Spatial and temporal patterns of the zooplankton in the Westerschelde estuary

The invertebrate zooplankton fauna of the Westerschelde (Belgium and The Netherlands) was investigated during 2 yr by means of monthly samples along a salinity gradient. Copepods were usually the most abundant holoplanktonic metazoans except in the freshwater zone where Rotifera were most numerous. The combination of a classification technique and an ordination-regression technique proved to be a valuable tool for the analysis of such an extensive data set. The presence of 4 groups was established, representing spatially distinct populations but with temporally shifting boundaries. Few zooplankton species were truly estuarine in their distribution, but many were derived from nearby coastal waters. This intrusion of marine species started in spring, reaching their most upstream distribution and highest densities in summer-early fall, then declining and retreating from the estuary, disappearing in winter. Fringing this community was a transition group with low densities, but many species. This brackish-water community consisted predominantly of the calanoid copepod Eurytemora affinis. It appeared in late fall, spread out seaward to obtain its maximum density and distribution in winter-early spring. Densities then declined and the community was absent by late summer-early fall. The freshwater zone near the port of Antwerp, Belgium, was characterized by a paucity of large zooplankters, despite the high primary production in this zone. This is probably due to the low oxygen availability in this area. A canonical correspondence analysis revealed 2 major environmental axes. The salinity gradient (mainly spatial) explained most of the variance. Strongly correlated with this factor were dissolved oxygen content and secchi disc visibility. The temperature gradient (mainly temporal) was almost perpendicular to the salinity axis, indicating little or no correlation. Of lesser importance was the load of suspended matter, which was highest in the brackish area in autumn-winter. Chlorophyll content of the water was unimportant in explaining community structure. Copepod dry weight was maximal in spring in the brackish part (500 mg m-3); a lower maximum (260 mg m-3) was observed in summer in the marine part of the estuary

How consumers link traceability to food quality and safety: An international investigation

It is not yet understood whether the implementation of traceability systems can contribute towards restoring consumer confidence in food quality and safety, one of the goals of the European Food Law. To date, little is known about how consumers perceive the role and potential impact of traceability within the supply chain. This paper aims to provide insight into how traceability information can offer guarantees of food quality and safety, and contribute towards increased consumer confidence. Data, collected in four EU countries, examines salient cognitions and attitudes that underpin consumer beliefs about product traceability that will influence their decision making. It will link traceability- related food attributes to perceived benefits (in terms of quality and safety) and important consumer values. Furthermore, variations between different consumer s are examined to illustrate how the concepts of food safety and food quality may have different meanings and consequences in the various European countries. Understanding which benefits consumer s associate with traceability will assist in providing consumers with traceability information in line with their requirement s.Traceability, Consumer Perception, Food Safety, Food Quality, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Stolen Generations: Online Testimonies as Sources of Social Justice: Towards an Ethics of Encounter

In this paper, I am using the provocation of `the source to examine the significance of a recent iteration of Stolen Generations testimonies to questions of contemporary social justice. This testimonial form has had a complicated and fraught history across Australian legal and cultural domains: in the handful of cases that have dealt with injuries arising out of the Stolen Generations, courts have placed oral testimony in contest with state documentary records1 ; oral testimony has also featured in different iterations of extra-legal Stolen Generations projects, which have been produced by state, corporate and Indigenous parties, sometimes leading to the problem of testimonies being co-opted into state and private projects, which do not necessarily benefit Indigenous peopl

The Poetics and Politics of Past Injuries: Claiming in Reparations Law and in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved

Why is there such a discrepancy between legal time and historical time? Or rather, whose historical time is tacitly represented and silently justified in legal representations? Whose interests are served by the law’s particular fictions and whose injuries are privileged? In exploring these questions I will focus on the 2006 case of In re African- American Slave Descendants, a claim made for reparations for slavery in the U.S. Since the 1980s a number of litigants have filed claims for injuries arising out of slavery and none has succeeded, but these very failures are worth examining for what they reveal about the contemporary inability to reconcile the demands of the past on the present. Throughout the twentieth century, historians challenged the idea that we have transparent access to historical truths, which has obvious implications for the status of the legal text; and yet the law itself has remained largely untouched by these insights. However, I argue that reparations cases can be read as theorising a new relationship between law and history, and as interventions in the law’s logic of time. Reparations claims intercept legal logic in at least two important ways: first, by insisting on the continuing damage of slavery, the claims defy positivist representations of history and time; and second, in their reliance on the legal fiction of corporate identity across time, these cases allude to the interconnected history of the fictions of corporate and slave identities, and potentially rework these fictions in the direction of social justice.This conference has been generously sponsored by the School of Social and Political Sciences and the Sydney Law School, University of Sydney, in collaboration with the School of Law, University of Western Sydne

Complicity as legal responsibility

© 2017 by The Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. Complicity is emerging as a key cultural and critical term for understanding settler responsibility in postcolonial contexts - especially in thinking through the sense of responsibility arrived at through transitional justice processes. But what sense can we make of complicity within more pedestrian legal processes? Here, I examine an emergent narrative of complicity in “everyday law” through the framework of evaluating harms provided by the Royal Commission into Institutional Reponses to Child Sexual Abuse (“the Commission”). I analyze one case study in particular - the 19th public hearing of the Commission was held between October 22 and 31, 2014, and on November 14, 2014 (“the Bethcar Case Study”) - to provide a reading of complicity in the context of everyday legal proceedings that took place within the wider context of Australia’s postcolonial reckoning of harms suffered by the Stolen Generations. This article focuses on the role and conduct of lawyers, and of law, in the civil proceedings relating to institutional responsibility for abuse, a process at a seeming distance from the scene of original trauma. I argue that the Commission makes available a narrative of the lawyers’ role in the ongoing violence against survivors - one story and case study that, as it concerns abuse in the context of the removal of Aboriginal children, is part of wider structural violence against Aboriginal people. The Commission provides a rich source for analyzing these legal processes and provides an archive of lawyers’ responsibility that is not normally made available through law. It examines the complicity of the legal profession in harms produced by the legal system itself

The Poetics and Politics of Past Injuries: Claiming in Reparations Law and in Toni Morrison's novel Beloved

Why is there such a discrepancy between legal time and historical time? Or rather, whose historical time is tacitly represented and silently justified in legal representations? Whose interests are served by the law’s particular fictions and whose injuries are privileged? In exploring these questions I will focus on the 2006 case of In re African- American Slave Descendants, a claim made for reparations for slavery in the U.S. Since the 1980s a number of litigants have filed claims for injuries arising out of slavery and none has succeeded, but these very failures are worth examining for what they reveal about the contemporary inability to reconcile the demands of the past on the present. Throughout the twentieth century, historians challenged the idea that we have transparent access to historical truths, which has obvious implications for the status of the legal text; and yet the law itself has remained largely untouched by these insights. However, I argue that reparations cases can be read as theorising a new relationship between law and history, and as interventions in the law’s logic of time. Reparations claims intercept legal logic in at least two important ways: first, by insisting on the continuing damage of slavery, the claims defy positivist representations of history and time; and second, in their reliance on the legal fiction of corporate identity across time, these cases allude to the interconnected history of the fictions of corporate and slave identities, and potentially rework these fictions in the direction of social justice.This conference has been generously sponsored by the School of Social and Political Sciences and the Sydney Law School, University of Sydney, in collaboration with the School of Law, University of Western Sydne

Encountering law's harm through literary critique: An anti-elegy of land and sovereignty

© 2015 by The Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. All rights reserved. This article focuses on the significance of practices of representation to law's role in adjudicating harm - both the role of representation in the adjudication of past harms, and in law's present-day assertions of authority. I focus in particular on the ways in which questions of harm to the person, relation to land, and sovereignty have been separated in law, and the effects of these practices in constructing legal authority. I turn to Wright's The Swan Book (2013) to provide a reading of the "undoing" of narratives of harm based on the person, and to thereby critique law's representations of harm. I argue that, as an anti-elegy in the Modernist tradition, Wright's novel provides a metaphor of harm and responsibility that reorganizes time, destabilizes law's claims to authority over the adjudication of harms, and queries law's claim to authority over other legal systems and sovereignties. This reading takes the framework of harm beyond the personal, to include the violent histories that have produced legal concepts including "land," "sovereignty" and even "law" itself - histories and contexts that are separated and obscured in law