Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission, Mark Sanders

As a contribution to the burgeoning literature on transitionaljustice and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission(TRC), Ambiguities of Witnessing is an idiosyncratic production.The uninitiated reader should not be put off by the deconstructionisttheoretical indulgences of the opening chapters, as perseveranceis rewarded with perceptive interpretations of such key issuesas the TRC's discourse of forgiveness and its unresolved problematicof reparations. Mark     

“依视路杯”全国法语文学翻译竞赛启事

为发现、培养和奖掖更多的法语翻译新人,推动中国法语教学和文学翻译事业的健康发展和繁荣,促进中法文化交流,全国法语教学研究会、南京大学法语系和上海依视路光学有限公司决定联合举办依视路杯全国法语文学翻译竞赛,具体参赛规则如下:     

The protection of the contractor in public works contracts in the Roman Republic and Early Empire

The use of contractors to build and maintain public works in Rome and the provinces is a common feature of Roman building practice in the Republic and early Principate. It reflects a general tendency in Roman republican administration (also found in other sectors such as tax-farming) to let out state business to private entrepreneurs. While the extant sources frequently mention the use of contractors in public works contracts, most references do not describe the internal working of these contracts or (to use the terminology of Roman private law) the rights and duties of the parties involved. This article examines selected references to public works contracts in legal and literary sources in an attempt to clarify a single aspect of the contractual relationship between the state and an individual. The purpose of this survey is to establish whether the sources allude to any form of legal protection available to a contractor in his dealings with Roman magistrates in the context of public works contracts.     

The state and the stray dogs in late Ottoman Istanbul: from unruly subjects to servile friends

The present article situates the systemic efforts to annihilate stray dogs within the wider picture of Ottoman modernizing reforms in the nineteenth century. The period under investigation witnessed an increasing desire on the part of the modern Ottoman state to control and reform disenfranchised human and animal groups, which were believed to jeopardize public order, security and hygiene. These groups – beggars, orphans and the unemployed – were identified as actors irreconcilable with the modern image that the reforming bureaucracy and modernizing elites sought to project. In the face of increasing challenges from European powers, they were the epitome of underdevelopment and backwardness. Ottoman elites and official authorities therefore proposed and implemented institutional measures in the form of forced labor, reformatories or deportation to reform the conditions of these groups, segregate them from the greater public and discipline them. In the modern period, along with the proposals that called for the removal of dogs, modernizing intellectuals and professionals proposed alternative plans to render non-human animals beneficial to human needs and the modern state's expectations.     

Homicide-suicide (dyadic death): a case study of double hanging

Murder-suicide, homicide-suicide, and dyadic death all refer to an incident where a homicide is committed followed by the perpetrator's suicide almost immediately or soon after the homicide. Homicide-suicides are relatively uncommon and vary from region to region. In the selected literature that we reviewed, shooting was the common method of killing and suicide, and only 3 cases of homicidal hanging involving child victims were identified. We present a case of dyadic death where the method of killing and suicide was hanging, and the victim was a young woman.     

In Defence of Substantial Sentencing Discretion

This article develops an ideal of sentencing discretion as consisting in sufficient dispositional flexibility for the trial judge to set, on behalf of the polity, reasonable terms for the continuance of relations with the offender in view of his crime. This ideal requires trial judges to have what may be termed “substantial” sentencing discretion: discretion that is exercised with direct reference to the values and goals penal sanctions are expected to serve, and where it is this quality of value-based engagement that provides the justification for the decision. The article engages with empirical research into sentencing that helps us address the strength of the case for and against substantial sentencing discretion, and ultimately defends substantial sentencing discretion on functional as well as ethical–political grounds.     

Turkish Women Architects in the Late Ottoman and Early Republican Era, 1908–1950

This article examines the public status and educational background of Turkish women architects from 1908 to 1950. Writings on the history of architecture in Turkey, as in the West, have focused on heroic male figures. Key works produced before the late 1970s used data gathered mainly from Arkitekt, the first Turkish architectural magazine, whilst a second generation of Turkish architectural historians has preferred to investigate state and private archives. It is impossible to find a mention of women as architects in either bodies of work, although their contributions are indeed evident in the pages of Arkitekt. This article aims to fill some of these gaps in the highly gendered history of modern Turkish architecture by identifying and examining women’s work as architects in Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century. It also explores the relationship between the women’s liberation movement, the discipline of architecture, and modernization ideology associated with the Turkish Republic. It argues that women architects, who undertook important private commissions and were permitted to enter public competitions as anonymous entrants, did not encounter overt discrimination until the 1940s. Nevertheless, forms of indirect discrimination across the period served to silence women in the pages of the architectural press and to occlude them from key public commissions and offices.     

The European Union, Burma/Myanmar and ASEAN: A challenge to European norms and values or a new opportunity?

The recent events in Burma/Myanmar, beginning with the November 2010 elections and the subsequent series of reforms, have taken Europe by surprise. For the last 20?years, the European Union (EU) has been one of the most vocal critics of the junta regime, thus jeopardising its constructive relations with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and its members. In a new context of transition, the EU has to show that it can quickly adjust to an unanticipated scenario if it does not want its credibility to remain deeply undermined in a regional space that is undergoing structural transformations. Europe and ASEAN should together find a way to consolidate both the socio-political transitions in Southeast Asia and the validity of European values.