Symposium - Intersections: Sexuality, Cultural Tradition, and the Law - Introduction

This Symposium inhabits two intersections: the intersection linking sexual orientation with other axes of social stratification, and the intersection linking the legal future to the legal past, legal reform to legal history. Francisco Valdes examines the relationship between sex and gender in Euro-American cultural and legal history to support a reform proposal on behalf of "sexual minorities"; Robert J. Morris excavates the cultural history of same-sex relationships in Hawai'i to support a claim that Hawaiian cultural preservation, mandated by the Hawai'i State Constitution, includes recognition of same-sex marriage; and Mary Coombs and Angela Harris provide critical comments on sociological, affiliative, intellectual, and historiographical intersections that structure Morris' and Valdes' claims. Valdes and Morris offer perhaps the most richly researched and polemically targeted cultural-historical accounts of sexual orientation in the law review literature. Particularly with the addition of Coombs' and Harris' critical responses, this Symposium frames the debate for queer legal history and historiography. It should be read under the immemorial motto: Those who don't study historiography are doomed to repeat it

Notes from the Editorial Advisory Board

My classmates Jim Tourtelott, Joe Sommer, and Eva Saks invented the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities at a Mexican restaurant one night in the fall of 1987. When they announced their idea to me the next day, my first thought was: "Great, now there can be a place to publish the things I want to write." How greedy, and (to say the same thing in a different way) how abject! My reaction reflects not a sense of marginality or deviance (both of these always being tinged with an adventurous self-confidence that was quite absent from my attitude at that moment), but rather a sense of isolation. I could not have had this bland reaction to the proposed oasis unless I had accepted it as a given that my most urgent projects on the Law and Humanities borderline were mine alone. But the idea of the Journal swept through the law school and various graduate departments on a wave of excitement. Clearly I had not been alone and would not be able to imagine myself as isolated again

Equivocation and the Legal Conflict Over Religious Identity In Early Modern England

During the trial of the so-called Powder Men--Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament with the King, Queen, and heir apparent all in attendance-the King's Attorney General Sir Edward Coke presented into evidence a curious manuscript with two titles. The text's original name was A Treatise of Equivocation, but that had been scratched out and replaced with a new title, A Treatise Against Lying and Fraudulent Dissimulation. It had been discovered in the rooms which one of the conspirators had used in the Inner Temple, and mere possession of this book, Coke clearly thought, spoke loudly of all the defendants' guilt. By delaying the trial long enough to secure this manuscript, Coke ensured that he would be able to continue in a prosecutorial tradition he had established in the trial of the Jesuit Robert Southwell - a tradition of proving treason against English Catholics by representing them as ready equivocators. The Treatise of Equivocation was written to instruct priests sent on a "mission" established by the Society of Jesus, whose aim was to preserve the Catholic Church in the newest heathen territory, England. The Treatise prepared priests to face the perilous questions asked of them by official interrogators, who as enforcers of the Anglican settlement had devised a series of interrogatories widely known as the "bloody questions" because they could force a Catholic priest to elect between the Queen and the Pope. The stakes were high: the penalty for being a priest in England, an act of treason, was death by public torture

Does Law Have an Outside?

I’ve been pondering this problem as I participated in this sparking conference titled “Beyond the Law”: What, if anything, is “beyond the law”? The better parent’s risk aversion, the propertyless man’s hunger: should we insist that these are non-legal attributes about these characters which interact with legal rules to condition legally important decisions? Are they inside or outside of the law? We can think of it either way. Most of the time, to be sure, I’m engaged in descriptive projects that are basically attempts to extend the reach of law. Not that I want it to be big, I’m trying to understand how big it is. But in the rest of my remarks I’d like to spool out my ambivalence about this. Why does it feel more critical, more decisive, to insist on the coercive character of background rules, no matter how far in the background they lurk? And why does the resulting picture of the world seem so narrowed, so reduced, once we have succeeded in drawing it? What’s at stake in positing that law is everywhere – or that there is something beyond it

Bounding film drainage in common thin films

A review of thin film drainage models is presented in which the predictions of thinning velocities and drainage times are compared to reported values on foam and emulsion films found in the literature. Free standing films with tangentially immobile interfaces and suppressed electrostatic repulsion are considered, such as those studied in capillary cells. The experimental thinning velocities and drainage times of foams and emulsions are shown to be bounded by predictions from the Reynolds and the theoretical MTsR equations. The semi-empirical MTsR and the surface wave equations were the most consistently accurate with all of the films considered. These results are used in an accompanying paper to develop scaling laws that bound the critical film thickness of foam and emulsion films

Epidural Analgesia in the Dog

Epidural analgesia is the injection of an anesthetic agent outside the dura mater producing a reversible motor and sensory paralysis of the spinal nerves. This is contrast to spinal analgesia, in which the local anesthetic is injected into the subarachnoid space

What is Family Law?: Genealogy Part I

What is the place of the family in legal scholarship and teaching, and in deep, implicit ideas about how our legal order is arranged? How did it get to be that way? Published in two separate Parts, this Article tells a story of American family law: how the law of Domestic Relations emerged as a distinct legal topic in late-nineteenth-century legal treatises, and what ideological conditions facilitated its renaming and reconstruction as Family Law in the Family Courts and casebooks of the twentieth century. Almost without exception, throughout this account Domestic Relations/Family Law are what they are by virtue of their categorical distinction from the law of contract and, more broadly, the law of the market. This distinction did not always seem natural: this Article tells how it was invented. The resulting market/family distinction remains a latent but structural element of the legal curriculum and the legal order more generally today. This Article calls that distinction into question and suggests that family law should be restructured to connect it for the first time to domains of law more readily understood to relate directly to the market: economically significant productivity, social security provision, and the fair or unfair distribution of economic resources. My story comes in three time periods, corresponding with Duncan Kennedy\u27s three globalizations of legal thought. The first is the classical era, roughly the last half of the nineteenth century. The second is the era of the social - characterized by the sociological jurisprudes\u27 and legal realists\u27 attack on the classical legal order and restructuring of legal taxonomy-spanning roughly the first half of the twentieth century. And the last is the era of conflicting considerations, roughly the last half of the twentieth century

Staffing and Recruiting Considerations for Financial Education Programs (Chapter Three of Student Financial Literacy)

A financial education program is only as good as the people who staff it. In order to get the right people on staff, careful attention must be paid to the strategy and execution of recruiting and hiring. Underlying the strategy is the determination of which staff positions are needed and how the roles will be defined. Various questions need to be addressed, such as: What financial resources are available? What types of services is the program planning to offer? What is the level of counselor content expertise? What is the type and size of facility where counseling will take place? How large is the program and who is the program’s target audience? With what other programs on campus is there possible opportunity for collaboration? The impact of a financial education program on a college campus is limited only by its implementation. Careful attention to the processes of staff selection is paramount in determining the early trajectory of such a program

An informed thought experiment exploring the potential for a paradigm shift in aquatic food production

The Neolithic Revolution began c. 10000 years ago and is characterised by the ultimate, near complete transition from hunting and gathering to agricultural food production on land. The Neolithic Revolution is thought to have been catalysed by a combination of local population pressure, cultural diffusion, property rights and climate change. We undertake a thought experiment that examines trends in these key hypothesised catalysts and patters of today to explore whether society could be on a path towards another paradigm shift in food production: away from hunting of wild fish towards a transition to mostly fish farming. We find similar environmental and cultural pressures have driven the rapid rise of aquaculture, during a period that has now been coined the Blue Revolution, providing impetus for such a transition in coming decades to centuries. We also highlight the interacting and often mutually reinforcing impacts of 1)technological and scientific advancement, 2)environmental awareness and collective action and 3)globalisation and trade influencing the trajectory and momentum of the Blue Revolution. We present two qualitative narratives that broadly fall within two future trajectories: 1)a ubiquitous aquaculture transition and 20commercial aquaculture and fisheries coexistence. This scenarios approach aims to encourage logical, forward thinking, and innovative solutions to complex systems dynamics. Scenario-based thought experiments are useful to explore large scale questions, increase the accessibility to a wider readership and ideally catalyse discussion around proactive governance mechanisms. We argue the future is not fixed and society now has greater foresight and capacity to choose the workable balance between fisheries sand aquaculture that supports economic, environmental, cultural and social objectives through combined planning, policies and management