The Symbolic Life of Law: The Instrumental and the Constitutive in Scheingold's The Politics of Rights

Stuart A. Scheingold's, ThePolitics of Rights, has left a considerableimprint on sociolegal scholarship. A centralfigure in the intellectual genealogy ofsociolegal studies, Scheingold has contributedto both instrumental and constitutiveapproaches to the study of law. Informing aninstrumental perspective, Scheingold's focus onlaw's symbolic life provides the foundation forexamining rights discourse and litigation aspolitical resources. Informing a constitutiveoutlook, Scheingold encourages an understandingof how law shapes our imaginations,aspirations, and expectations. After reviewinghis contribution to instrumentalism andconstitutivism, this essay suggests howScheingold offers the grounds for seeing theseoften divergent approaches as complementary.     

‘The beneficent and legal godfather’: a history of the guardianship of unaccompanied immigrant and refugee children in Australia, 1946–1975

Abstract

In Australia in 1946, the Immigration (Guardianship of Children) Act was passed. This Act was intended to support the postwar migration to Australia of British children, unaccompanied by their parents, and provided them a guardian in Australia: the Immigration Minister. This key provision of the Act continues into the present, covering all unaccompanied child migrants, including refugees. Starting with the parliamentary debates which occurred at the formation of the Act in 1946, this article traces a history of the Act until its first High Court challenge in 1975. In doing so, a focus is placed on a series of key questions raised by its production of categories: How does the Act construct ideas of migranthood? What do the discussions it has provoked have to say about notions of parenthood and the ideal family? And, finally, what concepts of the child have been produced through this legislative and legal history? Through an examination of archival materials, parliamentary debates, court records, and newspaper coverage, this article explores the discursive productions of the Act, following the understanding that ideas of the family, of parenthood, of guardianship, of migrant status, and of the child are not natural, but instead are historically created and produced, here through racialized techniques of governmentality.     

Civil liberties and the left

Mzwanele Mayekiso, Township Politics: Civic Struggles for a New South Africa. Monthly Review Press: New York. 1996. pp. 288. (foreword by Mel King)

Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, Edited by Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Modernization and the Production of Power

Kevin A. Yelvington, Producing Power: Ethnicity, Gender, and Class in a Caribbean Workplace (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 286 pp.

Milagros Pena, Theologies and Liberation in Peru: The Role of Ideas in Social Movements (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 222 pp.

Partha Chatterjee (ed), Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 220 pp.

Carol A. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in South Asia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 261 pp.

Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right‐Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States. (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995. pp. 445. $19.95.)     

Medical technology in combatting terrorism

State‐sponsored terrorism is a form of coercion, backed up by the threat and use of violence, to achieve political ends. These terrorist tactics also involve signaling of intentions and responses between the terrorist sponsor and those whom it targets. Accordingly this study examines Iranian state sponsorship of anti‐U.S. terrorism in the period of 1980–1990 as an example of political communication aimed at manipulating U.S. policy through the threat and use of violence. Official Iranian media are quantitatively content‐analyzed to demonstrate their systematic use of threat‐projections as warnings and indications to the U.S. in this period.     

Estrangement and Empowerment in Scheingold's The Political Novel

This essay develops an understated argument in Stuart Scheingold's The Political Novel (2010), namely, how narratives of estrangement serve to empower re‐imagination without reinforcing the false promises of modernism. I argue that Scheingold's earlier work in The Politics of Rights and on cause lawyering provides guidance for understanding the character of empowerment to which Scheingold points in his latest work. In addition, I examine three film narratives that treat the “mournful legacy of the twentieth century”—Pan's Labyrinth, Life Is Beautiful, and Everything Is Illuminated. Emergent in these narratives, I suggest, is a way that storytellers point to empowerment by highlighting the largely overwhelming constraints that limit the agency promised by modernism and the strategic, though contingent, choices characters make to confront and cope with their own estrangement.