A New History of Colonial Lawyering: Likhovski and Legal Identities in the British Empire

The history of the legal profession has been dominated by Richard Abel's monopolization thesis, and by Terence C. Halliday and Lucien Karpik's political model of lawyers as maintainers of liberal polities. By contrast, Assaf Likhovski's legal history of mandate Palestine treats lawyers and judges as cultural intermediaries who shaped the legal identity of Jewish and Arab communities. This article situates Likhovski's book within a growing body of scholarship on non-European lawyering in the British Empire. It links Likhovski's case studies to legal figures from colonial India, West Africa, and Malaya, all of whom acted as cultural translators and ethnographic intermediaries in the formation of colonial identities.     

Telling the Refugee Story: The `Ordinary Australian', the State of Australia

By international standards, fewuninvited asylum-seekers arrive in Australia.However, in 2001, a conservative federalgovernment trailing in the opinion pollsreversed its fortunes and won the November 2001election largely, it seems because of its``tough' refugee policy, which the Oppositioncould only feebly endorse, deeming oppositionelectorally suicidal. Using some insights fromLacan and writers in the Lacanian tradition,this paper examines how the refugee story waswritten, and why it was that the intentions ofits authors so successfully shaped itsreception by the majority of the electorate.     

The Pursuit of the Perak Regalia: Islam, Law, and the Politics of Authority in the Colonial State

Islamic law changed radically in the last century and a half. It was codified and limited to the domain of personal and family law in almost all majority and minority Muslim states. The argument of this article is that this remarkable change in Islamic law began in the colonial state. Islamic law, as it functions within postcolonial Muslim states, is a product of negotiations between colonial and local elites over law, religion, culture, ethnicity, and the identity of the Muslim subject. In the case of colonial Malaya, this resulted in a codified, institutionalized legal system within a colonial state, which was critical in constructing Malay ethnic and religious identities and interpretations of Islam that prevail today.     

The Legislative Origins of the MPs' Expenses Scandal

The MPs' expenses scandal of 2009 was one of the most controversial Parliamentary events of modern times. It had a profound impact on public perceptions of MPs and led to the Parliamentary Standards Act 2009. Little academic consideration has, however, been given to the legislative origins of the scandal and the role of ministers and MPs in the creation of the system for MPs' expenses under the Finance Act 1984. Using official documents obtained by Freedom of Information requests, we construct a comprehensive historical analysis of how – without one word of debate in Parliament and only minimal media coverage – ministers and MPs created a special statutory scheme for their own benefit, which they had effective control of and which exempted their expenses claims from the rules applying to other UK taxpayers and the jurisdiction of the Inland Revenue.     

The Differential Management of Financial Illegalisms: Assigning Responsibilities in the Libor Scandal

How, in a context of growing critiques of financialization, can law contribute to protecting the legitimacy of finance? This paper argues that the assignment of responsibilities between individuals and organizations plays a decisive role, using the recent Libor scandal as an empirical illustration. To do so, the paper offers a Foucauldian framework, the differential management of financial illegalisms, dedicated to the study of illegalities in financial capitalism. The comparison of the legal treatment of two manipulations of Libor, this key benchmark in financial markets, reveals how mid‐level traders have been the object of criminal prosecution, while law undervalued the role of top managers and organizations. To capture how differential management is performed in practice, I analyze precisely how the conflict‐resolution devices (criminal trial vs. settlement) and the social categorizations prevailing in the two manipulations of Libor favor different forms of responsibility, individual or organizational. I conclude by exploring the implications of law's relationship to financial legitimacy.     

The BT Kemi Scandal and the Establishment of the Environmental Crime Concept

This study analyses the significance of the 1977 BT Kemi scandal in Teckomatorp, Sweden for the establishment of the concept of 'environmental crime', first in the public debate and then later in legislation. The BT Kemi scandal is analysed as a 'focusing event' that placed the relationship between environmental pollution, responsibility, legislation and penal sanctions firmly on the political agenda. Several commissions of inquiry were established as a consequence, and in 1981 the Environmental Protection Act was revised and environmental crimes were included in the penal code. This tightening of the legislation had very little effect in practice, however, and this study examines why these legislative changes had so little practical impact. Attention is focused on the historical and societal contexts in which Swedish environmental legislation during the 1960s, as an explanation of why environmental crime has been and remains such a marginalized phenomenon. Shared mentalities in the area of environmental protection, which have evolved over time within public sector agencies and the private sector, coupled with an unequal emerged distribution of power and diffuse legislation, have obstructed the establishment of environmental crime. The BT Kemi scandal was a decisive factor in the coming of age of environmental offending, but it nonetheless takes time before a new form of crime becomes 'self-evident' and accepted as such in the wider society.     

What are Tort Awards Really Like? The Untold Story from the State Courts*

The popular press frequently reports exorbitant money damage awards by juries. These stories cause paroxysms in the business community because juries are viewed as favoring plaintiffs over corporations. A growing body of literature has examined aspects of this complex issue, but within a limited framework. Prior studies, which are based on data from the early 1980s or before, tend to focus on federal court cases, primarily product liability and medical malpractice torts, only jury verdicts, and single jurisdictions when state courts are included. The objective of this article is to contribute to the literature by examining all tort cases reaching either a bench or a jury trial verdict during a sample period in 1989 in twenty-seven general jurisdiction trial courts. Research is organized around three basic questions. What do torts look like? Do particular types of plaintiffs/defendants gain a higher percent of favorable verdicts? When plaintiffs are awarded money damages, what is the importance of litigant status, while controlling for other factors, in influencing the size of the awards? The article begins by describing the landscape of torts - the typical configurations of the contending litigants, the composition of torts by area of law, the types of trials, verdict patterns, and the average size of awards. Basic contours of the landscape reflect the elemental facts that individuals generally are plaintiffs in these cases and the opposite tendency of corporations, insurance companies, and governments to appear as defendants. Next a model is outlined and tested to determine how strongly different possible determinants shape the size of tort awards in the twenty-seven state trial courts. Does the size of the award depend on the configuration of the parties after taking into account the type of tort, the type of trial, the length of disposition time, and the state in which the court is located? The results indicate that the group of variables representing the various pairing of litigants accounts for most of the explained variation in award size. These findings support the notion that the status of the litigants is an important factor in influencing awards. Because the variables representing some of the individual states are also significant, the evidence also suggests no single, uniform pattern applies across all the courts. Instead, the state context shapes the basic parameters of plaintiff and defendant success.     

Memorializing Colonial Power: The Death of Frank Paul

Through an analysis of an inquiry into the death of an Aboriginal man in custody, I argue that the contemporary colonial relationship between white settlers and those whom they have dispossessed is spatially and racially organized as one between modern subjects and those who must be assisted into modernity. Law, in the form of an inquiry, serves to confirm these arrangements. In Part One, Redemption, I begin with the inquiry's conclusion that Frank Paul was intrinsically vulnerable. In Part Two, Memorializing, I unravel Frank Paul's story, showing the imprinting of colonial power on his body. In Part Three, Cleansing, I show that the Aboriginal body must be repeatedly evicted from the civilized spaces of the settler. In Part Four, Abandonment, when the cleansing ritual proves lethal, death is declared comprehensible, given the body's incompatibility with modern life. In Part Five, Death Worlds, I suggest that the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, Canada where Frank Paul lived is maintained as a death world where humans are reduced to the status of the living dead. Throughout, I argue that Frank Paul must be understood and remembered as an Aboriginal man whose body bore the imprint of an ongoing colonialism.     

从青岛看德国殖民统治与中德文化交流

一、德国青岛殖民史的新观察点把德国在山东与青岛的殖民史列入这次会议的范围之内 ,即把德国占领胶州湾当作中德文化的碰撞 ,把青岛看成是中德文化的一个交汇点 ,会给熟悉这段历史及其研究史的人们一种异样的感觉。可以说 ,这是对这段历史的观察点的又一次转移。 80年代以来 ,德国在山东的殖民史 ,特别是在青岛的经营史的研究 ,已经经历了一个大转折。多数学者已经不再仅仅从殖民侵略的角度来观察与评论这段历史 ,而是同时肯定了德国殖民者在青岛的城市与现代化方面所作出的成就。而 90年代以来 ,随着文化史的兴起 ,中外学术界对殖民史中东…     

Politics and white collar crime: Explaining government intervention in the Savings and Loan Scandal

The Savings and Loan Scandal of the 1980s was the biggest crime ever perpetrated in the United States. While several studies have examined the causes of the crime (e.g., deregulation, increase of insurance coverage to $100,000, fluctuations in the economic markets, greed), few scholars to date have studied state intervention in the industry after the crime had been committed. We explore the questions of when and how state managers intervene in the actions of the powerful by supplementing state theory with the literature on the social construction of social problems. Revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Miami, November 1994. The authors would like to thank the College of Criminal Justice of Sam Houston State University for financial support in searching newspaper data bases and Henry Pontell for comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

The Ideologies of Mediation: The Movement's Own Story

This paper has three aims. First, it describes the ideologies of six organizations that have been and continue to be prominent in the alternative dispute resolution (ADR) movement in the United States. These organizations all feature the use of mediation as a central component of their work and as a solution to larger social problems.
Second, it elaborates some points of similarity and difference in these ideologies in light of a debate that emerged in the late 1970's between "community" and "agency" models of mediation, that is, between programs that chose to closely affiliate with the formal justice system and those that chose not to. Several years after the start of this debate, we believe there are important points of convergence and divergence that have not received enough attention by those who advocate for or against alternative dispute processing.
Finally, the authors wish to use the opportunity this study provides to speculate more openly on the contemporary meaning of legal informalism and the ways in which formal and informal legal structures now seem to be linked.     

Abhinav Chandrachud: Republic of Religion: The Rise and Fall of Colonial Secularism in India

Liverpool Law Review -     

试论《新中国未来记》中梁启超的民族国家思想

梁启超的<新中国未来记>是一部体裁模糊的作品,它有小说的外壳,却内含大篇幅的政论.其中,黄克强和李去病之间的辩论是全文的一大焦点.作品中有对未来中国的想象,也有对现实中国的描述,更有采用两位主人公激烈辩论的方式探讨如何改变中国现状,无论是从形式还是从内客看,他并没有全盘接受西方民族国家思想,而是清醒地意识到中国国民的精神状态与民族国家的基本要求存在着巨大的差距,力图通过国民精神价值的重建而为政治理想的实现找到一条道路.由是现之,<新中国未来记>充分体现了梁启超的民族国家思想.