Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Law

Recognizing Victimhood, Christine Wilke Jan 2006

Recognizing Victimhood, Christine Wilke

Studio for Law and Culture

The category of victimhood resonates deeply with many contemporary struggles for recognition without, however, receiving similar attention by political theories of recognition. Many “struggles for recognition” are fought with explicit reference to massive injustice that have ceased without having been publicly recognized as injustices. The state responses to claims for the recognition of victimhood mirror, I will argue, the state’s dominant conceptions of justice and injustice. In many cases, the state affirms its conceptions of injustice and moral innocence through the selective recognition of victims. For example, the U.S. government has granted Japanese-Americans interned during the Second World War an …


Healing The Bishop: Consent And The Legal Erasure Of Colonial History, Jennifer Anne Hamilton Jan 2006

Healing The Bishop: Consent And The Legal Erasure Of Colonial History, Jennifer Anne Hamilton

Studio for Law and Culture

During the summer of 1998, Hubert O’Connor, a white Catholic bishop and former Indian residential school principal in British Columbia, participated in what a local magazine termed “a centuries-old native ceremony”: an indigenous healing circle. In 1991, O’Connor was indicted on criminal charges for sexual offences he had allegedly committed some thirty years earlier against five indigenous women, all of whom were his former students and/or employees. While O’Connor acknowledged having sexual relations with these women, he denied having committed any illegal acts, maintaining that these relationships had been consensual. While the trial court originally convicted O’Connor of rape and …


Origins Of The Asymmetric Society: Freedom Of Incorporation In The Early United States And Canada, Jason Kaufman Jan 2006

Origins Of The Asymmetric Society: Freedom Of Incorporation In The Early United States And Canada, Jason Kaufman

Studio for Law and Culture

This article explores the origins of a phenomenon of lasting and profound impact on American society: the private business corporation. Business is only part of our concern here, however. Seen in comparative-historical terms, the modern private corporation was born in colonial (i.e. pre-Revolutionary) America. Surprisingly, this occurred not only because of the business needs of colonial Americans but also as a result of their own struggles for political autonomy. More specifically, the post-Revolutionary doctrine of freedom of incorporation first emerged in states that were originally chartered as private corporations. These “corporate colonies’” experienced repeated conflict with the Crown over their …


Equality With A Vengeance – Women Conscientious Objectors In Pursuit Of A "Voice" And Substantive Gender Equality, Noya Rimalt Jan 2006

Equality With A Vengeance – Women Conscientious Objectors In Pursuit Of A "Voice" And Substantive Gender Equality, Noya Rimalt

Studio for Law and Culture

This article examines the story of female draft resistors in Israel. The story serves as a case study that can provide important insights into the inherent constraints of contemporary legal discourse in promoting substantive gender equality and into the relationship between specific legal arrangements and the invisibility of women in the public sphere. This case study also sheds a more complex light on the nature of separate legal arrangements for women, and raises important questions about the appropriate feminist agenda for social and legal change.


“The Inalienable Rights Of The Beasts”: Organized Animal Protection And The Language Of Rights In America, 1865-1900, Susan Pearson Jan 2006

“The Inalienable Rights Of The Beasts”: Organized Animal Protection And The Language Of Rights In America, 1865-1900, Susan Pearson

Studio for Law and Culture

Contemporary animal rights activists and legal scholars routinely charge that state animal protection statutes were enacted, not to serve the interests of animals, but rather to serve the interests of human beings in preventing immoral behavior. In this telling, laws preventing cruelty to animals are neither based on, nor do they establish, anything like rights for animals. Their raison d’etre, rather, is social control of human actions, and their function is to efficiently regulate the use of property in animals. The (critical) contemporary interpretation of the intent and function of animal cruelty laws is based on the accretion of …


Paradoxes Of Constitutional Democracy, Kevin Olson Jan 2006

Paradoxes Of Constitutional Democracy, Kevin Olson

Studio for Law and Culture

Drawing on the work of Frank Michelman and Jürgen Habermas, I outline two interconnected paradoxes of constitutional democracy. The paradox of the founding prevents a purely democratic constitution from being founded, because the procedures needed to secure its legitimacy cannot be spontaneously self-generated. It displays an infinite regression of procedures presupposing procedures. The paradox of dynamic indeterminacy heads off any attempt to resolve this problem through constitutional amendment. It shows that a developing constitution needs some standard to guide it towards legitimacy. Without such a standard, constitutional reform will be aimlessly indeterminate. After rejecting proposed solutions to these paradoxes based …


Interrogating Torture And Finding Race, Ayanna Thompson Jan 2006

Interrogating Torture And Finding Race, Ayanna Thompson

Studio for Law and Culture

Antonin Artaud’s second manifesto for the Theatre of Cruelty cries out for a theatre that will depict “great social upheavals” and “conflicts between peoples and races.” Opposed to “disinterested” theatre, Artaud designed the Theatre of Cruelty to depict and affect not only the “tortured victims,” but also the “executioner-tormentor himself.” Artaud viewed both as trapped by “a kind of higher determinism” which he sought to alter through the Theatre of Cruelty (102). To usher in this new theatrical tradition, Artaud declared that the “first spectacle of the Theatre of Cruelty will be entitled: The Conquest of Mexico” (126). Explaining …