Sex-Positive Feminism’s Values in Search of the Law of Pleasure

Author(s):  
Susan Frelich Appleton

In challenging traditional stereotypes of female sexualities centered on passivity, subordination, harm, and repronormativity, proponents of sex-positive feminism criticize legal feminism generally for undervaluing women’s pleasure, which they celebrate. Yet these proponents often struggle with charting a supportive and affirmative course for law and legal institutions, which have long fostered sex negativity. Part I of this article identifies sex positivity as a thread that runs through multiple feminisms and that offers a potential answer to criticisms and problems. Along the way, this part demonstrates the importance of power and power disparities in sex-positive feminism and of the role of gender. Part II turns to the place of law and legal institutions in sex-positive feminism, juxtaposing prevailing critiques of law’s sex negativity with promising opportunities for change. Part III continues on this note of optimism, consulting popular culture for possibilities to support a more fully developed sex-positive and feminist legal regime.

Daedalus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 146 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Popova

In Putin's Russia, the regime uses the law and legal institutions to fulfill political goals, to communicate them to society, and to manage the authoritarian coalition that helps the president govern. As a result, the law is highly consequential and important, but its use tends to be arbitrary, expedient, and instrumental, rather than predictable and principled. Can we expect any major shifts in the role of law and the courts over the next ten years? Russia's legal regime is unlikely to undergo major evolutionary change and may outlive Putin's tenure: both foreign and domestic pressures for change toward constitutionalism are limited. If a positive shift were to take place, Russia would inch toward authoritarian constitutionalism. But negative change is also possible. If Putin's regime weakens, the politicized use of the courts against both dissidents and political competitors within the authoritarian coalition will increase.


2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-253
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Stefanowicz

This article undertakes to show the way that has led to the statutory decriminalization of euthanasia-related murder and assisted suicide in the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It presents the evolution of the views held by Dutch society on the euthanasia related practice, in the consequence of which death on demand has become legal after less than thirty years. Due attention is paid to the role of organs of public authority in these changes, with a particular emphasis put on the role of the Dutch Parliament – the States General. Because of scarcity of space and limited length of the article, the change in the attitudes toward euthanasia, which has taken place in the Netherlands, is presented in a synthetic way – from the first discussions on admissibility of a euthanasia-related murder carried out in the 1970s, through the practice of killing patients at their request, which was against the law at that time, but with years began more and more acceptable, up to the statutory decriminalization of euthanasia by the Dutch Parliament, made with the support of the majority of society.


Author(s):  
Julia S. Kharitonova ◽  
◽  
Larisa V. Sannikova ◽  

Nowadays, the law is being transformed as a regulator of relations. The idea of strengthe-ning the regulatory role of technologies in the field of streamlining public relations is making much headway in the world. This trend is most pronounced in the area of regulation of private relations. The way of such access to the market as crowdfunding is becoming increasingly widespread. The issuing of the so-called secured tokens is becoming popular for both small businesses and private investors. The trust in new ways of attracting investments is condi-tioned by the applied technology - the use of blockchain as a decentralized transparent data-base management system. Under these conditions, there is such a phenomenon as the democ-ratization of property relations. Every individual receives unlimited opportunities to invest via technologies. Thus, legal scholars all over the world face the question about the role of the law and law in these relations? We believe that we are dealing with such a worldwide trend of regulating public relations as the socialization of the law. Specific examples of issuing tokens in Russia and abroad show the main global trends in the transformation of private law. The platformization of economics leads to the tokenization and democratization of property relations. In this aspect, the aim of lawyers should be to create a comfortable legal environment for the implementation of projects aimed at democratizing property relations in Russia. The socialization of private law is aimed at achieving social jus-tice and is manifested in the creation of mechanisms to protect the rights of the weak party and rules to protect private investors. Globalization requires the study of both Russian and foreign law. To confirm their hypothesis, the authors conducted a detailed analysis of the legislation of Russia, Europe and the United States to identify the norms allowing to see the process of socialization of law in the above field. The generalization of Russian and foreign experience showed that when searching for proper legal regulation, the states elect one of the policies. In some countries, direct regulation of ICOs and related emission relations are being created, in others, it is about the extension of the existing legislation to a new changing tokenization relationship. The European Union countries are seeking to develop common rules to create a regulatory environment to attract investors to the crypto industry and protect them. Asian countries are predominantly developing national legislation in isolation from one another, but most of them are following a unified course to encourage investment in crypto assets while introducing strict rules against fraud on financial markets. The emphasis on the protection of the rights of investors or shareholders, token holders by setting a framework, including private law mechanisms, can be called common to all approaches. This is the aim of private law on the way to social justice.


2020 ◽  
pp. 88-124
Author(s):  
Arzoo Osanloo

This chapter studies the operations of the Iranian criminal law and analyzes how the procedural administration of the law animates the shariʻa. Iranian criminal laws provide many avenues for victims to forgo retributive sanctioning. But preserving the right of retribution serves several purposes: maintaining the sovereign's monopoly on legitimate violence, giving victims a sense of power, and halting the cycle of violence. The way Iran achieves this comprises an interesting balancing act between maintaining the monopoly over legitimate violence and granting individual victims the right of retribution, which its leaders believe, through their interpretation of the shariʻa, cannot be appropriated by the sovereign. Since the law categorizes intentional murder as qisas and leaves judges with no discretion in sentencing, the judges may use their considerable influence to pressure the family to forgo retribution. The chapter then considers the role of judges and examines how the laws (substantive and procedural) shape their reasoning and discretion in both sentencing and encouraging forbearance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 367-379
Author(s):  
Charles Fried

Abstract In The Choice Theory of Contracts, Hanoch Dagan and Michael Heller state that by arguing “that autonomy matters centrally to contract,” Contract as Promise makes an “enduring contribution . . . but [its] specific arguments faltered because [they] missed the role of diverse contract types and because [it] grounded contractual freedom in a flawed rights-based view. . .. We can now say all rights-based arguments for contractual autonomy have failed.” The authors conclude that their proposed choice theory “approach returns analysis to the mainstream of twentieth-century liberalism – a tradition concerned with enhancing self-determination that is mostly absent in contract theory today.” Perhaps the signal flaw in Contract as Promise they sought to address was the homogenization of all contract types under a single paradigm. In this Article, I defend the promise principle as the appropriate paradigm for the regime of contract law. Along the way I defend the Kantian account of this subject, while acknowledging that state enforcement necessarily introduces elements — both normative and institutional — for which that paradigm fails adequately to account. Of particular interest and validity is Dagan and Heller’s discussion of contract types, to which the law has always and inevitably recurred. They show how this apparent constraint on contractual freedom actually enhances freedom to contract. I discuss what I have learned from their discussion: that choice like languages, is “lumpy,” so that realistically choices must be made between and framed within available types, off the rack, as it were, and not bespoke on each occasion. I do ask as well how these types come into being mutate, and can be deliberately adapted to changing circumstances.


1992 ◽  
Vol 17 (01) ◽  
pp. 89-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Feldman ◽  
Mark Gould

In a recent issue of this journal (Volume 15, Number 4, Fall 1990), Susan Sterett examined the role of the Law Commission in the development of English administrative law. She suggested that the Commission mimicked a “peak association” and adopted an “idiom of legalism” in order to justify its reform proposals. This comment disagrees with Sterett on three grounds. First, the role and constitutional position of the Commission is far more complex than Sterett suggests, and this affects the way in which the Commission works. Second, judges and academic lawyers were central to the reform of substantive principles of judicial review in the 1960s and 1970s, making it unnecessary for the Law Commission to act in this field. Finally, it is wrong to ignore the fact that much administrative law occurs outside the judicial review procedure.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (12) ◽  
pp. 145-148
Author(s):  
E. S. Orlova

The paper is devoted to the cooperation of international judicial bodies operating based on the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea This cooperation is determined by the Convention, which sets out four procedures for the resolution of international maritime disputes. The relevance of the paper is determined by the important role of international judicial bodies in resolving international maritime disputes by amicable means. The subject of the study is the relationship between international judicial authorities on the interpretation and application of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The purpose of the paper is to determine the rules of law on cooperation of international judicial bodies considering international maritime disputes based on the Convention on the Law of the Sea. The hypothesis of the study is that the cooperation of international judicial bodies operating within the framework of a single legal regime causes competition among the jurisdictions of international judicial bodies and is productive.


Oceánide ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 72-77
Author(s):  
Peter Osterreid

This article investigates the cultural potential of the beach as a concrete place, a meaning-laden space, and finally as a metaphorical setting of idealistic vision. In conjunction with the politically heated dimension of beaches as borders to fugitives, the relevance that the humanities play in society is discussed placing particular emphasis on the role of cultural studies. Quite a number of cultural products both from the canon of high culture and from popular culture reaching wider audiences will be examined in the way they centre on the pivot of the beach. Cultural studies, it will turn out, is able to significantly contribute to discussions on morals and, beyond that, to the question of what attitudes in Western societies can be considered ethically acceptable. Thus, in contrast to many other academic disciplines, cultural studies is closely linked to reality and politics so that it is a discipline away from the ivory tower of academia because it deals with life and, most importantly, can have a practical impact on it.


Author(s):  
Mokal et

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Modular Approach to the insolvency of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs). The Modular Approach shares with standard insolvency regimes the core objectives of preserving and maximizing value in the insolvency estate, ensuring distribution over an appropriate period of time of the highest feasible proportion of that value to those individuals and entities entitled to it, providing due accountability for any wrongdoing connected with the insolvency, and enabling discharge of over-indebted natural persons. The Modular Approach differs from standard processes, however, in the way it pursues these objectives. Its basic assumption is that the parties to an insolvency case are best placed to select the tools appropriate to that case. The role of the legal regime should be to make these tools available to the parties in a maximally flexible way, while creating the correct incentives for their deployment.


2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (5) ◽  
pp. 336-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigi Guiso ◽  
Paola Sapienza ◽  
Luigi Zingales

While both cultural and legal norms (institutions) help foster cooperation, culture is the more primitive of the two and itself sustains formal institutions. Cultural changes are rarer and slower than changes in legal institutions, which makes it difficult to identify the role played by culture. Cultural changes and their effects are easier to identify in simpler, more controlled, environments, such as corporations. Corporate culture, thus, is not only interesting per se, but also as a laboratory to study the role of societal culture and the way it can be changed.


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