America’s First Memorial Honoring Survivors of Sexual Violence

Over the past two decades, America taken part of a broader global trend of “memorial mania” in which memorials dedicated to remembering injustice have exploded into public space. Memorials that facilitate the centering of marginalized narratives of violence hold significant power for social change. This article focuses on one such space: The Survivors Memorial in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Survivors Memorial opened in October 2020 and is the first public memorial honoring survivors of sexual violence. Despite the progress of the anti-rape and feminist movements as well as a variety of legal interventions designed to address sexual violence and empower, many survivors are left without a sense of justice or institutional or community recognition. Drawing on 21 in-depth, qualitative interviews with individuals involved in all aspects of the memorial project, this article documents how one community mobilized to create a space for survivors whose voices are often overlooked, disbelieved and silenced by the criminal justice system, practitioners, and communities. In focusing on how participants narrate the significance and meaning of the Survivors Memorial, this article uncovers how social, political, and local circumstances coalesced to make the Memorial possible. These factors include local leadership, the prevalence of sexual violence, the unique structure of the Minneapolis park structure, and the rise of the #MeToo movement. Interviews illuminate that participants worked to intentionally construct the Memorial as an accessible and visible space that centers on providing all sexual violence survivors with public acknowledgment of their experiences, while simultaneously engaging community members in dialogs about sexual violence, ultimately, laying the foundation for sexual violence prevention efforts.

Happiness as an Expression of Health

Health gained a global prominence and became a right declared by the World Health Organization in 1948. In the 21st century, it is understood as a complete well-being of the individual, far beyond the absence of disease. In this context, the right to happiness translates as an expression of the aspirations for the realization of the right to health. Thus, this chapter aims to understand, in the light of the Freudian perspective, the aspects of soul life that lead the individual to the exhausting task of seeking happiness and seeks to reflect the possible contributions that legal science can offer to the improvement of individual well-being as a right health in the context of global health. Freud's theories about the formation of the psychic apparatus, his conception of malaise caused by culture and legal interventions that can possibly contribute to the reduction of individual unhappiness are presented.

The Double Force of Vulnerability

This article reviews ethnographic literature of environmental justice (EJ). Both a social movement and scholarship, EJ is a crucial domain for examining the intersections of environment, well-being, and social power, and yet has largely been dominated by quantitative and legal analyses. A minority literature in comparison, ethnography attends to other valences of injustice and modes of inequality. Through this review, we argue that ethnographies of EJ forward our understanding of how environmental vulnerability is lived, as communities experience and confront toxic environments. Following a genealogy of EJ, we explore three prominent ethnographic thematics of EJ: the production of vulnerability through embodied toxicity; the ways that injustice becomes embedded in landscapes; and how processes like research collaborations and legal interventions become places of thinking and doing the work of justice. Finally, we identify emergent trends and challenges, suggesting future research directions for ethnographic consideration.

The Cambridge Companion to Hugo Grotius

The Cambridge Companion to Grotius offers a comprehensive overview of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) for students, teachers, and general readers, while its chapters also draw upon and contribute to recent specialised discussions of Grotius' oeuvre and its later reception. Contributors to this volume cover the width and breadth of Grotius' work and thought, ranging from his literary work, including his historical, theological and political writing, to his seminal legal interventions. While giving these various fields a separate treatment, the book also delves into the underlying conceptions and outlooks that formed Grotius' intellectual map of the world as he understood it, and as he wanted it to become, giving a new political and religious context to his forays into international and domestic law.

Tācippeṇ, The Dancing Girl: Entangled questions of social and aesthetic reform in a Tamil drama by Pammal Campanta Mutaliyār (1873–1964)

Pammal Campanta Mutaliyār (1873–1964) is generally regarded as the ‘father of the modern Tamil theatre’. In this article I examine how Pammal’s non-mythological and non-Shakespearean dramas – that is, what he termed his ‘social dramas’ – were woven into different domains and constituencies that saw themselves as agents for social change. I argue that his engagement with projects of civic and social reform ran parallel to his ideas about the aesthetic reform of the Tamil drama itself. Beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, Pammal’s dramas self-consciously attempt to rid themselves of what Pammal understands as the aesthetic excesses of the Parsi-inflected Tamil theatre, including its densely musical nature and its increasingly mixed-gender cast. Tācippeṇ, The Dancing Girl (1928), a drama that deals with devadāsī reform, perhaps best exemplifies the simultaneity and intertwined nature of Pammal’s programmes. It was composed on the eve of reformer Dr Muthulakshmi Reddy’s earliest legal interventions towards the abolishment of devadāsī lifestyles and is a deeply self-reflexive work. Not only does it stage well-established tropes about devadāsī reform, but it deploys the idiom of Pammal’s new vision of the modern Tamil theatre – bereft of its musical temperament and performed exclusively by men – to do so.

Personalized Regulatory Techniques

This chapter expands the demonstration how personalized law would transform existing legal institutions. The chapter shifts the focus from specific doctrines to regulatory techniques. These are generic approaches to the design of legal interventions, used in every area of law. The chapter examines the personalization of several techniques: default rules, mandated disclosures, compensatory damages, and bundles of rights. With each of these tools, the law presently prescribes one-size-fits-all rules, designed to either best fit the average person, or to promote the interests of a specific subgroup of the population. By shifting to personalized rules, the law could simultaneously advance the interests of different groups and individuals. The chapter shows that designing personalized default rules, disclosures, damages, or bundles of rights would promote the goals underlying these interventions. Personalized default would mimic peoples’ preferences more successfully and reduce the incidence of opt-out. Personalized disclosures stand a chance of being more useful to people. Personalized compensation would come closer to making victims of wrongs whole. And personalized bundles of rights would recognize the diversity of people’s interests and aspirations.