. Some, like The Merchant of Venice, are reassuring that threatening circumstances and innovatory social practices are capable of being overcome or assimilated from the unknown to the known. Some, like King Lear and Hamlet, ponder the consequences of a failure to discover a resolution. Some writers have argued that England was historically quite early in beginning to conceive of itself as a nation, rather than as a population of possibly heterogeneous regions subject to a dynasty, a state of affairs summarized in the by now clichéd remark attributed to the Sun King, “L’Etat, c’est moi”. For Shakespeare, if not for all of his contemporaries, the Englishman is a bit slow-witted, owing to his fondness for beef and red wine, but he is distinguishable from others and provides material for the second pieces of theater I look at. If there could be an Englishman, his experience with the absolutist pretensions of the Stuart monarchy allowed there to be a free-born Englishman (and, actually, Englishwoman). The two crucial battles of the English civil war, Marston Moor and Naseby, followed by the Army Debates of 1647–1649 form the stage for an at least aspiring egalitarianism we now know as the rights of man, or the rights of the civic person.

Garland v. Torre and the Birth of Reporter's Privilege

In 1959, Marie Torre of the New York Herald Tribune went to jail rather than reveal who had told her that Judy Garland apparently thought herself to be “terribly fat.” Many reporters derided Torre as a gossip columnist (she was actually the TV columnist) who did not deserve support. But the libel suit that sent her to jail, Garland v. Torre, is more consequential than they imagined. Though Torre lost her appeal, the judge recognized a degree of constitutional protection for newsgathering. Elevated to the Supreme Court of the United States, that judge, Potter Stewart, reiterated his Garland reasoning in a dissenting opinion in Branzburg v. Hayes. Many federal courts then employed the Branzburg dissent or Garland itself to craft a conditional reporter's privilege. In this fashion, Marie Torre helped scores of later reporters avoid jail.     

Al Rawi,Tariq, and the Future of Closed Material Procedures and Special Advocates

This note considers the impact of the Supreme Court's decisions in Al Rawi v The Security Service and Home Office v Tariq on the use of closed material procedures and special advocates. The government's subsequent Justice and Security Green Paper is also discussed.     

Laws of Inclusion and Exclusion: Nomos,Nationalism and the Other

This article explores how and why contemporary nationalist ‘defence leagues’ in Australia and the UK invoke fantasies of law. I argue these fantasies articulate with Carl Schmitt’s theory of ‘nomos’, which holds that law functions as a spatial order of reason that both produces and is produced by land qua the territory of the nation. To elucidate the ideological function of law for defence leagues, I outline a theory of law as it relates to (political) subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Agamben and Brown, I demonstrate how subjects form and are formed by historically contingent relationships to law in the contemporary neo-liberal moment. Turning to Lacan, I show how nationalistic invocations of law provide nationalists with a fantasy that the nation’s law represents them and holds them together (as the nation itself). Similarly, I argue that nationalists imagine that the other has their own law as well, which not only corresponds to the other, but functions as a legible index of the other’s otherness—a metonym for the threatening uncertainty and radical difference that the other represents. Drawing on Lacan’s concept of the big Other, I ultimately argue that nationalists aggressively (re)assert law not only to defend the nation, but to ensure their own symbolic and ontological security therein.