Utility, Public Rules, and Common-Law Adjudication

A theme running through all of Bentham’s jurisprudential writings is the conflict between the demands for stability and certainty of law and the need for flexibility in adjudication. Although he was keenly aware of the need for fixed rules for social conduct, Bentham regarded the principle of utility as the sovereign rational decision principle. Thus, he sought ways to constrain the decision-making of judges while leaving them room to respond to the constantly varying demands of utility in particular cases. The complex history of the development of Bentham’s theories of law and adjudication is the history of a series of increasingly sophisticated attempts to solve this central problem of utilitarian political and legal theory. This history begins to unfold in Bentham’s early reflections on justice, utility, and common-law adjudication. In these writings, Bentham defined the basic terms of the conflict, surveyed with remarkable insight the issues at stake, and proposed a unique utilitarian solution for his native common-law system. He soon became dissatisfied with this solution and this dissatisfaction set him on a course of increasingly deeper reflections on the nature of law and adjudication that eventuated in a complex and sophisticated jurisprudential theory. However, abandoning his initial solution did not signal that Bentham abandoned the principles underlying his early argument. Rather, he came to see that only a systematic arrangement of comprehensive codes—the “pannomion”—could hope to answer the demands of publicity on the law.

The early argument for prefrontal leucotomy: the collision of frontal lobe theory and psychosurgery at the 1935 International Neurological Congress in London

The pathophysiology of mental illness and its relationship to the frontal lobe were subjects of immense interest in the latter half of the 19th century. Numerous studies emerged during this time on cortical localization and frontal lobe theory, drawing upon various ideas from neurology and psychiatry. Reflecting the intense interest in this region of the brain, the 1935 International Neurological Congress in London hosted a special session on the frontal lobe. Among other presentations, Yale physiologists John Fulton and Carlyle Jacobsen presented a study on frontal lobectomy in primates, and neurologist Richard Brickner presented a case of frontal ablation for olfactory meningioma performed by the Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon Walter Dandy. Both occurrences are said to have influenced Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz (1874–1955) to commence performing leucotomies on patients beginning in late 1935. Here the authors review the relevant events related to frontal lobe theory leading up to the 1935 Neurological Congress as well as the extent of this meeting’s role in the genesis of the modern era of psychosurgery.

‘Every Wife has a Church in her Home’: The Family and the Church in the American ‘Quiverfull’ Movement

‘Quiverfull’ is shorthand for a religious phenomenon that emerged within the networks of the Christian homeschooling movement in America over the past forty years. Quiverfull names a subculture of evangelical Christians whose lived religion includes three central practices: prolific childbirth, homeschooling, and patriarchy. Based upon two years of ethnographic research among Quiverfull families, the following essay explores the interplay between the family and the church within the subculture. Building on an early argument of Colleen McDannell, it is argued that within the context of the Quiverfull subculture and their particular construction of the family, the constitutive practice of homeschooling results in a transformed ecclesiology. The family functions as a ‘mini-church,’ headed by the father and mother who carry out the work of worship, spiritual formation, and evangelism on their own terms through the practice of homeschooling.

Against Parsimony

This chapter takes up several critiques on the early nineteenth-century social and economic order—capitalism—and their interrelations. First, the chapter shows the close relationship and direct contradiction between an early argument in favor of market society and a subsequent principal critique of capitalism. Next, the chapter points to the contradictions between this critique and another diagnosis of the ills from which much of modern capitalist society is said to suffer. And finally the tables are turned on this second critique by yet another set of ideas. In all three cases, the chapter reveals an almost total lack of communication between the conflicting theses.

Going, going, gone: the acquisition of the verb ‘go’

This study investigated different accounts of early argument structure acquisition and verb paradigm building through the detailed examination of the acquisition of the verb Go. Data from 11 children followed longitudinally between the ages of 2;0 and 3;0 were examined. Children's uses of the different forms of Go were compared with respect to syntactic structure and the semantics encoded. The data are compatible with the suggestion that the children were not operating with a single verb representation that differentiated between different forms of Go but rather that their knowledge of the relationship between the different forms of Go varied depending on the structure produced and the meaning encoded. However, a good predictor of the children's use of different forms of Go in particular structures and to express particular meanings was the frequency of use of those structures and meanings with particular forms of Go in the input. The implications of these findings for theories of syntactic category formation and abstract rule-based descriptions of grammar are discussed.