Food,Meaning, and the Law: Confessions of a Vegan Semiotician

The essay that follows combines several genres along an unconventional path. It departs from the psycho-semiotic analysis of a personal turning point: the author’s ‘conversion’ to veganism. After exposing the rationale for this change in semiotic terms, however, the essay extends its theorization to the social level, inquiring about the intersection between vegan conviction and commensality. In a world where different food ideologies co-occur, converge, conflict, and sometimes clash, what is the role of the law in establishing value priorities and strike a balance among different sociocultural and political trends? The essay concludes with a synthetic definition, in semiotic terms, of the perspective on food, meaning, and law promoted by the author: a vegan liberalism that is tolerant of food pluralism but simultaneously militates for the evolution of culture and society toward the accomplishment of a utopia, that of a world immune from the exploitation of animal suffering.     

Women and depression

Neurotic depression is twice as common among women. This is a puzzle to medical and social science. In this article, genetic and hormonal explanations are considered as well as the problem of distinguishing body from mind. Environmental causes are considered from the viewpoint of epidemiology, psychoanalysis and sociology. Neurotic depression is viewed as the outcome of an excess of stresses over supports and related to a woman's marital status, class and occupation.In the doctor-patient relationship, the doctor has a privileged role in interpreting what is said, an interpretation which appears as scientific to some and as individual to others. For, in order for it to be meaningful in a personal exchange, language constantly refers back to symbols which have been historically and culturally generated and, in doing so, incorporates particular historical and cultural values. By subjecting doctors and their patients to invoking a particular ideology, language binds us and blinds us in an allusive search for reality.     

Restraining auto imports: Does anyone win?

The conventional wisdom suggests that import restraints help the protected domestic industry at the expense of consumers. In the longer term, however, trade restraint may encourage foreign firms to adopt new and more threatening business strategies, such as upgrading the quality of their products or moving plants to the United States. If these long-term dynamic effects of restraint are considered, trade restraints may prove harmful to the domestic industry as well as consumers.     

Institutional design and the accountability paradox: A case study of three Aboriginal accountability regimes in Canada

While academic interest in accountability and transparency mechanisms in Aboriginal governance has risen over the past few years, very few studies have examined how these mechanisms operate in practice. One author, Shin Imai ( 2007 ), argues that Indigenous groups in Canada are faced with an accountability paradox that gives too much power to the federal government to intervene in band affairs, while giving too little power to band members to hold their local officials accountable for their actions. This paper examines the extent to which Aboriginal groups can avoid this paradox by reviewing three experiments in institutional design and self‐government in Aboriginal communities: the Sechelt Indian Band and the Westbank First Nation in British Columbia, and Nunatsiavut in Labrador. While considerable variation exists in terms of how well these communities overcome Imai's paradox, each community's accountability regime is an improvement over the one imposed by the Indian Act. The effectiveness of these regimes depends heavily on the institutional designs chosen by the Indigenous groups.     

The semiotics of religious space in Second Life®

Scholarly research on the religious dimension of Second Life® can be conducted with reference to several elements: ties between the religious dimension of Second Life and that of the “First Life” (an approach privileged by the sociology and the psychology of religion); the transcendent value inherent in the creation of an alternative reality (an approach favored by the philosophy of religion); the enunciation of a “virtual” religious dimension through the digital artifacts of Second Life (an approach promoted by aesthetics, phenomenology, and semiotics); and so forth. Adopting the point of view of cultural semiotics, the paper summarizes the results of a “virtual” ethno-semiotic participant observation conducted over six months in portions of the digital “metaverse” of Second Life where a religious dimension is predominant. The consequent analysis of digital places of worship singles out five main characteristics of their aesthetics, phenomenology, and semiotics: isolation, prototypicality, didacticism, anarchy, and parasitism.     

The Question Concerning the Common Frame of Reference

The many directives on private consumer law enacted in the last three decades have met with considerable neglect and resistance amongst domestic judges, legislatures and scholars, bringing about less legal unity and more ‘legal fragmentation'—to say it in the words of the Commission. The Draft Common Frame of Reference is one more attempt, on the part of certain strands of European private law scholarship, at imposing a formal break on, and at overcoming, such fragmentation. Presented as a ‘comprehensive and self‐standing’ document, its ambition is to definitively implement the Commission‐generated, market‐orientated agenda of private law reform, so much resisted at the national level. The article argues that the EU legislative institutions should not go ahead with the plan of incorporating the Draft's content in EU law, by adopting a CFR. A CFR would confer an unprecedented degree of authority on a range of contested directive‐generated rules, from the test of fairness to the risk development defence in product liability. In creating a climate in which CFR‐based legalistic arguments promote unity over fragmentation, a CFR would emasculate public debate by implementing, under the spell of legal necessity, exactly those partisan, Commission‐initiated policies that have been, and still are, openly opposed in domestic legal circles. The Draft embodies a grammar of imposition that should be questioned.     

Form and Substance in European Constitutional Law: The ‘Social’ Character of Indirect Effect

This article proposes to understand the constitutional discourse about individuals, rights and enforcement, as developed in the courtrooms, in relation to historic and contextual circumstances. It focuses on the interface between indirect effect and social policy, and argues that the creation of indirect effect has been integral to a judicial strategy centred on the key concern for sustaining the balance between market freedom and interventionism as achieved in the political process.     

Teaching management without cases

Many of the qualities of case method teachitig stem from the classroom method and not merely from the case. This article describes five noncase exercises designed to achieve purposes that cases are often used to accomplish, but which experience indicates, can do the job more easily. They are all based on the proposition that attention to the classroom method and not merely to the case will allow instructors to teach public management more effectively.