Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Encouraging Victims: Responding To A Recent Study Of Battered Women Who Commit Crimes, Carol E. Jordan

Carol E. Jordan

Over many decades, domestic violence statistics have consistently revealed that women from a wide variety of backgrounds are victimized, though the rate of victimization varies depending on a woman’s particular characteristics. Despite this consistency, past and present approaches to domestic violence have failed to attend to the diverse realities of victims. Advocates and researchers first devoted their efforts toward conveying the message that while any woman could potentially become a victim of domestic violence, no woman should become a victim. They then focused on creating laws and policies granting victims greater access to the legal system and making the justice …

Legal Anthropology: An Introduction, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION offers an initial overview of the challenging debates surrounding the cross-cultural analysis of legal systems. Equal parts review and criticism, the author outlines the historical landmarks in the development of the discipline, identifying both strengths and weaknesses of each stage and contribution. LEGAL ANTHROPOLOGY suggests that future progress can be made by treating as the distinguishing feature of law the perceived fairness of structural inequalities of social systems, rather than the traditional emphasis upon sanction or dispute resolution.

Prolegomenon To A Fairness-Centered Anthropology Of Law, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

Legal anthropology, which began with Malinowski’s holistic reflections on law, has today drifted toward an emphasis on the study of dispute resolution. Part I outlines the three historical phases of this development—Holism, Realism, and Processualism—and identifies two shortcomings of viewing the dispute as the central problem for legal anthropology: (1) the collapse of law into dispute analyses has not been, and perhaps cannot be, fully theorized; and (2) the most pressing of current problems, such as human rights and intellectual property issues, cannot be reduced without distortion to the disputing paradigm. Part II offers fairness as an alternative organizing concept …

"Anticipatory Self-Defense" And Other Stories, Jeanne M. Woods, James M. Donovan

James M. Donovan

We argue that the specious justification for the invasion of Iraq -- a war based on a pretext of anticipatory self-defense -- necessarily exacerbates the inherent tendency of war to dehumanize and humiliate the enemy. This tendency is particularly evident in the variant of anticipatory self-defense that we have denominated as "capacity preemption," a type of claim that by definition depends upon characterizations of the opponent as utterly inhuman.

The Bush Doctrine tells a timeless story of self-defense. This story is shaped by an identifiable and predictable narrative structure, one that is able to transform the morally outrageous -- an …