Abused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities, or slaves killed by the state--all are deprived of personhood through legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout ...history, and the law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil order. Examining such troubling cases,The Law Is a White Dogtackles key societal questions: How does the law construct our identities? How do its rules and sanctions make or unmake persons? And how do the supposedly rational claims of the law define marginal entities, both natural and supernatural, including ghosts, dogs, slaves, terrorist suspects, and felons? Reading the language, allusions, and symbols of legal discourse, and bridging distinctions between the human and nonhuman, Colin Dayan looks at how the law disfigures individuals and animals, and how slavery, punishment, and torture create unforeseen effects in our daily lives.
Moving seamlessly across genres and disciplines, Dayan considers legal practices and spiritual beliefs from medieval England, the North American colonies, and the Caribbean that have survived in our legal discourse, and she explores the civil deaths of felons and slaves through lawful repression. Tracing the legacy of slavery in the United States in the structures of the contemporary American prison system and in the administrative detention of ghostly supermax facilities, she also demonstrates how contemporary jurisprudence regarding cruel and unusual punishment prepared the way for abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
Using conventional historical and legal sources to answer unconventional questions,The Law Is a White Dogilluminates stark truths about civil society's ability to marginalize, exclude, and dehumanize.
The present paper examines Human Rights in the light of western and Islamic thought. Western concepts; particularly the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is analyzed in comparison with Islamic ...perspective. It is done by examining the historical documents of west and religious scriptures of Islam. The aim of the paper is to highlight the relevance and importance of human rights in the contemporary global society
Republic Act 9710, or the Magna Carta of Women (MCW), is considered the Philippine version or national law translation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against ...Women (CEDAW). Using the concept of impact translation as a framework and the Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) approach, this article examines the MCW and the minutes of committee meetings, particularly the bicameral conference committee meeting where lawmakers agreed on the finalized version of the bill. It applies the concept of gender relationality in examining how legislators negotiated the provisions of the MCW, particularly those on reproductive health and the definition of gender. The analysis shows that these provisions challenged Catholic doctrines specifically on gender, childbearing, and pre-marital sexual relations. It argues that the Catholic conception of gender norms and women's role in society shaped the law's final version, disregarding the CEDAW Committee recommendations on abortion. Findings suggest that the legislators' fear that the law's ratification would serve as an opening for the legalization of abortion led to a weakened version of the law, particularly the section on women's reproductive health.
In interpreting the feudal contract between kings and nobles in medieval Western Europe, Western historians have tended to elaborate on its interaction, equivalence, and even equality, with an ...emphasis on the resulting restrictions on the king's authority. However, this was not the case in England during this period. After the Norman Conquest, "imported feudalism" became a strong support for the English monarchy. On this basis, the feudal contract between kings and nobles evolved from an oral to a textual contract and from "personal commitment" to "collective negotiation," in a process strongly marked by the coercion and inequality bestowed on such contracts by hierarchical feudal roles. In the course of this process, the English kings ceaselessly consolidated their power by breaking down the feudal customs reflected in agreements between the two sides. Although the Magna Carta, as a text-based feudal contract, made explicit provision for feudal customs, it failed to effectively constrain royal power. History shows that if we seek to elaborate on the reciprocity and even equality of the feudal contract from the perspective of modern social contract theory and thus exaggerate the nobles' right to resist the king, we will inevitably construct a mythical "feudal contract determinism."
BETWEEN SOVEREIGN AND SUBJECT McLean, Janet
The University of Toronto law journal,
11/2020, Letnik:
70, Številka:
Supp_02
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Drawing on the work of Jean Bodin, this article seeks to re-establish the central place of the official in constitutional thought and thus to constitutionally ground administrative law. It argues ...that the official not only needs to be responsive to the sovereign but also, being a creature of law, is subject to fundamental legal side constraints and additionally has a critical constitutional duty to remonstrate against unjust law. In this way, the official moderates between the sovereign and the subject and militates against direct rule which leads to tyranny.
The Allure of Legal Locales Ziolkowski, Theodore
Law and literature,
01/2022, Letnik:
34, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This essay amounts to a tour through major locales associated with the development of law, from Hammurabi's Babylon and Moses' Mount Sinai to Philadelphia's Independence Hall, by way of Greece ...(Gortyn), Rome, Iceland (Thingvellir), Germany (Burg Falkenstein), and England (Runnymede). It exemplifies the point that law is not simply a written document but a living entity inspired by time and place.
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