The Miscegenation/Same‐Sex Marriage Analogy: What Can We Learn from Legal History?

It has become commonplace among historically inclined legal scholars to look to the history of the United States' elimination of bans on mixed-race sexual relationships for guidance about the recent controversy over same-sex marriage. This article argues that, while the analogy is helpful, it is not perfect because of the particular historical circumstances of the battle over antimiscegenation laws. Because regulations against interracial marriage were at the heart of defining and perpetuating the political and institutional system of white supremacy, they served a different purpose than the bans on same-sex marriage. The analogy can be pursued, however, to promote a critical consideration of the history of marriage as a heteronormative institution, generating a broader agenda for empowering change. Such a use of history takes the experience of the struggle against the antimiscegenation regime as a cautionary tale rather than a guidepost.     

The lore of sexual difference in social and legal discourse on ‘date rape’

Using a framework informed by Foucauldian discourse theory and feminist accounts of sexual difference, this paper investigates the process of attrition in cases initially recorded as rape and in which complainant and suspect are known to each other. Having particular regard to police and prosecutor decision-making in the processing of such cases, the authors consider discourses that utilise conceptions of sexual difference, which work to normalise and privilege cultural assumptions about male desires and conduct in sexual relations. In illuminating the manner in which the traditional binary categories of sexual difference is put to work, the authors argue that socio-legal debates over the phenomenon commonly described as ‘date rape’ have over-simplistically inverted these categories. The authors further argue that this inversion operates to women's detriment and fails to advance a sufficiently nuanced understanding of complex issues implicated in rapes committed against women by men they know. This revised version was published online in November 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Traumatic Injury Pattern Analysis in a Light Rail Transit Death: A Retrospective Case Study

Within the context of medical examiner's offices, forensic anthropologists are increasingly being asked to assist with the interpretation of traumatic skeletal injury. This case study presents an example of trauma analysis performed by forensic anthropologists at the Maricopa County Forensic Science Center in Phoenix, Arizona. The primary goal of this study is to document an uncommon pattern of traumatic injury—severe grinding abrasions of the lower appendage that macroscopically resemble sharp force trauma, especially as observed in dismemberment cases—resulting from an individual being dragged beneath a Light Rail train for c. 1.7 miles. The abraded skeletal elements include a femoral shaft fragment, a femoral head portion, and the right foot. Second, this study aims to illustrate the efficacy of forensic anthropological analysis of patterned skeletal trauma. Finally, this study demonstrates the critical importance of analyzing scene information before drawing conclusions as to the etiology of a traumatic injury pattern.     

Water crises: political construction or physical reality?

Various definitions of water crises emerge from epistemic communities deploying a great disparity of methodologies and fundamental hypotheses. Scientists' perceptions of which power structures legitimately carry out water management affect their definition of a crisis, their capacity to ask questions and the manner they formulate them. This determines the stakes and the actors they can observe or the scale of analysis they find relevant. This leads some to recommend a ‘solution’ that appears to be a disaster to others. This article examines how three epistemic communities have each built their science by promoting very specific understandings of what is a water crisis. Proponents of the ‘global water crisis’ spawned Integrated Water Resources Management while proponents of the ‘municipal water crisis’ locked the perception of water equity within the Millennium Development Goals. Researchers on small-scale irrigation and property regimes have often disagreed with such recommendations, often presented as inevitable.