Personal Narratives, Social Justice, and the Law

North American writer Joan Didion’s eloquent testimonial speaks to the significance of storytelling in our lives. Personal storiesmake our lives meaningful. Part of this is because our stories, wittingly or not, become the means through which we fashion our identities for listeners. Or, as scholars from many disciplines have argued, identity and selfhoodare narrative accomplishments. In this formulation, an individual constructs a sense of self by telling stories or “personal narratives,” which describe “the evolution of an individual life over time and in social context” (Maynes et al. in Telling stories: the use of personal narratives in the social sciences and in history. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2008, 2). While personal narratives contain unique autobiographical elements, the logics of storytelling and the values and beliefs of a particular time and place also influence the kinds of stories people tell. As feminist historian Mary Jo Maynes and her coauthors argue: “The stories that people tell about their lives are never simply individual, but are told in historically specific times and settings and draw on the rules and models in circulation that govern how story elements link together in narrative logics” (2008, 2). Put another way, even the most idiosyncratic story is always in some way social: what narrators decide to tell is often guided by the expectations of audiences (real or imagined); the conventions of various genres (such as life history or autobiography); as well as the broader cultural narratives located in particular historical times and places. In this light, personal narratives at once provide evidence of a storyteller’s viewpoint and experiences as well as the social and cultural milieu in which they live.     

Women,Law and John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill's intellectual reputation is unarguable; his liberal credentials seemingly impeccable. Moreover there seems to be a Mill for everyone; liberal, radical, feminist. The precise nature of the feminist Mill has however remained a matter of considerable debate. The purpose of this article is less to engage this speculation, but rather to invite closer consideration of what Mill actually said and wrote about women and the law in nineteenth-century England. For Mill, the law was both an instrument of women's subjection and a prospective means of liberation.     

Feminism, Aestheticism and the Limits of Law

This article seeks to identify and address the normative void that resides at the heart of postmodernist-feminist theory, and to propose a philosophical framework – beyond postmodernism, but incorporating its central insights – for thinking through the normative questions with which feminists are inevitably confronted in their engagements with positive law. Two varieties of postmodernist-feminism are identified and critically analysed: the ‘corporeal feminism’ of Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler, which seeks to ground feminist critical practice in the irruptive capacities of the material body considered as an arte fact of social construction; and the deconstructionist feminism of Drucilla Cornell, for whom ‘the feminine’ is an indeterminate but disruptive force beyond its construction in law and in other social sites. The first component of the argument elaborated here is that each of these approaches ultimately reduces to a form of aestheticism which is incapable of generating a worthwhile and workable feminist approach to the restructuring of politics and law. The second component of the argument involves a return to aesthetics, in particular to the philosophical aesthetics of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, it will be suggested, yields a framework of concepts which, duly re-manipulated, could speak to the very concerns that have inspired postmodernist-feminism: how to attend to (bodily) particularity while avoiding the dangers associated with ‘essentialism’; and how to theorise the propensity of the unrepresentable power of the feminine to exceed both embodied human capacities and the confining rein of socially privileged rationalities. Crucially, however it also responds to a set of preoccupations – those of the feminist lawyer – that cannot be accommodated by postmodernism: how to translate embodied experience into (legal) norms; generalise from the particular; seek consensus; and codify an endless potentiality in the form of law. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

正确评估《劳动合同法》 适时修改《劳动法》

要客观评价《劳动合同法》,该法对促进劳动力资源市场配置、规范劳动关系发挥了重要作用。目前并没有确切数据证实《劳动合同法》给企业带来不合理用工成本。就用工灵活而言,无固定期限合同是市场经济国家普遍的现象。因为违反规章解除和相关弹性概念的存在,《劳动合同法》的解除保护也并非是彻底刚性的。由于修法的共识并没有形成,相关立法的配套问题没有解决以及经济下行的特殊背景,目前修改《劳动合同法》的时机并不成熟。此外,真正给企业带来负担的是税负等其他因素,修改《劳动合同法》并不能解决企业负担问题。我国劳动关系协调机制的整个问题是集体合同制度不能发挥作用,劳动关系分层处理未能完成。在短期内,解决现有问题应充分发挥司法的能     

The Law and Politics of Marital Rape in England, 1945–1994

This article examines the ending of the marital rape exemption in England. It describes the unresponsiveness of the political and legal establishment on the issue from the war to the mid-1970s. The arguments and campaigns that feminists and others advanced against the rule from the 1970s onwards are analysed, together with the political and legal reaction to this campaign. Next, the Parliamentary and legal debates over the rule in the 1980s are discussed: a story of inertia, even hostility, towards such campaigning. Finally, the article considers the demise of the exemption in the 1990s. The article presents a nuanced account of this change, which was both vigorously contested and highly contingent. It also suggests that legal protection from ‘the rapist who pays the rent’, and the campaign to achieve this, deserve appropriate recognition within the story of feminist activism in the late twentieth century.