Le Centre autonome d'enseignement et de pédagogie religieuse (CAEPR) également appelé département de théologie est un département pédagogique de l'UFR de Sciences humaines et sociales de l'université de Lorraine situé à Metz. Les particularités statutaires du CAEPR découlent d’une convention du 25 mai 1974 conclue entre le Saint-Siège et la République française. Elle fixe les prérogatives de l’évêque de Metz dans le fonctionnement de ce département notamment pour la nomination des enseignants chercheurs. L’objectif principal de ce centre est de fournir (...) aux clercs et aux laïcs chargés de l'enseignement religieux catholique dans les écoles primaires et secondaires de la Moselle une formation appropriée. Les autorités religieuses ont de plus sur une longue période demandée aux futurs prêtres de se former dans le cadre du CAEPR. L’évêque de Metz a décidé en 2018 de rompre les liens avec le CAEPER et de mettre fin à la formation universitaire publique des cadres religieux en regrettant que ces formations trop élitistes ne prennent pas en compte les « dimensions humaine, spirituelle et pastorale ». (shrink)

Throughout the medieval period law was seen as the product of social groups and associations that formed legal orders, as Max Weber elaborates, "either constituted in its membership by such objective characteristics of birth, political, ethnic, or religious denomination, mode of life or occupation, or arose through the process of explicit fraternization." During the second half of the Middle Ages, roughly the tenth through fifteenth centuries, there were "several distinct types of law, sometimes competing, occasionally overlapping, invariably invoking different traditions, (...) jurisdictions and modes of operation." Types of law included imperial and royal edicts and statutes, canon law, unwritten customary law of tribes and localities, written Germanic law, residual Roman law, municipal statutes, the law of merchants and of guilds, and in England the common law, on the continent the Roman law of jurists after the twelfth century revival of the Justinian Code. The types of courts included various imperial and royal courts, ecclesiastical courts, manorial or seigniorial courts, village courts, municipal courts in cities, merchant courts, and guild courts. Serving as judges in these courts, respectively, were kings or their appointees, Bishops and abbots, barons or lords of the manor or their appointees, local lay leaders, leading burghers, merchants, and members of the guild. These various positions were not wholly separate-many high government officials were in religious orders, while Churches held landed estates that came with local judicial responsibilities. "Bishops, abbots and prioresses, as lords of temporal possessions, controlled manorial or honorial courts at which they sometimes, though not generally, presided in person, exercising responsibility for criminal and customary law." "The result was the existence of numerous law communities," Weber wrote, "the autonomous jurisdictions of which overlapped, the compulsory, political association being only one such autonomous jurisdiction in so far as it existed at all." Jurisdictional rules for judicial tribunals and the laws to be applied related to the persons involved and the subject matter at issue. The personality principle linked law to a person's community or association, and under feudalism property ownership came wrapped together with the right to judge those tied to the property. "Demarcation disputes between these laws and courts were numerous." Jurisdictional conflicts arose especially in relation to ecclesiastical courts, which claimed broad jurisdiction over personal status laws (marriage, divorce, inheritance) and moral crimes, as well as church property and personnel, matters which regularly overlapped with the jurisdiction of other courts. Furthermore, different bodies of law could be applicable in a given court in a given case. "It was common to find many different codes of customary law in force in the same kingdom, town or village, even in the same house, if the ninth century bishop Agobard of Lyons is to be believed when he says, 'It often happened that five mem were present or sitting together, and not one of them had the same law as another.'" In long settled areas, the personal law of communities became local customary law. People living within cities were subject to municipal statutes and customary law on certain matters (penal law, procedural), and the community law to which they were attached. (shrink)

Hudson has formulated two local deterministic theses and argued that both are incompatible with freedom. We argue that Hudson has half the story right. Moreover, reflection on Hudson’s theses brings out an important point for debates about freedom generally: that instead of focusing on the notion of entailment, debates about freedom should focus on the notions of explanation and sourcehood. Hudson’s theses provide an excellent case study for why the latter notions ought to take precedence over the former in (...) debates about freedom. (shrink)

This chapter examines the immediate background of the emergence of the highly influential insular canonical collections and investigates the way they relate to the earliest canonical texts compiled in Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England. It discusses the Irish collection of canons Collectio Canonum Hibernensis and the Canons of Theodore, and explores how the compilers of canonical literature approached an age-old problem inherent to medieval canon law. The chapter also outlines the governing principles which characterised insular canonical thinking and shows that the (...) Collectio Canonum Hibernensis was firmly grounded in an insular canonical tradition. (shrink)

The Principle of the Fixity of the Past (FP) holds that the past is ‘fixed’ in evaluating what we are free to do, and it is frequently invoked by incompatibilists when arguing that freedom and determinism are incompatible. However, several authors have argued that incompatibilists ought to abandon FP for a different principle, sometimes called the Principle of the Fixity of the Independent (FI). According to this principle, it is not the past in its entirety that is fixed, but only (...) those parts of the past that are independent of our current choices. But a question remains: What about authors who are not friendly to incompatibilism in the first place? Is there any reason to think that compatibilists should also abandon their preferred interpretation of FP for something along the lines of FI? I examine perhaps the most influential version of (classical or leeway) compatibilism, David Lewis's ‘local-miracle compatibilism’. I argue that although Lewis's version of local-miracle compatibilism avoids being committed to anything like FI, his version faces a number of objections. Once we revise Lewis's version to avoid these objections, we arrive at a version of local-miracle compatibilism that is committed to FI, or at least something very close. (shrink)

This paper asks whether geographically localised, or ‘hyperlocal’, uses of Twitter succeed in creating peer-to-peer neighbourhood networks or simply act as broadcast media at a reduced scale. Literature drawn from the smart cities discourse and from a UK research project into hyperlocal media, respectively, take on these two opposing interpretations. Evidence gathered in the case study presented here is consistent with the latter, and on this basis we criticise the notion that hyperlocal social media can be seen as a community (...) in itself. We demonstrate this by creating a network map of Twitter followers of a popular hyperlocal blog in Brockley, southeast London. We describe various attributes of this network including its average degree and clustering coefficient to suggest that a small and highly connected cluster of visible local entities such as businesses form a clique at the centre of this network, with individual residents following these but not one another. We then plot the locations of these entities and demonstrate that sub-communities in the network are formed due to close geographical proximity between smaller sets of businesses. These observations are illustrated with qualitative evidence from interviews with users who suggest instead that rather than being connected to one another they benefit from what has been described as ‘neighbourhood storytelling’. Despite the limitations of working with Twitter data, we propose that this multi-modal approach offers a valuable way to investigate the experience of using social media as a communication tool in urban neighbourhoods. (shrink)

Fire safety expertise was in great demand following the Grenfell Tower fire in London in June 2017. The government established a review of building regulations and an expert panel to inform its responses to Grenfell, and many other relevant organisations also formed their own expert panels. However, expert knowledge in fire safety is a highly contested domain, with knowledge claims based on differing sources. Fire fighters can claim expertise based on their experience of fighting fires, scientists and science-based engineers can (...) claim expertise from experimentation, and those who create and enact regulations can claim expertise in what can termed ’codespeak’—the language of regulation. Although distanced from fundamental empirical experience of fire, codespeak is powerful because of its relative clarity and certainty, and legal status. Building users also bring their own form of ‘local’ expertise—they have first-hand experience of the practicalities of the solutions wrought by the other experts. Policy-makers thus face many competing forms of expert advice on fire safety, and their ability to judge what is most relevant in any particular case rests on the existence of a sufficient range and depth of in-house government expertise. (shrink)

Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1485-1546) is well-known for his philosophical contributions to natural rights and international law. However, his extensive work on the conflict between civil authority and the authority of the Catholic Church has been largely neglected by political theorists and intellectual historians. While scholars have recently recognized the significant role played by natural law in the history of political secularism, they have focused almost exclusively on the “modern” natural law theories of Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Thomasius, as opposed to (...) the “scholastic” natural law of early modern Thomists like Vitoria. This essay undertakes an analysis of Vitoria’s use of natural law theory in his approach to civil-ecclesiastical conflict. Contrary to critiques from the “modern” natural lawyers, it argues that Vitoria’s idea of natural law spearheads a forceful defence of the autonomy of civil power from ecclesiastical power. Based on his sharp distinction between the natural and the supernatural spheres of human life, Vitoria argues for a “dualist” position in which civil and ecclesiastical powers are independent and equally binding on human consciences. The essay acknowledges that Vitoria’s dualism ultimately gives way to his endorsement of papal supremacy over all Christian princes. However, this papalist conclusion does not follow from Vitoria’s natural law theory but rather from an opposing political principle: the notion of the universal Christian commonwealth. (shrink)

In this paper, the structure of a southeastern Spanish population was studied for the first time with respect to its inbreeding patterns and its relationship with demographic and geographic factors. Data on consanguineous marriages from 1900 to 1969 were taken from ecclesiastic dispensations. Our results confirm that the patterns and trends of inbreeding in the study area are consistent with those previously observed in most non-Cantabrian Spanish populations. The rate of consanguineous marriages was apparently stable between 1900 and 1935 and (...) then sharply decreased since 1940, which coincides with industrialization in Spain. A marked departure from Hardy-Weinberg expectations in the ratio of first cousin to second cousin marriages in the study population was observed. The high levels of endogamy and its significant steadiness throughout the twentieth century is noteworthy. Accordingly, our results show that exogamous marriages were not only poorly represented but also that this reduced mobility suggests that the choice of a mate was preferentially local. We found higher mobility in M22 with respect to M33 cousin mating. The relationships between population size and consanguinity rates and inbreeding fit power-law distributions. A significant positive correlation was observed between inbreeding and elevation. Many Spanish populations have experienced a prolonged and considerable isolation across generations, which has led to high proportions of historical and local endogamy that is associated, in general, with high \ values. Thus, assessing genomic inbreeding using runs of homozygosity in current Spanish populations could be an additional pertinent strategy for obtaining a more refined perspective regarding the population history inferred from the extent and frequency of ROH regions. (shrink)

Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew represent the issues of sociality and dissent in strikingly similar terms and articulate a common social vision. Both writers strive to harmonize social unity with inward liberty. Hooker seeks not only to refute the non-conformity of his Puritan opponents, but to reconcile them, in both heart and mind, to the social order to which they belong. Similarly, Petruchio convincingly demonstrates to Katherine that the common good (...) and her own personal happiness substantially coincide in the reciprocity and communion of marriage. (shrink)

Public health laws and policies are uniquely able to mitigate the adverse and inequitable health impacts of climate change. This article summarizes some key considerations in developing such laws and policies and a variety of approaches local public health departments are using to increase climate resilience and health equity.

Marital and family structures, together with the closely related areas of gender relations and attitudes to sexuality, constitute one area in which scholars have suggested medieval England clearly differs from other regions. It is always difficult to compare across regions when the nature of the evidence differs; but because marriage and sexual behavior were under the jurisdiction of the church courts and because the ecclesiastical court system used the same set of legal rules across Europe, one level of difficulty (...) disappears from a comparison. Records from different regions reflect somewhat different procedures or penalties, based on local synodal statutes, but are more commensurable than records of the secular courts, which did not depend on a common set of rules. Basic principles of canon law were universally accepted in western Christendom: marriage was formed by the consent of the parties; marital promises followed by sexual intercourse created an indissoluble marriage; and any extramarital sexual activity by either a husband or a wife was adultery. An examination of church court records from late-medieval Paris compared with better-known records from England suggests that differences between England and northern France in the understanding of sexual behavior and the formation of unions, while they reflect different approaches, were still addressing fundamentally the same issues, and the demographic patterns may not have been as different as scholars have assumed. (shrink)

This is an accessible language edition of Richard Hooker's Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the major prose work of the English 16th century.

The paper focuses on the application of a particular conception of the rule of law to situations characterized by traditional local justice and legal pluralism. While in the twentieth century international rule‐of‐law programmes were directed almost exclusively at state legal system, they have recently begun to take into account traditional local justice, namely, those institutions which in many world regions represent the main form of effective justice. Starting with a review of the positive and negative aspects of traditional (...) local justice from a rule‐of‐law perspective, the paper underlines the widespread lack of protection of human rights, particularly of women’s rights. Discussing vertical rule‐of‐law functions in contexts of legal pluralism the paper stresses the advantages of an approach to the promotion of the rule of law based on mutual recognition and influence between different legal authorities and sources. It is argued that this “interactive” approach appears best suited to the complex frameworks of relations that characterize present‐day systems of deep legal pluralism. Finally, the paper underlines the correspondence between this approach and a conception of the rule of law as an ideal framework of plural interactions characterized by the limits imposed on the law by the law itself, and it discusses its advantages from the perspective of human rights and women’s rights promotion. (shrink)

This study examines the socioeconomic and familial background of Irish Catholic priests born between 1867 and 1911. Previous research has hypothesized that lack of marriage opportunities may influence adoption of celibacy as part of a religious institution. The present study traced data from Irish seminary registries for 46 Catholic priests born in County Limerick, Ireland, using 1901 Irish Census returns and Land Valuation records. Priests were more likely to originate from landholding backgrounds, and with landholdings greater in size and wealth (...) than the local average. Priests were found to originate from families with more sons than the national average, but with similar numbers of daughters. These findings are discussed in relation to competition for resources and lineage survival strategies. (shrink)

Traditional debates, such as those regarding whether the universe is finite in spatial or temporal extent, exemplified, according to Kant, the inherent tendency of pure reason to lead us astray. Although various aspects of Kant’s arguments fail to find a footing in modern cosmology, Kant’s objections to the search for a complete objective description of the cosmos are related to three intertwined issues that are still of central importance: the applicability of universal laws, the status of distinctively cosmological laws, and (...) the explanatory sufficiency of laws. We will advocate a broadly Kantian position on these three issues as part of a critical response to a prevalent strain of Leibnizian rationalism in contemporary cosmology. (shrink)

The recent studies on the relations between humanism or humanists and jurisprudence convince that Reneaissance, especially in XVIth century, when the national states began to raise, belonged to the periods of increased interest in the issue of law. Although Erasmus was not a layer, nor he introduced in any of his works a complete theory of law, he maintained close relations with many leading theoreticians of the law and jurists and sometimes spoke in the legal discussions of his age. Among (...) hist most important works concerning the matter of law were: Institutio principis Christiani, Ratio seu Methodus verae theologiae, Christiani matrimonii institutio, De interdicto esu carnium and Ecclesiastes. In the paper I’m going to concentrate on this latter work, in which Erasmus discusses the significance of preaching, preacher and widely understood Christian rhetoric. In the Ecclesiastes Erasmus touches the law subject with the special emphasis on historical character of law and relations between the divine law, the law of Christ and the law of Nature. After a short discussion about his understaning of law I will concentrate on the essential differentiation between the letter of law and the spirit of law, and I will point at proposed by Erasmus ways of introduction of law into human life. Erasmus, on the one hand, escaped a rigidity and abstraction of law and, on the other, he neutralised an aspect of the coercion of law. In his solution Erasmus appreciated the political dimension of preaching and acknowledged preacher as a more important guide of the people, than ruler. I’m going to interpret the Erasmian concept of preaching as an rhetorical mean of introduction of law in analogical way to “introduction” proposed by Plato in his Nomoi. (shrink)

The single most influential and widely accepted objection against any form of dualism, the belief that human beings are both body and soul, is the objection that dualism violates conservation laws in physics. The conservation laws objection against dualism posits that body and soul interaction is at best mysterious, and at worst impossible. While this objection has been both influential from the time of its initial formulation until present, this paper occupies itself with arguing that this objection is a fleeting (...) one, and has successful answers from both scientific and philosophical perspectives. It is to this end that I provide three groups of responses to the conservation laws objection. First, I outline responses which take the ‘laws of nature’ as the proper entry point into the discussion. Secondly, I provide an analysis of those who argue that contemporary quantum physical data requires that the objection itself involves scientifically unjustified premises. Finally, I layout a philosophically oriented answer which argues that the objection is linguistically problematic since its demands on the dualist are categorically fallacious. From these groups of answers, I conclude that while the conservation laws objection has been arguably the most widely accepted objection against dualism, the objection is without philosophical justification. (shrink)

A conventional wisdom about the progress of physics holds that successive theories wholly encompass the domains of their predecessors through a process that is often called reduction. While certain influential accounts of inter-theory reduction in physics take reduction to require a single "global" derivation of one theory's laws from those of another, I show that global reductions are not available in all cases where the conventional wisdom requires reduction to hold. However, I argue that a weaker "local" form of (...) reduction, which defines reduction between theories in terms of a more fundamental notion of reduction between models of a single fixed system, is available in such cases and moreover suffices to uphold the conventional wisdom. To illustrate the sort of fixed-system, inter-model reduction that grounds inter-theoretic reduction on this picture, I specialize to a particular class of cases in which both models are dynamical systems. I show that reduction in these cases is underwritten by a mathematical relationship that follows the broad prescriptions of Nagel/Schaffner reduction, and support this claim with several examples. Moreover, I show that this broadly Nagelian analysis of inter-model reduction encompasses several cases that are sometimes cited as instances of the "physicist's" limit-based notion of reduction. (shrink)

Since Leibniz's time, Cartesian mental causation has been criticized for violating the conservation of energy and momentum. Many dualist responses clearly fail. But conservation laws have important neglected features generally undermining the objection. Conservation is _local_, holding first not for the universe, but for everywhere separately. The energy in any volume changes only due to what flows through the boundaries. Constant total energy holds if the global summing-up of local conservation laws converges; it probably doesn't in reality. Energy conservation (...) holds if there is symmetry, the sameness of the laws over time. Thus, if there are time-places where symmetries fail due to nonphysical influence, conservation laws fail there and then, while holding elsewhere, such as refrigerators and stars. Noether's converse first theorem shows that conservation laws imply symmetries. Thus conservation trivially nearly entails the causal closure of the physical. But expecting conservation to hold in the brain simply assumes the falsehood of Cartesianism. Hence Leibniz's objection begs the question. Empirical neuroscience is another matter. So is Einstein's General Relativity: far from providing a loophole, General Relativity makes mental causation _harder_. (shrink)

The law-governed world-picture -- A remarkable idea about the way the universe is cosmos and compulsion -- The laws as the cosmic order : the best-system approach -- The three ways : no-laws, non-governing-laws, governing-laws -- Work that laws do in science -- An important difference between the laws of nature and the cosmic order -- The picture in four theses -- The strategy of this book -- The meta-theoretic conception of laws -- The measurability approach to laws -- What (...) comes where -- In defense of some received views -- Some assumptions that will be in play -- The laws are propositions -- The laws are true -- The logically contingent consequences of the laws are laws themselves -- At least some laws are metaphysically contingent -- The meta-theoretic conception of laws -- Laws of nature, laws of science, laws of theories -- The first-order conception versus the meta-theoretic conception -- What is a law of nature? -- Some examples of meta-theoretic accounts -- The virtues of the meta-theoretic conception -- Weighing the virtues and shortcomings of the meta-theoretic conception -- An epistemological argument for the meta-theoretic conception of laws -- The discoverability thesis, the governing thesis, and the first-order conception -- The main argument -- The objection from bad company -- The objection from inference to the best explanation -- The objection from bayesianism -- The objection from contextualist epistemology -- The objection from the threat of inductive skepticism -- Laws, governing, and counterfactuals -- Where we are now -- What would things have to be like in order for the laws of nature to govern the universe? -- Lawhood, inevitability, counterfactuals -- What is it for a proposition to be inevitably true? -- What is it for a whole class of propositions to be inevitably true? -- What is it for lawhood to confer inevitability? -- NP and supporting counterfactuals -- The worry about context-variability -- A solution and a look ahead -- When would the laws have been different? -- Where we are now -- The God cases -- Other counterexamples to NP -- A moral-theoretic counterexample to NP -- Scientific contexts and non-scientific contexts -- Scientific God cases? -- Lewisian non-backtracking counterexamples -- Where things stand now -- How could science show that the laws govern? -- Why the law-governed world-picture must include the science-says-so thesis -- What is extra-scientific? -- How can the science-says-so thesis be true? -- NP as a consequence of the presuppositions in any scientific context -- Np as true in all possible scientific contexts -- But how could it be so? -- Attack of the actual-factualists -- Measurement and counterfactuals -- Where we are now -- Measurements, reliability, counterfactuals -- A general principle that captures the relation between measurement and counterfactuals -- What we can learn about lawhood from what we have learned about the counterfactual commitments of science -- A first-order account of laws or a meta-theoretic account of laws? -- What methods are presupposed to be legitimate measurement procedures? -- Why we must adopt a meta-theoretic account of laws -- What lawhood is -- Where we are now -- The measurability account of laws -- Brief review of the case for the mal -- A note about hedged laws -- How plausible is the mal? -- What if we don't care about the law-governed world-picture? -- Newton's God and Laplace's demon -- Beyond humean and non-humean -- Two views of laws -- Humean supervenience and the meta-theoretic conception -- Alleged counterexamples to humean supervenience -- Governing and non-trivial necessity -- How the mal lets us have it all -- Humeanism? non-humeanism? -- What is the significance of the idea of the law-governed universe? -- Where in the world are the laws of nature? -- Appendix: The mal in action : a few examples -- Of scientific theories and their laws -- Newton's theory as a paradigm example -- Classical special-force laws -- Geometrical optics and one of its laws -- Local deterministic field theories. (shrink)

Addresses the relationship between the nation-state and non-state law, considering how they can coexist and transform each other.

ABSTRACTCommentators have commonly noted the metaphysical role of participation in Richard Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity: participation both describes how creation is suspended from God and also how believers share in Christ through grace. Yet, the role in Hooker’s thought of the attendant Platonic language of ‘between’ and ‘desire’ has not received sustained attention. Metaxu describes the ‘in-between’ quality of participation: the participant and the participated remain distinct but are dynamically related as the former originates from and (...) returns to the perfection of the latter. Within this metaxological dynamic, desire acts as the physical and psychic motor driving the move between potentiality and perfect actuality, that is to say from multiplicity to divine unity: desire aims at goodness and so ultimately tends towards that which is goodness itself, namely God’s nature. For Hooker, desire becomes couched in amorous affectivity and has an erotic register. This essay explores, then, how Hooker appeals to a language of ‘between’ and ‘desire’ within his accounts of participation. First, it examines how human beings exist between the footstool and throne of God in Hooker’s legal ontology. Here, angelic desire acts as a hierarchical pattern of and spur to erotic participation in the divine nature. Second, this essay examines how theurgy transforms desire in Hooker’s account of liturgical participation as a redemptive commerce between heaven and earth. Here, angels still act as invisible, hierarchical intermediaries within earthly worship, but soon give way to immediate grace through participation in Christ within the sacraments. (shrink)

This paper describes the automated classification of legal norms in German statutes with regard to their semantic type. We propose a semantic type taxonomy for norms in the German civil law domain consisting of nine different types focusing on functional aspects, such as Duties, Prohibitions, Permissions, etc. We performed four iterations in classifying legal norms with a rule-based approach using a manually labeled dataset, i.e., tenancy law, of the German Civil Code ). During this experiment the \ score continuously improved (...) from 0.52 to 0.78. In contrast, a machine learning based approach for the classification was implemented. A performance of \ was reached. Traditionally, machine learning classifiers lack of transparency with regard to their decisions. We extended our approach using so-called local linear approximations, which is a novel technique to analyze and inspect a trained classifier’s behavior. We can show that there are significant similarities of manually crafted knowledge, i.e., rules and pattern definitions, and the trained decision structures of machine learning approaches. (shrink)

By most measures, the impact of international human rights law ratification in the Arab Gulf region primarily in the 1990s and 2000s has been minimal. Scholars have found little evidence of correlation between ratification of the core human rights conventions with the minimal improvements in human rights practice in the region. Ratification of most human rights instruments Arab Gulf states in recent decades has, however, offered new cases from which to explore the impact of international human rights law in countries (...) where human rights monitors find protections to be most limited. Using the case of Kuwait’s ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women, this article examines the impact of ratification in 1994 on discourses on discrimination against women in national press on human rights in the country. Through analysis of reporting in national newspaper Al-Anba, the article identifies how ratification has shaped the language used in national press reporting on women’s rights to increasingly reference the convention and frame rights violations in the language of “discrimination.” In tracing these connections between the convention and related content in local press, the article identifies new avenue to explore the “impact” of human rights treaty ratification, even when formal changes in laws and policies so far have been limited. (shrink)

Background:Reducing the incidence and negative consequences of concussion among youth athletes is a public health priority. In 2010, Massachusetts passed legislation aimed at addressing the issue of concussions in school athletics. We sought to understand local-level implementation decisions of the Massachusetts concussion law.Methods:A qualitative multiple-case study approach was utilized. Semi-structured interviews with school-employed actors associated with the law's implementation were used for analysis. Interview data were subjected to a conventional content analysis.Results:A total of 19 participants from 5 schools were (...) interviewed. Schools were purposefully selected from communities varying in socioeconomic status and population. Participants included 5 athletic directors, 5 coaches, 4 athletic trainers, 4 school nurses, and 1 health and wellness coordinator. Eight themes emerged regarding specific ways schools have implemented the law. Six themes emerged regarding factors influencing implementation.Conclusions:All cases employ neurocognitive testing as a means to assess concussions, place decision-making authority in athletic trainers' hands, and use a 30-minute online video to disseminate concussion education. Employing athletic trainers could pose challenges to school districts with limited financial capacity, as financial assistance from the state is not provided under the law. The validity of neurocognitive testing and the effectiveness of online concussion training need further study. Cooperation from student athletes, their parents, and physicians is necessary for full implementation of the law. (shrink)

The laws of nature have come a long way since the time of Newton: quantum mechanics and relativity have given us good reasons to take seriously the possibility of laws which may be non-local, atemporal, ‘all-at-once,’ retrocausal, or in some other way not well-suited to the standard dynamical time evolution paradigm. Laws of this kind can be accommodated within a Humean approach to lawhood, but many extant non-Humean approaches face significant challenges when we try to apply them to laws (...) outside the time evolution picture. Thus for proponents of non-Humean approaches to lawhood there is a clear need for a novel non-Humean account which is capable of accommodating these sorts of laws. In this paper we propose such an account, characterizing lawhood in terms of constraints, which are understood as a form of modal structure. We demonstrate that our proposed realist account can indeed accommodate a large variety of laws outside the time evolution paradigm, and describe some possible applications to important philosophical problems. (shrink)

The observed Taiwanese neonatal professionals' more conservative attitudes than their worldwide colleagues towards end-of-life (EOL) decision making may stem from cultural attitudes toward death in children and concerns about medicolegal liability. Healthcare practice is rooted in local culture and laws; however that should be adjusted to patients' best interests. Improving Taiwanese neonatal professionals' knowledge and competence in EOL care may minimize ethical dilemmas, allow appropriate EOL care decision making, avoid infants' suffering, and ease parents' bereavement grief.

Bicycle helmets protect against head injury. Mandatory helmet laws likely increase their use. Although 21 states and Washington, DC have mandatory helmet laws for youth bicyclists, no U.S. state has a mandatory helmet law that applies to all ages; however, some localities have all-age helmet laws for bicyclists. This study abstracted local helmet laws applicable to all-ages to examine their elements.

In the early days of HIV awareness, prior to universal precautions, as a local health officer, I was supervising an openly gay employee. The county executive asked me the HIV status of the employee and threatened my employment if I did not reveal it. I was reluctant to do so, believing it would be an invasion of the employee’s privacy. I contacted the county attorney who advised me that I could reveal the employee’s HIV status to the county executive (...) but he was not willing to put his guidance in writing. Ultimately, I spoke with the employee’s attorney and was given permission to reveal the employee’s HIV status. The experience, however, left a bad taste in my mouth. I felt the county attorney was acting politically in support of the county executive rather than doing what was legally appropriate. He certainly did not act as an advocate for the local health department! (shrink)

This chapter re-examines the evidence for local ecclesiastical and other burial sites in pre-Viking Ireland. It compares local churches and cemetery settlements in pre-Viking Ireland with those found in England and Wales. The chapter describes the density of the pre-Viking ecclesiastical sites in Ireland, church density and social structure in Anglo-Saxon England, and the local ecclesiastical sites in Cornwall and Wales.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of constraints in the theory of relativity and, in particular, what philosophical work they do for Einstein's views on the laws of physics. Einstein presents a view of local ``structure laws'' which he characterizes as the most appropriate form of physical laws. Einstein was committed to a view of science, which presents a synthesis between rational and empirical elements as its hallmark. If scientific constructs are free inventions of the (...) human mind, as Einstein, held, the question arises how such rational constructs, including the symbolic formulation of the laws of physics, can represent physical reality. Representation in turn raises the question of realism. Einstein uses a number of constraints in the theory of relativity to show that by imposing constraints on the rational elements a certain ``fit'' between theory and reality can be achieved. Fit is to be understood as satisfaction of constraint. His emphasis on reference frames in the STR and more general coordinate systems in the GTR, as well as his emphasis on the symmetries of the theory of relativity suggests that Einstein's realism is akin to a certain form of structural realism. His version of structural realism follows from the theory of relativity and is independent of any current philosophical debates about structural realism. (shrink)

The field of “business for peace” recognizes the role that businesses can play in peacebuilding. However, like much of the discussion concerning business in conflict zones, it has prioritized the view of multinationals, often overlooking the role of indigenous local firms. The economic, social, and intergroup dynamics experienced by local businesses in conflict zones are understudied, with the current paper beginning by positioning micro- and small enterprises in the peacebuilding debate, then engaging with multidisciplinary works to understand how (...) they foster peace. Through a case study set in north Lebanon, we conducted semi-structured interviews with twenty-three MSE owners in one industry who operate across sectarian divisions and with recently displaced Syrian refugees. Our findings indicate that local business activity can simultaneously promote peace and foster conflict, with peacebuilding improved when intergroup differences are reduced within the operating environment. Furthermore, the importance of economic development was elevated for local businesses, suggesting that peace through mechanisms such as social development, the rule of law, and training, is only achieved if economic needs are alleviated through these measures. We conclude by citing how contextual factors in conflict zones can enhance intergroup differences, and how resolving such factors can promote peacebuilding, with further empirical work needed in this area. (shrink)

In Re JB, a local authority, concerned with the risk the respondent posed to vulnerable women, successfully appealed against an order made in the Court of Protection that declared JB, an autistic man with impaired cognition, possessed capacity to consent to sexual relations. In this recent decision, the Court of Appeal has arguably reset the last 15 years of jurisprudence concerning P’s capacity to make decisions in regard to sexual relations. Previous case law focused on P’s ability to consent (...) to such relations, and whether P understood the information relevant to that decision. Notwithstanding the abundance of legal authority, including the recent appellate judgments of Hayden J in London Borough of Tower Hamlets v NB and AU [2019] EWCOP 27. and B v A Local Authority [2019] EWCA Civ 913. there was a lacuna in the existing law in relation to what information was relevant for the purposes of assessing the issue of capacity to consent to sexual relations. Judges have traditionally adopted a protectionist stance in understanding “the information relevant to the decision” under s3 of the Mental Capacity Act 2005, with an emphasis on whether P understood the risks of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. However, the Court of Appeal in Re JB has broadened its interpretation of ‘relevant’ information to also include the ability to understand the importance of a partner’s consent to such relations. This is a welcome change to previous courts’ interpretations of the ‘nature’ of the sexual act, moving from an approach focused on the physical sexual mechanics to one which views the nature of sex as a mutually consensual engagement. However, a fundamental shift in how we view such cases is likely to have far-reaching consequences, particularly for local authorities and professionals seeking guidance in relation to their care planning. (shrink)

How best to realize international human rights law in practice has proved a vexing problem. The challenge is compounded in the USA, which has not ratified several treaties including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. The Cities for CEDAW movement addresses this deficit by encouraging cities to endorse and implement CEDAW norms. In doing so, it seeks to catalyze a local boomerang effect, whereby progressive political momentum at the local level generates internal (...) pressure from below to improve gender equity outcomes across the country and eventually, at the national level. In this article, we trace the diffusion of Cities for CEDAW activism with attention to the case of Cincinnati and analyze its implications for advancing women’s rights principles. We argue that while Cities for CEDAW has potential to enhance respect for women’s rights in local jurisdictions, its impact on national policy remains limited. (shrink)

Law abidance is very important for effective leaders. Without law abidance, abuse of power and corruption would easily happen, which would eventually erode organizational health. To promote law abidance leadership in university students in Hong Kong, we developed a law abidance leadership program with 3 h of face-to-face lecture and 7 h of self-study of materials disturbed to students. To understand students’ perception of the 3-h lecture, we conducted a post-lecture evaluation study using a 26-item measure. Results showed that the (...) scale possessed good reliability and validity. Confirmatory factor analyses showed that the assessment tool has three internally consistent and factorial invariant dimensions: program attributes, appreciation of law abidance, and teacher attributes. Regarding students’ perception of the program, students were generally satisfied with the lecture attributes, including design, content, lecture atmosphere, teaching quality, and benefits to students. In particular, students agreed that the lecture helped them understand the importance and value of law abidance and national security; over 95% of the students indicated that they would try their best to serve as law-abiding citizens and socially responsible leaders. Multiple regression analyses showed that program attributes, appreciation of law abidance, and teacher attributes predicted overall satisfaction with the lecture. Qualitative comments of the student echoed the quantitative findings, with most of the comments being positive in nature. The present study replicated the findings reported previously. Local and international contextual factors relevant to the interpretations of the findings are highlighted. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of the development patterns of the local government system in the Russian Federation. The submission to the State Duma of the Russian Federation of the draft Federal Law «On the general principles of the organization of local self-government in the unified system of public authority» in December 2021 means the preparation of a new stage of municipal reform and makes it relevant to study long-term changes in the institutional organization of (...) class='Hi'>local self-government. The purpose of the study is to analyze changes in the structure of local self-government bodies and the rules of their formation at each stage of the development of this institution, as well as to identify the main patterns of this process. The analysis of the legislative base regulating the structure and rules of formation of local self-government bodies has been carried out. The data related to the development of the local government system provided by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation were analyzed. It is shown that the structure of local self-government bodies has not undergone significant changes. However, there have been changes in the ways of forming local self-government bodies, which reflect the trend towards their loss of institutional independence and integration into a single system of public power. This trend appeared at the stage of implementation of the Federal Law on Local Self-Government in 2003 and was consolidated in the new Draft law on Local self-government submitted to the State Duma of the Russian Federation in 2021. It is concluded that there is a tendency to increase the dependence on federal and regional legislators of local self-government bodies. For the institute of heads of municipalities, the loss of institutional independence was clearly manifested by the introduction of the procedure for electing heads by competition, displacing both election at municipal elections and election from the Council of Deputies. The formation of representative bodies, having passed the stage of delegating deputies to higher levels, returns to the model of direct elections. However, this happens in the context of the rejection of a two-tier system of local self-government. (shrink)

In Wisconsin, many alcohol policies are regulated at the local level. To examine the relationship between local policies, alcohol use and health outcomes, our team developed a database to collect local alcohol policies. Initial results highlight differences in how policies are defined, enforced, and made available to the public.

There is a long tradition of preferring local theories to ones that posit lawful or causal influence at a spacetime distance. In this paper, we argue against this preference. We argue that nonlocality is scientifically unobjectionable and that nonlocal theories can be known. Scientists can gather evidence for them and confirm them in much the same way that they do for local theories. We think these observations point to a deeper constraint on scientific theorizing and experimentation: the (quasi‐) (...) isolation of causal or lawful influence. We argue that this requirement ought to replace the locality desideratum in science. We then explore the possibility that the order of explanation has been reversed: perhaps it is isolatable influence that determines what counts as local in the first place. (shrink)

Deleuze and jurisdiction : expressionism in jurisprudence -- Personal jurisdiction : the "method of dramatization" in the law of persons -- Minority and personal jurisdiction : judging sex in re alex -- Persons of animal law -- Deleuze, the law of things and subject-matter jurisdiction -- To put to flight : the right of possession -- The activity of judgment : law of actions and the procedural genre of jurisprudence -- Jurisdiction of control : judgment and procedural forms in Thomas (...) v Mowbray -- The locality of law : jurisdiction in Deleuze. (shrink)

This article examines the criteria for determining when a local authority owes a duty of care at Common Law, concurrent with statutory obligations, in light of the decisions of the House of Lords in X (Minors) v Bedfordshire County Council and M (A Minor) v Newham Borough Council. The various policy arguments employed by their Lordships are analysed and located within current debate regarding the purpose and scope of the tort of negligence. It is argued that, in relevant circumstances, (...) English courts should have regard to the European Convention on Human Rights in order to conclude whether it is ‘just and reasonable’ to impose a duty of care. The cases under discussion raised issues under several Articles of the Convention (Article 6 and Article 8, in particular), and their impact upon the decision of the House of Lords, as well as the facts themselves, is assessed. (shrink)