Rewriting Roe v. Wade

Presented in this essay are suggestions for rewriting Roe vs. Wade, the case that resulted in the establishment of a constitutional right to abortion. Essentially, the argument is 1 of equal protection. It is suggested that abortion be viewed as presenting a problem that might be termed "the law of samaritanism" -- the law regarding obligations imposed on certain individuals to provide assistance to others. In American law it is a deeply rooted principle that an individual is ordinarily not required to volunteer assistance to another individual who is in danger or in need of aid. The argument presented maintains that if a pregnant woman is required to carry the fetus to term and deliver it, then she is being compelled to be a Good Samaritan. It is argued further that if the generally limited scope of obligations of samaritanism under current law are considered, and the special nature of the burdens imposed on pregnant women by laws forbidding abortion are also considered, the obvious conclusion is that the equal protection clause forbids imposition of these burdens on pregnant women. The argument is developed in a lengthy form and calls for an extended discussion of the law of samaritanism. The uniqueness of the abortion case also creates problems as the equal protection argument is approached, and an approach to equal protection questions is sketched.     

Religion,Same-Sex Desire,and the Imagined Geographies of Empire: the case of Constance Maynard (1849–1935)

Although a devout Evangelical, living in an era that largely predated the dissemination of sexological discourses of female same-sex desire, Constance Maynard (1849–1935), the prominent Victorian educational reformer, pursued a series of same-sex relationships. This essay focuses on Maynard's relationship with the Anglo-Irish Marion Wakefield (1876–1956), exploring the role of Maynard's erotic imagination in the constitution, contestation, and consolidation of the imagined geographies of imperialist discourse. Maynard's erotic positioning of her lover in diverse imperial landscapes reveals the ostensibly ‘private’ discourses of the erotic imagination to be profoundly implicated in the ‘public’ discourses of empire. At the same time, the domestic settings in which these landscapes were imagined and in which the women's illicit desires were enacted, pose a challenge to the gendered spatial dichotomies—private/public, domestic/imperial, and home/away—of both imperialist discourse and the historiography of empire.     

Making the Invisible Visible: Disability Inclusive Development in Solomon Islands

International and national level disability inclusive discourse, policy and strategy typically render invisible the institutional structures, political economies and socio-cultural power relations that constitute the lived experience of disability. The lack of robust information on disability extends these theoretical blind spots to the absence of disability in official statistics, political dialogue and social policy. Empirically grounded, inclusive research that recognises disability as embedded in globalised political economies and culturally specific power relations is required to address the theoretical, statistical and programmatic invisibility of disability. Such research will provide a solid knowledge base on which to build effective inclusive interventions.     

Craniocervical injuries in judicial hangings: an anthropologic analysis of six cases

Restoration projects and archaeologic excavations in two Canadian prisons resulted in the recovery of the skeletons of six felons executed by judicial hanging. Damage inflicted by hanging on various skeletal elements was observed. Among the injuries seen were fractures of the hyoid cornua, styloid processes, occipital bones, and cervical vertebral bodies (C2) and transverse processes (C1, C2, C3, and C5). Despite the general uniformity of the hanging technique, which involved a subaural knot, the trauma to the skeletal elements and the cause of death varied among individuals. Although some of this variation was probably due to minor differences in hanging practices, individual anatomic peculiarities of the victims likely also contributed.     

Social and Political Cultural Effects on the Outcomes of Mediation in Militarized Interstate Disputes

The article investigates the relationship between cultural similarities and differences on the part of the representatives of contending states and mediators, and outcomes of mediation efforts in militarized disputes. A distinction is made between social culture, defined primarily in terms of religious identity, and political culture, defined according to the state's political system. Analysis of 752 mediation attempts in militarized disputes occurring between 1945 and 1995 yields support for the hypothesis that mediation is more likely to succeed when the parties are from similar social cultures. The results, however, suggest that the relationship is more complex than that suggested by a simple categorization of states based on Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. We also find that mediation is more likely to succeed when the parties share democratic political cultures, a finding that is consistent with the cultural/normative explanation for the democratic peace.