‘Great inhumanity’: scandal, child punishment and policymaking in the early years of the New Poor Law workhouse system

New Poor Law scandals have usually been examined either to demonstrate the cruelty of the workhouse regime or to illustrate the failings or brutality of union staff. Recent research has used these and similar moments of crisis to explore the relationship between local and central levels of welfare administration (the Boards of Guardians in unions across England and Wales and the Poor Law Commission in Somerset House in London) and how scandals in particular were pivotal in the development of further policies. This article examines both the inter-local and local-centre tensions and policy consequences of the Droxford Union and Fareham Union scandal (1836–1837), which exposed the severity of workhouse punishments towards three young children. The article illustrates the complexities of union cooperation and, as a result of the escalation of public knowledge into the cruelties and investigations thereafter, how the vested interests of individuals within a system manifested themselves in particular (in)actions and viewpoints. While the Commission was a reactive and flexible welfare authority, producing new policies and procedures in the aftermath of crises, the policies developed after this particular scandal made union staff, rather than the welfare system as a whole, individually responsible for the maltreatment and neglect of the poor

Regulating E-Cigarettes: Why Policies Diverge

This paper, part of a festschrift in honor of Professor Malcolm Feeley, explores the landscape of e-cigarette policy globally by looking at three jurisdictions that have taken starkly different approaches to regulating e-cigarettes—the US, Japan, and China. Each of those countries has a robust tobacco industry, government agencies entrusted with protecting public health, an active and sophisticated scientific and medical community, and a regulatory structure for managing new pharmaceutical, tobacco, and consumer products. All three are signatories of the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, all are signatories of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, and all are members of the World Trade Organization. Which legal, economic, social and political differences between the three countries explain their diverse approaches to regulating e-cigarettes? Why have they embraced such dramatically different postures toward e-cigarettes? In seeking to answer those questions, the paper builds on Feeley\u27s legacy of comparative scholarship, policy analysis, and focus on law in action

The Return of Character: Parallels Between Late-Victorian and Twenty-First Century Discourses

There has been an increasingly common trend in the UK to identify character skills and traits as the basis for various individual successes and achievements. In education policy and employment services, character has been linked to the making of successful, morally aware, employable and socially mobile citizens. This article explores the late-nineteenth century use of character discourses, focusing on the economist Alfred Marshall. During this period character was associated with future-oriented subjects – those displaying provident and thrifty habits and dispositions – and held particular class, race and gender prejudices. The article draws parallels between this late-Victorian approach to character and the ‘return’ of character in twenty-first century education and welfare-to-work policy, in particular where cultivating character is linked to improving employability and social mobility. We can make productive comparisons between character’s Victorian legacy and its reemergence more recently amid increasingly moralized discourses around poverty, inequality and unemployment. In doing so, we might better understand the historical antecedents to stigmatizing character discourses today, insofar as they leave the burden of responsibility for particular social outcomes in life and the labour market with individuals and their ability to cultivate their own human capital

Christian use of pharaonic sacred space in Western Thebes : the case of TT 85 and 87

13 page(s

Of wives, mothers, and wild women : figurations of the female in Coptic sacred and martyr legends

11 page(s