Refusing to be a man?: Men's responsibility for war rape and the problem of social structures in feminist and gender theory

As the majority perpetrators of sexual violence, it is plausible to see men as responsible for war rape not only as individuals, but also as collective bystanders, facilitators and beneficiaries. Following recent criticisms of individual legal and moral responsibility for rape as a war crime in international law, this article examines how we might think of war rape as a collective action in moral and sociological terms. First, it assesses existing moral arguments for the responsibility of men in groups for rape, primarily with reference to the work of Claudia Card, Larry May and Robert Strikwerda. Critiquing elements of these arguments, it explores the difficulties in talking about ‘men’ as a coherent group and in discussing ‘collectives’ themselves. Second, the article draws out the connection between accounts of moral responsibility and accounts of causal responsibility. Drawing on critiques of collective responsibility and the long-standing agency/structure problem, it argues that causal accounts focusing on structure pose a serious challenge to ideas of both individual and collective moral responsibility. The complexities of the relationship between moral and causal claims are illustrated through a discussion of Susan Brownmiller and Catharine MacKinnon’s influential perspectives on rape. The seeming paradox of responsibility is emphasised as a problem to be addressed by gender and feminist perspectives that seek to pursue both ethical and sociological inquiry into the workings of masculinity and the political means for undoing gendered wrongs

Towards a FrameNet Resource for the Legal Domain

In the AI&Law community, the importance of frame-based ontologies has been acknowledged since the early 90\u27s with the Van Kralingen\u27s proposal of a frame language for legal knowledge representation. This still appears to be a strongly felt need within the community. In this paper, we propose to face this need by developing a FrameNet resource for the legal domain based on Fillmore\u27s Frame Semantics, whose final outocme will include a frame-based lexical ontology and a legal corpus annotated with frame information. In particular, the paper focuses on methodological and design issues, ranging from the customization and extension of the general FrameNet for the legal domain to the linking of the developed resource with already existing Legal Ontologies

Joseph Story

Joseph Story (1779-1845) was one of the greatest and most influential American lawyers of all time. Both as a Supreme Court Justice and as a professor at Harvard Law School, his work and thought were, and still are, of great importance. Today’s private international law would look different without him, both in the United States and in the rest of the world. At the same time, his approach to the field cannot be properly understood unless placed within his broader work on law, and the specific American background against which it was developed

Ontology learning from Italian legal texts

The paper reports on the methodology and preliminary results of a case study in automatically extracting ontological knowledge from Italian legislative texts. We use a fully-implemented ontology learning system (T2K) that includes a battery of tools for Natural Language Processing (NLP), statistical text analysis and machine language learning. Tools are dynamically integrated to provide an incremental representation of the content of vast repositories of unstructured documents. Evaluated results, however preliminary, show the great potential of NLP-powered incremental systems like T2K for accurate large-scale semi-automatic extraction of legal ontologies

School Librarian Preparation and Practice: An Exploration of the AASL National School Library Standards and ALA/AASL/CAEP School Librarian Preparation Standards

The American Association of School Librarians (AASL) recently released standards to guide the practice of school librarians. The National School Library Standards for Learners, School Librarians, and School Libraries (2018) were put forward as a single text with integrated frameworks. One year later, the ALA/AASL/CAEP School Librarian Preparation Standards (2019) were adopted to inform the preparation of school librarians. Using a one-way crosswalk analysis, this study explores the alignment of the AASL Standards Framework for School Librarians from the AASL Standards with the ALA/AASL/CAEP Preparation Standards to determine consistencies in expectations as well as identify noted gaps. Findings will assist educators of school librarians to develop meaningful coursework and pre-service experiences

Los modelos de semántica de marcos para la representación del conocimiento jurídico en el Derecho Comparado: el caso de la responsabilidad del Estado

En aquest article s'analitza en profunditat i es realitza una proposta de representació del coneixement jurídic subjacent al concepte de responsabilitat de l'Estat des d'una perspectiva multilingüe i juscomparativa. Per a això, es proposa d'augmentar la informació dels marcs semàntics (a partir d'ara, marcs) a través dels semantic types en el sistema FrameNet, amb el doble objectiu de servir com a representació interlingua del coneixement jurídic i de formalitzar les causes del desajust lèxic i conceptual dels sistemes jurídics. S'estudia el principi de responsabilitat de l'Estat en els models espanyol, anglès, francès i italià i es demostra com una descripció més detallada del coneixement jurídic, a través de la vinculació dels frame elements (a partir d'ara designats amb l'acrònim FE) dels marcs amb els tipus semàntics [±sentient], possibilita no només la utilització d'aquests com a representació interlingua, sinó, a més, procura explicar les divergències/convergències dels diferents plantejaments del concepte de responsabilitat de l'Estat, ancorats en contextos socioculturals de diferent tradició. La present proposta evidencia els avantatges de l'esmentada formalització com a model explicatiu del procés dinàmic de vaig donar/convergència en la jurisprudència del Tribunal de Justícia de la Unió Europea (a partir d'ara designat amb la sigla TJUE).This article offers an in-depth analysis, and proposes a representation of the legal knowledge underlying the concept of State responsibility from a multilingual and comparative law perspective. To this end, it recommends increasing information on frame semantics (hereinafter, frames) through the semantic types in the FrameNet system, with the double purpose of acting as an interlingual representation of legal knowledge and formalising the causes for lexical and conceptual imbalances in legal systems. The article studies the principle of State responsibility in the Spanish, English, French and Italian models and shows how a more detailed description of legal knowledge through the linking of the frame elements (hereinafter designed by the acronym FE) of the frames with the semantic types [±sentient], makes it feasible not just to use these as an interlingual representation, but also to try to explain the divergences/convergences of the various approaches to the concept of the State responsibility that are rooted in sociocultural contexts of a different tradition. This proposal demonstrates the advantages of this formalisation as a model to explain the dynamic process of divergence/convergence in the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (referred to hereinafter by the acronym CJEU).En este artículo se analiza en profundidad y se realiza una propuesta de representación del conocimiento jurídico subyacente al concepto de responsabilidad del Estado desde una perspectiva multilingüe y juscomparativa. Para ello, se propone aumentar la información de los marcos semánticos (a partir de ahora, marcos) a través de los semantic types en el sistema FrameNet, con el doble objetivo de servir como representación interlingüe del conocimiento jurídico y de formalizar las causas del desajuste léxico y conceptual de los sistemas jurídicos. Se estudia el principio de responsabilidad del Estado en los modelos español, inglés, francés e italiano y se demuestra cómo una descripción más detallada del conocimiento jurídico, a través de la vinculación de los frame elements (a partir de ahora designados con el acrónimo FE) de los marcos con los tipos semánticos [±sentient], posibilita no solo la utilización de estos como representación interlingüe, sino, además, procura explicar las divergencias/convergencias de los distintos planteamientos del concepto de responsabilidad del Estado, anclados en contextos socioculturales de diferente tradición. La presente propuesta evidencia las ventajas de dicha formalización como modelo explicativo del proceso dinámico de di/convergencia en la jurisprudencia del Tribunal de Justicia de la Unión Europea (a partir de ahora designado con la sigla TJUE)