Underpinning success in the real world of corporations law

This paper reports on an action research project which sought to evaluate and guide ongoing teaching and learning development in Principles of Corporations Law, a semester-long unit of study. Typically, enrolments in this subject area include students from a range of cultural contexts for whom the legislative and administrative concepts of the unit are unfamiliar and who also experience significant difficulties with cultural conventions of communication and business practice. At our university, unit enrolments include a high proportion of distance education as well as non-English speaking background (NESB) students, predominantly from China, who have not studied units formerly considered as prerequisite, and many of whom experience difficulties with basic academic skills. As the development team planned and created teaching features to ensure better learning outcomes for these students, it was clear that some truly contextual thinking as well as some practicable solutions would be required. While we had determined in the redesign planning that scenario- or problem-based learning (PBL) with its emphasis on finding, understanding and using information in context, was best suited to help students acquire the skills that underpin success in the unit, our experience in the project indicated students had a broader range of more basic needs. It emerged that students were struggling with fundamental issues that would need to be addressed before real change could occur.     

The End of Domestic Violence

In this article, I examine the rationales that have been given for extending domestic violence legislation to associated persons. I argue that the empirical and principled rationales are unfounded and that the ideological rationale is reactionary. With regard to the empirical rationale, the extent of violence that the aggregate of associated persons suffers is not high enough to justify privileging associated persons over other citizens with regard to protection from violence. In relation to the principled rationale, the impetus for domestic violence legislation was based on isolation and inequality, which are not experienced in particular by the category of associated persons when taken as a whole. With regard to the ideological rationale, it is worrying that intimacy and equality are emerging as the touchstones of a newer rationale for domestic violence legislation, which rightly has more to do with isolation and inequality than intimacy and equality.     

HUMAN TISSUE LEGISLATION AND MEDICAL PRACTICE: A BENEFIT OR A BURDEN?

The scandals surrounding organ removal and retention throughout the United Kingdom provoked several Inquiries and ultimately led to law reform. Although the medical professions were well represented at the Inquiries, little was heard of the voices of those at the 'coal face'. In this scoping study, funded by the Wellcome Trust, we interviewed a number of doctors and others engaged in the uses of human tissue and organs to explore their hopes, concerns and fears about the role of the law in their practices. We found that those involved in transplantation were more aware of, and more actively involve with, the law, whereas others, such as pathologists, had less direct engagement with the law. Most of those we interviewed expressed the hope that law reform would provide much-needed clarity. Although some expressed concern that the law might be over-intrusive, most felt that the placing of authority firmly in the hands of the person him or her self to decide what should happen to their bodies was to be welcomed.     

The Significance of Shame in the Lives of Women Who Experience Male Violence

Recently there has been recognition of the cultural politics of emotion, that is, the ways in which emotions impact upon individual life experiences. Significantly, it has been shown how emotions can produce effects of power on and through the bodies of individuals. Despite this knowledge, the law and legal responses tend to minimise, obscure and deny the ways in which emotions, and in particular shame, impacts upon individuals. This article therefore argues that the lives of women who experience male violence cannot be fully understood without reference to the ways in which shame affects those experiences. It explores how shame operates as a gendered set of self-regulatory practices, which are also practices of male power in individual womens’ lives. In order to do this findings from a small scale qualitative study which used semi-structured interviews with women who have experienced violence are utilised, together with a Foucauldian theoretical framework. The article contends that an awareness and understanding of how shame affects the lives of women experience male violence can improve law and social policy responses to male violence against women.     

Emerging from the Chrysalis: Union Citizenship Must Escape its Nationality-Based Shortcomings

The European Union is at the core of a supranational citizenship project. This supranational project resulted in a crystallised form of citizenship in 1992, although it has been subject to constant revision by the ECJ since then. Nonetheless, the basis on which this novel form of citizenship is predicated is the traditional national paradigm of citizenship, with all its inherent sensitivities and inhibitions replicated on the international stage. It will be suggested that this nation-centric focus is ultimately the single biggest failing of European Union citizenship and its greatest limitation. The very nature of the supranational entity is exclusionary, to the detriment of over a million individuals. This paper will address which sectors of the broader European society are most affected by European citizenship’s exclusive properties and will explore the Union’s obligations and its responsibility to include marginalised groups, particularly the stateless, refugees, and third country nationals on an equal footing with Member State nationals. The extent of the statelessness problem will form the main portion of the discussion with a view to considering the challenges these at risk individuals face on a daily basis and how they can be incorporated in the most effective way within the Union framework: such incorporation will, of necessity, also mandate an examination of surrounding human rights issues, all the more pressing in light of the post-Lisbon Union commitment to accede to the European Convention on Human Rights. The stateless are not the only marginalised group found in Union territory: third country nationals who do not benefit from Directive 2003/109 nonetheless make a considerable contribution without receiving the same rights and freedoms as those serendipitous enough to call themselves ‘long-term residents’. The human rights and democratic bases of the Union appear to be undermined by the restrictive approach to inclusion that has, to date, been taken when addressing non-nationals’ incorporation under the citizenship umbrella. This paper aims to assess the shortcomings of the European Citizenship project by highlighting the effects of its exclusivity and the limitations of its notion of inclusivity. Rather than establishing a single supranational form of citizenship the Union has, instead, succeeded in developing a multi-tiered and hierarchical construct, far removed from the notion of ‘a broader community of peoples’. It will culminate in a proposal for a significantly modified vision of Union citizenship which would seek to overcome the current version’s apparent limitations, elevating the standing of the at risk groups in such a way that their contribution to Union life is fully, and deservedly, recognised.     

US state crimes related to nuclear weapons: Is there hope for change in the Obama administration?

Given the long history of US state crimes related to nuclear weapons and the aggressive unilateralism of the George W. Bush administration that compounded these crimes, the election of Barack Obama created a “hope” for “change” in American nuclear weapons policy. While it is too early to render any conclusive judgment, we offer a preliminary assessment of the Obama record with regard to nuclear weapons based on a number of significant policy statements made and official actions taken, including Obama's 2009 Prague speech, the signing of the new START agreement in April 2010, the administration's 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, the Washington DC Nuclear Security Summit, and the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference of 2010. Although the new administration has taken some steps to reduce the likelihood of the use or threat to use nuclear weapons, we conclude that under President Obama the US continues to be in violation of the solemn legal obligation to disarm as imposed by the NPT treaty of 1968. We also briefly note some of the structural and cultural factors related to the American empire that hinders any president from changing American nuclear weapons policy.