‘Fat cat’ lawyers and ‘illegal’ migrants: the impact of intersecting hostilities and toxic narratives on access to justice

ABSTRACT

This article examines how three spheres of hostility intersect to prevent effective access to justice for those living with insecure immigration status. The neoliberal governance model, the barren justice landscape and the hostile environment are supported by the cynical construction of the ‘fat cat’ lawyer and the toxic ‘folk devil’ narrative of the ‘bogus’ asylum seeker. To the extent that the judiciary have frustrated the more obvious, ideologically driven, attempts to restrict access to justice for migrants, the austerity predicated measures pursuant to the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO) have completely altered the legal landscape. The analysis is informed by the findings of the ‘Legal advice and support for persons with insecure status’ project (hereafter LAPIS) in Nottingham which explores the challenges faced by service providers and the lived experiences of those with insecurity of status. It is clear that access to justice is a passport to the realisation of other rights, yet participants struggled to access a remedy because legal advice is too often out of reach.     

Estimating Individual Contributions to Complex DNA SNP Mixtures.,

High‐throughput sequencing (HTS) of large panels of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provides an alternative or complimentary approach to short tandem repeats (STRs) panels for the analysis of complex DNA mixture forensic samples. For STRs, methods to estimate individual contribution concentrations compare capillary electrophoresis peak heights, peak areas, or HTS allele read counts within a mixture. This article introduces three approaches (mean, median, and slope methods) for estimating individual DNA contributions to forensic mixtures for HTS/massively parallel sequencing (MPS) SNP panels. For SNPs, the major:minor allele ratios or counts, unique to each contributor, were compared to estimate contributor proportion within the mixture using the mean, median, and slope intercept for these alleles. The estimates for these three methods were typically within 5% of planned experimental contributions for defined mixtures.     

Obtaining redress for abuse of office in Russia: The Soviet legacy and the long road to administrative justice

This article examines the options for redressing abuse of office available to citizens in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. I consider the courts, the procuracy, and the complaint mechanism as sites for citizens to lodge claims against abuse of office in late-Soviet and post-Soviet times. After the collapse of the Soviet system there was an attempt to overcome the Soviet legacy, to strengthen legal institutions and establish administrative justice. Analysis of Soviet and post-Soviet normative documents and statistical data allows us to argue that opportunities for Russian citizens to combat service crimes in the courts have improved substantially. However, the system for coping with abuse of office remains imperfect, and retains features of the Soviet legacy despite vague legislation about administrative justice and dual ways of coping with abuse through legal and quasi-legal mechanisms. The re-establishment of the complaint mechanism in the conditions of contemporary Russia exacerbates this imperfection. Overall, the complaint mechanism occupies a significant place in people's options for making claims against officials, especially claims against high-ranking officials.     

Performative Rhetorics in Invisibility: Phoebe Philo's Undone Authorship

ABSTRACT

This inquiry analyses the rhetoric of intentionally unfinished fashion contained in the collections from Céline as designed by Phoebe Philo and explicates the implications of this approach to fashion as a feminist text. Shoshana Felman’s seductive promise of speech, modified with insights from Paul de Man’s theory of autobiography as both giving face and defacement, is applied to Philo’s ‘new minimalism’ in order to highlight its appeal to modern female audiences. Using insights from the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, I examine ways in which wearers may seek to create a signature citationality via clothing that produces its own ‘unwriting’ therefore allowing the wearer to believe she inscribes her own iteration while maintaining control. Wearers are offered the chance to identify with a designer who is enlightened beyond fast and flashy fashion while hinting at the notion of the clothing having the substantialising effect that language has (instead of representational). Through this examination, clothing is shown to be a decision, and clothing is also shown to be a fiction. These decisions and fictions are open to failure; yet Felman offers that this failure acts as an opening remaining inadvertent or unacknowledged. Philo's designs invite an exploration of clothing as performative rhetoric.