This article is a jurisprudential analysis of the idea of a ‘living Constitution’, as a common feature of the constitutional practice in democratic countries. The main argument of the article is that constitutional interpretation encompasses, rather than excludes the judicial power to develop and change the content of constitutional guarantees. The metaphor of the ‘living Constitution’ is appropriate to the nature of constitutional adjudication because it suggests gradual, incremental change on a case-by-case basis. While it is stressed that courts can (...) and should be creative, this judicial creativity is subject to significant legal and practical constraints. (shrink)

_Arguing about Law_ introduces philosophy of law in an accessible and engaging way. The reader covers a wide range of topics, from general jurisprudence, law, the state and the individual, to topics in normative legal theory, as well as the theoretical foundations of public and private law. In addition to including many classics, _Arguing About Law_ also includes both non-traditional selections and discussion of timely topical issues like the legal dimension of the war on terror. The editors provide lucid introductions (...) to each section in which they give an overview of the debate and outline the arguments of the papers, helping the student get to grips with both the classic and core arguments and emerging debates in: the nature of law legality and morality the rule of law the duty to obey the law legal enforcement of sexual morality the nature of rights rights in an age of terror constitutional theory tort theory. _Arguing About Law_ is an inventive and stimulating reader for students new to philosophy of law, legal theory and jurisprudence. (shrink)

Under the Human Rights Act, British courts are for the first time empowered to review primary legislation for compliance with a codified set of fundamental rights. In this book, Aileen Kavanagh argues that the HRA gives judges strong powers of constitutional review, similar to those exercised by the courts under an entrenched Bill of Rights. The aim of the book is to subject the leading case-law under the HRA to critical scrutiny, whilst remaining sensitive to the deeper constitutional, (...) political and theoretical questions which underpin it. Such questions include the idea of judicial deference, the constitutional status of the HRA, the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and the constitutional division of labour between Parliament and the courts. The book closes with a sustained defence of the legitimacy of constitutional review in a democracy, thus providing a powerful rejoinder to those who are sceptical about judicial power under the HRA. (shrink)

This article challenges Jeremy Waldron's arguments in favour of participatory majoritarianism, and against constitutional judicial review. First, I consider and critique Waldron's arguments against instrumentalist justifications of political authority. My central claim is that although the right to democratic participation is intrinsically valuable, it does not displace the central importance of the `instrumental condition of good government': political decision-making mechanisms should be chosen (primarily) on the basis of their conduciveness to good results. I then turn to an examination of Waldron's (...) claim that individuals are entitled to participate in decisions which affect their lives. Furthermore, I respond to his claim that justifications of constitutional judicial review rely on an objectionable distrust of democratic politics, and is inconsistent with a view of the person as a morally responsible, autonomous agent. Finally, I seek to show that judicial review can itself become a valuable channel of political participation, especially for those who are marginalized and disempowered in the normal political process. (shrink)

In recent case-law under the Human Rights Act 1998, the senior judiciary have reiterated the view that their task under section 3(1) of the Act is one of ‘interpretation rather than legislation’. This article has two main aims. The first is to provide a general, theoretical analysis of the extent to which it is possible (if at all) to distinguish between interpretation and legislation. The second is to examine the judicial understanding of this distinction, as revealed through judgments in the (...) HRA case-law. (shrink)

This essay gives more detailed content to the widespread view that the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) has changed the traditional role of parliamentary intention in statutory interpretation. It begins by outlining the various ways in which legislative intent has featured in traditional (pre-HRA) statutory interpretation. This is followed by an examination of the interpretive principles developed by the senior judiciary under the HRA case-law, focusing on the extent to which they seem to depart from traditional principles. It is argued (...) that although the traditional role of parliamentary intention is partly preserved post-HRA, the interpretive obligation under s 3(1) HRA nonetheless shifts the interpretive focus away from what Parliament originally intended in enacting the legislation under HRA scrutiny, towards fulfilling the overriding goal of achieving compatibility with Convention rights. The final sections of the essay attempt to provide an account of what is involved in this shift. (shrink)

This first full-length study of the Arabic reception of Plato's Timaeus considers the role of Galen of Pergamum in shaping medieval perceptions of the text as transgressing disciplinary norms. It argues that Galen appealed to the entangled cosmological scheme of the dialogue, where different relations connect the body, soul, and cosmos, to expand the boundaries of medicine in his pursuit for epistemic authority – the right to define and explain natural reality. Aileen Das situates Galen's work on disciplinary boundaries (...) in the context of medicine's ancient rivalry with philosophy, whose professionals were long seen as superior knowers of the cosmos vis-à-vis doctors. Her case studies show how Galen and four of the most important Christian, Muslim, and Jewish thinkers in the Arabic Middle Ages creatively interpreted key doctrines from the Timaeus to reimagine medicine and philosophy as well as their own intellectual identities. (shrink)

Kavanagh, Aengus Review(s) of: Our fathers: What Australian Catholic priests really think about their lives and their Church, Chris McGillion and John Carroll, Mulgrave: John Garratt Publishing, 2011, pp.200, $29.95.

This research presents findings from a study of gender-based differences in an ethical decision situation. The study focuses on gender as it relates to situational factors and accounting experience. The primary element of interest is how the gender of the actor (the person described in each vignette) influences the evaluation/assessment of the ethical/unethical decisions. While previous research has provided evidence of ethical differences relating to the gender of the responding subjects, limited evidence has been presented relating to situational issues that (...) may influence assessments of ethical decisions.This research uses four accounting environment vignettes to survey the responses of accountants and accounting students to the ethical/unethical nature of the actions that are taken. In addition, how likely the accountants believe they are to take the same actions is also surveyed. The subjects are a representative sample of practicing accountants in the U.S. and senior/graduate accounting majors at a state university in the southwestern United States. (shrink)

Mainly known for its links to the periodical market and radical politics, this article recontextualizes the editorship of William Nicholson (1753–1815) in terms of its roots in the metropolitan natural philosophical circles of the second half of the 18th century as well as its impact on experimenters and men of science after 1797. The article argues that Nicholson's editorship of the Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts was a means to expand his philosophical significance among natural philosophers at (...) home and abroad—and was, in fact, a form of epistemological subversion that challenged the “Banksian Learned Empire.”. (shrink)

What was once the factory is now the university. As deindustrialization spreads and the working class is decentralized, new means of social resistance and political activism need to be sought in what may be the last places where they are possible: the university and the art world. Gerald Raunig's new book analyzes the potential that cognitive and creative labor has in these two arenas to resist the new regimes of domination imposed by cognitive capitalism. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's concept of (...) "modulation" as the market-driven imperative for the constant transformation and reinvention of subjectivity, in Factories of Knowledge, Industries of Creativity, Raunig charts alternative horizons for resistance. Looking at recent social struggles including the university strikes in Europe, the Spanish ¡Democracia real YA! organization, the Arab revolts, and the Occupy movement, Raunig argues for a reassessment of the importance of cultural and knowledge production. The central role of the university, he asserts, is not as a factory of knowledge but as a place of creative disobedience. (shrink)

In this "concise philosophy of the machine," Gerald Raunig provides a historical and critical backdrop to a concept proposed forty years ago by the French philosophers Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze: the machine, not as a technical device and apparatus, but as a social composition and concatenation. This conception of the machine as an arrangement of technical, bodily, intellectual, and social components subverts the opposition between man and machine, organism and mechanism, individual and community. Drawing from an unusual range of (...) films, literature, and performance--from the role of bicycles in Flann O'Brien's fiction to Vittorio de Sica's Neorealist film The Bicycle Thieves, and from Karl Marx's "Fragment on Machines" to the deus ex machina of Greek drama--Raunig arrives at an enhanced conception of the machine as a social movement, finding its most apt and concrete manifestation in the Euromayday movement, which since 2001 has become a transnational activist and discursive practice focused upon the precarious nature of labor and lives. (shrink)

ABSTRACTUsing a frame analysis approach this paper examines how The Irish Times and the Irish Independent portrayed public sector workers during Ireland's economic crisis. Using a sample of coverage from 2009 and 2010 it discusses the five media frames identified in this analysis, three of which were hegemonic and two of which were counter hegemonic. In this paper, I argue that coverage of the public sector by each newspaper was imbalanced and inaccurate. This paper also finds that both newspapers were (...) strong advocates of austerity cutbacks in the public service as a solution to Ireland's financial crisis, frequently representing this idea as ‘fact’ while simultaneously delegitimising those opposing this viewpoint. (shrink)

Stepping-up the historiography of peripheral popularisation Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9454-8 Authors Aileen Fyfe, School of History, University of St Andrews, St Katharine’s Lodge, The Scores, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9AR UK Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

This paper considers the development and judicial application of the Public Sector Equality Duty now found in section 149 Equality Act 2010, previously in a variety of forms in the Race Relations Act 1976, the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. It identifies a number of emerging themes in the jurisprudence concerned, in particular, with the relationship between the PSED and Wednesbury review, the extent of the information-gathering obligation it imposes, the delegability of PSED decision-making and (...) the timing of PSED challenge. It then considers the uncertainties which remain including, in particular, the application of the duty to various categories of decision-making, and concludes by assessing the impact of the PSED on challenges to ‘cuts’ cases arising from the reductions to public sector funding, and on domestic equality jurisprudence. (shrink)

This study uses accounting professionals from an international setting to test the individualism and power distance cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede [Culture's Consequences 1980]. Six countries, which appropriately represented high and low values on the Hofstede dimensions, were chosen for the survey of ethical beliefs. Respondents from the six countries were requested to supply their agreement/disagreement with eight questionable behaviors associated with the work environment. Each of these behaviors contained an individualism and/or power distance cultural component for the responding accountants (...) to consider. The results of the cultural analysis indicated significance on five of the eight survey items. Results lend support for the presence of the individualism cultural element in the ethical responses of the accountants surveyed. (shrink)

The algorithmic turn in photography raises the question of whether an algorithmically generated image is even a photograph at all. This paradox is abundant on India's urban streets, where the pedestrian or road user is met with giant photo saturated flex hoardings printed with political and community messages and photo-shopped portraits of gods, chief ministers and party workers. In this article, attention to photo-based political posters alongside art practices sharing common elements of digital capture and postproduction contextualizes a reading of (...) technologically produced visual landscapes in the South Indian city of Bangalore. Informed by Vilèm Flusser, the techno-materiality of hoardings are interpreted as visual practices whose reliance on Microsoft and Adobe softwares reveal more than the semiotic information that is ostensibly transmitted; in so doing the extent to which photography is a useful entry point for assessing the visuality in which we're currently living and how this gets locally inflected in the case of India is explored. (shrink)

In the decades after the Second World War, learned society publishers struggled to cope with the expanding output of scientific research and the increased involvement of commercial publishers in the business of publishing research journals. Could learned society journals survive economically in the postwar world, against this competition? Or was the emergence of a sales-based commercial model of publishing – in contrast to the traditional model of subsidized journal publishing – an opportunity to transform the often-fragile finances of learned societies? (...) But there was also an existential threat: if commercial firms could successfully publish scientific journals, were learned society publishers no longer needed? This paper investigates how British learned society publishers adjusted to the new economic realities of the postwar world, through an investigation of the activities organized by the Royal Society of London and the Nuffield Foundation, culminating in the 1963 report Self-Help for Learned Journals. It reveals the postwar decades as the time when scientific research became something to be commodified and sold to libraries, rather than circulated as part of a scholarly mission. It will be essential reading for all those campaigning to transition academic publishing – including learned society publishing – away from the sales-based model once again. (shrink)

Relocation or closing of manufacturing plants is an unavoidable element of our economic system which causes hardship to employees and communities. this article argues that, in making a decision to close or relocate, companies have moral obligations to: (1) take into account the impact on employees and the community; (2) avoid the move if possible; (3) notify affected parties as soon as possible; and (4) take positive measures to ameliorate effects of the move.

A central principle of bioethics is “subject autonomy,” the acknowledgement of the primacy of the informed consent of the subject of research. Autonomy requires informed consent — the assurance that the research participant is informed about the possible risks and benefits of the research. In fact, informed consent is difficult when a single drug is being tested, although subjects have a baseline understanding of the testing of a pharmacological agent and the understanding that they can stop taking the drug if (...) there were an adverse event. However, informed consent is even less easily achieved in the modern arena of complex new molecular and cellular therapies. In this article, we argue that as science confronts new issues such as transplantation of stem cell products, which may live within the participant for the rest of their lives, researchers must carefully consider and constantly re-examine how they properly inform subjects considering participation trials of these novel therapeutic strategies.For example, the manufacture of a vial of a cell product that consists of a collection of growing cells is very different than the production of a vial of identical pills, which can be presumed to be identical. The scientific concepts on which these cellular approaches are based may seem alien and incomprehensible to a research subject, who thinks of a clinical trial as simply the selection and testing of the most efficacious pharmaceutical agent already proven to work in preclinical animal studies. The research subject would be wrong. (shrink)

RésuméLe « Synopsis du Timée de Platon » de Galien, ouvrage clé pour l’étude du platonisme prémoderne, survit uniquement dans une édition dite « imparfaite » de 1951 qui présente pour la première fois le texte arabe survivant accompagné de sa traduction en latin. Les rédacteurs de la série « Plato Arabus » du Corpus Platonicum, à laquelle l’édition appartient, ont attribué les défauts de cette édition à la mort inopportune de Paul Kraus, qui l'a préparée, aidé par un autre (...) réfugié juif, Richard Walzer, pendant la période de la seconde guerre mondiale. Notre analyse de sources tirées d'archives démontrera que le travail sur ce volume était majoritairement celui de Kraus. Qui plus est, nous démontrons que Walzer et le rédacteur du Corpus Platonicum Raymond Klibansky ont marginalisé le travail de Kraus sur le projet dans l'optique d'avancer leurs propres carrières universitaires en tant que Juifs réfugiés en Grande-Bretagne. Nous allons également examiner la manière dont Walzer et Klibansky ont remanié le projet initial de Kraus – celui d'un corpus sémitique du platonisme – en un « Plato Arabus » plus étroit qui s'alignerait sur une étude du platonisme latin, projet qu'ils présumaient plus susceptible d'intéresser leurs mécènes britanniques. (shrink)

Unknowing is at the center of spiritual life. It is only by creating a space in which anything can happen that we allow God to speak; only by stepping back that we allow space for that unpredictable Spirit that brings us gifts beyond any of our imaginings.

The recent widespread transformation in the conjugal rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people across much of the globe may seem to suggest that, at long last, the history of heterosexism has reached its terminus. In Ireland, the Equal Marriage Referendum in May 2015 offered the opportunity for the citizens of the Republic to extend the same rights, permissions, and privileges to same-sex couples that married heterosexual couples freely enjoy. The passing of that referendum and the extension of (...) these rights to same-sex couples denotes a move beyond societal tolera6tion toward societal acceptance, yet it remains to be seen whether or not the affordance of conjugal rights to LGBT people will necessarily mean that all queer subjects will be given the same acceptance.This article examines equal marriage and its potential engendering of binary divisions between queer subjects who adhere to the logic of cultural heteronormativity and those who transgress its structuring forces. It aims to historicise the discourse that surrounds gay marriage by tracing these debates back to the Enlightenment's production of the companionate marriage. The works of Edmund Burke, his aesthetic writings and political speeches, provide the textual basis for an examination of 'normative desire' in the eighteenth century. The article contends that assessing the eighteenth century's regime of heteronormativity will allow us to see the provisional nature of our own heterosexist cultural formations. (shrink)

Introduction : playing with play -- Child's play : childhood and "the lack" in organizational discourse -- Playful representations of work -- Dance as play and work : images of organization in Irish dance -- Talk and silence : playing with silence as an organizational resource -- Playing the fool : the university as fool -- Play and madness in the market -- Playing business : gambling and "casino capitalism".

As his writings tend to prioritize the incorporeal over the corporeal, Plato seems an unlikely authority on medicine. He does not appear to have engaged in any systematic investigation of the body through direct examination of animal anatomy, like his pupil Aristotle. Notwithstanding Plato's apparent lack of interest in anatomical research, modern scholars view his dialogues as valuable witnesses for earlier and contemporary theories about the body. Famously, thePhaedrus(270c–e) mentions Hippocrates’ holistic approach to studying the body. Out of all his (...) dialogues, theTimaeusoffers the most extensive comments about the nature of the body and its functions. Many of its physiological ideas, however, seem to derive from earlier medical and philosophical authorities such as Alcmaeon of Croton (fifth century), Empedocles (fifth century) and Philistion of Locri (fourth century) rather than from Plato himself. (shrink)

Many commonly accepted models for understanding disability use a vertical method in which disability is defined as a category into which people are slotted based on whether or not they fit its definitional criteria. This method, and the models of disability developed in accordance with it, inevitably homogenizes the experiences of disabled people to preserve the integrity of the definition of disability that a given model provides. A hermeneutic investigation and critique of commonly accepted models for understanding disability will provide (...) an epistemological tool that makes it possible both to critique and to augment contemporary models of disability. (shrink)