`The Capabilities Approach', `The Imaginary Domain', and `Asymmetrical Reciprocity': Feminist Perspectives on Equality and Justice

In this article the author revisits the question of how feminist theory/theories could address questions regarding universalism, sameness, difference, and the quest for justice. She reconsiders the quest for justice and equality for women and the (im) possibilities of a feminist perspective on justice and a feminist `community'. The three feminist theorists that she discusses are Martha Nussbaum, Drucilla Cornell, and Iris Marion Young. Nussbaum is closer to a liberal defense of universal values – Cornell and Young stand critical of liberalism and focus on sublimity, dignity, and asymmetrical reciprocity. The author supports the perspective of the latter two theorists and applies these perspectives to aspects of South African equality jurisprudence. She also considers critically the extent to which the Draft Protocol to the African Charter on Human and People's Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa breaks with liberal universalism and sameness. To the end she supports a notion of` slowing down' in order to protect women's freedom and dignity, to approach each other with wonder and respect. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Finding cover: Legal trauma and how to take care of it

As law originates in violence, it is always haunted by its constitutive trauma. Recourse to law's origin, which is implicitly or explicitly sought in (constitutional) adjudication, thus requires a way to deal with law's trauma. What is needed is a cover, to be provided through (legal) interpretation. Four such interpretive ‘cover up’ operations, all necessarily somewhat duplicitous, are discussed. The first three represent main currents in legal theory. First, the standard legal view, which denies the trauma but relies on traditional authority to cover it. Second, a ‘neurotic’ solution, in which trauma is also denied but nevertheless cover is produced through collective interpretation. In the third, ‘perverse’ solution, trauma is admitted, and even enjoyed; on the other hand, it is denied that cover can be produced by any interpretive authority. The fourth option provides an alternative: recognition of law's trauma, covering it through the collectively shared practice of interpretation. It is shown that an example of such a collective effort can be found in the Dutch practice of gedogen, the deliberate under-enforcement of law, which is capable of creating an ‘informal rule of law’ that deals with intractable social problems more successfully than attempts formally to enforce applicable law. This revised version was published online in November 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The planning of content relevant and context relevant education

This paper dwells on the question of planning education for ten or twenty years hence. First, it deals with the question of career patterns and the importance of allowing more flexibility in the course sequences which individuals undertake at different periods of their life. Then, it discusses the divergence in facts and the dissonance in beliefs which may exist between the planners and students soon to become graduates. It makes a plea for resolving these differences by asking educators to become more content relevant and context relevant. Through this process, education will be enhanced and learning facilitated.     

International disaster identification report. Investigative and dental aspects

This meeting, held in October 1980 in Apeldoorn, Netherlands, was a very serious effort to begin international cooperation in a much needed area: disaster investigation and identification. Under the leadership of Col. Arie van den Bos of the Royal Police of the Netherlands, the work was accomplished with representatives and observers from many major countries represented. Efforts were made to solve the enigma of international cooperation. A plane crash of an airline of a major country in a distant country can be properly investigated only with the cooperation of the carrier and the country in which the tragedy occurred. The International Academy of Legal Medicine and Social Medicine devoted a 3-day program to the study of this problem during their last international meeting in Lyon, France, and it will be discussed further in Vienna in 1982 under the leadership of Prof. Wilhelm Holczabek. The experience of Norwegian investigators is mentioned as an example of the type of problems encountered with foreign nationals involved in a crash in the country, or a disaster involving a ship or a oil platform where foreign nationals are working, or in a tragedy such as the propylene explosion in Tarragona, Spain, which resulted in more than 200 tourists from many countries dying in the fire, many bodies burned beyond recognition.     

Three types of price systems

Economic Change and Restructuring -     

THE STATUTORY CORPORATION—A NOTE ON THE THEORY OF AUTONOMY

Readers of this journal, especially those who watch developments affecting the machinery of government in Canberra, will no doubt have noticed the rehabilitation of the concept of statutory independence—a notion that, in some academic circles, had been virtually written off as having little or no relevance in the real world, where the general tendency has been towards an extension of government control and co-ordination of bureaucratic systems. Although it is much too early to evaluate, with suitable scholarly detachment, the significance of the administrative changes initiated since December, 1972, it seems a safe observation that for a small group of government agencies at least, the Labor Government has committed itself to the idea of independence. This much is clear from its declared aim of giving the Australian Broadcasting Commission more autonomy and the decision, recently announced, to reconstitute the Postmaster-General's Department into two separate statutory corporations.