Islamo-Arabic Culture and Women’s Law: An Introduction to the Sociology of Women’s Law in Islam

The present paper addresses the mutual relationship between society and law in shaping women’s law in Islam from the perspective of the sociology of law. It analyzes the role of pre-Islamic social, political, and economic structures in the Arabian Peninsula in modeling women’s law and highlights some customary laws which were rejected or revived and integrated in Islamic jurisprudence. In this regard, the paper reviews issues such as polygyny, rights to inheritance, marriage, the process of testimony and acceptable forms of evidence in legal matters, diyya (blood money), the exclusion of women from the judiciary and the system of issuing fatwa (legal opinion), natural right of guardianship (wilāya) of underage children after divorce, and regulations related to the veil. Finally, referring to the manner of the Prophet of Islam, the paper suggests that ?urf (custom) can be considered as a source of Islamic legislation alongside other commonly known sources of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence).     

Space and Law, Gender and Land: Using CEDAW to Regulate for Women’s Rights to Land in Vanuatu

International laws such as The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) promise a universal system of rights to varied people in varied places. In many Pacific states this has been translated to mean that women should have the same privileges as men to control, possess and use land. This could not be further from the truth as evidenced by women’s experiences in Vanuatu, which bring home the visible and invisible spaces of international law. The insights of legal geographers into the spatialised dimensions of social, political and economic activities, together with those of feminist legal scholars into the gendered nature of law, are invaluable in understanding how some spaces are prioritized while others are devalued. We rely on these insights to uncover the prioritized legal spaces of Vanuatu and to locate them against the lived-in spaces of Vanuatu’s women. Becoming aware of the multispatiality of law is the first step in contemplating a landscape where justice can play a part.     

Comparative study of sustainable and non-sustainable interventions in technology development and transfer to the women’s vegetable gardens in the Gambia

In the Gambia numerous projects have been implemented to boost vegetable production. A survey was conducted in Kanifing Municipality and Western Division of the Gambia to determine the level of technology development and transfer. The result shows that the total membership of the intervention sites is 726 and 1,115 growers in the non-intervention sites respectively. From the survey 92% of farmers considered variety improvement as a priority area for technology development. The result indicated that 45% of the respondents regard that 80% of technologies comes research and farmers and 90% of technology dissemination to farmers is through the public extension system, and 20% of respondents mentioned farmer groups. The aim of this study was therefore to examine acquisition, technology development, and transfer to farmers and to come with appropriate strategies of technology transfer in The Gambia in the areas of production and marketing of vegetables.      

Defining the limits: the clash between a doctor’s duty to preserve life and enforcement of a patient’s religious belief

This article examines the question whether, under Nigerian law, a doctor has a duty to save the life of a patient whose refusal of medical treatment will inevitably lead to death. An affirmative answer is suggested after an examination of relevant Nigerian laws on the subject matter. Mindful of developments in this area of law in some other jurisdictions, this article concludes that there is scope for the amendment of relevant Nigerian laws to institutionalise a patient’s unqualified prerogative to give informed consent. It however cautions that, in the light of complex social challenges, Nigeria does not appear ready for such a change.     

Levinas’s Contribution to the Law of Hospitality

Liverpool Law Review - This article examines the ethical thinking of Levinas, from which Derrida’s Law of Hospitality is derived, to see if it is sustainable in the face of Badiou’s...     

The Situation in Libya and the ICC’s Understanding of Complementarity in the Context of UNSC-Referred Cases

The PTCI’s decision on the admissibility of the case against Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi and the subsequent AC Judgement are the first expressions of the ICC’s understanding of complementarity in Article 13(b) cases. Admissibility decisions display how the ICC attempts to strike the balance between international justice and states’ right to exercise their territorial criminal jurisdiction. In relation to cases triggered by UNSC referrals, these decisions also mark the delicate moment in which the ICC’s interaction with the politics UNSC is unveiled. In the case against Saif Al-Islam Gaddafi the ICC seems to have taken deferent approach toward the highly authoritative mechanism that triggered the case. Legally speaking, these decisions might appear as a missed opportunity. They fail to provide a conclusive clarification of the parameters of the ‘same case’ test. First, the AC did not subscribe to the offence-specific interpretation of the ‘same conduct’ test embraced previously by PTCI and, in the name of consistency with the Court’s previous case law, reverted to the incident-specific approach adopted in Lubanga. However, the case-by-case approach adopted by the AC undermines the legal certainty that the AC meant to achieve in the definition of the admissibility test. Moreover, the AC has failed to appraise the PTCI’s conclusion that domestic implementation of international crimes is not necessary for the purposes of successfully challenging the admissibility of a case. Finally, in light of the constraints imposed by Article 17(2) on the relevance of due process violations, the PTCI’s decision to reject on the grounds of ‘inability’ as opposed to ‘unwillingness’, which again the AC did not consider, could be seen as evidence of a deferent stance toward the UNSC.     

Who’s afraid of penal populism? Technocracy and ‘the people’ in the sociology of punishment

Contemporary sociologists of punishment have criticized the rising incidence of incarceration and punitiveness across the Western world in recent decades. The concepts of populist punitiveness and penal populism have played a central role in their critiques of the burgeoning penal state. These concepts are frequently sustained by a doctrine of penal elitism, which delegates a limited right to politicians and ‘the people’ to shape institutions of punishment, favoring in their place the dominance of bureaucratic and professional elites. I argue that the technocratic inclinations of penal elitism are misguided on empirical, theoretical, and normative grounds. A commitment to democratic politics should make us wary of sidelining the public and their elected representatives in the politics of punishment. A brief discussion of Norway’s legal proceedings against Nazi collaborators in the mid-1940s and the introduction sentencing guidelines commissions in Minnesota in the 1980s shows – pace penal elitism – that professional elites may variously raise the banner of rehabilitationism or retributivism. While penal elitism may yield a few victorious battles against punitiveness, it will not win the war.     

China’s stolen children: internal child trafficking in the People’s Republic of China

Trafficking in children has attracted worldwide attention in the last two decades primarily due to its links with global migratory movements and the role ‘transnational organised crime’ is perceived to play in these. Internal trafficking is largely ignored primarily because of a preoccupation with cross-border, transnational migratory movements. Arguably, the growth of the relevant literature has given rise to certain widespread perceptions about the uniformity in the trade characteristics and actors under the common rubric of ‘trafficking in human beings’. By capitalising on direct linguistic access to a wide range of Chinese open sources, the purpose of the article is to offer an account of the various dimensions of the issue as they present themselves in the particular Chinese context. Our main concern has been to perform a systematic presentation of this material in light of the extant wider literature. In the Chinese case the combination of socioeconomic, political and cultural factors set a complex picture that highlights the shortcomings of dominant ways of thinking about the phenomenon. This complex picture serves usefully to cast doubts with regard to how the criminal activity itself is being conceptualised as well as to perceptions of victimisation embodied in current discourses on human trafficking.     

Transitions in the negotiations on climate change: from prisoner’s dilemma to chicken and beyond

Frequently, international environmental negotiations have been analyzed in two-agent (2 × 2) games. Yet, in order to involve additional strategies, (3 × 3) games gained attention recently. We employ such a (3 × 3) game setting in order to depict international negotiations on climate change and integrate both the prisoner’s dilemma and the chicken games in this setting. We analyze transitions of negotiation states and describe how ancillary benefits and first-mover advantages influence agents’ behavior in the negotiations, when three different strategies or levels of climate protection efforts are available. Finally, we also integrate strategies to mitigate and to adapt to climate change into the analysis in the (3 × 3) game setting.     

Surveillance and social control: the FBI’s handling of the Black Panther Party in North Carolina

Extant research on state policing of protest tends to focus on overt and physical forms of repression, yet far less work has examined more subtle types of social control. Such mechanisms often take place behind the scenes and are carried out within large government agencies. Drawing upon previously classified documents, we analyze the targeted investigation of the Black Panther Party by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) between 1968 and 1976. Findings indicate that directives from FBI headquarters to regional offices in North Carolina had three specific goals: forewarn law enforcement agencies of planned activities, gather evidence for possible preemptive prosecutions under an anti-sedition statute, and gather evidence for possible prosecution under existing firearm statutes. We highlight how local offices in North Carolina often distorted and embellished Black Panther activities to meet national FBI directives. Findings have important implications for ongoing state investigations of social movement activity.     

Thomas Craig’s Aetiology of Law and Society: Literary Dependence and Independence in the Jus Feudale

While Craig's relationship to, and emergence from, the French legal humanist tradition has always been widely recognized, this paper constitutes a deeper analysis of the specific threads connecting Craig to the humanist literature of the sixteenth century. It examines the first chapter to the Jus feudale and, by studying Craig's aetiology of law and society, assesses the literary and cultural influences on his historiographical product. It demonstrates that Craig's understanding of the earliest human society and of law's evolution was highly dependent on continental humanist literature and, above all, on the writings of Jean Bodin. Yet it also shows that Craig was capable of independent thought and rigorous critical analysis of sources. The article examines Craig's relationship to the writings of his fellow Scot and humanist, George Buchanan, whose De jure regni apud Scotos constitutes a vital intertextual frame for many aspects of Craig's thought, particularly as it relates to sovereignty, monarchy and the limits of royal power. Moreover, it will be seen that the first chapter, though seemingly an antiquarian digression, actually reflects Craig's thoughts on many significant political issues that were current in Scotland at the time he was writing.     

Ritual Texts and Literary Texts in Abhinavagupta’s Aesthetics: Notes on the Beginning of the ‘Critical Reconstruction’

In a recent paper in this Journal Hugo David discussed the possible sources for the comparison that Abhinavagupta draws between ritual and literary discourse at the beginning of his “critical reconstruction” of the theory of rasa in the sixth chapter of his New Dramatic Art. The question of Abhinavagupta’s sources raises more general questions about Abhinavagupta’s use of the concepts and analytical procedures of Mīmā?sā in his literary-theoretical works. What, if anything, does Mīmā?sā really have to do with the analysis of literary texts? How, if at all, can we construct parallels between ritual and literary texts such that the hermeneutics of one can illuminate the hermeneutics of the other? And more specifically, what are the examples that might convince us that there are such parallels? With these questions I attempt, modestly, to reach a somewhat better understanding of the beginning of Abhinavagupta’s “critical reconstruction,” which has already received a disproportionate amount of scholarly attention. I also hope, however, that this passage might serve as an example for how to think of the “borrowing” of concepts typically associated with Mīmā?sā into the realm of literary theory.