Of Public Space: My Island Home

Welcome to the second volume of the refereed journal, Public Space: the Journal of Law and Social Justice. The second volume of Public Space offers a meditation on the theme My Island Home. The theme was inspired, in part, by Neil Murray’s song My Island Home. Murray said that he had been living in the deserts of Central Australia for some time, estranged from the fresh water country of his youth. He wrote the song after spending a week camping at Galiwinku in Arnhem Land, living like a king on bush tucker, and then leaving to travel to Sydney during the winter. The song expressed his intense longing to be in a boat on a tropical sea

The Corporate Monster Metaphor

The metaphor of corporations as monsters is a feature of academic and judicial writings. Like monsters, corporations are creatures of fiction that problematize and challenge order. Corporations do not fit neatly into common law criminal legal doctrine, which was conceived and structured around the classic legal subject, that is, the individual human being. Corporations are amoral immortals, which ‘have no conscience and feel no pain’. They have superhuman strength, growing exponentially in size and wealth in accordance with the dictates of capitalism, and are capable of doing great harms and evil. Like monsters, corporations are contaminated and contaminating; in the process of becoming legal subjects corporations have become dehumanised and dehumanising. Despite the dominance of the corporate monster metaphor, there is slippage around the conception of which type of monster best represents corporations, and this slippage has implications for how the law regards and regulates (or not) corporations. This article takes the metaphor of the corporation as monster seriously. Descriptively, this analysis asks us to think more specifically about the different metaphorical implications of different kinds of monsters. Normatively, the argument considers the implications of these distinctive framings for criminal legal understandings of the corporation. Calling corporations monsters places us within the horror genre. We therefore need to read and understand these metaphors within that genre. A central insight of the horror genre is that monsters justify and require extreme responses. Rather than stopping at the argument that corporations have no body to kick, we need to find more imaginative and specific responses to corporate crime

PARTNERSHIPS: MARRYING THE STRENGTHS AND RESOURCES OF DIVERSE INTEREST GROUPS

This paper explores the growing importance of partnership development within the social services sector in Australia. It proposes that the social, political and economic factors giving rise to shifting priorities in this newly named "third" sector are encapsulated in the notion of social entrepreneurship being given impetus by the Federal Government’s policy of mutual obligation, the findings of the Welfare Reform Group and the consequent Australians Working Together programme. It argues that community development is the ideal strategy for partnership development that fits well with the strengths perspective, where the emphasis is on mutual engagement in an equal relationship such that the collective assets and resources of the collaborating partners can be harnessed for the good of the community. The parallels between partnerships and human relationships are outlined and the role of the key sectors of community, business, government and non-government in the provision of social services are discussed. The paper ends with a discussion of community-business partnership development. Partnerships are seen to offer social workers with opportunities and challenges in the development of creative and innovative programmes aimed at social improvement

Through the looking glass: the framing of law through popular imagination

It has been 150 years since the first publication of Lewis Carroll’s acclaimed children’s fiction Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,2 and it remains a book that is appreciated widely across culture for its unique representation of the world. Indeed, the enduring quality of both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass,3 is evident in the way they have inspired creations of art, theatrical performances,4 judicial decision-making,5 cinematic portrayals,6 videogame plot development,7 and of course, the desire for adventure

BRITICE Glacial Map, version 2: a map and GIS database of glacial landforms of the last British-Irish Ice Sheet

During the last glaciation, most of the British Isles and the surrounding continental shelf were covered by the British–Irish Ice Sheet (BIIS). An earlier compilation from the existing literature (BRITICE version 1) assembled the relevant glacial geomorphological evidence into a freely available GIS geodatabase and map (Clark et al. 2004: Boreas 33, 359). New high-resolution digital elevation models, of the land and seabed, have become available casting the glacial landform record of the British Isles in a new light and highlighting the shortcomings of the V.1 BRITICE compilation. Here we present a wholesale revision of the evidence, onshore and offshore, to produce BRITICE version 2, which now also includes Ireland. All published geomorphological evidence pertinent to the behaviour of the ice sheet is included, up to the census date of December 2015. The revised GIS database contains over 170 000 geospatially referenced and attributed elements – an eightfold increase in information from the previous version. The compiled data include: drumlins, ribbed moraine, crag-and-tails, mega-scale glacial lineations, glacially streamlined bedrock (grooves, roches moutonnées, whalebacks), glacial erratics, eskers, meltwater channels (subglacial, lateral, proglacial and tunnel valleys), moraines, trimlines, cirques, trough-mouth fans and evidence defining ice-dammed lakes. The increased volume of features necessitates different map/database products with varying levels of data generalization, namely: (i) an unfiltered GIS database containing all mapping; (ii) a filtered GIS database, resolving data conflicts and with edits to improve geo-locational accuracy (available as GIS data and PDF maps); and (iii) a cartographically generalized map to provide an overview of the distribution and types of features at the ice-sheet scale that can be printed at A0 paper size at a 1:1 250 000 scale. All GIS data, the maps (as PDFs) and a bibliography of all published sources are available for download from: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/geography/staff/clark_chris/britice

The Beauty and Horror of Corporate Persons

Lisa Siraganian’s Modernism and the Meaning of Corporate Persons (2020) illuminates modernist investigations of corporate personhood and how collective agents might intend, and if so, how they might manifest meaning. Through a magisterial and seamless analysis of cases, legal theory, legal analysis, political cartoons, philosophy and artistic endeavors, Corporate Persons demonstrates that the questions and answers of the modernist era remain salient today. This article highlights firstly the persuasiveness and insight of Siraganian’s analysis of the implications of the failure to fully conceptualize the corporate person. The article then explores the strands of horror in Corporate Persons generated by the “artificial creature” created by law and law’s failure to adequately conceptualize the meaning of corporate persons

Brothels and Disorderly Acts (2007) Vol 1 Art 2

Although brothels have been able to operate as legal businesses for more than a decade, they continue to be treated more restrictively than businesses with similar amenity impacts. This paper explores the idea that this restrictive treatment can be explained by the continued perception of brothels as disorderly, as 'matter out of place'. This is due in part to the historical association of brothels with disorder in terms of cleanliness, morality and the law. These historical associations have been maintained and reflected in the current regulation of the sex industry, generating fears of pollution and contamination on the strength of its disorderliness