Bodies of Law: the Divine Architect,Common Law and the Ancient Constitution

This article addresses the architecture of the four Inns of Court inLondon as repositories for the body of law (corpus iuris). Thebuildings are perceived as visual representations of the unwrittenconstitution; evidence that the sign, not the text, remains thepredominant form through which the constitution manifests its content.It is in this context that the self-governing Inns are interpreted asmicrocosms of the City of God, envisaged by Saint Augustine andprefigured in ancient Greece by the Republic of Plato. The Innssynthesise these classical and Christian precepts; thereby creatinga unique commonwealth whose Utopian ideals are based on the applicationof Justitia, or righteousness: an ethical rather than alegal concept which underpins the English constitution. The argumentproposes a correlation between architectural development at the Inns andthe challenge posed to the institutional authority of the law by the newlearning of the Renaissance. It is the semiotics of legal architecturerather than its historical provenance which is central to my analysis. Iattempt to comprehend the effect of the influences outlined above on theform and content of the common law, the legal institution and theancient constitution.     

Elected Bodies: The Gender Quota Law for Legislative Candidates in Mexico

In the past decade, 21 countries have adopted gender quota laws that require between 20% and 50% of all legislative candidates to be women. What explains the adoption of these laws? I argue that three factors make politicians more likely to adopt gender quota laws. First, electoral uncertainty creates an opportunity for internal party reform that factions within a party can exploit to their advantage. Second, the courts play an important role because of the centrality of the issue of equal protection under the law to gender quotas. Finally, cross‐partisan mobilization among female legislators raises the costs of opposing such legislation by drawing public attention to it. I examine these three claims with regard to Mexico, where the federal congress passed a 30% gender quota law in 2002. I'd give up my seat for you if it wasn't for the fact that I'm sitting in it myself. —Groucho Marx (quoted in Abdela 2001) [Many Latin American countries] have ‘homosexual’ political systems, that is, the power of the political parties and the state is in the hands of only one of the sexes.… —Line Bareiro, Paraguayan feminist (Bareiro and Soto 1992, 11)     

Displacing Marginalized Bodies: How Human Rights Discourses Function in the Law and in Communities

In this article, we examine disability and eugenics discourses and the ways they function in spaces where vulnerable persons have been historically excluded by the state and blamed for their own “immiseration.” We ask how queer theories of repudiation, abjection, and vulnerability lend insight into the ways that people with intellectual disabilities are discursively located outside normative discourses of home, care, and quality of life, and whether these discourses shifted to serve this vulnerable population when historically the very places in question repudiated them, infringed on their human rights, and questioned their sexuality. To address these questions, we focus on the recent and impending closures of Virginia’s Training Centers, residential institutions for persons with intellectual disabilities now scheduled for staggered closures before 2020.     

Public Procurement Law, Public Bodies, and the General Interest: Perspectives from Higher Education

Abstract This article examines the interaction of EC public procurement law with the legislative framework governing higher education in England and Wales. It focuses on the impact of this interaction on changing status of higher education institutions, organisations that are at the margins of the much‐discussed public–private divide in law. The Higher Education Act 2004 is viewed as a driver of potential change in status, and a distinction is drawn between mechanisms which appear to support the introduction of change and those that instead introduce fluctuation and lead to concerns for legal certainty at the margins of public law. The study thus also has wider relevance where public‐sector reform is premised upon organisational forms with hybrid or ambiguous status.     

Imagining Human Rights: Utopia or Ideology?

Human rights are both a means for the ideological justification of the status quo and for its utopian subversion. In order to account for this paradox we need to consider the role that our capacity to form images plays in human rights discourses. I will first discuss how best to conceptualise the capacity to produce images, which is the focus of this paper. In order to go beyond the impasse generated by philosophical approaches to imagination as an individual faculty, and by sociological approaches to the imaginary understood as a social context, I propose to use the category of the ‘imaginal’, understood simply as that which is made of images and can therefore be both the product of an individual faculty and a social context. Second, I show how the imaginal enters the three major strategies of justifications of human rights, when we think of them as ‘human’, as ‘rights’ and as ‘rational’. Finally, I will show that the imaginal is also the force that compels us to enforce human rights, to put ourselves in the shoes of others and imagine a world that is different from the one in which we are currently living.     

Punishing Bodies,Securing the Nation: How Rule of Law Can Legitimate the Urbane Authoritarian State

Although authoritarian rule of law may seem an oxymoron, strategic reconfigurations of the “rule of law” can produce acceptance of law that observes procedure while erasing rights. By bringing into conjunction critical discourse theory and scholarship on the legal professions and political liberalism, this article shows how rulers can deploy rhetoric and legislation to produce derogations from the liberal content of rule of law while sustaining a state legitimacy built on claims to state realizations of rule of law. A close analysis of Singapore's Vandalism Act shows that silencing the critique of lawyers and constraining the power of judges has been crucial to a legitimation of the surveillance and criminalization of dissenters. The consolidation of state power effected via law and discourse might be seen as making the nation a notional panopticon—corporal punishment, even if conducted behind prison walls, becomes instructive public spectacle conveying the state's seeming omniscience and monopolistic command of law.     

The Patterns of Masculinity in Prison

A prison culture of masculinity shapes the prison macho – boys dont cry. The prison macho is a real man who always hides his feelings and performs like a tough guy. These characteristics are much different from what happens in everyday life in the social spheres, where human being needs to be loved, need concerns and compassion from others and express these to others as well. In the current study, there is a recognition of a multiplicity of masculinities and an emphasis on how subjects are continually constituting and constructing their identity. Based on qualitative research, this study analyzes the patterns of masculinity embedded in the daily code of conduct used by prison staff to deal with prisoners and by prisoners to interact with other inmates and constitute their subculture. The investigation of prison sociology in the constitution of masculinity discourses in Tainan Prison contributes to both gender studies and to the literature exploring differences between western and eastern perspectives and policies related to incarceration.     

Ann Wagner and Le Cheng (eds): Law,Cinema, and the Ill City: Imagining Justice and Order in Real and Fictional Cities

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique -     

Elizabethan ‘Spinning’ and Penelope’s Weaving: The Political, the Common Law and Stately Bodies

This paper examines the public, private and political in the work of Adriana Cavarero by drawing upon the situations of two women whose lives feature in her work: Elizabeth I and Penelope. It includes an analysis of the way in which Cavarero is rethinking Hannah Arendt’s view of ‘the political.’ Cavarero’s exposition of the metaphor of the King’s two bodies in the common law is explored, along with her critique of hylomorphism. Finally, it extends her work in Stately Bodies by considering different images of the power of the body in later political discourses regarding the worker’s body and the effect of the advance of techno-science. This paper was presented at ‘The State He’s In – Political Philosophy and the Figural: A Conference with Adriana Cavarero on her book Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy and the Question of Gender’ at Warwick University, Department of Philosophy in May 2004. I would like to thank Adriana and all the conference participants for their comments. Thanks also to the referees of this paper. I have kept the informal style of presentation from the conference, along with the emphasis upon theoretical, rather than historical, analysis.     

Women Corrections Officers in Men's Prisons

ABSTRACT

Women have worked as corrections officers (COs) in some adult male prisons in most states for the past two decades. However, the degree of acceptance of women COs and the perception of women officers' job performance by men officers have varied greatly. This study was based on the results of a survey of men and women officers working in men's prisons in a midwestern state. Comparisons of the officers' responses about women's acceptance, safety, and perceived job performance revealed some significant gender differences. The results indicated that while women faced some resistance among men officers, it was not to the extent suggested by previous research studies, and the resistance came primarily from more experienced men officers. Women officers were confident of their ability to work effectively in men's prisons. The resistance to women that persists among some men officers is likely to provide an obstacle for women seeking opportunities for advancement and promotion in adult male prisons.     

SEX AND DELINQUENCY: A Partial Test of the Masculinity Hypothesis

With increasing frequency, commentators assert that attitudes associated with occupying the male status or “masculinity” contribute to criminal/delinquent involvement. Despite the ubiquity with which this “masculinity hypothesis” appears, it has received few empirical assessments, and those that do exist typically are flawed by what amounts to the ecological fallacy. Using individual level data, this research attempted to test the masculinity proposition. In general, our data lent some support to the hypothesis, indicating that independent of gender, having masculine attributes positively affected the commission of different types of delinquent offenses.     

The Fight: Symbolic Expression and Validation of Masculinity in Working Class Tavern Culture

This study examines the role that masculinity plays in men’s decisions to participate in bar fights. The data were obtained via semi-structured interviews with adult, White males in Louisiana who had a history of fighting. We argue that specific elements of fighting events represent symbolic attempts at attaining and maintaining honor and status, which many men in working class culture equate with masculine identity. While winning fights was seen as important, participants suggest that willingness to fight in the right circumstances builds character, develops an honorable reputation, and prevents negative labels. We further argue that pursuit of symbolic masculinity is important to working class men, who possess fewer alternative avenues for achieving status than do those from higher social ranks.     

Arresting Masculinity: Anger,Hybridity and the Reproduction of Phallic Space

This paper examines how the signifier of ‘toxic masculinity’ operates in the contemporary psycho-social landscape of embodied power relations. It is argued that toxic masculinity is a symbolic response to the deep sense of anger people experience owing to the persistent disturbance of reason that characterizes the radically incongruous Thirdspace in which we live. To those who feel disoriented and lost, toxic masculinity is both an imagined cause and a projected solution to the endemic sense of dislocation. As an index of repressive power, self-serving discipline and ruthless ambition, toxic masculinity is held fully responsible by angry ‘outsiders’ for the ongoing disturbance of reason, whilst the very attribution of the cause of this disturbance to a gendered position of traditional embodied authority simultaneously serves the purpose of changing the hybridity of Thirdspace into more conventional figurations of social imbalance. This explanatory model, which draws both on Edward W. Soja’s reflections on the changing spatialities of the human lifeworld and Henri Lefebvre’s theory of the (re-)production of (phallic) space, is further employed to address the questions as to why patriarchy persists and whether alternative constellations of governance are feasible.

     

Imagining violent criminals: an experimental investigation of music stereotypes and character judgments

Objectives

In criminal cases, prosecutors treat defendant-authored rap lyrics as an admission of guilt rather than as art or entertainment. Do negative stereotypes about rap music shape jurors’ attitudes about the defendant, unfairly influencing outcomes? Replicating and extending previous research (Fischoff Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 29(4), 795–805, 1999; Fried Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 26(23), 2135–2146, 1996; Dunbar et al. Public Policy, and Law, 22(3), 280–292, 2016), the current study begins to address these questions.

Methods

Using an experimental approach, participants were presented with music lyrics and asked to make judgments about the person who wrote the lyrics. All participants read the same lyrics but were told they were from a country, heavy metal, or rap song, depending upon the condition into which they were randomly assigned. Again using random assignment, participants were provided with information about the race of the songwriter in a photo of a young man. Finally, participants were tasked with judging the character of the songwriter, including traits such as his violent nature and criminal disposition.

Results

We find that writers of violent “rap” lyrics are perceived more negatively than writers who pen identical country and heavy metal lyrics. We also find that songwriter race matters; no differences in judgments were detected between the White and Black songwriters; however, when race information was not provided, participants who inferred the songwriter was Black judged him more negatively than participants who inferred he was White.

Conclusions

These findings have implications for racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

     

Masculinity and Spousal Violence: Discursive Accounts of Husbands Who Abuse Their Wives in Ghana

This study investigated the influence of cultural notions of masculinity and its enactments on husband-to-wife abuse in Ghana from a discursive psychological perspective. Two focus group discussions and four in-depth personal interviews were conducted with 16 perpetrators (husbands) from rural and urban Ghana. Participants’ discursive accounts revealed that social anxieties of husbands, their fear of being perceived by others as weak or emasculated, and their disappointment with unfulfilled notions of masculine sovereignty influence conjugal violence. Perpetrators constructed a wife’s expression of dissent to her husband’s wishes and commands as an encroachment on masculine spaces, a gender-norm violation, or as providing a public challenge to male identity and thus violence could be used as an obligatory passage to manhood. Perpetrators also mobilized shifting and ambivalent discourses that draw upon culturally familiar notions of maleness to both resist and authorize a patriarchal privilege in marriage.     

Sustained Combustion of Bodies: Some Observations*

Abstract: Previous tests have explored the fire effects and fuel characteristics of animal carcasses in intense fires of relatively short duration. Here, test fires were conducted involving intact human cadavers and torsos that included nonaccelerated, long‐duration fires involving the bedding and clothing (in the manner of typical accidental deaths). The objective was to observe the fire conditions (size, radiant heat flux, and duration), where a human body represented the major fuel package in a nonaccelerated fire. The pattern of damage to the body was documented and compared with that resulting from a furnished room fire. Two intact, unembalmed human cadavers were exposed to fires of simulated accidental origin. The bedding was ignited by an open flame, and the fires were allowed to burn unaided to self‐extinguishment. It was found that normal human bodies can support a modest‐sized fire for some 6–7 h under these conditions. The presence of a substrate material that can act as a wick for the combustion of the rendered body fat results in extensive destruction of the torso where the greatest amount of subcutaneous fat resides, with less damage to the head and limbs. A third (partial) cadaver was exposed to a recreation of a typical accidental fire in a furnished room that progressed to full room involvement. This fire of some 15 min of total duration inflected only surface‐layer damage to the torso of the victim.     

Unwilling Fathers and Abortion: Terminating Men's Child Support Obligations?

There is broad agreement across the western industrialised world that men who father children outside of marriage share in an obligation to support their offspring financially. Against this consensus, some men's groups have claimed that if women are accorded control over the decision to continue or to terminate a pregnancy then it is unfair to hold genetic fathers financially liable for child support. This paper assesses the merits of this claim from a feminist perspective. Having considered a number of arguments, it suggests that the currently accepted grounding of child support liability (in voluntary creation of need) provides little scope for refuting the men's groups' argument. The paper then moves on to argue that voluntary creation of need is, however, inadequate as a basis for child support liability, and that the current analysis offers compelling grounds for preferring a collective model of support obligations.