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Gunslinging justice explores American Westerns in a variety of media alongside the historical development of the American legal system to argue that Western shootouts are less overtly ‘anti-law’ than has been previously assumed. While the genre’s climactic shootouts may look like a putatively masculine opposition to the codified and mediated American legal system, this gun violence is actually enshrined in the development of American laws regulating self-defense and gun possession. The climactic gun violence and stylized revenge drama of seminal Western texts then, seeks not to oppose ‘the law,’ but rather to expand its scope. The book’s interdisciplinary approach, which seeks to historicize and contextualize the iconographic tropes of the genre and its associated discourses across varied cultural and social forms, breaks from psychoanalytic perspectives which have long dominated studies of film and legal discourse and occluded historical contingencies integral to the work cultural forms do in the world. From nineteenth-century texts like Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and Reconstruction-era dime novels, through early twentieth-century works like The Virginian, to classic Westerns and more recent films like Unforgiven (1992), this book looks to the intersections between American law and various media that have enabled a cultural, social, and political acceptance of defensive gun violence that is still with us today.
Introduction Is justice intra-national or international, localised or globalised, communitarian or cosmopolitan, universal or particular, in its scope? Do richer countries have a duty to help poorer countries and, if so, is this duty a matter of charity or justice, or both? Answers to these questions are often dependent upon an answer to a prior question: are state boundaries morally arbitrary and, if
right of parents to raise their children as they see fit so long as they do not harm them. On the other hand, they want to show that equality of opportunity is an independent principle of justice, not simply an efficient way in most circumstances of allocating jobs and educational places that is consistent with what justice requires. John Rawls’s account of fair equality of opportunity in A Theory of
on the ways in which our counter-archive of migratory testimonies advances demands for justice that contest the unequal right to free movement embedded in the EU's preventative policy framework. More specifically, it examines the challenges that such testimonies pose to a policy agenda that is oriented towards resolving the ‘root causes’ of migration, and which addresses border security and development as interconnected concerns. After providing an overview of the various ways through which people on the move oppose the preventative policy agenda and advance
This book addresses one of the most acute moral and political dilemmas of the twelfth century: how did a judge determine how to punish an offender, and what was the purpose of such punishment? It examines how English judges weighed a choice which, if made wrongly, could endanger both the political community and their own souls. That choice was between two ideas which twelfth-century intellectual and legal thought understood as irreconcilable opposites: justice and mercy. By examining the moral pressures on English judges, Justice and Mercy provides a new way into medieval legal culture: rather than looking at the laws that judges applied, it reconstructs the moral world of the judges themselves. The book offers a fresh synthesis of the disciplines of intellectual history and legal history, examining theological commentaries, moral treatises, letters, sermons and chronicles in order to put the creation of the English common law into its moral context. This broad vision brings to light the shared language of justice and mercy, an idea which dominated twelfth-century discourse and had the potential to polarise political opinion. Justice and Mercy challenges many of the prevailing narratives surrounding the common law, suggesting that judges in church courts and royal courts looked strikingly similar, and that English judges had more in common with their continental counterparts than is often assumed.
This book provides a critical investigation of what has been termed the ‘global justice movement’. Through a detailed study of a grassroots peasants' network in Asia (People's Global Action); an international trade union network (the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mining and General Workers); and the Social Forum process, it analyses some of the global justice movement's component parts, operational networks and their respective dynamics, strategies and practices. The authors argue that the emergence of new globally connected forms of collective action against neoliberal globalisation are indicative of a range of variously place-specific forms of political agency that coalesce across geographic space at particular times, in specific places and in a variety of ways. They also argue that, rather than being indicative of a coherent ‘movement’, such forms of political agency contain many political and geographical fissures and fault-lines, and are best conceived of as ‘global justice networks’: overlapping, interacting, competing and differentially placed and resourced networks that articulate demands for social, economic and environmental justice. Such networks, and the social movements that comprise them, characterise emergent forms of trans-national political agency. The authors argue that the role of key geographical concepts of space, place and scale are crucial to an understanding of the operational dynamics of such networks. Such an analysis challenges key current assumptions in the literature about the emergence of a global civil society.
Truth commissions are widely recognised tools used in negotiation following political repression. Their work may be underpinned by formal scientific investigation of human remains. This paper presents an analysis of the role of forensic investigations in the transition to democracy following the Brazilian military governments of 1964–85. It considers practices during the dictatorship and in the period following, making reference to analyses of truth commission work in jurisdictions other than Brazil, including those in which the investigation of clandestine burials has taken place. Attempts to conceal the fate of victims during the dictatorship, and the attempts of democratic governments to investigate them are described. Despite various initiatives since the end of the military government, many victims remain unidentified. In Brazil, as elsewhere, forensic investigations are susceptible to political and social influences, leading to a situation in which relatives struggle to obtain meaningful restitution and have little trust in the transitional justice process.
Law and society without justice ‘Towards the middle of the sixteenth century, there lived on the banks of the Havel a horse dealer by the name of Michael Kohlhaas, the son of a schoolmaster, one of the most upright and at the same time one of the most terrible men of his day … the world … would have every reason to bless his memory, if he had not carried one virtue to excess
The second stage in Tunisia's transitional justice process was marked by a shift in the focus of transitional justice activities from ad hoc measures to designing transitional justice and the introduction of a planned transitional justice project that went beyond the first steps towards institutionalisation discussed in the previous chapter. This shift is crucial for understanding the development of transitional justice in Tunisia and how the process interacted with the volatile political context, as the planned project became the
Transitional justice is an interdisciplinary field with blurred boundaries, which accounts for its “energy and vibrancy but also the immense disagreements inherent in the field” (Clark and Palmer 2012 , 1). These disagreements start with attempts to identify the origins of transitional justice. A major difference in the various accounts is whether the authors set the starting point of their analysis at when transitional justice – in the author's opinion – started to be done , or when what was done started to be called transitional justice