SUPERVISING VISITS BETWEEN PARENT AND CHILD

Serious conflicts can arise when contacts between a child and a parent require supervision unless specific guidelines and objectives are clarified for all involved parties. This article discusses supervision objectives, the importance of maintaining the parent-child relationship, instances warranting recommendation for no parental contact, qualifications of the supervisor, and practical guidelines for supervision.     

The Frontiers of Legal Analysis: Reframing the Transition in Northern Ireland

British constitutional legal discourse is structurally limited in its capacity to capture the complexity of the Good Friday Agreement. Rather than assessing the Agreement in narrow devolutionary terms, it should be seen as a hybrid domestic and international law instrument, making an important contribution to accepted international law norms in relation to self-determination. The Agreement transforms and partly transcends the Northern Ireland conflict by substituting political contestation for violent conflict, and by defining the modalities of conducting that contestation. This analysis complements classical international law perspectives, and opens up the application of legal discourses associated with 'transitional justice' to the legal and political transformation in Northern Ireland. These discourses focus on the problem of reconciling the demands of peace with the imperatives of justice. The Agreement sits squarely in this terrain with its provisions on 'dealing with the past' and 'institutional legacies'. The insights gained here challenge orthodox thinking about conflict-management and the ongoing political process.     

Law representing life — Reflections on Darwinian jurisprudence

A living organism is a model of the world in which it lives ... if you present an animal's body, even a new species previously unknown to science, to a knowledgeable zoologist, she should be able to read its body and tell you what kind of environment it inhabited: desert, rain forest, arctic tundra, temperate woodland or coral reef. She should be able to tell you, by reading its teeth and its guts, what it fed on. Flat, millstone teeth indicate that it was a herbivore; sharp, shearing teeth that it was a carnivore. Long intestines with complicated blind alleys indicate that it was a herbivore; short, simple guts suggest a carnivore. By reading the animal's feet, and its eyes and other sense organs, the zoologist should be able to tell how it found its food. By reading its stripes or flashes, its horns, antlers or crests, she should be able to tell something about its social and sex life.¹ My thanks to Bobbi Low who put me on to the step-parenting material, and Richard Dawkins who put me right on the science.