Of caterpillars and butterflies: The introduction of metamorphosis at the UWA law school

CENTRAL ISSUES IN JURISPRUDENCE: JUSTICE, LAW AND RIGHTS By Nigel E. Simmonds [Sweet and Maxwell, 2002, 2nd ed., 338 pp., £16.95 (paperback)]

JUSTICE, HUMANITY AND THE NEW WORLD ORDER By Ian Ward [Ashgate, 2003, 192 pp., £50 (hardback)]

CONSTITUTIONAL LAW OF THE EUROPEAN UNION By Sionaidh Douglas Scott [Longman, 2002, xlx + 533 pp., £29.99 (paperback)]

THE ENGLISH LEGAL PROCESS By Terence Ingman [Oxford University Press, 2002, 9th ed., 624 pp., £19.99 (paperback)]

SMITH, BAILEY &; GUNN ON THE MODERN ENGLISH LEGAL SYSTEM By S. H. Bailey, J. P. L. Ching, M. J. Gunn and D. C. Ormerod [Sweet and Maxwell, 2002, 9th ed., 1,387 pp., £30.00 (paperback)]

A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO CIVIL LITIGATION By Robert Hill, Helen Wood and Suzanne Fine [Jordans, 2003, 571 pp., £45 (paperback)]

PARTNERSHIP LAW By G. Morse [Blackstone Press, 2001, 5th ed., 280 pp., £14.95 (paperback)]

EMPLOYMENT LAW By Malcolm Sargeant [Longman, 2003, 2nd ed., 499 pp., £26.99 (paperback)]

THE LAW OF CONTRACT By J. C. Smith [Sweet and Maxwell, 2002, 4th ed., 268 pp., £15.95 (paperback)]

CONTRACT LAW By Catherine Elliott and Frances Quinn [Pearson Education, 2003, 4th ed., 353 pp., £17.99 (paperback)]

AQA LAW IN FOCUS: AS LEVEL By Simon Jackson [Causeway Press, 2003, First impression, 233 pp., £12.95 (paperback)]

TORT LAW By Chris Turner [Hodder and Stoughton, 2003, 1st ed., 232 pp., £13.99 (paperback)]

LOOKING AT CRIMINAL LAW By Chris Turner [Hodder and Stoughton, 2003, 1st ed., 114 pp., £9.99 (paperback)]

CRIMINAL LAW By Alan Reed and Peter Seago [Sweet and Maxwell, 2002, 2nd ed., lvii + 597 pp., £22.95 (paperback)]

CRIMINAL LAW: DOCTRINE AND THEORY By William Wilson [Longman, 2003, 2nd ed., lii + 640 pp., £29.99 (paperback)]

BURGLARY By R. I. Mawby [Willan Publishing, 2001, x + 213 pp., £40.00 (hardback), £16.99 (paperback)]

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY By David Bainbridge [Longman, 2002, 5th ed., 710 pp., £34.99 (paperback)]

PARRY AND CLARK: THE LAW OF SUCCESSION By Roger Kerridge Assisted by A. H. R. Brierley [Sweet and Maxwell, 2002, 11th ed., 671 pp., £29.95 (paperback)]

CONSTRUCTION LAW By John Uff [Sweet and Maxwell, 2002, 8th ed., 536 pp., £23.95 (paperback)]

WATER POLLUTION AND WATER QUALITY LAW By William Howarth and Donald McGillivray [Shaw and Son Publishers, 2001, 1212 pp., £85.00 (hardback)]

PROPERTY LAW By Roger J. Smith [Longman, 2003, 4th ed. lxviii + 617 pp., £29.99 (paperback)]

PROPERTY LAW: CASES AND MATERIALS By Roger J. Smith [Longman, 2003, 2nd ed. lv + 836 pp., £33.99 (paperback)]

HOUSING LAW CASEBOOK By Nic Madge [Legal Action Group, 2003, 3rd ed., 1,139 pp., £39.00 (paperback)]

LEGAL MATERIALS FOR SOCIAL WORKERS By Hugh Brayne and Graeme Broadbent [Oxford University Press, 2002, 522 pp., £24.99 (paperback)]     

Doctrine and Decision: Navigating Labour's New Constitutional Position in the Lords

The 2015–17 Parliament was the first time in history that the Conservatives were in government with no easily assembled majority in the House of Lords. This has fundamentally altered the role that Labour is able to play in the Lords and, conversely, that peers are able to play in the Labour party. Yet the political significance of this situation has not yet been fully appreciated by a party which remains culturally antagonistic and constitutionally wary of the Lords. In this paper, we draw on interviews with Labour peers, particularly the late Baroness Hollis of Heigham, who have been able to use the essentially conservative powers of the Lords for social democratic ends. We suggest that the Labour party needs to incorporate the second chamber into both its practical and symbolic politics, and to find ways to use this new source of constitutional power without accommodating to it.     

Sex Determination Using the Second Cervical Vertebra—A Test of the Method*

Abstract: Sex is one of the critical questions addressed when unidentified skeletal remains are discovered in forensic or archeological contexts. Continuous testing and re‐evaluation of existing techniques is essential to improve accuracy and precision. The Wescott (J Forensic Sci 2000; 45 (2):462–6) method of sex determination from dimensions of the second cervical vertebra was blind‐tested on 153 adult individuals from the Spitalfields documented collection of human skeletal remains held at the Natural History Museum, London. Significant sex differences were determined for all dimensions measured (independent two‐sample t‐test, p < 0.05–0.001). The discriminant functions developed by Wescott were shown to have an overall accuracy of classification of 76.99%. Using stepwise discriminant analysis, a discriminant function based on the Spitalfields data correctly classified sex in 83.3% of individuals and was able to classify males and females with equal accuracy. Additional discriminant functions are presented for use in instances where preservation of the second cervical vertebra is poor.     

Reversing microcrystalline tests--an analytical approach to recycling of microcrystals from drugs of abuse

A combined analysis of microcrystalline tests followed by LC-MS or GC-MS analysis is described. Microcrystalline tests are shown to be non-destructive as addition products formed were easily dissociated after the application of an appropriate solvent. Subsequent analysis of the sample was done to quantify the recovery of the drug. Examples were performed using the date rape drug γ-hydroxybutyrate (GHB) and the synthetic opioid methadone.     

The Problem of Emergency in the American Supreme Court

Sixty years before Carl Schmitt wrote his Political Theology, and more than a 100 years before President Bush announced a ‘war on terrorism’ the American Supreme Court grappled with the difficult issue of emergency powers in connection with issues arising out of the American Civil War (1861–1865). The question confronting the Court in a set of cases named the Prize Cases was whether President Lincoln’s decision to respond to acts of aggression by the secessionist Southern states with measures of war was lawful. The legal problem was that Lincoln had made this decision unilaterally although the American Constitution specifically allocates the power to declare war to Congress. The Court solved the dilemma by arguing that in cases where no war has been declared, the decision whether the country is in a state of war is ultimately ‘a question to be decided by him [the President], and [the Supreme] Court must be governed by the decisions and acts of the political department of the Government to which this power was entrusted’ (Prize, p. 669). The precedent, which the Court thereby laid down, has since played out as an important leverage for the Bush government’s legal arguments in connection with the war on terrorism. This article engages the theoretical framework of Locke, Schmitt and Agamben in order to come to a better understanding of this important set of cases.     

re-reading horror stories: maternity,disability and narrative in Doris Lessing's <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Fifth Child</Emphasis>

The central issues raised in much of feminist literary theory's early scholarship remain prescient: how does narrative engage with the social‐historical? In what ways does it codify existing structures? How does it resist them? Whose stories are not being told, or read? In this article I use Doris Lessing's novel The Fifth Child (1988) as a text with which to begin to address the above questions by reading with attention to the mother story but also the ‘other’ stories operating both within and outside of the novel; in particular I am concerned with the convergence of maternity, disability and narrative. The novel's co-implication of sexual difference and corporeal difference reveals the ways in which the mother's story is both made possible and authorized by the disabled body of her child, and by his inability to tell his own story. Yet, if The Fifth Child is a horror story that uses the disabled child's body as its ground, it is also about the horror of maternity, in its conception and attendant choices. In this fictional story as well as in the social‐historical narrative circulating at the time of its publication in the late 1980s, both child and mother are indicted in their otherness and it is ultimately impossible to separate one from the other.