Reading the Archive: Historians as Expert Witnesses

In a substantial study into the relationship between law and history in Australian jurisprudence, Curthoys, Genovese and Reilly found that when historians appear as expert witnesses in Australian courts, they have often not been well received. While it is acknowledged that historians have particular skills in identifying relevant sources in archives, Australian courts have generally been resistant to the idea that they bring special interpretative skills, because lawyers and judges believe that the hermeneutic processes involved in the interpretation of historical documents is a skill in which they are already well versed. A number of developments have occurred in relation to the role of historians as experts in the decade since this study. For example, the Federal Court of Australia has introduced procedural rules for expert conferences and for the production of concurrent evidence of expert witnesses. In this article, I will discuss the legal reception of expert opinion evidence from historians through an investigation of what has happened in the period since the mid-2000s. This research suggests that the collision that occurred between historians and the law during the 1990s subsequently resulted in an impasse between the disciplines of law and history. Legal counsel are disinclined to call historians as expert witnesses; historians themselves have resiled from the role of witnesses, and have been critical of courts’ failure to recognise the particular value of their skills in reading an archive. The article will report on empirical research conducted into the role of historians as expert witnesses in Australia and will include reference to transnational research conducted in New Zealand and Canada

Decision making conditioned by radical uncertainty: Credibility assessment at the Australian refugee review tribunal

The increasing global magnitude and exigency of refugee status determination is resulting in recent attention to the parameters of credibility as part of evidentiary assessment in refugee law. In Australia, as in other countries, it is well recognised that applications for review of primary level decisions on refugee status commonly fail on the basis of credibility evidence. Furthermore, it has been suggested that the assessment of credibility is likely to be a source of error in decision making. This article reports on the results of a small-scale study into decision making and credibility assessment at the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal involving interviews with decision makers. Drawing on feminist theories of epistemic responsibility, it argues for a revised standard of proof, suggesting a rebuttable presumption of credibility, or truthfulness, on the part of the applicant seeking asylum. Such an approach may go some way towards addressing the potential for epistemic injustice and is consistent with a position of epistemological responsibility demanded by an ethical obligation to the refugee. © The Author (2013)

Women into print: Feminist presses in Australia

The freedom of the press belongs to those who control the press’ was one of the enduring slogans of the second-wave women’s movement. Reflecting the belief that the printed word could incite social change, feminists asserted their position in the public sphere of publishing, as authors, in print production and through the establishment of feminist presses. Reclaiming and celebrating women’s writing was a defining characteristic of second-wave feminism, and feminist literary and cultural historians took up the literature of Australian women writers from the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century. The Australian second-wave women’s movement emphasised cultural forms; it was a catalyst for feminist writing, in the form of journalism, autobiography, short fiction, novels, poetry and plays, as well as feminist history, political theory, gender and sexuality studies. These texts, in turn, form a body of cultural memory that informs how feminism marks its own past, providing a narrative for individual and collective remembering

The Court as Archive

"Until the late 20th century, ‘an archive’ generally meant a repository for documents, as well as the generic name for the wide range of documents the repository might hold. An archive could be visited, and then also searched, to discover past actions or lives that had meaning for the present. While historians and historiographers have long understood the contests that archives contain and represent, the very idea of ‘the archive’ has, over the last 40 years, become the subject and object of widening and intensified consideration. This consideration has been intellectual (from scholars in a wide range of disciplines) and public (from communities and individuals whose stories are held captive, or sometimes hidden or excluded from official archives), as well as institutional. It has involved scrutiny and critique of official archives’ limitations and practices, as well as symbolic, affective and theoretical expansion and heightened expectation of what ‘the archive’ is or should be. The very language of ‘the archive’ now carries freight as administrative practice, normative value, metaphor, description and aspiration in different ways than it did in the 20th century. This collection offers a unique contribution to these reinvigorated and sometimes new conversations about what an archive might be, what it can do as a consequence, and to whom it bears custodial responsibilities. In particular, this collection addresses what it means for contemporary Australian superior courts of record to not only have constitutional and procedural duties to documents as a matter of law, but also to acknowledge obligations to care for those materials in a way that understands their public meaning and public value for the Australian people, in the past, in the present and for the future.

Corneal Replication Is an Interferon Response-Independent Bottleneck for Virulence of Herpes Simplex Virus 1 in the Absence of Virion Host Shutoff

Herpes simplex viruses lacking the virion host shutoff function (Δvhs) are avirulent and hypersensitive to type I and type II interferon (IFN). In this study, we demonstrate that even in the absence of IFN responses in AG129 (IFN-αβγR−/−) mice, Δvhs remains highly attenuated via corneal infection but is fully virulent via intracranial infection. The data demonstrate that the interferon-independent inherent replication defect of Δvhs has a significant impact upon peripheral replication and neuroinvasion

Microfluidic Endothelium for Studying the Intravascular Adhesion of Metastatic Breast Cancer Cells

BACKGROUND:The ability to properly model intravascular steps in metastasis is essential in identifying key physical, cellular, and molecular determinants that can be targeted therapeutically to prevent metastatic disease. Research on the vascular microenvironment has been hindered by challenges in studying this compartment in metastasis under conditions that reproduce in vivo physiology while allowing facile experimental manipulation. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:We present a microfluidic vasculature system to model interactions between circulating breast cancer cells with microvascular endothelium at potential sites of metastasis. The microfluidic vasculature produces spatially-restricted stimulation from the basal side of the endothelium that models both organ-specific localization and polarization of chemokines and many other signaling molecules under variable flow conditions. We used this microfluidic system to produce site-specific stimulation of microvascular endothelium with CXCL12, a chemokine strongly implicated in metastasis. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE:When added from the basal side, CXCL12 acts through receptor CXCR4 on endothelium to promote adhesion of circulating breast cancer cells, independent of CXCL12 receptors CXCR4 or CXCR7 on tumor cells. These studies suggest that targeting CXCL12-CXCR4 signaling in endothelium may limit metastases in breast and other cancers and highlight the unique capabilities of our microfluidic device to advance studies of the intravascular microenvironment in metastasis

'On the Wet Side of the Womb’:The construction of mothers in anti-abortion activism in England and Wales

Across the UK, there has been an increase in anti-abortion activism outside abortion clinics. The activism deployed includes explicitly religious activities such as ‘prayerful witnessing’ and ‘pavement counselling’, which aim to discourage women from entering clinics. This article stems from a wider ethnographic study of public activism over abortion to determine what claims about motherhood are being made within these debates. Two arguments are presented. First, how women’s role as mothers is central and essentialised in anti-abortion discourses, with the body of the mother often disappearing as activists seek to erode the distinction between a foetus and a baby by constructing pregnancy as a foetal environment. Motherhood is constructed as ‘natural’ and sacred, therefore abortion must be damaging because it destroys women’s ‘natural’ position. Second, the article argues that although the activists’ arguments are always religiously framed, their activism takes place in a largely secular context, meaning that they have to find ways of appealing to secular audiences. This leads to a complex interrelationship between secular and religious discourses, where theological viewpoints sit alongside ‘scientific’ claims to buttress activists’ views. This article explores how the presence and absence of mothers within activists’ narratives is due to the tensions between religiously based understandings of motherhood, and the need to appeal to a secular audience