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Full-Text Articles in Law
Equality And The Defence Of Provocation: Irreconcilable Differences, Isabel Grant, Debra Parkes
Equality And The Defence Of Provocation: Irreconcilable Differences, Isabel Grant, Debra Parkes
Dalhousie Law Journal
Recent amendments to the defence of provocation have limited access to the defence to those who are provoked by conduct that, if prosecuted, would have been an indictable offence punishable by at least five years imprisonment. The paper argues that these amendments are both over- and under-inclusive and fail to confront the central problem surrounding provocation which is that it privileges loss-of-control rage often in the context of male violence against women or in response to same-sex advances. The paper supports the abolition of the defence of provocation but only if mandatory minimum sentences for murder are abolished providing trial …
Slipping Between Danger, Pleasure And The Law: Thoughts On Three Recent Books Addressing Sexuality., Ummni Khan
Slipping Between Danger, Pleasure And The Law: Thoughts On Three Recent Books Addressing Sexuality., Ummni Khan
Dalhousie Law Journal
Sexuality is slippery. It slips, for example, between pleasure and danger, between surrender and repression, and between force (the kind that turns some of us on) and violence (the kind that terrorizes us). It can be a site of intense oppression and unwanted objectification, and also ofempowerment and affirming desirability. In this review, I address three recent books that reckon with the ambivalence of sexuality in relation to the law and regulatory practices.
Family Violence-Investigating Child Abuse And Learning From British Mistakes, Alastair Bissett-Johnson
Family Violence-Investigating Child Abuse And Learning From British Mistakes, Alastair Bissett-Johnson
Dalhousie Law Journal
It seems appropriate at the onset to set out something of what the disciplines of law, medicine and social work know about family violence and when, during recent years, this knowledge came to the attention of professionals, the public and legislature. We can then, perhaps, judge whether our existing laws, rules of evidence and procedure take this information adequately into account in dealing with cases of violence within the family. Whilst solving these problems takes time, and law often lags behind the behavioural sciences, the question arises whether the lag is too long and whether differences between experts in the …
Nomos And Thanatos (Part B). Feminism As Jurisgenerative Transformation, Or Resistance Through Partial Incorporation?, Richard F. Devlin
Nomos And Thanatos (Part B). Feminism As Jurisgenerative Transformation, Or Resistance Through Partial Incorporation?, Richard F. Devlin
Dalhousie Law Journal
In Part A of this essay, "The Killing Fields", I developed a critique of the disciplinary impulses that underlie modern law and legal theory. Invoking a number of perspectives and a plurality of analyses, I proposed that male-stream legal theory and contemporary law both assume as inevitable, and legitimize as appropriate, the funnelling of violence through law. The problem with a funnel, however, is that it does not curtail or reduce that which is channelled through it. On the contrary, to funnel is to condense and to intensify. Viewed from this perspective, interpreted from the bottom up, law and legal …
Nomos And Thanatos (Part A). The Killing Fields: Modern Law And Legal Theory, Richard F. Devlin
Nomos And Thanatos (Part A). The Killing Fields: Modern Law And Legal Theory, Richard F. Devlin
Dalhousie Law Journal
Law, is so far as it sanctions the coercive power of the state, enables people to do frightening - even deadly - things to each other. Contemporary jurisprudence, the explanatory and justificatory voice of legal practice, fails to interrogate law's interconnection with violence and death and therefore, by a sin of omission, legitimizes humankind's mutual inhumanity. The end result is jurisprudential tolerance of, and acquiescence in, societies underpinned by violence. By identifying the nexus between community (nomos) and death (thanatos), this, admittedly speculative, essay attempts to raise the possibility of a discourse, practice and society that can encourage, reflect and …