‘Good Blokes’ and ‘Bad Mothers’: Media and Legal Discourses of Family Homicide

2022 ◽  
pp. 139-152
Author(s):  
Laura Button
Keyword(s):  
Legal Discourses

Muslim Notables, French Colonial Officials, and the Washers of the Dead

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-33
Author(s):  
Augustin Jomier
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Male Domination ◽  
The Road ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Dead

For many decades, scholars of gender and women’s history in the Middle East and North Africa have challenged prevailing visions of an unchanged patriarchy, showing how patriarchy was transformed in relation to colonialism, and how some women struggled against it. To the contrary, this article aims to challenge our understanding of women’s agency, taking Mzab as a case study. It explores the ways in which women of this Berber speaking region, inhabited by Ibadi Muslims and conquered by the French in 1882, contributed to the colonial reinforcement of male domination. Reading together works of ethnography, colonial administrative files, legal disputes, and Arabic-language newspapers, this article shows that, together with the colonial legal framework, other informal legal discourses and institutions shaped women’s condition. Down the road, forms of patriarchy and notions of gender shifted.

Legal Traditions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Duve
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Practical Importance ◽  
Time History ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Legal Anthropology ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
The Past ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
Legal Regimes

Legal anthropology has to understand and deal with complex and often plural constellations of normative bodies, legal discourses, institutions, and practices. They shape the legal regimes people live in. These legal regimes as well as the ways in which societies operate with legal diversity have developed over time. History has done more than shape the vocabulary and the grammar of each community’s law. The narratives we produce about the past are also used to construct and express individual and social identities. Thus, history and its (re)construction by later generations can impose constraints and limit available options, but also open spaces of negotiation and provide for innovation. Legal regimes of the past are often called ‘legal traditions’. In the last decades, the idea of ‘legal traditions’ has gained considerable practical importance. Especially in former colonial countries, and due to the increasing recognition of the rights of Indigenous Peoples in international and national law, many actors are drawing on history to claim rights and obligations for the present and the future. In a similar manner, some historical legal regimes seem to embody injustice, leading to pleas for the recognition of their unjust character or even for material compensation. The aim of this chapter is to offer some reflections on the concept of ‘legal traditions’ and its role in constructing our identities and shaping our present legal regimes.

Bilingual Heaven: Was There a Distinct Persianate Islam in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire?

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 214-241
Author(s):  
Aslıhan Gürbüzel
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Sacred Text ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
Other World

Abstract What is the language of heaven? Is Arabic the only language allowed in the eternal world of the virtuous, or will Muslims continue to speak their native languages in the other world? While learned scholars debated the language of heaven since the early days of Islam, the question gained renewed vigor in seventeenth century Istanbul against the background of a puritan reform movement which criticized the usage of Persian and the Persianate canon as sacred text. In response, Mevlevī authors argued for the discursive authority of the Persianate mystical canon in Islamic tradition (sunna). Focusing on this debate, this article argues that early modern Ottoman authors recognized non-legal discourses as integral and constitutive parts of the Islamic tradition. By adopting the imagery of bilingual heaven, they conceptualized Islamic tradition as a diverse discursive tradition. Alongside diversity, another important feature of Persianate Islam was a positive propensity towards innovations.

How Trains Became People: Southern Pacific Railroad Co.’s Networked Rhetorical Culture and the Dawn of Corporate Personhood

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 194-213
Author(s):  
Nicholas S. Paliewicz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Corporate Personhood ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Pacific Railroad ◽  
Southern Pacific Railroad

This essay analyzes how a rhetorical culture emerged in which the Supreme Court of the United States assumed corporations were constitutional persons under the Fourteenth Amendment. Approaching rhetorical culture from a networked standpoint, I argue that corporate personhood emerged from Southern Pacific Railroad Co.’s networks and alliances with environmental preservationists, politicians, publics, lawyers, judges, and immigrants in the late 19th century. Contributing to literatures on rhetorical culture and agency, this study shows how Southern Pacific Railroad Co., through networks of influence and force, was a rhetorical subject that shaped a networked rhetorical culture that expanded the boundaries of the Fourteenth Amendment even though the Supreme Court of the United States had not worked out the philosophical underpinnings of corporate personhood. Corporate personhood remains theoretically restrained by legal discourses that reduce subjectivity to a singular, speaking, human subject.

Using the Past and Bridging the Gap: Premodern Islamic Legal Texts in New Media

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 993-1019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahmood Kooria
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Legal Tradition ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Historical Texts ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Audio Video

This article analyses the internal dynamics of online Islamic legal discourses embedded in their offline and multimedia contexts that use of a rich repository of legal texts composed over a period of about a thousand years. Through their vigorous and spirited engagements with these historical texts, contemporary Islamic jurists simultaneously create new digital platforms in mass and social media to disseminate their ideas. In so doing, they perpetuate a long textual legal tradition through hypertext commentaries and super-commentaries. The premodern texts are thus reborn through new forms ofḥāshiyas such as audio commentaries, video commentaries, audio-video commentaries and hypertext commentaries. These new developments from the age of new media contribute to the textuallongue-duréeof Islamic law. Tracking the peregrinations of three Islamic legal texts in the mass media and cyber world, I argue that the dissemination of premodern Islamic legal texts via cyber space has resulted in the “democratization” of a knowledge-system that was previously dominated by trained fuqahā and affiliated institutional structures and has enlivened the traditional school affiliations.

scholarly journals Conceptual Origins of Legal Linguistics

2021 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-56
Author(s):  
Marcus Galdia
Keyword(s):  
State Of The Art ◽  
The State ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Linguistic Knowledge ◽  
Linguistic Complexity ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
The Law ◽  
Problem Awareness

Abstract This essay is a survey of methods applied and topics scrutinized in legal-linguistic studies. It starts with the elucidation of the epistemic interest that led to the emergence and to the subsequent expansion of the mainstream legal-linguistic knowledge that we dispose of today. Thus, the essay focuses upon the development of problem awareness in the emerging legal-linguistic studies as well as upon the results of research that might be perceived as the state of the art in the mainstream legal linguistics. Meanwhile, some methodologically innovative tilts and twists that enrich and inspire contemporary legal linguistics are considered as well. Essentially, this essay traces the conceptual landscape in which the paradigms of legal-linguistic studies came about. This conceptual landscape extends from the research into the isolated words of law and the style used by jurists to the scrutiny of legal texts and legal discourses in all their socio-linguistic complexity. Within this broad frame of reference, many achievements in legal-linguistic studies are mentioned in order to sketch the consequences of processes in which legal-linguistic paradigms take shape. The author concludes upon a vision of legal linguistics called pragmatic legal linguistics as the newest stage in the intellectual enterprise that aims to pierce the language of the law and by so doing to understand law better.

Abandoning the Nationalist Framework

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjell Å Modéer
Keyword(s):  
German Law ◽  
Comparative Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Legal Realism ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
Post War ◽  
Modern Nation State

This chapter is about the relations between the national legal system and the ‘other’—especially from the creation of the modern nation state in the early nineteenth century and up to current times. Comparative law in the twentieth century was dominated by the concept of ‘valid law’, functionalism, legal positivism and legal realism. The parameters of time and space within law were minimalized. The German law emigrés from Nazi Germany to England and the United States played a special role for the relation to comparative law, and several of these scholars played a great role for the post-war development of comparative law. Critical theories and post-colonialism have developed new legal discourses on culture and identity, and have increased interest not only in history but also in differences between legal cultures—and thus an increasing interest in comparative legal history.

Muslim Notables, French Colonial Officials, and the Washers of the Dead

2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-33
Author(s):  
Augustin Jomier
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Arabic Language ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Male Domination ◽  
The Road ◽  
Legal Discourses ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
The Dead

Abstract For many decades, scholars of gender and women's history in the Middle East and North Africa have challenged prevailing visions of an unchanged patriarchy, showing how patriarchy was transformed in relation to colonialism, and how some women struggled against it. To the contrary, this article aims to challenge our understanding of women's agency, taking Mzab as a case study. It explores the ways in which women of this Berber speaking region, inhabited by Ibadi Muslims and conquered by the French in 1882, contributed to the colonial reinforcement of male domination. Reading together works of ethnography, colonial administrative files, legal disputes, and Arabic-language newspapers, this article shows that, together with the colonial legal framework, other informal legal discourses and institutions shaped women's condition. Down the road, forms of patriarchy and notions of gender shifted.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document