Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute
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Exorcising the Clergy Privilege
Get PDFThis Article debunks the empirical assumption behind the clergy privilege, the evidentiary rule shielding confidential communications with clergy. For over a century, scholars and the judiciary have assumed generous protection is essential to foster and encourage spiritual relationships. Accepting this premise, all fifty states and the District of Columbia have adopted virtually absolute privilege statutes. To test this assumption, this Article distills data from over 700 decisions — making it the first scholarship to analyze state clergy privilege jurisprudence exhaustively. This review finds a privilege in decline: courts have lost faith in the privilege. More surprisingly, though, so have clergy. For decades, clergy have recast communications to ensure they fall outside testimonial protection — thus challenging how essential confidentiality actually is to spiritual relationships. The Article discusses both why clergy testimony frequently decides the question of privilege and the corresponding query of why some clergy break confidences. This understanding breathes new life into efforts to revise state statutes to reflect the narrowing privilege rather than perpetuate illusory promises of broad protection
Captive: Zoometric Operations in Gaza
Get PDF“We are the only people in this world who are living under such total occupation. Israel sees us as being equal to our animals, and sometimes they even value us less than our animals.” This quote, from the founder of the Gaza Zoo, demonstrates both the significance and the complexities of human-animal relations in Gaza, especially at times of siege and war. My article draws on ethnographic encounters and investigative analysis to relay how Gaza’s spatial confinement generally, and the Israeli incursion into Gaza of summer 2014 in particular, has lent itself to a radicalized discursive interplay between the animalization of humans and the humanizing of animals who dwell in this place. I tell how human animals — Israelis and Palestinians, children and terrorists — as well as nonhuman animals — snakes, zoo animals, dogs, mice, lions, insects, zebras, donkeys, chicken, and beasts — perform detailed daily rituals of humanization, dehumanization, and animalization, making life and death more or less worthy through redefining the degrees of their relative humanity and animality. I coin the term “zoometrics” to refer to such detailed calculations of biopolitical worthiness that occur within and along the animal-human divide. Such zoometric accounts highlight the slippages between bestialized and humanized bodies, exacerbated by these bodies’ shared conditions of extreme captivity in Gaza
Prolegomenon to a Defense of the City of Gold
Get PDFIn recent political contests, economics has been used as a subjective language of disputation and identification, contradicting the field\u27s traditional aspirations to objectivity, even science. In both partisan politics and the related but not identical bifurcation between populist and establishment or elite discourse, positions have become routinized into antagonistic tropes. This poses a serious problem for the United States, which uses political discourse not only for politics, but to create social cohesion among disparate groups. More generally, elites bereft of Marx no longer have a grammar with which to conceptualize, critique, and ultimately defend the global liberal order that they have inherited, and which I call the City of Gold. In particular, they have little way to address the problem of alienation other than through a banal materialism that requires economic growth (in short supply), or the use of subaltern narratives to generate the warmth of bien pensant tribes. Elites in many high income societies have thus revealed themselves to be not only unprepared for the onslaught of populism, but not serious on their own terms
