Efficiency and counter-revolution: connecting university and civil service reform in the 1850s

Historians have often recognised important links between the processes of university and civil service reform in mid-nineteenth-century England. Yet such connections are usually seen as forming part of a wider project of modernising reform with any conservative or counter-revolutionary aims largely discounted. However, as this article suggests, the decision to tie success in the new examinations to a career at the ancient English universities was not designed chiefly to recruit the most efficient people (as the report itself claims) or to provide new employment opportunities for Oxbridge graduates. Rather, the reformers sought to take advantage of the socialising function of the universities, to ensure the recruitment of men of sterling moral character, reliable and loyal, into a civil service increasingly called upon to serve as a bulwark of the state at a time of social and political upheaval

“Anxious to Be Restored”: Managing War Neuroses in Interwar Canada

Using newly available records from the Veterans Affairs Pension Files, doctors’ notes and Veterans’ Hospital records, this article explores how war neurosis was simultaneously a personal and public event. Veterans were required to describe symptoms that breached masculine ideals to demonstrate that their disability impacted their daily lives. Ex-servicemen were caught in a delicate balance between following the soldier ideal and describing their symptoms accurately. War neurosis not only impacted veterans in the private examining room of the pension administrator it also affected their ability to find and maintain employment and the lives of their family members. The more public their symptoms became, the more difficult it was to contain their diagnosis. Family members worked tirelessly to assist returned men with their symptoms and took on new responsibilities in the home. When these symptoms could not be managed in the home, families and veterans began to look for new options, such as permanent hospitalisation at Westminster Hospital in London, Ontario, an institution specifically created for veterans with mental illnesses

Promoting Dignity and Preventing Shame and Humiliation by Improving the Quality and Education of Attorneys in Sexually Violent Predator (SVP) Civil Commitment Cases

In Strickland vs. Washington, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the role of counsel is critical to the ability of the adversarial system to best insure that just results are produced. Yet, the Court did not elaborately define the Sixth Amendment constitutional right to counsel and lower courts, have set the bar shockingly low.In this article we examine the quality of attorneys who litigate Sexually Violent Predator Act (SVPA) cases, and conclude that a failure to apply a higher standard of adequate counsel – beyond what was set out in Strickland – results in humiliation, shame and lack of dignity for clients. Effective and competent counsel must be cognizant of how shame and humiliation corrupts our legislation, court proceedings and subsequent management of the sex offender population.We explore the concepts of shame and humiliation and how the effects of these concepts damage not only the client, but the integrity of the court proceeding and subsequent goals of treatment rehabilitation. We focus on the volatile “arranged marriage” of law and psychology in sex offender civil commitment cases that require attorneys to have a particular set of skills and knowledge in order to conduct a fair, judicious and ethical trial, and to secure an accurate verdict. This is necessary to not only preserve the dignity of the legal system but additionally preserve the dignity of clients facing – what is most likely considered – one of the most undignified adjudicative determinations: that of “sexual violent predator”. We propose that without specialized training and expert collaboration, attorneys cannot provide even remotely adequate or effective representation.We consider these issues through the prism of therapeutic jurisprudence, which we believe is vital to any authentic understanding of the underlying issues and offer suggestions to prevent and minimize client shame, humiliation and lack of dignity (including sample dialogues that counsel might have with her client)

See This Empty Cage Now Corrode: The International Human Rights and Comparative Law Implications of Sexually Violent Predator Laws

From every perspective, our sexually violent predator (SVPA) laws are a miserable failure. In this paper, we present a new approach: a turn to international human rights law as a source of rights for the population in question, and a consideration of the matter from the perspective of comparative law.To briefly summarize, many nations have enacted laws that both mirror and contradict early developments in United States civil commitment jurisprudence. In these nations, though, challenges to community containment and preventive detention laws have been more successful when based upon international human rights law. Also, registry notification is generally far more limited, and details are usually confined solely to police agencies. We believe that the implications of the laws and court decisions from other nations are necessary to consider when implementing US law reform in this area, and require far more attention than they have received from US scholars and legislators.This paper will proceed in the following manner. In Part I, we will consider the implications of international human rights law for cases involving the populations in question, and then assess how realistic it is that such law be embraced by domestic jurisdictions in dealing with relevant cases. We will also consider the human rights issues and violations that have resulted from the domestic enactment of “International Megan’s Law.” In Part II, we will apply comparative law, in an effort to determine how other nations have struggled with some of the basic issues that have been focused on by domestic jurisdictions, for the 20+ years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Kansas v. Hendricks, 521 U.S. 346 (1997). In Part III, we will assess the application of therapeutic jurisprudence (TJ) to the legal and human rights issues discussed prior, in an effort to determine whether other nations have more successfully implemented TJ principles to combat some of the seemingly-intractable problems raised in SVPA cases. In part IV, we offer some conclusions and some suggestions for US-based policy-makers in this contentious area of law and social policy

“Take the Motherless Children off the Street”: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Criminal Justice System

Remarkably, there has been minimal academic legal literature about the interplay between fetal alcohol syndrome dis- order (“FASD”) and critical aspects of many criminal trials, including issues related to the role of experts, quality of counsel, competency to stand trial, the insanity defense, and sentencing and the death penalty. In this Article, the co-authors will first define fetal alcohol syndrome and explain its significance to the criminal justice system. We will then look at the specific role of experts in cases involving defendants with FASD and consider adequacy of counsel. Next, we will discuss the impact of FASD on the major fundamentals of criminal law and procedure, especially as it relates to questions of culpability. Under this broad umbrella of topics, we consider questions that may arise in the criminal trial process, such as those related to competency to stand trial (and, to a limited extent, other criminal competencies), the insanity defense, sentencing, and the death penalty. We look care- fully at the way that courts all too often dismiss effectiveness- of-counsel claims in such cases, and the implications of this case law. Finally, we investigate why it is so significant that the caselaw in this area has totally ignored the teachings of therapeutic jurisprudence and offer some conclusions and recommendations (based on therapeutic jurisprudence principles) that, we hope, can (at least partially) ameliorate this situation