Losing the Feminist Voice? Debates on The Legal Recognition of Same Sex Partnerships in Canada

Over the last decade, legal recognition of same-sex relationships in Canada has accelerated. By and large, same-sex cohabitants are now recognised in the same manner as opposite-sex cohabitants, and same-sex marriage was legalised in 2005. Without diminishing the struggle that lesbians and gay men have endured to secure this somewhat revolutionary legal recognition, this article troubles its narrative of progress. In particular, we investigate the terms on which recent legal struggles have advanced, as well as the ways in which resistance to the legal recognition has been expressed and dealt with. We argue that to the extent that feminist critiques of marriage, familial ideology, and the privatisation of economic responsibility are marginalised, conservative and heteronormative discourses on marriage and family are reinforced. Our case studies include two pivotal moments in the quest for legislative recognition of same-sex relationships: the Hearings of the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights on Bill C-23, The Modernization of Benefits and Obligations Act, in 2000 and the hearings on Same-Sex Marriage in 2003. We find that the debates operated within a narrow paradigm that bolstered many existing hierarchies and exacerbated conditions for those who are economically disadvantaged.     

Legislators as Lobbyists

Public policy is produced by elected and unelected officials and through the interactions of branches of government. We consider how such interactions affect policy implementation and representation. We argue that legislators try to influence bureaucratic decisions through direct communication with federal agencies, and that such contact is effective and has consequences for policy outcomes. We provide empirical evidence of this argument using original data about direct communication between members of Congress and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) along with decisions made by the DOL regarding trade and redistributive policies. We find that direct contacts influence DOL decisions, and the agency is more likely to reverse previous decisions when requested to do so by legislators. Our results challenge key assumptions and findings in the previous literature and have important implications for interbranch relations and informal means of control over the implementation of national policy.     

Displaying the Law: A Cross-disciplinary Learning Experiment Using the Internet and Multimedia Technology

The law is increasingly being displayed to its practitioners and subjects in new forms and through new media. Some of this technological change simply permits easier access to information and faster recording processes. However students are at the forefront of the attempt to provide new ways of representing legal dilemmas, problems and issues. How do students imagine and represent the law? This paper describes an experiment in which undergraduate students from quite different backgrounds examined topical legal issues and presented reports in visual form, choosing between three formats: CD-ROMs, videos and web pages. Participants came from two universities in Victoria; students from Victoria University were multimedia students, students from the University of Melbourne were criminology research methods students. They formed small teams, pooling their skills to carry out research projects on aspects of the law, including busking, football violence and how images of blood should be shown on film or TV. This article reviews the lessons of this collaborative exercise for understandings of the law.     

Creating the Financial Stability Forum: What Role for Existing Institutions?

The Financial Stability Forum (FSF)—now rebranded as the Financial Stability Board (FSB)—has become a focal point for financial regulatory initiatives in the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Despite its central status, the body has received little attention from scholars. This is particularly striking both in light of the increasing centrality of the FSF/FSB within the realm of financial regulatory governance and the body's unusual structure and composition. Indeed, the creation and design of the FSF pose an empirical puzzle: what explains the creation of a new, informal and loosely structured institution and the centre of a financial regulatory governance regime? At the time of the Forum's creation, the broader financial architecture was marked by significant institutional density, with a large number of international organisations engaged in governance activities. This paper argues that it is precisely the structure and activities of these existing institutions, particularly the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and the Joint Forum on Financial Conglomerates, which account for the creation and design of the FSF, and points to the need for scholars to take seriously the role of organisations operating within institutionally dense spaces.     

Crime scene analysis and the escalation of violence in serial rape.

The current study examines the crime scene behavior manifest by 108 serial rapists responsible for the perpetration of 565 rapes across various cities within the US. The goal of the current study is to identify which aspects of crime scene behavior reported to law enforcement by the victim are most useful in predicting, early in a series of offenses, which rapists are most likely to escalate into higher and, at times, life threatening levels of violence. Using 58 scales that quantify the verbal, physical, and sexual behavior manifest by a rapist in his interaction with his victim during his first reported rape and 36 modal variables that summarized approach, timing, demographics, and weapon usage across the series of rapes, the study attempts to differentiate between those rapists who escalate in their use of blunt force (Increasers) from those who do not (Non-Increasers). A logistic regression indicates that rapists who are white rather than of minority status and who, at the time of their first reported rape, rape their victims for longer periods of time and use more profanity are more likely to escalate in their level of blunt force than those rapists who do not exhibit these behaviors. The relevance of this type of predictive framework for law enforcement in its attempts to prioritize particular investigations is discussed.     

Human Rights: Changing the Culture

The Human Rights Act 1998 is likely to come into force early year next year. It unquestionably has the potential for being one of the most fundamental constitutional enactments since the Bill of Rights over 300 years ago. While so much constitutional change in the United Kingdom has been achieved without resort to legislation, this is a deliberate part of a programme of constitutional change by legislation. The legislation has to be seen in the context of the government's wider programme of constitutional reform: the reform of the House of Lords, the promised Freedom of Information Act, devolution to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and elected mayors. Any evaluation of a change in the way in which the constitution is perceived and imagined in the United Kingdom cannot ignore the interrelationship of these reforms. The scope of this collection of essays is, however, narrower. It is to consider what changes have brought about this particular constitutional reform and its potential for creating a 'human rights culture'.     

Political Identity,Public Memory and Urban Space: A Case Study of Parcul Carol I,Bucharest from 1906 to the Present

This article analyses the inter-relationship between political identity, public memory and urban space in South-east Europe through a case study of Parcul Carol I (Carol I Park) in Bucharest, Romania from 1906 to the present. The article analyses how the urban cultural landscape has been reshaped to support the political ambitions of three successive regimes—Romania as a kingdom and liberal constitutional monarchy (1881–1938); state-socialist Romania (1947–1989); and the post-socialist Romanian state from 1989. The article highlights complex continuity from the state-socialist period under post-socialism, rather than destruction of the landscape of state-socialism, combined with the return of pre-socialist landscape elements. The article argues for the need for studies of the fate of state-socialist urban landscapes under post-socialism which consider the complexities introduced by the persistence of landscape elements from the pre-socialist and state-socialist periods and their combination with pre-socialist and post-socialist landscapes to produce hybrid memory-scapes and spaces of the nation.     

Scavenger Species-typical Alteration to Bone: Using Bite Mark Dimensions to Identify Scavengers

Scavenger-induced alteration to bone occurs while scavengers access soft tissue and during the scattering and re-scavenging of skeletal remains. Using bite mark, dimensional data to assist in the more accurate identification of a scavenger can improve interpretations of trauma and enhance search and recovery methods. This study analyzed bite marks produced on both dry and fresh surface deposited remains by wild and captive red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and Eurasian badger (Meles meles), as well as domestic dog (Canis familiaris). The bite marks produced by foxes were distinguishable from those made by badgers and dogs based on ranges of mean length and breadth of pits. The dimensional data of bite marks produced by badgers and dogs were less discernible. Bone modifications vary due to a variety of factors which must be considered, such as scavenger species-typical scavenging behavior, scavenger species' dentition, condition and deposition of remains, and environmental factors.     

The Participedia Project: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

Participedia is an open-source, participatory knowledge tool that responds to a new global phenomenon: the rapid development of experiments in new forms of participatory politics and governance around the world. The experiments are diverse and widespread, from the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly in Canada and the Oregon Citizens' Initiative in the United States to Participatory Budgeting in Brazil, deliberative forums in China, Panchayati Raj reforms in India, and citizen technology assessment in Denmark. Our knowledge of this rapidly expanding universe is shallow. The authors of this article, together with several others, have created the Participedia to respond to this deficit in knowledge. This article documents the development of the Participedia project to date. Participedia aims to be useful to scholars (and practitioners) as an open-source, real-time, cumulative qualitative and quantitative data repository about participatory and deliberative governance experiences. We believe that Participedia is the first effort in the social sciences to build a large data set through a method that is both crowd-sourced and structured to produce good quality, comparable information.

[Editor's Note: The authors of this article are two of the co-founders of Participedia.]