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Legal Constructions of Body Work
Get PDFThis chapter explores the way in which two examples of body work - the labour involved in caring for the vulnerable elderly and in providing commercial sex - are regulated. It highlights the challenges that body work presents for labour law and exposes the wider conceptual limitations that this area of law faces in a consumer based market economy in which the boundaries between production and social reproduction are being reconstituted
Research Note: Rethinking Feminist Engagements with the State and Wage Labour
Get PDFIn this paper I reflect on recent attempts by feminist economists to engage with post-Keynsian policies aimed at the socialisation of investment, in particular the proposal for the government to act at once as the Employer of Last Resort (ELR) and a social provider. Such an engagement seems to depart from feminist autonomists' critique of the wage society, their refusal to place reformist demands on the state and their emphasis on the collectivisation of social reproduction. Drawing on earlier explorations by Italian feminists of the dynamic interaction between labour and value, I suggest that these two approaches might not be as different as they first appear: at stake for both is a challenge to capitalist value through the promotion of arrangements able to instantiate alternative processes of valorisation
The Strange Temporalities of Work-Life Balance Law
Get PDFThis research paper is part of a broader project on law and time. I am in the midst of studying the time-related concepts and assumptions that structure some of the key initiatives in the area of equalities regulation in the UK over the past two decades. Time fulfils certain legal and political functions in equalities law and policy, establishing the parameters through which a person might claim a legal identity in order to argue a discrimination case, for example, or providing a paradigm for thinking about the allocation of care responsibilities. Yet, far from merely tracing how legal concepts and communities symbolise time, or how they use temporal concepts in their world-making features, I am also interested in the materialisation of time and interconnections between time, matter, form and objects in the making of law. Key temporalities within work-life balance law - balance, equilibrium and flexibility, for example - therefore become amenable to inquiry through the actions of documents and documentary practices, administrative forms and the form of law itself in materialising time alongside and in relationship with human legal subjects. As Michel Serres puts it: 'Time doesn't flow; it percolates' (Latour and Serres, 1995, 58). With this in mind we might ask: how has work-life balance percolated? What role have human and non-human legal actors played in confabulating this temporal form
A New Era of Foreign Investment Law and Policy? The Crisis of the Classic Theory and the Challenge of Regulation
Get PDFThis article asks whether and to what extent successive economic crises, including the one which started in 2007, have weakened the hold of the classic approach to foreign investment in the field of foreign investment regulation. It explores this quesiton taking into account the apparent shift towards a multipolar world signalled by the emergence of the BRICS countries. It argues that the decline of the post-war superpower coupled with the absence of its replacement in a multipolar world order has prevented the emergence and implementation of a much needed new theoretical approach to foreign investment able to replace the classic theory
A Moral Underpinning for Legal Ethics
Get PDFThis paper explores the ideal basis, qua moral theory, for legal ethics. It favours David Luban’s interpretation of Fuller’s theory of natural law. Luban’s theory offers a pragmatic moral standard that is flexible in nature, with the primary aim being the protection of human dignity. The advantages of Luban’s theory are fleshed out by contrasting it with those of Kant and Mill. An examination of Kant’s Categorical Imperative, and Mill’s Utilitarianism illuminates the need for a less rigid moral underpinning of legal ethics. Luban’s theory serves as a more convincing moral compass as opposed to a strictly prescribed principle. It allows for subjective moral values, autonomy, and personal judgement in its overarching pursuit of safeguarding human dignity. If there is to be a moral theory as the foundation for legal ethics, it must be one that is practical and attainable, whilst allowing for the revision and evolution of laws. Luban’s theory does precisely this
About the cover image
No full textThis issue features a piece of artwork by Hannah Tiernan. Hannah graduated in 2013 from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and is now studying photography at Griffith College Dublin. She works mainly in sculpture, installation and photography. She has exhibited her work on a number of occasions in Dublin, including a solo show at the Hendrons Collider gallery space. The featured piece is 'Amber Topography'. This image is a detail from a wax study on skin. It was taken from a clay press mould of overlapping feathers. Using light to illuminate the wax, the resulting image is somewhat reminiscent of geographical shipping charts. For more of Hannah's work please visit her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/HannahTiernanArtist?ref=stream
Gender and the Idea of Labour Law
Get PDFIn recent years and as a consequence of radical changes in the world of work the idea of labour law has come under sustained interrogation. Of particular concern has been the extent to which the traditional boundaries of labour law organised around the regulation of employer-employee relations are in need of revision, as the ambit of labour regulation expands outwards to encompass a much broader range of socio-economic and political objectives. Such developments, inter alia, present feminists with an opportunity to challenge the extent to which labour law is predicated upon a paid work paradigm and to emphasise the interconnectedness of paid and unpaid labour and the significance of gender as a category of analysis in this context. Taking as a particular focus a recent collection of essays entitled The Idea of Labour Law, edited by Guy Davidov and Brian Langille (OUP 2011), this paper endeavours to gauge how far mainstream labour law debate has taken up the feminist challenge to confront the implications - for labour regulation - of acknowledging the interdependence of work and family life and the constituting significance of gender in relation to the social (and legal) organisation of work
The Contribution of Feminism to Contemporary Public Debates About Law
No full textThis is the audio recording of a panel session at the Kent Critical Law Society conference held at the University of Kent on 1 March 2014. Nicola Barker speaks on 'Feminism, Family and the Politics of Austerity' (with accompanying powerpoint slides); Sinead Ring speaks on 'The Pernicious Nature of Rape Myths and How They Continue to Affect Rape Prosecutions'; Maria Drakopoulou speaks on 'Feminism, Tradition and the Question of Sexual Violence'; and Rosemary Hunter acts as discussant, commenting on all three papers
A Philosophical Examination of the English Laws Relating to Assisted Suicide: Resurrecting Emotion
Get PDFThis study seeks to jurisprudentially analyse the statutory English laws relating to assisted suicide, so as to advance a justifiable re-articulation of their moral framework. Currently based on emotionless principles, that framework necessarily denies ethics. Particular attention is paid to a conceptual study of assisted suicide and particularly the notion of ‘assistance’. This analysis is made against a background of the traditional Natural Law, which is supported as the correct, albeit under-developed legal theory defining the scope and logic of English suicide laws. Knowledge and reason jointly constitute the correct yardstick by which morality and therefore justice in this area should be measured; not solely the latter. The re-articulation of this framework shall be primarily achieved by resurrecting human emotions through a study of fine art, supported by English common law developments so as to distinguish various extra-jurisdictional anomalies. It shall be concluded that the laws in this area, as they are currently enacted, are immoral and therefore unjust and legalisation through Parliament (with the necessary safeguards) is justifiable in the eyes of the traditional Natural Lawyer.The dissertation on which this article is based won the Kent Law School Hallett Dissertation Prize for best law dissertation in 2013
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