Journal Service - Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
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Still Mad–On Feminism, Anger, and the Current State of U.S. Women’s Rights: An interview with Sandra Gilbert
No full textThe current state of Women’s Rights in the United States is a matter of grave concern and thus, without question, a core topic for an issue on “American Crises.” An altered Supreme Court and individual state legislation like the 2021 Texas Heartbeat Act raise distinct concerns over human rights issues, women’s reproductive rights, and the potential dismantling of Roe v Wade. The Trump administration and the January 6 insurrection gave new urgency to debates over toxic masculinity and its relation to populism and the media. The frustration over gender inequality, care work gaps, and the toll of emotional labor has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Recent Supreme Court nomination hearings have also raised new concerns about gender equity
Bomb and Climate Change in Fact and Fiction
No full textThis essay counterpoints two existential threats in our lifetimes—nuclear apocalypse and climate catastrophe—comparing how they have been recorded in historical documents and how they have registered in the American imagination. It surveys non-fiction and fiction, including a few films, to uncover persistent patterns of American denial that may lead—in fact, scientists increasingly believe will lead—to climate apocalypse. Strong historical and thematic similarities exist until, surprisingly and even shockingly, they diverge at their imagined endpoints.
My essay turns to examples from the United States’ history as a nuclear power. These include governmental suppression of information after the bombing of Hiroshima, willful distortions of how the Cuban Missile Crisis was resolved, and controversial museum exhibitions since 2000. I also analyze American perceptions of climate change, as directly informed by numerous, but flaccid, reports, conferences, and summits on “global warming” that activist youth groups now parody in postings and memes.
The essay examines the kind of doom-laden fantasies that I myself once had about the threat of nuclear annihilation. It looks to the worlds of fiction and film for iterations of the same kind of dread and doom. Imaginative projections in fiction include motifs such as “empty cities” with no sense of human responsibility for the absence of people, strong themes of racial disparity, and the exploration of human depravity versus the possibility of cooperation and community. Primary fictional examples of nuclear plots include Cormac McCarthy and Octavia Butler, and the suppressed 1959 racial drama The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, starring Harry Belafonte and Inger Stevens. For cli-fi fiction, the essay touches on similar preoccupations in novels by Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and a host of 21st-century others.
My topic has renewed urgency in 2022, when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reintroduced the nuclear threat and forestalled action to slow climate change. But—and this emerges as an important payoff in the essay—nuclear and climate change narratives differ strongly in how we conceive of their endpoints. Despite sporadic fears about terrorists after 9/11, about North Korea, and now about Ukraine, Americans still by and large expect that, absent a true madman (Putin being a chief suspect), nuclear restraint will hold. In contrast, with regard to climate catastrophe, an increasing number of examples in both fact and fiction now expect climate catastrophes that will end humanity but (unlike nuclear winter), not end life on Earth which will remain, and increasingly become, both inventive and fecund. The essay ends with a meditation on the possible, even likely, consequences of expecting, and even accepting, the inevitability of climate apocalypse on a human scale.
Archive: Selected 20th and 21st-century American novels, grouped by theme and outcome and cited briefly; a few 20th and 21st-century films; best-selling non-fiction books: Schell’s The Fate of the Earth. Weisman’s The World Without Us, the History Channel’s Life After People, Scranton’s We’re Doomed, Now What? Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, Rich’s Losing Earth and others. Academic books by Nixon, Scranton, Ghosh, Purdy, McClintock, and others.
Professor George Anastaplo: A Remembrance
No full textThis essay constitutes the author's eulogy for his mentor, Professor George Anastaplo
Paritätsgesetze: Die verfassungsrechtliche Zulässigkeit der verpflichtenden Quotierung von Wahllisten nach Geschlecht
No full textSowohl im Bundestag als auch in allen Landesparlamenten
sind Frauen im Vergleich zu ihrem Anteil an der Gesamtbevölkerung
unterrepräsentiert. Diesem durch die historische
und aber fortwährende strukturelle Benachteiligung von Frauen sowohl in der Politik als auch anderen Gesellschaftsbereichen erklärbaren Phänomen wollen einige dadurch begegnen, dass Parteien gesetzlich dazu verpflichtet werden sollen, ihre Wahllisten jeweils zur Hälfte mit Männern und Frauen zu besetzen.
Die Verfassungsmäßigkeit solcher Paritätsgesetze ist umstritten und Gegenstand vierer aktueller Verfassungsgerichtsentscheidungen. Der Beitrag leitet in die rechtspolitische Diskussion um Paritätsgesetze (A.) ein, bevor ihre Verfassungsmäßigkeit an den Maßstäben des grundgesetzlichen Demokratieprinzips (B.), der Wahlgrundsätze (C.), der Rechte politischer Parteien (D.) sowie der Gleichheitsrechte (E.) untersucht wird
Rudolf von Jhering (1818-1892): Die Geschichte seines Kampfes mit dem Recht
No full text»Diese Lebensgeschichte ist, wenn man will, arm an äußeren spannenden Momenten; es ist das Bild eines Gelehrtenlebens, ohne die Zuthaten, welche für viele demselben erst seinen Reiz geben.« 1 Dieser Einschätzung des Lebens Rudolf von Jherings wird in diesem Beitrag eine zeitgemäßere Erzählung gegenübergestellt. Es geht um das Leben des einflussreichsten Rechtsgelehrten in Deutschland in der 2. Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, dessen Göttinger Vorlesungen Hörer aus aller Welt besuchten und der einer der wenigen deutschen Juristen ist, die Weltruhm erlangt haben
Cross/Borders: : The Transcultural Poet as Counterwitness in Anthony Cody’s Borderland Apocrypha
No full textThe US/Mexican border continues to be an important topic of public debate for Americans. The ways journalists frame stories about Latino immigration at the southwest border can have devasting consequences for Latino communities living and residing in the United States. Poets have been quick to respond to misleading, and often pervasive, representations. In previous essays, I have introduced a figure of diverse social and cultural background who testifies against dominant media narratives in the public sphere. I call this figure the transcultural counterwitnesss. This essay turns to Anthony Cody’s Borderland Apocrypha to investigate how his experimental collection offers new consideration of Latino-American identity through its engagement with the longstanding stereotypes in the American public sphere. By observing the transcultural impulses of Cody’s work, this essay explores the ways Borderland Apocrypha experiments with poetic form and voice to provide more insightful considerations of American identity politics and examines how his collection engages with, and opposes, the longstanding stereotypes of Latino communities. A greater transcultural awareness illustrates the ways past violence influences and emerges with contemporary realities and invites readers to contemplate Latino identity in contemporary American culture.
Law and Ideas of Justice
No full textThe social contract approach concentrates on identifying perfectly just social arrangements, taking the characterization of "just institutions," along with compliant human behaviour, to be the principal - and often the only identified - task of the theory of justice. Rather than following the contractarian tradition of beginning the exercise by asking what is perfect justice, or what principles should govern the choice of perfectly just institutions for the society, Amartya Sen here argues for asking about the identification of clear cases of injustice on which agreement could emerge on the basis of public reasoning (even in the absence of an agreement on the nature of "perfect justice"). In arguing, for example, for the abolition of slavery, as the Marquis the Condorcet, Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft all did, they did not have to seek an agreement on the nature of the perfectly just society, or the characteristics of ideally just social institutions. That is, agreement can be reached on the manifest injustice of particular institutions and behaviour patterns even without having the same view of an ideally just society, or of perfectly just institutions.
Amartya Sen on Economics and Philosophy: An Introduction
No full textRemarks prepared by Kotaro Suzumura to introduce Professor Amartya Sen, the keynote speaker at the Third Biennial Literature and Law Conference held at John Jay College of Criminal Justice on March 29th, 2012
Rückkehr nach Lemberg und die Geburtsstunde des Völkerstrafrechts: Eine recht literarische Völkerstrafrechtsgeschichte
No full textAls Grundlagenbeitrag im Bereich des Forschungsfelds Recht und Literatur behandelt der Aufsatz die Verknüpfung zwischen Rechtsgeschichte und Literatur. Anhand Philippe Sands Rückkehr nach Lemberg wird die Entstehungsgeschichte des Völkerstrafrechts, die Entwicklung des Begriffs bzw. Tatbestands Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit und dessen Verknüpfung mit dem Völkerrechtler Hersch Lauterpacht dargestellt