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Customary law
No full textAll countries around the world have social norms that regulate behaviour and structure the decisions of individuals. In many countries, these are sufficiently weighty as to fall into a category that we refer to as customary law. Customary law exists in places as diverse as Australia, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Melanesia and the Western Balkans. Customary law is a body of rules governing personal status, communal resources, and local organization. It can determine access to land and water, the pool of eligible marriage partners, and what a child or a spouse inherits. It is, therefore, socially and economically important. Customary law can be conceived of as a very strong social norm, and while it is possible to break that norm, the consequences, both social and economic, are so high as to prevent noncompliance. It is a normative order formed by rights and obligations controlling access to community and personal resources. Customary law is not exclusive and exists in hybridized forms, layering onto statute law in both rural and urban areas. It is complex, fluid, and resilient, differing across communities and reflecting social hierarchies and power. Customary law is typically unwritten, or incompletely systemized, enabling dynamism and adaptation in its application (Sage and Woolcock 2012).
Much of what we know about customary law comes from the study of post-colonial societies. Customary law in colonial regimes was used as a tool of administering indigenous populations and was encouraged, transformed, and sometimes even constructed in ways to assist with domination and rule (Chanock 1991, 1998; Joireman 2011; Mamdani 1996). Colonial policies established communal land rights based on customary law, empowered a cadre of local leaders, and enabled customary dispute resolution institutions. After colonization, customary law often became embedded in the formal legal systems of independent states through explicit recognition, case law, or the use of assessors.
The use of customary law in colonial and post-colonial settings is distinct from customary law in socialist settings in which customary norms were allowed to continue insofar as they did not interfere with public law. To be explicit, customary law thrived and developed under colonization because it controlled access to important resources such as land, timber, water, and labour. The use of customary law under colonial regimes gave it a power that endured into the post-colonial era. Customary law in post-communist states is slightly different. Customary law survived the Soviet era and efforts to supplant its use in both family life and the control of resources (Edgar 2004; Joireman 2014; Upton 2009). In both post-colonial and post-communist settings, customary law clearly forms group identity and practices
Leveraging Existing Policy for a University/K-12 Partnership: Using a Teacher Residency and Induction Model to Address a Teacher Shortage in Virginia, USA
No full textThis chapter details how university and school partners leveraged a potentially harmful licensing policy to address both short- and long- term problems caused by a critical teacher shortage. The shortage is primarily concentrated in schools that serve a large number of students living in poverty where school administrators increasingly hire unqualified and inexperienced teachers using a temporary licensing policy that was not designed for this purpose. Prompted by concern over the impact these unqualified teachers will have on economically disadvantaged students, faculty from a university preparation program and leaders from a large public K-12 urban–suburban school division in the Greater Richmond region of Virginia collaborated to innovate possible solutions. The school-university partnership reimagined ways to utilize the temporary licensing policy and reallocate resources to financially support a newly conceived teacher residency and induction support model designed to quickly fill vacant teaching positions in high-poverty schools while simultaneously improving the retention of quality teachers. Within this new model, the temporary licensing policy is repurposed as a mechanism to maintain cost neutrality and therefore guarantee long-term sustainability of the residency and support model without external funding. Initial findings from the first two years of program implementation suggest a positive impact on teacher effectiveness and retention in high-poverty schools
Marketplace of Ideas 3.0? A Framework for the Era of Algorithms
Get PDFFor over a century, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ metaphor of the “Marketplace of Ideas” has been central to Americans’ conceptualization of the First Amendment. However, the metaphor has evolved, and the today’s marketplace looks much different than the marketplace of the early twentieth century. We argue that the Marketplace of Ideas is now a dynamic environment of information exchange that is distributed throughout the internet and private applications and is guided by algorithms. The modern Marketplace of Ideas frames discussion of freedom of expression and content moderation. An updated understanding of the metaphor allows for an improved public sphere of discussion where free thought can flourish, truth can be tested, and ideas can be productively exchanged. This paper articulates three central evaluative criteria against which a given contemporary marketplace regime can be judged: instrumental value; epistemic value; and normative value. In this paper, we explain how the metaphor has evolved into marketplace 3.0 and the criteria necessary for judging the usefulness of the Marketplace of Ideas
Generative Beauty: How Engaging with Beauty Sparks Transformation
Get PDF“Be the change you wish to see in the world,” declared Mahatma Gandhi. There is a profound awareness of the need for change as individuals reflect on the impact of global and system challenges as well as community challenges. People cannot just “be the change” until they themselves are first changed. Beauty is a powerful catalyst for change that begins with the individual, expanding to the community. To solve community problems, program designers must find a way to unleash untapped creativity. This study explores the impact of engaging beauty via the arts (paintings, Mary Oliver poetry, and The Lark Ascending) on the lives of seven women (American and British South Asian) living in London. Using theories surrounding Barbara Fredrickson’s “broaden-and-build” work as well as Developmental Evaluation and Most Significant Change techniques, this multi-cultural and multi-sensory approach shows the powerful role of beauty and art to change individuals’ thinking and actions
Resolving Regulatory Threats to Tenure
Get PDFMany lawmakers and public university governing boards are looking to curb faculty tenure. Driven by both ideological and economic motives, recent efforts range from eliminating tenure systems altogether to interfering when schools seek to tenure individual, often controversial scholars. These actions raise serious questions about higher education law and policy and have important implications for the future of academic freedom. Indeed, if they gain further traction, current regulatory threats to tenure will jeopardize the ability of American universities to remain at the forefront of global research and intellectual progress.
This Article examines the growing anti-tenure sentiment among state officials and develops a framework for how members of academia should respond. In particular, this Article provides several novel legal strategies that public universities and their faculty can pursue to protect tenure from external interference. These strategies include replicating or defending tenure through alternative contractual means, as well as using privatization techniques to better preserve faculty autonomy. This Article also draws on collaborative governance theory to show how the quasi-legislative powers of private accreditors and similar groups can be applied to incentivize stakeholders on competing sides of the tenure debate to resolve their differences through cooperative decision-making
Python Patrol: Combatting The Problem of Evasive Non-Native Snakes in Florida
Get PDFThe Florida hotspot of non-native invasive species has long been recognized as a fascinating, yet perplexing environmental issue since the late 1900s. After decades of patchwork efforts by the federal and state government, it has become clear that a more holistic approach must be taken to help eradicate the Burmese Pythons that have overtaken Southern Florida. This article highlights the prior efforts taken federally and state-wide to combat this issue and assesses the current gaps in these efforts and what must be done to achieve a more holistic approach. Other states are used as points of comparison in regard to their legislation and handling of non-native invasive species in order to display effective or ineffective efforts. As it currently stands, the environment and ecosystem of Southern Florida are suffering immense devastation at the hands of this non-native invasive species and something must be done to control, contain, and hopefully eradicate the issue at-hand
Community Schools Model Provides Wraparound Support For K-12 Students
No full textThe Community Schools model challenges a traditional vision of K-12 schools by offering wraparound services to meet the holistic needs of children, families, and communities
Musical Evidence for Low Boundary Tones in Ancient Greek
Get PDFSeveral scholars have suggested that in ancient Greek there was a low boundary tone at the end of a relatively small prosodic constituent such as a clitic group or maximal prosodic word. The boundary tone may phonologically motivate some puzzling pitch-accentual phenomena in the language. One is the diachronic pitch-peak retraction that led to the circumflex pitch accent (HL) on penultimate syllables (the “sōtêra rule”). Another is the intonational phrase-internal downstepping or deletion of a word-final acute accent (H); that conversion of an acute to a grave accent is known as “lulling” or “koímēsis”. If such a low boundary tone existed, its effects should still be audible in ancient Greek non-strophic vocal music, where there is a significant correlation between the pitch movement of the text and the movement of the melody to which it is set, i.e. between tone and tune. Specifically, proponents of such a low boundary tone would predict that the turning point between falling and rising melody, the “musical trough”, should center around the word-final mora or syllable. The present study provides the first full description of troughs in the Delphic Hymns and finds that they are indeed closely aligned with word-end. Furthermore, once other factors that could lead to word-final troughs are set aside, i.e. once potential confounds are controlled for, the association of the trough with word-end remains strong, suggesting that we should in fact reconstruct the low boundary tone