Rights and Quarantine During the SARS Global Health Crisis: Differentiated Legal Consciousness in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Toronto

Interventions in public health crises inevitably give rise to concerns about how the balance between rights concerns and community health security might be handled. During the SARS global health crisis, different jurisdictions struggled simultaneously with similar public health challenges posed by the previously unknown and deadly disease. Yet instead of a convergence of strategies, different jurisdictions responded with measures, especially with regard to the use of quarantine, that revealed a pattern of divergence about how to strike the balance between rights concerns and health security. The origins of this article stem from the realization that Toronto's use of quarantine was far more extensive than that of either Hong Kong or Shanghai, two jurisdictions with historically weak records regarding respect for fundamental rights and civil liberties. Perspectives on the balancing of individual rights and community health security are treated here as expressions of legal consciousness. Instead of assuming a uniform legal consciousness in Toronto, Shanghai, or Hong Kong, this article presents legal consciousness as varied among groups of individuals differently situated in the crisis. The promise of this differentiated approach to legal consciousness is that it facilitates both drawing contrasts between perspectives of differently situated groups within the same city and noting commonalities between similarly situated groups in other cities. Through an examination of three distinct perspectives on rights and quarantine in each city—those of senior public health officials, frontline hospital workers, and contacts of SARS patients—the competing legal meanings and understandings about the tensions between community health security and individual rights during the SARS crisis are identified in a way that enables us to better understand the pattern of different uses of quarantine.     

Talking With Teen Parents,Hearing Young Families: (In)forming Welfare Reform Through Local Relations

This article explores an engagement process undertaken by Australian government social workers in one disadvantaged locality prior to the introduction of federal “teenage parent” welfare reforms. The focus of engagement was to learn about young parents’ experiences and aspirations, and to draw on this to inform policy implementation. Findings from engagement, and how engagement between social workers and young parents impacted local policy implementation are discussed, including the subsequent development of family friendly school options. The authors suggest that problematizing early parenting may itself be “risky,” and may obscure opportunities for building on the parental role as a source of inspiration.     

The relationship between income and material hardship

This paper examines the relationship between income and the extent of material hardship and explores other factors that might affect hardship. Using panel data from the Women's Employment Study, we examine the incidence of material hardship from 1997 to 2003 among current and former welfare recipients. We then consider the extent to which income is associated with hardship. We show that hardship decreases monotonically across quintiles of the income distribution for several income measures. When we measure income as the average across the 6‐year study period, a 10 percent increase in average income is associated with a 1.1 percentage point decrease in the likelihood of experiencing a hardship, a drop of about 3.4 percent. We also find that the relationship between transitory changes in income and hardship is weak. These results are consistent with findings based on a nationally representative sample of disadvantaged households from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. Our results indicate that observable factors, such as measures of mental health, are more strongly related to hardship than current income. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Safeguarding Children's Welfare in Non‐Contentious Divorce: Towards a New Conception of the Legal Process?

This article considers the working of the current procedure intended to ensure the welfare of children when their parents divorce but are not seeking any orders relating to them. It shows that the process is ineffective in safeguarding children's welfare and is not geared to ensuring that their wishes and feelings are taken into account. It argues that the focus of policy should shift away from assuming that the legal system can handle the problems of divorce, towards using the legal process as a point of contact through which families can be offered the full range of services they may need during relationship breakdown.     

The perceived employability of ex-prisoners and offenders

A large-scale study was conducted to examine the perceived employability of ex-prisoners and offenders. Four participant groups comprising 596 (50.4%) employers, 234 (19.8%) employment service workers, 176 (14.9%) corrections workers, and 175 (14.8%) prisoners and offenders completed a questionnaire assessing the likelihood of a hypothetical job seeker's both obtaining and maintaining employment; the importance of specific skills and characteristics to employability; and the likelihood that ex-prisoners, offenders, and the general workforce exhibit these skills and characteristics. Apart from people with an intellectual or psychiatric disability, those with a criminal background were rated as being less likely than other disadvantaged groups to obtain and maintain employment. In addition, ex-prisoners were rated as being less likely than offenders and the general workforce to exhibit the skills and characteristics relevant to employability. Implications for the preparation and support of ex-prisoners and offenders into employment are discussed, together with broader community-wide initiatives to promote reintegration.     

The importance of ethics in the law curriculum: essential or incidental?

Recently, the debate as to whether ethics should be a compulsory requirement of a law degree was refuelled when the English and Welsh Legal Education Training Review (LETR) recommended that professional ethics should be primarily addressed in vocational Legal Services and Education Training programmes and that learning outcomes in the academic curriculum should include reference to morality and the law, the values supporting the legal system and their connection to the role of lawyers. This debate is also occurring in other jurisdictions. In Australia the debate is focused on the proposal that ethics be removed as a compulsory subject in the law degree. This proposal has raised a concern that law students will be denied the opportunity to develop as ethically competent lawyers. This paper argues for the continuation of ethics as a core component of a law degree and evidences the model used for the teaching of ethics in the law degree at the University of Technology Sydney in support of our argument. The background to the model is examined to highlight the significance of student feedback and ongoing curriculum review, including the alignment of parallel pedagogical factors. This model serves as an example of not only why ethics should be core to a law degree but, in order to provide graduates who are ethical and reflective practitioners, why ethics should be pervasively taught throughout the degree and supported by an introductory and capstone presence.