British Abortion Law: Speaking from the Past to Govern the Future

This paper analyses the poor alignment of the aging statutory framework and modern understandings of medical best practice in the context of abortion services. With a particular focus on medical abortion, it assesses the significant challenges that the gulf between the two poses for clinicians, service providers, regulators and the courts. Law is said to be at its most effective where there is a shared regulatory community that accepts and endorses the values that underpin it. It is suggested that the example of abortion law provides a marked example of what happens when legal norms once justified by broadly shared moral understandings, concerns for patient safety and requirements of best practice are now either unsupported by or, indeed, sit in opposition to such concerns.     

... And justice for all

African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, and European American students rated their procedural preferences in response to a hypothetical conflict scenario and then recalled a real dispute in which they had been involved. Subjects of all four ethnicities and of both genders preferred persuasion and negotiation to other options. There were significant, ethnic and gender differences in preferences, as well as differences for the nature of the relationship and the nature of the issue, but these differences were small in comparison to the overall pattern of procedural preferences. Reports of actual procedure use also showed differences in procedure use across genders, ethnicities, and relationship type, but the differences were relatively small. Procedural fairness was the strongest predictor of both procedural preference and affect toward actual procedure use.     

Food, drugs, and droods: a historical consideration of definitions and categories in American food and drug law

This Article explores the evolution and interaction of the legal and cultural categories "food" and "drug" from the late nineteenth century to the present. The federal statutory definitions of "food" and "drug" have always been ambiguous and plastic, providing the FDA with significant regulatory flexibility. Nevertheless, the agency is not necessarily free to interpret the definitions however it chooses. "Food" and "drug" are not only product classes defined by food and drug law, but also fundamental cultural concepts. This Article demonstrates that the FDA, as well as Congress and the courts, have operated within a constraining cultural matrix that has limited their freedom to impose their preferred understandings of these categories on American society. Nonetheless, history also provides ample evidence that lawmakers possess substantial power to mold the legal categories of "food" and "drug" so as to advance desired policies. One explanation for this regulatory flexibility in the face of deep-seated cultural conceptions is the indeterminate nature of the extralegal notions of "food" and "drug." The terms, as commonly understood, embrace nebulous, overlapping, and constantly evolving realms. Moreover, the relationship between culture and law is not a one-way street with respect to these categories. Although the regulatory apparatus has always had to take into account the extralegal understandings of "food" and "drug," the law in turn has exerted significant influence over their meaning in broader culture.     

"Jurisdictional Politics" in the Occupied West Bank: Territory, Community, and Economic Dependency in the Formation of Legal Subjects

This article examines the distribution of legal rights in the Israeli occupied West Bank. It argues that legal rights are distributed through a "jurisdictional politics" that tries to stabilize the contingent relationship between political community, territory, and legal subjects. In particular, this jurisdictional politics seeks to delimit the contradictory boundaries of the Israeli state by creating distinct categories of person out of the populations that live and work in the region. These issues are addressed by examining a dispute concerning the jurisdiction of Israeli law over Palestinian workers in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The article ends by arguing that in the context of multiple movements of people, capital, and military force, attention must be paid to the often contradictory ways in which jurisdictional regimes seek to produce particular types of citizens and subjects.     

Cultural Spillovers: Copyright,Conceptions of Authors,and Commercial Practices

Economists, sociologists, and legal scholars agree that intellectual‐property law is fundamental to markets because legal control over copying motivates creative production. But in many markets, such as fashion and databases, there is little or no intellectual‐property protection, yet producers still create innovative products and earn profits. Research on such “negative spaces” in intellectual‐property law reveals that social norms can constrain copying and support creative production. This insight guided our analysis of markets for American literature before the Civil War, in both magazines (a negative space, where intellectual‐property law did not apply) and books (a positive space, where intellectual‐property law did apply). We observed similar understandings of authors and similar commercial practices in both spaces because many authors published the same work in both spaces. Based on these observations, we propose that cultural elements that develop in positive spaces may spill over to related negative spaces, inducing changes in buyers' and sellers' behavior in negative spaces. Our historical approach also revealed nuances—shades of gray—beyond the sharp distinction typically drawn between negative and positive spaces. In the 1850s, a few large‐circulation magazine publishers began to claim copyright, but many still allowed reprinting and none litigated to protect copyright.     

Old Habits Are Hard to Change: A Case Study of Israeli Real Estate Contracts

This article presents a case study on the persistent dollarization norm in the Israeli real estate market. For many years Israeli real estate contracts have been denominated in American dollars. This contracting norm has remained surprisingly stable despite tremendous changes in the structure of the Israeli foreign currency market that severed the connection between the dollar and local inflation and added significant risks to exchange rates. Using an array of theoretical tools, I explain this puzzling phenomenon and demonstrate the centrality of social norms to the design of high‐stakes contracts. Finally, I explore the interaction between social norms and the law and highlight the potential obstacles to regulating contracting norms.     

Abortion, breast cancer, and informed consent

The purpose of this article is to show that the current level of scientific evidence linking induced abortion with increased breast cancer risk is sufficient to support an ethical and legal duty to disclose fully the risk to women who are considering induced abortion. The article examines the relationship between this evidence and the elements of a medical malpractice claim alleging failure to obtain informed consent. The first part focuses on the elements of informed consent, which require the plaintiff to establish that the physician had a duty to disclose information, which he failed to disclose, that this failure to disclose was a legal cause of the plaintiff's decision to undergo the procedure, and the procedure was a legal cause of the plaintiff's injury. The second part compares two prevalent standards for determining which risks a physician has a duty to disclose. Part three reviews the scientific evidence of the abortion/breast cancer (ABC) link and explains why it survives both the Frye and the Daubert tests for admissibility of expert testimony. The fourth part assesses the materiality of the risk posed by the ABC link. Parts five and six discuss evidentiary issues and the possibility of punitive damage awards.     

UK Abortion Law: Reform Proposals,Private Members’ Bills,Devolution and the Role of the Courts

UK abortion law remains unsettled, and subject to on‐going controversy and reform. This article offers a comprehensive critique of all reforms implemented or proposed since 2016. It examines reforms proposed in both Houses of Parliament and contextualises them within a public law analysis, showing both that the complex parliamentary processes relating to Private Members’ Bills have frustrated reform attempts, and that these attempts have been contradictory in their aims between the two Houses. Secondly, it examines the unique positions of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales to show the extent to which devolutionary settlements have influenced both reforms and executive involvement. Finally, it examines the potential impact of the courts on abortion law following Re Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission's Application for Judicial Review, showing that the Supreme Court's reframing of the debate in human rights terms is likely to affect abortion law, not only in Northern Ireland, but in the whole of the UK.     

Lawyers for Conservative Causes: Clients, Ideology, and Social Distance

Scholars have devoted attention to "cause lawyers" on the political left, but lawyers who work on the conservative side of the American political spectrum have received relatively little academic consideration. This article presents systematic data on the characteristics of and relationships among lawyers affiliated with organizations active on a selected set of 17 conservative issues. We find that the lawyers serve several separate and distinct constituencies—business conservatives, Christian conservatives, libertarians, abortion opponents—and that the credentials of the lawyers serving these varying constituencies differ significantly. The greatest degree of social separation occurs between the business constituency and the abortion opponents, with another clear separation between libertarians and the interest groups devoted to traditional family values and order maintenance. The divisions among these constituencies appear to reflect the difference between "insider politics" and "populism," which is manifested in part in actual geographic separation between lawyers located in the District of Columbia and those in the South, West, and Midwest. In the center of the network, however, we find some potential "mediators"—prominent lawyers who may facilitate communication and coordination among the several constituencies. These lawyers and the organizations they serve attempt to merge morality, market freedom, and individual liberty concerns, and they convene meetings of diverse sets of lawyers and organizational leaders to seek consensus on policy goals. Nonetheless, the findings indicate that most organizations are seldom active on issues that lie beyond the relatively narrow boundaries of their own interests.     

Embryonic discourse: abortion, stem cells and cloning

This Article interprets the debate about abortion and the debate about embryonic research and therapeutic cloning as aspects of a larger history of ideas. The Article suggests that embryos increasingly stand for different truths in discourse about abortion on the one-hand and about embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning on the other. More specifically, the Article suggests that the contemporary debate about the meaning of the embryo in the context both of abortion and of embryonic research bespeaks a widespread transformation in Western, and especially American, society during the last three or four decades. At base, that transformation involves displacement of an understanding of personhood, particularly in domestic settings that depended on the submersion of individualism with an understanding of personhood that values autonomous individuality and that envisions community as the consequence of individuals' distinct choices rather than as a pre-existing, hierarchically structured whole.     

DERIVATIVE DEVIANCE The Cases of Extortion, Fag-Bashing, and Shakedown of Gay Men

Derivative deviance is defined as the victimization of stigmatized persons because of their inability to avail themselves of the protections of civil society without threat of discrediting. Whether there is a preexisting relationship between the victim and the victimizer affects the possible forms of victimization. When there is no preexisting relationship, victims must he identified by culturally accepted understandings of which places are deviant and what deviants look like. In these cases, the principal forms of victimization are assault and robbery. When there is a preexisting relationship, greater knowIedge of the victim's significant others permits the more sophisticated victimization of extortion. However, to the extent the victim has reference groups who are also deviant, he is often able to resist extortion attempts. Extortion attempts were found typically to arise our of preexisting relationships among our gay male respondents.     

Lifetime Abuse, Mental Health, and African American Women

This study examined the relationship between lifetime abuse and mental health among 126 African American women and 365 White women from a primary health care setting who participated in a telephone interview as part of a larger study. Seven types of childhood and adult intimate partner abuse were measured. Consistent with hypotheses, (1) lifetime abuse was associated with elevated levels of anxiety and depression, and (2) women who experienced childhood abuse were more likely to report adult partner abuse. African American and White women showed more similarities than differences in the associations between most abuse experiences and depression and anxiety, as well as types of childhood abuse. African American abused women reported more excessive jealousy by partners. Nonabused African American women reported higher levels of depression and anxiety than their White counterparts. Results are interpreted and discussed taking into account relevant social and cultural factors.     

Mobilizing Migrant Workers’ Rights in “Non‐immigration” Countries: The Politics of Resonance and Migrants’ Rights Activism in Israel and Singapore

How are the rights of migrant workers mobilized in non‐immigration regimes? Drawing on an ethnography of human rights NGOs in Israel and Singapore, two countries that share similar ethnic policies but differ in their political regime, this study contributes to scholarship on migrants’ rights mobilization by expanding cross‐national analysis beyond the United States and West Europe and diverting its focus from legal institutions to the places where rights are produced. Findings show that differences in the political regime influence the channels for mobilizing claims but not the cultural politics of resonance that NGOs use when dealing with the tensions between restrictive ethnic policies and the expansion of labor migration. While restraints in authoritarian Singapore operate mainly outside the activists’ circle, in the Israeli ethno‐democracy they operate through self‐disciplining processes that neutralize their potential challenge to hegemonic understandings of citizenship. Paradoxically, success in advancing rights for migrants through resonance often results in reinforcing the non‐immigration regime.     

Legal Emotions: An Ethnography of Distrust and Fear in the Arab Districts of an Israeli City

Recent sociolegal scholarship has explored the role of emotions in lawmaking and policymaking on security and crime issues. This article extends this approach to the relationship between law enforcement and affect by addressing the role of policing and security agencies in the (re)production of long‐term emotions, which bind a collective and fuel ethnonational division. An ethnography of the distinct emotional climate within the Arab districts of Lod, an Israeli city, shows that this climate is structured by two emotions: rampant distrust toward friends and neighbors, and intense fear of the Israeli authorities. This emotional climate is the product of the subterranean ties of Lod Palestinians with the Israeli security agencies as well as their experiences of the blurred line between state security and crime control enforcement. I embed the initial creation and relative stability of this emotional climate in the broader relationship between the Israeli state and its Palestinian citizens from 1948 to the present. The article concludes with a discussion of how the law enforcement's affective production has consequences for the salience and scope of citizenship and by arguing for a greater focus on the link between law enforcement, collective emotions, and processes of inclusion and exclusion.     

Genetic variation of three tetrameric tandem repeats in four distinct Israeli ethnic groups.

The allele frequency distributions of three STR loci amplified by PCR have been studied in four Israeli communities: Ashkenazi Jews and three non-Ashkenazi groups, namely Moroccan, Yemenite, and Ethiopian Jews. The loci analyzed were CSF1PO, TPOX, and HUMTHO1. The typing was performed in sequencing polyacrylamide gels under denaturing conditions that could separate alleles with differences of a single base. The population data were analyzed with respect to Hardy-Weinberg (H-W) equilibrium and found that all loci meet the H-W expectations. No-ticeable differences were encountered between the four Jewish ethnic groups studied hereby indicating the importance of establishing a local database to be used in human identity testing in these different Israeli Jewish groups.     

HOW JUDGES THINK ABOUT RACIAL DISPARITIES: SITUATIONAL DECISION‐MAKING IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM*

Researchers have theorized how judges’ decision‐making may result in the disproportionate presence of Blacks and Latinos in the criminal justice system. Yet, we have little evidence about how judges make sense of these disparities and what, if anything, they do to address them. By drawing on 59 interviews with state judges in a Northeastern state, we describe, and trace the implications of, judges’ understandings of racial disparities at arraignment, plea hearings, jury selection, and sentencing. Most judges in our sample attribute disparities, in part, to differential treatment by themselves and/or other criminal justice officials, whereas some judges attribute disparities only to the disparate impact of poverty and differences in offending rates. To address disparities, judges report employing two categories of strategies: noninterventionist and interventionist. Noninterventionist strategies concern only a judge's own differential treatment, whereas interventionist strategies concern other actors’ possible differential treatment, as well as the disparate impact of poverty and facially neutral laws. We reveal how the use of noninterventionist strategies by most judges unintentionally reproduces disparities. Through our examination of judges’ understandings of racial disparities throughout the court process, we enhance understandings of American racial inequality and theorize a situational approach to decision‐making in organizational contexts.     

Social learning theory,drug use,and American Indian youths: A cross-cultural test

Contemporary delinquency theories have been challenged as being biased by inherent cultural myopia, even though there have been few tests of these theories involving samples that share all theoretically important characteristics except cultural heritage. In particular, recent studies of delinquency among American Indians suggest that the central constructs of these explanatory models may operate differently among Indians or may translate poorly into the “Indian experience.” Using a census of rural American Indian and Caucasian youths who lived close to one another, we examined the empirical link between key social learning theory constructs and self-reported deviant behavior. Although there were some intergroup differences, the selected theoretical constructs yielded considerable insights into the level of self-reported youthful misbehavior, in this instance alcohol and marijuana use, of both subgroups.     

The application of stress theory to the study of family violence: Principles,problems, and prospects

This paper investigates the nature of the relationship between social stress and family violence. Specifically, a model of the stress process is presented, the applicability of the concept of stress to the occurrence of family violence is discussed, important research issues relating to the nature of the relationship between these two variables are raised, and predictions are offered regarding the likely impact of social stress upon the incidence of violence in the American family in the future.     

Trapped in Resistance: Collective Struggle through Welfare Fraud in Israel

This paper offers a qualitative empirical examination of the noncompliance of Israeli female welfare recipients with welfare laws and authorities. The paper demonstrates that their behavior, defined as “welfare fraud” by the law, is a limited form of collective resistance to the Israeli welfare state. Although the acts of welfare fraud that the women in my study engaged in entail a political claim against the state, the relationship between these acts and notions of collectivity is very constricted in form. The women's collectivity is shown to be constrained by the welfare authorities' invasive and pervasive investigation practices and methods. Due to fear of disclosure to the authorities, the women emerged as deliberately isolating themselves from their immediate environment and potential members of their like‐situated collective. This weakens the connection between the women's acts of resistance and their collectivity, and prevents their acts of resistance from driving social change, trapping them in their harsh conditions and existence.     

Patriarchy,Abortion, and the Criminal System: Policing Female Bodies

This paper argues for a broader consideration of the issue of abortion—one that stresses the centrality of the denial of reproductive rights in the patriarchal policing of women’s bodies and their sexuality. Globally, the estimates of abortion-related deaths in 2014 ranged from 22,500 to 44,000, and countless women are injured or left infertile by seeking illegal abortions. We briefly review international trends regarding abortion politics and then analyze closely women’s access to abortion in two countries: the United States and Bangladesh. Representing two very different contexts of the developed and the developing world, respectively, we contend that abortion services are being constrained by misogynistic politics that deny women control over their bodies. Finally, the paper reviews recent international efforts to establish abortion rights as part of a broader landscape of human rights. Notably, while there are some efforts in the global north to recriminalize both contraception and abortion, these practices have been characterized by a recent United Nation’s report as the deliberate denial of medically available and necessary services and hence a form of “torture.”