Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954): a pioneer woman lawyer in Britain and India

ABSTRACT

Cornelia Sorabji, born into a Parsee Christian family in Pune, was the first woman to write the BCL examinations at Oxford University in 1892. She had some initial success as a woman lawyer after she returned to India in 1893, including becoming the first woman lawyer in the British Empire to defend an accused charged with murder in 1896. In 1904, she was appointed Lady Assistant to the Court of Wards and provided advice to women Purdahnashin in northern India for nearly two decades. Yet, her ardent support for ‘British India’ eventually resulted in her opposition to Gandhi’s independence movement and, as Vera Brittain concluded, she chose ‘a wrong direction’ at a critical moment in history. Her story reveals both opportunities and constraints for women in India in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, as well as the shifting colonial relationships in British India in the context of the Independence movement of the 1930s and 40s.     

Barriers to Gender Equality in the Canadian Legal Establishment

In this paper we trace the historical exclusion of women from the legal profession in Canada. We examine women’s efforts to gain entry to law practice and their progress through the last century. The battle to gain entry to this exclusive profession took place on many fronts: in the courts, government legislature, public debate and media, and behind the closed doors of the law societies. After formal barriers to entry were dismantled, women continued to confront formidable barriers through overt and subtler forms of discrimination and exclusion. Today’s legal profession in Canada is a contested one. Women have succeeded with large enrolments in law schools and growing representation in the profession. However, women remain on the margins of power and privilege in law practice. Our analysis of contemporary official data on the Canadian legal profession demonstrates that women are under-represented in private practice, have reduced chances for promotion, and are excluded from higher echelons of authority, remuneration, and status in the profession. Yet, the contemporary picture of the legal profession also reveals that women are having an important impact on the profession of law in Canada by introducing policy reforms aimed at creating a more humane legal profession. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Helena Normanton: legal crusader or myth Maker? ‘[S]urely the one thing history teaches us is that we cannot generalise,or even worse,categorise individual humans into saints and sinners,or heroes and villains’

ABSTRACT

Helena Normanton aspired to become a lawyer at a time when women were prohibited from entering the legal profession. This aspiration became a reality when, on 24 December 1919, she became the first woman to be admitted to an institution of the legal profession after the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, thus enshrining her place in legal history. Her achievement was, without doubt, remarkable. She has become the ‘face’ of women’s entry to the legal profession, but what was her contribution to the opening the legal profession to women? How should history remember her? This article will examine her role in this history and compare it to her own narrative. Further it will consider how we reconcile her trailblazing challenge to the male exclusivity of the Bar with the difficulties her behaviour often presents to us. Helena Normanton: saint or sinner? And does it matter?     

Inevitable Answers: The Joke and its Relation to Social Equilibrium in the Novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett

The majority of existing studies of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s comedy class her as either a ‘camp’ novelist, or a social satirist in whose novels jokes are used for either oppression or subversion. The present essay proposes a new reading of the social uses of jokes in Compton-Burnett’s novels. In these domestic fictions, family life is characterized by constant strife, most commonly of a verbal nature. As part of their daily struggle for power and position, her characters use aggressive jokes to keep each other in check. This process does not distinguish primarily between oppressors and oppressed, but between successful and unsuccessful egotists. As an ideal result, a social equilibrium emerges that is at least vaguely habitable to all. This way, Compton-Burnett’s comedy is essentially conservative; the ultimate function of the jokes employed by her characters is not to permanently transform social structures, but to maintain the delicate balance of power within the family.     

Sacred year or broken reed? The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919

ABSTRACT

The Sex Disqualification (Removal Act 1919) enabled women to enter some professions including law for the first time. Virginia Woolf calls 1919 a ‘sacred year’ because of this Act in her later essay ‘Three Guineas’. However, the historical literature largely considers the act to be a ‘broken reed’, focussing on its failure to equalise the franchise, remove the marriage bar or to enable women to sit in the House of Lords. This article argues that such negative verdicts fail to take into account the political and Parliamentary situation in 1919 and overlooks the genuine achievements of the Act.     

The Avalanche Perspective: women jurists in Korea 1952–2008

The author proposes and employs the Avalanche Perspective in analysing the entry of women into the Korean judiciary from the first pioneers in 1952 to the present. Starting from a general atmospheric warming trend towards women in postwar Korea, there developed instability in the status quo, then a breakthrough that led to a cascade of women participating in the legal profession. Although cultural resistance and political obstacles remained to be overcome, this quantitative expansion ultimately led to a greater acceptance of women’s participation in the judicial arena. Significant judicial changes that furthered the causes of women in contemporary Korea were coincident with women being members of the judiciary. The quantitative changes of the past fifty-six years opened the possibility of qualitative progress for women in the Korean judiciary. The Avalanche Perspective as applied to the judiciary in Korea, provides an understanding of the forces at work that have had a profound effect upon the place of women in the new cultural and political reality of the Korean people.

论商业秘密的法律保护

2 0世纪 6 0年代 ,国际商会首先把商业秘密视为工业产权。在知识经济的大背景下 ,商业秘密已成为企业生存、竞争的极其重要的手段 ,加强对商业秘密的法律保护已经成为国内外知识产权制度发展的必然趋势。     

工会法律关系刍议

工会法律关系是以一方主体为核心的法律关系 ,从法律关系的类型看 ,这种法律关系是一种具有不对称关系性质的法律关系。本文同时分析了市场经济条件下工会法律关系各构成要素出现的一些新变化和新特点。     

The Ethic of Care, Female Subjectivity and Feminist Legal Scholarship

The object of this essay is to explore the central role played by the ‘ethic of care’ in debates within and beyond feminist legal theory. The author claims that the ethic of care has attracted feminist legal scholars in particular, as a means of resolving the theoretical, political and strategic difficulties to which the perceived ‘crisis of subjectivity’ in feminist theory has given rise. She argues that feminist legal scholars are peculiarly placed in relation to this crisis because of their reliance on the social ‘woman’ whose interests are the predominant concern of feminist legal engagement. With the problematisation of subjectivity, the object of feminist legal attention disappears and it is in attempts to deflect the negative political consequences of this that the ethic of care has been invoked, the author argues, unsuccessfully. The essay concludes with suggestions as to how the feminist project in law might proceed in the wake of the crisis of subjectivity and the failure of the ethic of care to resolve it. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

转型中政府地位的变化

中国于 1978年开始推行市场经济以来 ,社会开始转型 ,由原来单一的再分配经济转入混合经济时代 ,即再分配经济与市场经济并存的局面。那么转型后的国家政府 ,其地位和作用是否受到冲击 ?地位是否下降 ?通过对职业获得的研究 ,我们得出一个结论 :政府的地位没有下降。     

新时代工会法律援助制度创新发展研究

工会法律援助工作是国家法律援助事业的重要组成部分。创新发展工会法律援助制度既是贯彻中央关于群团改革决策部署的必然要求,也是落实法律规定、加强工会服务职工和维护职工合法权益工作、维护职工队伍和社会稳定的重大举措,具有重要的现实意义。多年来,特别是群团改革以来,工会法律援助制度建设取得了突出成效,但也存在思想认识不到位、队伍建设亟须加强、运行机制有待完善、资金保障仍显不足等问题。研究认为,应从做好顶层设计、完善协作机制、培育人才队伍、创新工作机制、拓宽经费渠道等方面入手,创新发展新时代工会法律援助制度。     

浅谈敬业奉献

敬业奉献是公民道德的重要规范。敬业奉献之所以被列为公民道德的重要规范,原因在于敬业奉献不仅是个人幸福的前提,也是社会进步发展的保障。敬业意为敬重职业,职业是人的生存之本、发展之源、幸福之基,唯有敬业才能立业、兴业。敬业和奉献有不可分割的联系,敬业本身就有服务社会、奉献社会之意,敬业与奉献一道构筑幸福人生,实现人生的意义与价值。     

工会的法律性质

以往工会性质的研究更多地停留在政治学和社会学层面,主要从工会的阶级性和群众性的角度研究工会的性质,很少从法律的角度来研究。工会的法律性质是工会法律制度的逻辑起点,工会的组织机构、工会的职能、工会的权利与义务、工会的内部法律关系和外部发生关系均由此产生,并由此决定。因此,研究工会的法律性质,不仅有着重要的理论意义,而且有着重大的实践意义。     

关于抓好法制建设的几点思考

法制建设是一个系统工程,为了实现依法治国,不仅需要实现立法各个方面的协调发展,而且需要实现执法、司法、守法等各个方面的协调发展,研究和把握各个方面、各个环节存在的问题,解决其薄弱环节。     

Gender Differences in Self-Perceptions and Academic Outcomes: A Study of African American High School Students

There is increasing divergence in the academic outcomes of African American males and females. By most accounts, males are falling behind their female peers educationally as African American females are graduating from high schools at higher rates and are going on to college and graduate school in greater numbers. Some have suggested that school completion and performance is associated with how students feel about themselves. The purpose of this study was to explore gender differences in the relationship between self-perceptions and 2 academic outcomes among a sample of 243 African American high school sophomores. The results suggest that, overall, females are more favorably oriented toward high school completion. Both male and female students with more positive self-perceptions have stronger intentions to complete the current year of high school. Higher grade point averages were more strongly associated with greater self-efficacy for females than for males. Given these findings, increased attention to educational programming, societal messages, and future research is warranted.     

Picture perfect: nostalgic femininity and temporal disruptions in the Aqualillies’ water ballets

This article examines nostalgic femininity in the aquatic performances of present-day synchronized swimming performance troupe, the Aqualillies. In spite of their fervent emulation of the iconic images of Golden Age Hollywood's splashiest star, Esther Williams, the Aqualillies’ performances refuse to be only a kitschy nod to the past through the addition of marketable symbols of modern femininity, such as the bikini, to their otherwise nostalgic representation. Through a concurrent multiplicity of temporally diverse femininities, they challenge the neoliberal rhetoric of choice that can arise in reperformance. This article invokes Svetlana Boym's theory of reflective nostalgia ­– an emotional connection to the past that does not foreclose critical reflection – to argue that the Aqualillies’ water ballets use performative temporal vacillation to expose the physical and psychical labor in the picture-perfect images of femininity in order to subvert the image's dominance and to defy capital's linear organization of time.     

‘This fair lady,in her laces’: Margaret Howie Strang Hall,the first woman in Scotland to try to become a lawyer

ABSTRACT

Margaret Howie Strang Hall was the first woman in Scotland, and the youngest woman in the UK, to try to become a lawyer through the same formal process open to her male contemporaries. This examination of Hall’s attempt aims to set it in context, using contemporary court documents and newspaper reports, while expanding on what is known of her life. Hall’s story is an important one in the struggle for equal professional opportunities and her experience in the Scottish legal system provides a counterpoint to the better-known English examples.