Law Commons^™

Book Review: Wilful Blindness By Margaret Heffernan, Brian Martin

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Whistleblowers see a problem and speak out about it. But what about the people who know there's a problem but say nothing? What about those who can't even see there's a problem?

If you're wondering about these questions, get a copy of Margaret Heffernan's book Willful Blindness. She surveys the evidence about how and why people turn away from unwelcome information, often to their own detriment.

Book Review: Nichole Georgeou. Neoliberalism Development And Aid Volunteering, Rowan Cahill

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

As Nichole Georgeou explains at the start of her book, the gestation of this study was her immersion and experiences in the field of aid volunteering in Japan and North Vietnam (pp.xv-xviii). This was during the early 1990s, when she was in her early twenties; they were experiences that left her asking huge moral, ethical, political questions about volunteering.

Book Review: The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing In Early Modern France; And, The Face Of The Earth: Natural Landscapes, Science And Culture, Michael G. Leggett

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Politics, and (therefore) national and personal identity, are at the core of these two publications. The analysis of the remarkable period of European (and therefore world) history during the early modern period of the 15th and 16th centuries is discussed in the first book and provides the call for the kind of topographic descriptions compiled during the early part of the 21st Century, the topic of the second book. Then as now, proliferation of technology and political change provide the background to these accounts—overtly in the first, occluded in the second.

Collaboration, Circulation And The Question Of Counterfeit In The Book Of Jessica, Michael R. Jacklin

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Suspicion is a requirement of professional reading. As one literary critic explains, reflecting on his own process of becoming a better reader: “I have learned to be more suspicious of narrative, not simply for the sake of suspicion, but because the complexity of what is a text deserves my suspicion. I must be suspicious to be a responsible reader of literature.” There is, then, a tension between a text’s designs to make readers believe and a critic’s need to hold that text at a distance, to question it and to remain suspicious. While this tension between text and reader can …

Book Review: Desmond Manderson: Kangaroo Courts And The Rule Of Law. The Legacy Of Modernism. Routledge, Abingdon 2012., Luis Gomez Romero

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Kangaroo Courts represents the height of the recent work that Desmond Manderson has developed around the nexus between ‘law and literature’ and the rule of law. Manderson’s approach to this matter is unique in taking seriously both literary theory and the aesthetic aspects of literary texts—strange though it may seem, this is an authentic revolution in the field of law and literature. Manderson rightly observes that back to their very origins the discourses constructed around the conjunction of ‘law and literature’ have suffered from two structural weaknesses: first ‘a concentration on substance and plot’ and second ‘a salvific belief in …

Book Review Of D. Cahill, L. Edwards And F. Stilwell (Eds.) (2012) ‘Neoliberalism: Beyond The Free Market, Scott Burrows

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Neoliberalism: Beyond the Free Market comes at a time of major economic crisis. This very timely book addresses the nature of neoliberalism as part of, and a consequence of, the global financial crisis. The book is structured in four parts each exploring neoliberalism from a range of inter-disciplinary perspectives. These include historical institutionalists, regulation theorists, Foucauldians, Marxists, Polanyi-inspired scholars and experts on the history of ideas. These approaches provide a useful contextual framework for understanding the concept of neoliberalism.

Book Review: Classified Woman By Sibel Edmonds, Brian Martin

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

If you have any trust in the US justice system, beware! This book shows such deep-seated dysfunction and corruption that any idea of working within the system for change seems forlorn. There is, though, hope in the end.

Edmonds grew up in Iran and Turkey. Her father, a physician, was outspoken in support of justice and paid the penalty, being arrested and tortured under the regime of the Shah of Iran. Edmonds came to the US, thrilled to finally live in a country where freedom meant something - or so she thought.