“To establish a community of property”: Marriage and race before and during the Haitian Revolution

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) was the greatest social upheaval in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions. The paper presents results from the first systematic study of marriage during this event, which included slave rebellion (1791), general emancipation (1793) and political independence from France (1803). The article focuses on a single colonial parish, leveraging a sample of roughly 1000 contracts by comparing them with similar documents from same region in the 1760s and 1780s. Ironically, amid a revolution that was ostensibly eliminating slavery and racism, the interracial marriages that had once been common in this parish virtually disappeared. The wealthy “mulatto” families who had been free long before 1791 intensified their pre-Revolutionary pattern of endogamy and cousin-marriage. In the meantime, French male immigrants of the sort who, before the Revolution, had allied with these established clans, now shunned these marriages.     

Yoga and restorative justice in prison: An experience of “response‐ability to harms”

Divisions within the contemporary restorative justice movement in the US often manifest in one state‐supported model: balanced and restorative justice (BARJ). Paul McCold, in this symposium frames the problem with BARJ as one of a corruption of restorative justice principles by its foundation in community justice. This article suggests that BARJ and McCold’s critique share a neglect of the transformative potential of restorative justice for realizing social and economic justice. Moreover, recent experience indicates that BARJ policy planning can take place in a way supportive of Social Equity Restorative Justice (SERJ). The time appears opportune for some peacemaking within the movement.     

High-Risk Interrogation: Using the “Mr. Big Technique” to Elicit Confessions

Kassin et al. (Police-Induced Confessions: Risk Factors and Recommendation, 2009) provide a detailed and thoughtful analysis of how police interrogation practices might elicit false confessions from innocent suspects. The purpose of this commentary is to provide a brief review of a relatively recent development in Canadian police investigation practice and discuss how this procedure may increase the likelihood of police-induced false confessions. The so-called “Mr. Big Technique” is a non-custodial interrogation tactic wherein suspects are drawn into a supposed criminal organization (actually an elaborate police sting) and subsequently told that to move up in the organization, they must confess to a crime. In this article, we describe this remarkable interrogation technique and discuss issues relevant to the potential induction of false confessions.     

Arbitration in financial dispute resolution: the final step to reconstructing the default(s) and exception(s)?

In this article, I argue for caution in embracing family arbitration as a new form of private ordering for resolving parties' financial disputes. I explain that family arbitration may be more successful than other forms of private ordering and final court hearings in enabling certain types of parties to resolve certain types of disputes. I consider why family arbitration may not become numerically significant despite its potential benefits, but may be much more important in normative terms. Lawyer-led negotiations remain the most common form of out-of-court resolution and constitute the de facto default form of bargaining in the shadow of the normative regime framed by ss 23–25 Matrimonial Causes Act 1973. Together with the transformation in approach to nuptial agreements, family arbitration may mark a normative shift towards autonomy and private ordering. I question whether this is a desirable step for family law, at least before we have resolved the underlying policy debate.     

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and the “Odd Consequence” of Progress

The Time Machine of H. G. Wells stands as one of the foundational works of science fiction. It is a true product of its time, a reflection of the fast pace of technological development and social change that makes a romance of the ideology of advancement for its own sake. But between the lines of its “adventure” plot, we find evidence of another, more complex story being told. Wells's work is plagued by ambivalence about the outcome of social and scientific progress—the selfsame progress that gave birth to the time machine in the first place. The Time Machine, in short, is preoccupied by an anxiety about a catastrophe just around the corner, not one born of global war or political turmoil but rather of the absence of turmoil, of need, of struggle. The idea and possibility of fiction itself becomes entangled in this problem of the everyday catastrophe, as it nearly suffocates under the conditions of the utopian society which it creates.