The Visiocracy of the Social Security Mobile App in Australia

This paper examines the forms of life established through the visual governance of the Australian social security mobile app (application)—the Express Plus Centrelink app. It is argued that the app exceeds established accounts of juridical and administrative power. The app involves a seeing that is not public, a responding that is not writing and a de-materialisation of an institution and its disciplinary apparatus. It is argued that the app creates proto-literate subjects that are required to respond to a real-time sequence of images in a highly structured and circumscribed manner to become complicit in the digitalisation of their life.     

Law,the Digital and Time: The Legal Emblems of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Doctor Who</Emphasis>

This article is about time. It is about time, or more precisely, about the absence of time in law’s digital future. It is also about time travelling and the seemingly ever-popular BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who. Further, it is about law’s timefullness; about law’s pictorial past and the ‘visual baroque’ of its chronological fused future. Ultimately, it is about a time paradox of seeing time run to a time when time runs ‘No More!’ This ‘timey-wimey’ article is in three parts. The first part looks to a hazy remembered past of the legal emblem tradition as presented in Peter Goodrich’s Legal Emblems and the Art of Law to learn visual literacy and also to glimpse the essential elements of modern legality with authority, decision and violence. The second part maps how these images and icons of modern legality are manifest in the Doctor Who fiftieth year anniversary special ‘The Day of the Doctor.’ The third stage looks beyond these first order meanings to understand the chronological chaos of ‘The Day of the Doctor.’ The technicity of the image as a portal through time and space that the narrative revolves around charts the implications for the digital end of time for law.     

Cause Lawyers,Political Violence,and Professionalism in Conflict

This article examines how cause lawyers in conflicted and authoritarian societies balance their professional responsibilities as lawyers with their commitment to a political cause. It is drawn from extensive interviews with both lawyers and political activists in a range of societies. It focuses on the challenges for lawyers in managing relations with violent politically‐motivated clients and their movements. Using the notion of ‘legitimation work', it seeks to examine the complex, fluid, and contingent understandings of legal professionalism that is developed in such contexts, offering three overlapping ‘ideal types’ of cause lawyers in order to better understand the meaning of legal professionalism in such sites: (a) struggle lawyers (b) human rights activists and (c) a ‘pragmatic moral community'. The article concludes by re‐examining how law is imagined in the legitimation work of cause lawyers in such settings and how that work is remembered in the transition from violence.     

Federal Criminal Careers: an Empirical Examination of the Post-Conviction Risk Assessment (PCRA)

The criminal career paradigm is a major research area but has largely overlooked federal offenders and federal data. Drawing on a population of federal supervised release clients in the Midwestern United States, the current study examined the predictive validity of the federal Post-Conviction Risk Assessment (PCRA) and its subscales for their association with six parameters of the criminal career. Poisson, negative binomial, and logistic regression models showed that PCRA Risk was significantly associated with annual offending rate (lambda), chronicity, prison misconduct, noncompliance on supervised release, having a warrant requested on supervised release, and career criminal status. Various PCRA subscales also were significantly associated with criminal career outcomes especially for current community supervision outcomes. These effects withstood confounding effects for age, sex, race, age of arrest onset, federal criminal history rank, and total prison exposure. The study supported basic criminal career findings using federal data and showed that a standard risk assessment actuarial in the federal system has utility as an indicator of the criminal career.     

Law, Struggle, and Political Transformation in Northern Ireland

This article analyses the role of law as an element of the Republican Movement's violent and political struggle during the Northern Ireland conflict. The trials and legal hearings of paramilitary defendants, the use of judicial reviews in the prisons, and the use of law in the political arena are chosen as three interconnected sites which highlight the complex interaction between law and other forms of struggle. The author argues that these three sites illustrate a number of themes in understanding the role of law in processes of struggle and political transformation. These include: law as a series of dialogical processes both inside and outside a political movement; law as an instrumental process of struggle designed to materially and symbolically 'resist'; and the constitutive effects of legal struggle upon a social and political movement. The article concludes with a discussion as to whether or not Republicans' emphasis upon 'rights and equality' and an end to armed struggle represents a 'sell out' of traditional Republican objectives.     

Immigration and Equal Ownership of the Earth

A number of philosophers argue that the earth's resources belong to everyone equally. Suppose this is true. Does this entail that people have a right to migrate across borders? This article considers two models of egalitarian ownership and assesses their implications for immigration policy. The first is Equal Division, under which each person is granted an equal share of the value of the earth's natural resources. The second is Common Ownership, under which every person has the right to use the earth's natural resources, but not the right to exclude others from them. While these models and their associated ideas have a long history within Western political thought, this article will examine them as they are presented by two sets of contemporary philosophers: Hillel Steiner, who defends Equal Division, and Michael Blake and Mathias Risse, who defend Common Ownership. In the case of each model, the article does three things. First, it considers the implications of the model for immigration policy. Second, it defends the model against objections from those defending immigration restrictions. Third, it contends that the model does not go far enough in its opposition to immigration restrictions. More specifically, the article argues that both Equal Division and Common Ownership, as presented by their proponents, fail to respect the claims of people whose interest in the land is not primarily economic. If the earth belongs to everyone equally, then people should not be prevented from pursuing important migratory goals such as family reunification, career development and education. The article concludes with a proposal for combining Equal Division with Common Ownership. Under this combined model, people would be free to migrate across international borders.