The Plight of Prostitution: A Study of Sonia Marmeladov in Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky\u27s celebrated novel Crime and Punishment (1866) exposes complex moral issues testing the urban population of nineteenth century St. Petersburg. Prostitution is one theme that complicates the novel, and Dostoevsky invites readers to consider the prostitute’s point of view. In 1843, the tsarist Ministry of Internal Affairs appointed “medical-police committees” to regulate prostitution in Russia. Registered prostitutes were typically poor urban women, and they became subject to strict rules. Sonia Marmeladov, an emblem of virtue in Crime and Punishment, endures the horrors of commercialized sex. Though her virtue and religious faith far exceed that of the average person, her character is representative of the voiceless, faceless woman who resorts to prostitution because she is desperate to escape poverty. Dostoevsky\u27s social commentary of the holy prostitute defends the dignity of the marginalized woman and condemns society for condoning the industry as an unavoidable practice. The history of prostitution in St. Petersburg helps shed light on the stigmas of the profession in Dostoevsky\u27s time

The NLRB\u27s Purple Communications Decision: Email, Property, and the Changing Patterns of Industrial Life

On December 11th, 2014, in a much-anticipated case, the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) held in a 3-2 decision that employees with access to an employer’s email system had a presumptive right to use that email system during non-working time under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”). In an attempt to adapt to the “changing patterns of industrial life,” the NLRB reversed a seven-year precedent by overturning In re Guard Publ\u27g Co., 351 N.L.R.B. 1110 (2007), and thereby gave employees the statutory right to use employer email systems for non-business purposes. This issue brief argues that the majority opinion in Purple Commc\u27ns, Inc., 361 N.L.R.B. No. 126 (2014) erroneously presumed that a ban on employer email systems interfered with employees’ rights to engage in concerted activities under Section 7. In reality, the influx of alternative avenues of communication, such as smartphones, social media, and tablets, have substantially grown for employees over the past several years, thus strengthening employees’ Section 7 rights. The new framework set forth in Purple Communications not only exaggerates the need for employees to exercise their Section 7 rights by using a company’s email system, but also unfairly burdens an employer’s resources, time, and energy in implementing such access. For these reasons, the rule in Purple Communications is unworkable and the prior Register Guard standard should still apply