Transforming the legal profession: an interview study of change managers in law

A lively debate progresses about change to the professions, including law, especially change in the form of managerialism. ‘Managerialism’ covers the methods and beliefs of managers within organisations, used to actively influence, evaluate, and ‘market’ professional work. But what about when that managerialism is change itself? How do we understand managerialism-as-change? This paper reports on an interview study with change managers, or ‘transformation leaders’ in the legal profession. Transformation leaders offer rich insights into the dynamics of professional change because they are incontrovertibly change agents. They are also themselves a form of managerial change as a new cadre of managers within the professions; managers with ‘hybrid’ identities whose legitimacy in professional settings is not assured. The findings presented include: the change leaders’ identities; the types of change being introduced; the constraints on and affordances for change in legal practices; and how change leaders secure, and sometimes struggle to secure, the authority needed to implement change. The concluding discussion highlights the study's contributions to our understanding of professional change and managerialism in the legal context – both what changes are being pursued and how they are materialising through certain ‘managerial’ goals, strategies, and the interactions of those with mixed identities and status.

The Ethics of Elie Wiesel`s Storytelling as a New Theoretical Approach in Representing the Holocaust

Grounded on Giorgio Agamben's assertion that once the historical, technical and legal context of the Jewish genocide has been sufficiently clarified, we are facing a serious challenge when we really seek to understand it and becomes more thought-provoking when we try to represent it. The difference between what we know about the Holocaust and how this delicate issue should be represented is facing major challenges in the context of content abundance onboth Holocaust classical analyses or contemporary digital formats. Contemporary society is facing ethical and emotional limitation regarding Holocaust representation. What is the right way to represent the Holocaust after eight decades since the Holocaust took place is one of the relevant questions that arises in this context? How to live, what to do, and how do the consequences of my actions affect society after the Holocaust experience,are some of the questsof Elie Wiesel’s life.The paper will highlight how his storytelling provides some guidelines for shaping a possible good way of representing the Holocaust and what are its resources. It will also illustrate what are the ethical components of his storytellingthat constitute an example of ethical conduct and give some relevant suggestions on how to instrument them in order to place Holocaust representation on a progressive way of reflection.

Contemporary Mainstream Bengali Movies and Societal Perceptions towards Rape: Legal Perspectives

Incidents like the rape of late have been grabbing the spotlight which is one of the most significant challenges in Bangladesh. This paper aims to assess people's perceptions by establishing a link between movies and society. This paper goes on to discuss people's perceptions of rape as well as how rape is depicted in Bengali films. While addressing how these portrayals affect people's perceptions in general, this research will also address whether or not the filmmakers open themselves up to any social or legal responsibilities to society. As a result, this study sought to examine to extend a film could indeed change a viewer’s perceptions and behavior from a socio-legal context. This paper further briefly discusses the existing laws to prevent rape and censorship rules for Bengali movies. The paper will identify the major setbacks in existing legal instruments and possible legal recourses to address the setbacks.

Yoga Spirituality in the Context of US Institutions

This chapter examines yoga as a spiritual and a social practice. It considers three institutional contexts for interpreting yoga spirituality: religion, law, and education. Social institutions such as public schools and courts of law must arbitrate interpretive contests by formulating and applying definitions for the purposes of educational policy and legal precedent. In making such determinations, it would be naive to accept all assertions of identity and meaning as full disclosures. Sometimes the same people describe the same practice as “spiritual” or “secular,” depending upon whether the legal context is First Amendment religious free exercise clause protection or establishment clause restriction. Decisions about how to categorize practices rest in large part on pragmatic concerns. This case study invites scholars of spirituality to pay closer attention to how legal and social contexts shape how people think and talk about practices in relation to the interpretive categories of “spirituality,” “religion,” and “secularity.”

Understanding the Algorithm: Meaning, Socio-Legal Context and Concerns

At present, algorithms are becoming the heart of society by taking control over the decision-making process as societies are increasingly getting digitalised. There is a consistent theme that an unaccountable, black box technology has taken over the stage and is now making decisions for us, with us, and about us. But the contention around public participation in making decisions in science and technology needs to advance to a stage where there is a more direct conversation between the public and those developing the technologies. With the above mentioned conception of moderating emerging technologies’ development, primarily digital technology due to its overreaching effects on humans and what humans interpret it to be. Firstly, the research through a literature survey is aimed to understand the meaning and nuances of the word algorithm. Then the analysis based on case study is focused on the algorithmic questions, such as bias, privacy, design, transparency, and accountability. In a larger context, concerns over jobs, ways of social interactions, etc., had been discussed, since these concerns are the result of the application of algorithms. The analysis of academic literature pointed out the vital facet of multiple understanding of the word algorithm. Further, the research also emphasizes the meaning of philosophy and politics in technology and its non-neutral nature.

Knighthoods and Empty Benches: Wilkie Collins’s Armadale and the Late Victorian Culture Industry

In locating Wilkie Collins’s novel Armadale (1866) in the context of its two subsequent dramatic versions, this article considers how the Victorian culture industry contended with an aggressively expanding market economy. It positions Collins’s work amid an ongoing Victorian debate that was especially prevalent in literary and dramatic periodicals concerning the bifurcated development of English drama and novels. Highlighting how Collins flexibly adapted his writing for the stage in the face of legal, commercial, and artistic pressures strengthens emerging links between the ostensibly discrete fields of novelistic and theatrical writing. The adaptation of novels for the stage is one of the primary areas where developing intellectual property law collided with cultural production, opening up, for writers such as Collins, new avenues to write, produce, and entertain. This article aims to expand on recent studies of the evolving nature of copyright law in the nineteenth century by considering the forms of cultural production that context facilitated. Considering the legal context of these adaptations in concert with, however, and not as ancillary to or separate from, their social and political valences highlights the modes of production that arose despite – or perhaps as a result of – the opaque nature of Victorian intellectual property laws. Wilkie Collins the successful dramatist, as opposed to Wilkie Collins the novelist writing for the stage, emerged in his own right partly due to the copyright contests that initially encouraged him to adapt his novels in the first place.

Preimplantation and prenatal genetic diagnostics in Russian Federation: ethical and legal issues

The topicality of the article is due to the strategy of transition to personalized medicine in Russia, based, among other things, on technologies of preimplantation and prenatal genetic diagnostics. The purpose of the article is to analyze the main directions of ethical and legal support for the development of these technologies. The work is based on the study of relevant international regulations, foreign and Russian legislation using the methods of legal-dogmatic and philosophical-legal analysis. The article substantiates the need for a clearer distinction between legal and moral-religious approaches to regulating relations in applying these technologies. The task is to find legal structures that can take into account the moral aspects of the problem without replacing legal regulation with an appeal to moral and religious values and norms. An example of this approach is the development of a legal regime for manipulations with embryo in vitro, in which the necessary legal protection of the embryo is provided by recognizing its special ontological status as a constitutional value of the common good. From these positions, the author identifies a range of issues that should form the organizational and legal context necessary to ensure adequate guarantees of human rights in the field of application of the considered genetic technologies. The legal regulation of this range of issues should be fixed in a special federal law on genetic testing.

The Legal Context

This chapter gives a brief introduction into late medieval Kampen, the archival sources used in the study, an overview of the historical and legal background of banishment in the Low Countries and a discussion of the by-laws concerning the topic. It also includes a brief description of the images illustrating the contents of one of the manuscripts used, some of which are included in this book.