Terms of service and bills of rights: new mechanisms of constitutionalisation in the social media environment?

ABSTRACT

From a cursory look at the terms of service of the main social networking websites, it is immediately possible to detect that Facebook’s show a peculiar configuration. Although they represent a mere contract between private parties, these terms adopt the traditional jargon of constitutional texts and articulate their contents in terms of rights, principles and duties. This curious pairing between norms regulating social media and the constitutional sphere is also apparent in a series of non-binding documents that are unequivocally named ‘bill of rights’ and seek to articulate a set of principles to protect social media users. This paper examines whether the emergence of a constitutional tone in this limited number of texts could be related to the effective, or aspirational, constitutional function that these documents exercise. The identification of a series of significant shortcomings will lead to exclude that social media’s terms of service and bills of rights of social media users currently play a constitutionalising role. Nevertheless, the possibility to theoretically justify the use of these documents as mechanisms of constitutionalisation in the social media environment will be adduced as an evidence of the potential constitutional aspirations of these texts.     

Drugs,law, people,place and the state: ongoing regulation,resistance and change

We introduce this special issue firstly by tracing drugs from their traditional, cultural and religious uses through to their roles as commodities in colonial relations and now the global economy. We secondly explore the shifting nature of drugs and drug use in different places and times as shaped by politics, especially state regulation and the law. Thirdly, given the complexity as well as contingency of drugs, we survey a wide range of relevant theoretical approaches, but suggest that a critical analysis attend to their spatial framing and geography. Fourthly, and finally, we summarize the eight papers comprising this collection.     

The Philosophy of the Gift and the Psychology of Advocacy: Critical Reflections on Forensic Mental Health Intervention

This article examines mental health advocacy,exploring the philosophy of the gift and thepsychology of forensic intervention. Byselectively, though strategically, reviewing the workof Hobbes, Emerson, and Nietzsche,we argue that egoism, charity, and pity displace altruistic, selfless gift-giving. To furtherlegitimize our analysis, we consider Derrida's semiotic deconstructionism and Lacan's psychoanalytic semiotics. Derrida points outhow gift-giving is an aporetic reality; that is,it represents an (im)possibility. Lacandemonstrates how the mirror stage of development givesrise to the self-other ego, in which the subjectis always and already divided. We subsequentlyexplain, therefore, how the gift of mental healthadvocacy must necessarily proceed, in part, from self-interests (i.e., egoism), making the virtuousact of mental health advocacy an (im)possibility.