Sir John Salmond and the Moral Agency of the State

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (4) ◽  
pp. 743
Author(s):  
P G McHugh
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Moral Agency ◽  
Legal History ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
A Site

New Zealand scholars have yet to develop a "tradition" of writing legal history outside the historiographically problematic field of Treaty claims. This essay uses Sir John Salmond as emblematic of the methodological features that such a tradition might carry. Any self-congratulatory and Whiggish vision of a good-hearted people incapable of anything other than a fundamentally decent past – itself a fiction punctured by the Treaty claims processes – should be discarded. Instead the New Zealand constitutional and legal system should be seen as a site of ongoing struggle, reflection and constant engagement amongst a series of actors whose thought – so much as that was articulated – is to be regarded as important as their action. A non-corrupt legal system is not the outcome of a complacent so much as vigilant past. Sir John Salmond's concern with the moral agency of the State not only placed him inside the mainstream of early twentieth century political thought, its "Idealist" thread in particular. It also underpinned his intendancy of the Crown Law Office, as Dr Hickford's subsequent (and important) essay demonstrates.

scholarly journals ‘The Menace of Effeminacy’: Medical and Popular Discussions of Masculinity in Interwar New Zealand, c.1918-1939

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Ailish Wallace-Buckland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Sexual Offenders ◽  
The State ◽  
Male Sexuality ◽  
Great War ◽  
Male Body ◽  
World War One ◽  
Mental Defectives ◽  
The Great War

<p>In January 1932, the Sydney-based lifestyle magazine Health and Physical Culture published an article titled ‘The Menace of Effeminacy’. This article, written by Carl Hertzig, and read by magazine-subscribers across the Tasman, documented anxieties around the state of men and masculinity following the upheaval of the Great War. Touching on topics such as gender, psychology, eugenics, and sexuality this article and its concerns represent those that this thesis explores in order to understand what the ‘fear of effeminacy’ actually meant for New Zealanders during the interwar years (c.1918-1939). This thesis documents and analyses contemporary discussions of male sexuality and masculinity through a series of sources in order to establish the ways in which these concepts were understood in interwar New Zealand. Firstly, it examines some of the key pieces of legislation and reports that demonstrated official approaches, and ways of thinking, towards mental defectives, sexual offenders, and those with war neuroses. It then explores medical journals, and the dissertations of medical students; and finally, it analyses parts of popular print culture in Aotearoa/New Zealand, such as magazines and newspapers, in order to investigate and piece together the landscape in which said anxieties around effeminacy, masculinity, mental stability, and other deviations from the societally prescribed norm met. This thesis approaches these primary sources in such a way that acknowledges the evolutionary framework of understanding that was pervasive in medical circles during this era.  By thus examining the connections between constructions of the male body, homosexuality and effeminacy, late nineteenth to early twentieth century ideas around eugenics, and psychology and psychiatry, this work further uncovers the state of masculinity and male sexuality in New Zealand during the interwar period. This thesis argues that the ‘threat’ to masculinity perceived in a variety of venues was a mixture of anxieties around physical and mental wounds inflicted by the Great War; population concerns exacerbated by the exposure of the health-standards of troops, and worries of how to recover and reconstruct a virile society following four years of strife; concerns at the apparent loosening of sexual mores, and the changing manifestations of both masculinity and femininity; and ever increasing interest in the psychology of self, sexuality, and society. It adds to existing work on post-World War One masculinity by centring New Zealand discussions and understandings in a way that contributes to the broader literature on New Zealand twentieth-century masculinity, psychology and psychiatry, eugenics, and male sexuality.</p>

scholarly journals Discrimination? Protestantism and Jewish Christians in the State of Israel

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gert J Van Klinken
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
State Of Israel ◽  
Jewish Christians

During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jewish mission became an established branch of Protestant mission in general. As the Jewish converts to Protestantism remained fairly few in numbers, these converts were expected to engage in missionary efforts too, among their fellow Jews. One of the results of the ensuing polarization was the exclusion of baptized Jews from the citizenship of the State of Israel, where they were considered traitors by a majority of society. This article argues that programmes for Jewish-Christian dialogue in the State of Israel came under pressure to bar the Jewish Christians from taking part, and explores the question whether the ensuing policies can be ranked as examples of discrimination against this group.

scholarly journals A Legal History of the New Zealand Jury Service - Introduction, Evolution, and Equality?

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 283
Author(s):  
Michèle Powles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Jury Service ◽  
History Of ◽  
Jury System ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Service Introduction

This article traces the development of the New Zealand jury system. Most noteworthy in thisdevelopment has been the lack of controversy the system has created. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, the pursuit of equality in the legal system generally led to debate and reform of juries in relation to representation, race and gender.

Contract

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Gordley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Legal Method ◽  
Legal Problems ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Law

‘Classical’ contract law was built on a substantive premise about contract law and two premises about legal method. The substantive premise was voluntaristic: the business of contract law is to enforce the will or choice of the parties. The first methodological premise was positivistic: the law is found, implicitly or explicitly, in the decisions of common law judges. The second methodological premise was conceptualistic: the law should be stated in general formulas which can be tested by their coherence. Finally, ‘classical’ contract law reflected an attitude about how best to steer a course — as every legal system must — between strict rules and equitable considerations. Since the early twentieth century, classical contract law has been breaking down. Allegiance to its premises has weakened as has the preference for rigor. At the same time, scholars have found classical law to be inconsistent even in its own terms. Nevertheless, much of it has remained in place faute de mieux while contemporary jurists have tried to see what is really at stake in particular legal problems. This article describes their work.

The Discipline of Meter

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meredith Martin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Education ◽  
The State ◽  
Good Citizen ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Educational Theorist ◽  
Public Cultures ◽  
Crucial Part ◽  
Mass Identification

This chapter looks closely at the rise of state-funded English education to uncover the disciplinary role that poetry played. It shows how the naturalization of English “meter” was a crucial part of the English literary curriculum. “Meter” is placed in quotation marks because the “meter” that emerges in the state-funded classroom has little to do with the prosody wars going on outside its walls. Educational theorist Matthew Arnold's cultural metrics, in which poetry by Shakespeare, for instance, will subtly and intimately transform a student into a good citizen, is replaced by a patriotic pedagogy wherein verses written in rousing rhythms are taught as a naturally felt English “beat.” It suggests that poet and educational theorist Henry Newbolt's figure of the “drum” performed a naturalized rhythm that brought England together as a collective. The collective mass identification with (and proliferation of) patriotic verses created an even sharper divide between the high and low, elite and mass, private and public cultures of poetry in the early twentieth century.

An Agitator Abroad

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Clayworth
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Transnational Migration ◽  
The United States ◽  
Class Conflict ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Compulsory Arbitration ◽  
Transnational Network

Patrick Hodgens Hickey, a New Zealander, was a labor activist who introduced American ideas of revolutionary industrial unionism and socialist political action to the country of his birth. Hickey grew up in rural New Zealand at a time of industrial peace under a compulsory arbitration system and initially had little interest in unions or socialism. He learned mining skills while working as an itinerant laborer in the United States, becoming part of a transnational network of mine workers. He was radicalized by his experiences of American class conflict and his involvement with the militant Western Federation of Miners. Returning to New Zealand, he became a leader of a workers’ revolt against the compulsory arbitration system in the period from 1907 through to 1914. Hickey was a key organizer of the union peak body that became the New Zealand Federation of Labour, the “Red Feds.” Following the defeats of the Waihi strike of 1912 and the Great Strike of 1913, Hickey suffered blacklisting. He went to Australia in 1915 to escape the blacklist and the threat of wartime conscription. In Australia he worked as a union activist and anticonscription campaigner. Hickey’s life and career illustrate the transnational migration of workers and their ideas in the early twentieth century.

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