Judicial responses to the protected confidential communications legislation in Australia

The article examines the background, aims and scope of recent legislation enacted in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia to protect from disclosure in court of "confidential communications" generated in the context of counselling persons who allege that they were victims of sexual offenses. In drafting the "confidential communications" legislation, the legislators undertook a difficult task of balancing the public interest in therapeutic confidentiality that would encourage victims of sexual assaults to report these offenses and seek psychological and psychiatric care on the one hand, and the public interest in fairness of the trial, which may be prejudiced by exclusion of evidence pertinent to the forensic process on the other. In South Australia this task was fulfilled with greater success than in New South Wales and Victoria.     

Pioneering women revisited: Representations of gender in some Israeli settlement museums

This study examines the representation of women in museums that are devoted to the preservation and celebration of the Zionist nation-building ethos of the 1920s and 1930s (i.e., Israel's pre-state era). These representations are encoded in the rhetoric of the museum guides. In the official discourse and the interpretive stances to which they give voice, the museums that provided ethnographic sites for this inquiry uphold the prevalent myth of gender equality in pioneering groups as if relates to women's participation in the male-dominated pubic sphere of “productivity” in agricultural and road construction work. At the same time, they reproduce representations of women as ambivalent participants in the pioneering enterprise. Their positioning within the redefined domestic sphere of communal living, women all too often remain marginalized participants; at times they are even “storified” as essentially objects of the male gaze.     

The Palestinian intifada: An analysis of a popular uprising after seven months∗

This study challenges the conventional wisdom that the Internet is a reliable source of operational knowledge for terrorists, allowing them to train for terrorist attacks without access to real-world training camps and practical experience. The article distinguishes between abstract technical knowledge (what the Greeks called techne) and practical, experiential knowledge (mētis), investigating how each helps terrorists prepare for attacks. This distinction offers insight into how terrorists acquire the practical know-how they need to perform their activities as opposed to abstract know-what contained in bomb-making manuals. It also underscores the Internet's limitations as a source of operational knowledge for terrorists. While the Internet allows militants to share substantial techne, along with religious and ideological information, it is not particularly useful for disseminating the experiential and situational knowledge terrorists use to engage in acts of political violence. One likely reason why Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorists have not made better use of the Internet's training potential to date is that its value as a source of operational knowledge of terrorism is limited.     

The Trouble with Terror: The Apologetics of Terrorism—a Refutation

This essay warns against a recent philosophical confusion concerning the definition of “terrorism,” which has dominated the post 9/11 literature. Terrorism, it is suggested, is nothing but the intentional random murder of defenseless non-combatants, with the intent of instilling fear of mortal danger amidst a civilian population as a strategy designed to advance political ends. Furthermore, this essay argues that regardless of its “root cause,” terrorism is diametrically opposed to the requirements of liberal morality and can only be defended at the expense of relinquishing the most basic of liberal commitments.     

Substituted consent: from lunatics to corpses

This analysis traces the origins and evolution of the doctrine of surrogate or substituted judgment, especially its application to medical treatment, including non-therapeutic sterilisation, decisions regarding life and death choices, and more recently, removal of sperm or eggs from incompetent, dying or dead males and females. It argues that the doctrine, which has been acknowledged to be a legal fiction, has an effect of devolving legal and moral responsibility for life and death choices, as well as non-consensual, non-beneficial intrusive procedures, from the competent decision-makers to the incompetent patient. It focuses on the subjective nature of the substituted judgment standard; the problematic nature of evidence propounded to establish the putative choices of the incompetent person; lack of transparency relating to the conflict of interest in the process of substituted judgment decision-making; and the absence of voluntariness, which is an essential element of a valid consent.     

The right to be forgotten: The Israeli version

The right to be forgotten and erase, originally introduced in the well-known case of Google Spain, has caused considerable legal debates on both theoretical and procedural issues. The Israeli Supreme Court has also just recently considered the issue when it was asked to enforce the right to be forgotten of an Israeli advocate, Jonathan Miller, and delist harmful information which appeared in a Google search, and was in truth related to a different adv. Jonathan Miller. The plaintiff relied on the Israeli Prohibition of Defamation Law. Liability was denied on the basis that the information was indeed true, and thus- justified. We suggest in this article that the court should have imposed liability in negligence, an open ended general tort that mainly applies when particular torts fail to supply a reasonable and just solution in new factual situations due to change in social, economic and technological circumstances.