Doctrinal considerations for fast-food obesity suits

Lawsuits brought by obese plaintiffs against fast-food chains have been the subject of some derision in the late-night talk shows and popular press, and have not succeeded so far. But the common law tort theories on which such lawsuits should be grounded are straightforward, unremarkable, and mainstream. This article first offers an overview of obesity-related health problems that can arise from fast-food diets. It then critiques the seminal Pelman v. McDonald's--how it was pleaded and how it should have been pleaded--and offers alternative legal theories under which such lawsuits can be brought in the future.     

George Orwell and ecological citizenship: moral agency and modern estrangement

Theories of ecological citizenship seek to conceptualize political agency while taking into account humanity’s embeddedness in nature. This essay intervenes with contributions from an author distant from discourses about environmental politics, but with insights to offer them. George Orwell’s writings respond to a problem continuously articulated in the history of ecological thought: the estrangement from the conditions of one’s existence. In doing so, he provides a literary case study of ecological moral reasoning, a practice whereby the virtues of ecological citizenship are cultivated. Such virtues are cultivated by confronting the conditions of one’s existence in embodied terms, incorporating that experiential knowledge, and contributing to practices of self-government using it. This essay presents Orwell’s case, explains its relevance to the contemporary discourse on ecological citizenship, and concludes by suggesting that it also provides resources for empirical social scientists seeking to operationalize ecological citizenship theory by way of a moral sociology of the environment.     

Freedom, Interference and Domination

Interference and domination make persons less free. This paper discusses how they do so. It considers and rejects two influential recent accounts of freedom, one that holds that freedom is best understood in terms of non-interference and one that holds that freedom is best understood in terms of non-domination. Against these accounts, the paper argues that both interference and domination play an important role in reducing freedom and that neither concept can be reduced to the other. To bolster this argument, the paper presents and defends an account of freedom that relates both concepts back to a common source. This account shows that while interference and domination have independent significance for judgments of freedom both reduce freedom by obstructing the ability of persons to plan their lives.     

Podcast as assessment: entanglement and affect in the law school

ABSTRACT

This article documents the “Orders in Decay” project, in which students taking the Law and Disorder module at the University of Warwick were required to produce a podcast as part of their assessment. The article situates the pedagogic benefits of student podcasting through the fields of legal storytelling, law and literature, and digital storytelling. It uses these to theorise three key moments in the podcasting process: the interview with an expert as an affective encounter with the ideas, the production of a complex and layered podcast that excites an affective response, and publication of the best of the podcasts to shift the students’ horizons of communication. Ultimately, the article suggests that the undergraduate is uniquely positioned between worlds – neither an expert nor a member of the public. As such, they are perfectly placed to mediate ideas and discussion in an affecting manner.     

Backing Away From Equality

Abstract

In his early work in political philosophy, Amartya Sen advanced an interesting and provocative thesis – the egalitarian thesis. This is the claim that every conception of social justice that has received support in recent times is egalitarian. This paper argues that Sen's account of capabilities and his more recent critique of transcendental justice have implications for the truth of the egalitarian thesis. It also discusses how the rejection of the egalitarian thesis bears on the larger, and more general, issue of the overall plausibility of egalitarian conceptions of social justice.     

English population statistics before 1800

The first national census of the British population was organized in 1801; the civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths commenced in 1837; and the first tentative attempt by the state to compile statistics on migration was included in the census of 1841. Prior to 1801, the chief source of information on the demography of the country was provided by the clergy's registration of baptisms, marriages, and burials that had occurred in their parishes, supplemented by information on mortality in the Bills of Mortality that were published for certain large towns and by inferences drawn from various counts of taxpayers. The article focuses on the reliability of the parochial registration system and the way in which it was exploited by the state as measured against the state's objectives for establishing it in 1538. These objectives were rarely achieved. By the end of the 18th century, the parish registers were falling short of providing a national system of registration. Neither had the registers at any time provided the requisite detail to allow the verification of age, lineal descent, or right of inheritance. They had not been used as a way of raising revenue except briefly between 1694 and 1705. Moreover, the Anglican Church was extremely lax about the enforcement of its own regulations regarding the appropriate time for registering baptisms, burials, and marriages.     

Bequests to widows and their property in early modern England

This paper analyses those wills made by persons with the surname Farrer between 1500 and 1849 that mention both a widow and children in order to see how different testators divided their property when the interests of more than one family member had to be considered. It is argued that the economic position of women following widowhood was weaker in the eighteenth century than it had been earlier. In the eighteenth century, fewer widows were appointed executrix of their husband's estate and fewer received a share of the residue of the estate. Relatively more bequests of houses and land went to children and not to the widow. These trends occurred in all regions we examined and were experienced by all social groups who made wills. However, while husbands in the eighteenth century were relatively less generous to their widows in their wills than their predecessors, their widows were far from destitute, often receiving some land, cash and goods in addition to a house.     

Westphalian Sovereignty: Rights,Intervention, Meaning and Context

Over the last two centuries or so sovereignty has proved to be an enigmatic institution, at once constant and changing. Presently, it faces sustained and diffuse siege. Relatively few studies have approached this enigmatic institution from a semantic angle. This paper assesses the meaning of sovereignty within a framework of competing logics as it faces up to a key normative challenge—human rights—bringing together the apparently conflicting norms of non-intervention and intervention against a background of discourse analysis. From “Westphalia” to the current logics of action and normative theory, the discussion places the institution of sovereignty against current, intra-disciplinary factors as an addition to the literature that serves to underscore how a fundamentally re-imagined concept is required, in theory and practice, to account for and promote humanitarian needs.     

Technologies, Security, and Privacy in the Post-9/11 European Information Society

Since 11 September 2001, many 'hard' and 'soft' security strategies have been introduced to enable more intensive surveillance and control of the movement of `suspect populations'. Suicide bombings have since generated a step-change in asymmetric threat analysis and public perceptions of risk. This article reviews how post-9/11 'security' issues intersect with existing and emerging technologies, particularly those relating to identity, location, home, and work that will form the backbone of the European Information Society. The article explores the complexities generated by the way that these technologies work, sites of nationalist resistance, and formal bureaucratic roles. Many of the planned surveillance methods and technologies are convergence technologies aiming to bring together new and existing data sources, but are unable to do so because of poor data quality and the difficulty of using the integrated data to reduce serious crime risks. The delay may enable legal compliance models to be developed in order to protect the principles of privacy that are set out in the ECHR and the EC Data Protection Directive. Though (moral) panics produce changes in law, the article emphasizes the constraining effects of law.