‘More Equitable than the Judgment of the Justices of the Peace’: The King's Bench and the Poor Law 1630–1800

Orders issued by justices operating the poor law in seventeenth and eighteenth century England – orders for removing paupers, orders for the maintenance of bastard children, orders adjudicating poor rate appeals – generated vast quantities of litigation. Most of that litigation was by way of appeal to Quarter Sessions; but a small number of cases went further, to the King's Bench, by way of certiorari. This account examines this litigation phenomenon from several vantage points: from the perspective of the King's Bench (which innovated procedures to regulate certiorari, and which expanded its means of reviewing legal error through the development of the special case); from the perspective of Parliament (which was required to respond to demands by justices that the process be abolished); and from the perspective of contemporary commentators (who were critical of the money wasted by parishes litigating in the King's Bench).     

Sex-Selective Abortion: A Matter of Choice

This paper argues that, if we are committed to a Pro-choice stance with regard to selective abortion for disability, we will be unable to justify the prohibition of sex-selective abortion (SSA), for two reasons. First, familiar Pro-choice arguments in favour of a woman’s right to select against fetal impairment also support, by parity of reasoning, a right to choose SSA. Second, rejection of the criticisms of selective abortion for disability levelled by disability theorists also disposes, by implication, of the key objections to SSA, as developed, most notably, by feminists. The paper, then, consists of a conditional defence of SSA, under which SSA should be available, and protected by a right, if selective abortion for disability is. Opponents of SSA might respond by conceding additional restrictions on selection against disabled fetuses. It should become clear throughout the paper, however, that any such new restrictions would be unacceptably onerous for women.     

Entering the Circle: The Praxis of Arts in Corrections

Abstract

When exiles create for themselves a new world in which to live and then construct that world in language, a poet, a writer, or intellectual may emerge. When the imagined world takes physical form and comes to exist in two, three, or four dimensions, it may be represented as the work of a performer or as that of a visual artist. This work creates a demilitarized zone, a place of safety, which defies old-world colonialization and presents a distillation of all the complexities within which one lives. Or, it may present a world beyond complexity that has imagined itself into synthesis. (Becker 1996, 113)