scholarly journals Recommissioning Law Reform

1997 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 831 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roderick A. MacDonald

This article offers a critical analysis of expert Law Reform Commissions in Canada. The author traces the history of the idea of institutional law reform from its intellectual roots early in the twentieth century through its apotheosis in the 1960s and 1970s to its modern decline, which the author attributes to shifting cultural tendencies creating scepticism as to the value of law reform. The author argues for a reconceptualization of expert Law Reform Commissions, and his analysis proceeds in three stages. First, the author examines the concepts of law which are promoted by law reform and concludes that the widespread belief that explicit, official law (state legislation) is the superior juridical form is in fact erroneous. The author argues that formal legislation is not the only form of law, but in fact everyday practices (including non-linguistic ones) also constitute part of legal normativity. Next, the author contends that law reform is not the exclusive domain of the law reform commissioner, but in fact is carried out by judges, lawyers and all citizens every day simply by the performance of their daily activities. Finally, the author argues that in order to maintain their utility Law Reform Commissions must be willing to reimagine themselves. They must be willing to reduce staff and work with external personnel, they must reject narrow instrumentalist processes and focus on issues of broader relevance, and they must conceive of research projects not directly related to doctrinal categories of law and which are intended to create a product digestible by the entire population. The author concludes by arguing that, while there is a future for expert Law Reform Commissions in Canada, they must be willing to recommission themselves with a new focus.

Transfers ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 24-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franziska Torma

This article deals with the history of underwater film and the role that increased mobility plays in the exploration of nature. Drawing on research on the exploration of the ocean, it analyzes the production of popular images of the sea. The entry of humans into the depths of the oceans in the twentieth century did not revitalize myths of mermaids but rather retold oceanic myths in a modern fashion. Three stages stand out in this evolution of diving mobility. In the 1920s and 1930s, scenes of divers walking under water were the dominant motif. From the 1940s to the 1960s, use of autonomous diving equipment led to a modern incarnation of the “mermen“ myth. From the 1950s to the 1970s, cinematic technology was able to create visions of entire oceanic ecosystems. Underwater films contributed to the period of machine-age exploration in a very particular way: they made virtual voyages of the ocean possible and thus helped to shape the current understanding of the oceans as part of Planet Earth.


2003 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Connah ◽  
S.G.H. Daniels

New archaeological research in Borno by the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has included the analysis of pottery excavated from several sites during the 1990s. This important investigation made us search through our old files for a statistical analysis of pottery from the same region, which although completed in 1981 was never published. The material came from approximately one hundred surface collections and seven excavated sites, spread over a wide area, and resulted from fieldwork in the 1960s and 1970s. Although old, the analysis remains relevant because it provides a broad geographical context for the more recent work, as well as a large body of independent data with which the new findings can be compared. It also indicates variations in both time and space that have implications for the human history of the area, hinting at the ongoing potential of broadscale pottery analysis in this part of West Africa and having wider implications of relevance to the study of archaeological pottery elsewhere.


Daedalus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
Linda K. Kerber

The old law of domestic relations and the system known as coverture have shaped marriage practices in the United States and have limited women's membership in the constitutional community. This system of law predates the Revolution, but it lingers in U.S. legal tradition even today. After describing coverture and the old law of domestic relations, this essay considers how the received narrative of women's place in U.S. history often obscures the story of women's and men's efforts to overthrow this oppressive regime, and also the story of the continuing efforts of men and some women to stabilize and protect it. The essay also questions the paradoxes built into American law: for example, how do we reconcile the strictures of coverture with the founders' care in defining rights-holders as “persons” rather than “men”? Citing a number of court cases from the early days of the republic to the present, the essay describes the 1960s and 1970s shift in legal interpretation of women's rights and obligations. However, recent developments – in abortion laws, for example – invite inquiry as to how full the change is that we have accomplished. The history of coverture and the way it affects legal, political, and cultural practice today is another American narrative that needs to be better understood.


2006 ◽  
pp. 89-96
Author(s):  
Ewa Sławkowa

The article presents a lexical and semantic study of the discourse, one of the most widespread terms of modern human sciences. We begin with etymology, and then demonstrate various stages of the development of the meaning of the term in the history of Polish. The lexem “discourse”, well established in the linguistic tradition of Polish, has undergone a characteristic evolution: first, a borrowing from Latin (discurere – “go in diverse directions”), it then became popular in the 16th through 18th centuries as a rhetorically marked Polish (particularly with the view of political speeches and sermons) to signal a kind of discussion and logical exposition of argumentation. Recent contemporary Polish gives this term a slightly archaic and bookish sense. At the same time, however, “discourse” has become a strictly scientific, scholarly term which carved for itself a special discipline of research (discourse studies). In the 1960s and 1970s the work of such linguists as Emile Benveniste or Roman Jakobsen helped to shape the meaning of discourse as a process of speaking, an interactive and dialogic communicative behaviour which sees language as conditioned by diverse social practices and/or ideologies (e.g. historical, scholarly, or feminist discourse).


2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-70
Author(s):  
Steffi Marung

AbstractIn this article the Soviet-African Modern is presented through an intellectual history of exchanges in a triangular geography, outspreading from Moscow to Paris to Port of Spain and Accra. In this geography, postcolonial conditions in Eastern Europe and Africa became interconnected. This shared postcolonial space extended from the Soviet South to Africa. The glue for the transregional imagination was an engagement with the topos of backwardness. For many of the participants in the debate, the Soviet past was the African present. Focusing on the 1960s and 1970s, three connected perspectives on the relationship between Soviet and African paths to modernity are presented: First, Soviet and Russian scholars interpreting the domestic (post)colonial condition; second, African academics revisiting the Soviet Union as a model for development; and finally, transatlantic intellectuals connecting postcolonial narratives with socialist ones. Drawing on Russian archives, the article furthermore demonstrates that Soviet repositories hold complementary records for African histories.


Author(s):  
Mary J. Henold

In this chapter, the history of the National Council of Catholic Women in the 1960s and 1970s – the years during and following Vatican II – is reassessed. The NCCW has been commonly perceived as a powerful anti-feminist organization for Catholic laywomen that was controlled by the Catholic hierarchy, but its archives reveal a sustained effort to engage with feminist ideas after the Second Vatican Council. Although most of the NCCW’s leadership did not self-identify as feminist, the group espoused many feminist beliefs, particularly about women’s leadership, opportunity, challenging ideas about women’s vocation, and women’s right to participate fully in the life of the Catholic church. The NCCW, under the leadership of Margaret Mealey, developed new organizational structures, educational programs, and publications to educate their membership about changing gender roles and the need to press the church for greater inclusion. Comparison to the international organization the World Union of Catholic Women’s Organizations (WUCWO), reveals the limitations of their feminism, however. Whereas WUCWO was willing to openly embrace feminism and feminist activism, NCCW was divided and preferred not to self-identify as feminist.


Author(s):  
Christopher T. Keaveney

Chapter 3 examines the long history of baseball films in Japan, a tradition nearly as old as the history of Japanese cinema itself. After a brief survey of the early history of cinema in Japan, a tradition whose history parallels that of the game of baseball chronologically, the study focuses on early shomingeki films and explores how baseball became an important marker of domesticity and middle class respectability in this genre of film in the 1930s. The chapter then examines several pivotal films in the postwar era, examining how baseball was used alternately to perpetuate a national hero in Suzuki Hideo’s Immortal Pitcher (1955) or to chart the corruption and greed surrounding professional baseball as in Kobayashi Masaki’s I Will Buy You (1956). In the 1960s and 1970s, as young filmmakers arose to challenge the dominance of the great postwar filmmakers and to produce often avant-garde and politically charged films that reflected an international challenge to the hegemony of Hollywood films, the baseball film was again adopted as a means to offer that challenge. Ōshima Nagisa’s Ceremonies, in a film that contests the very concept of the baseball film, uses baseball as a metaphor for the Japan’s abandonment of its citizens during the war. The recent splatter comedy baseball films of Yamaguchi Yūdai likewise play with the familiar tropes of Japanese baseball and of the baseball hero as antihero in problematizing the very concept of the baseball film.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 638-642
Author(s):  
Jesse Olszynko-Gryn

AbstractThis essay uses Predictor, the first home pregnancy test, to reexamine the doctor-patient relationship in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, a tumultuous period associated with permissiveness, women's liberation, and the erosion of medical authority. It shows how the rise of self-testing contributed to a realignment of the power dynamics among women, doctors, and pharmacists. It argues that the humble home pregnancy test kit merits a place—alongside the birth control pill and abortion law reform—in histories of health consumerism and reproductive choice in the twentieth century.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-81
Author(s):  
Etienne Morales

This article focuses on the transformation of the carrier Cubana de aviación before and after the 1959 Cuban revolution. By observing Cubana's management, labour force, equipment, international passenger and freight traffic, this article aims to outline an international history of this Latin American flag carrier. The touristic air relationships between the American continent and Spain that could be observed in the 1950s were substituted – in the 1960s and 1970s – by a web of political “líneas de la amistad” [Friendship Flights] with Prague, Santiago de Chile, East Berlin, Lima, Luanda, Managua, Tripoli and Bagdad. This three-decade period allows us to interrogate breaks and continuities in the Cuban airline travel sector and to challenge the traditional interpretations of Cuban history. This work is based on diplomatic and corporative archives from Cuba, United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain and France and the aeronautical international press.


2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 453-475 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID M. CRAIG

ABSTRACTRecent claims about the convergence in methodology between ‘high politics’ and the ‘new political history’ remain unclear. The first part of this review examines two deeply entrenched misunderstandings of key works of high politics from the 1960s and 1970s, namely that they proposed elitist arguments about the ‘closed’ nature of the political world, and reductive arguments about the irrelevance of ‘ideas’ to political behaviour. The second part traces the intellectual ancestry of Maurice Cowling's thinking about politics, and places it within an interpretative tradition of social science. The formative influences of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott are examined, and Mark Bevir's Logic of the history of ideas is used to highlight how Cowling's approach can be aligned with ‘new political history’.


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