Law, Morality, and Scientific Method: A Review Article

I have been asked by the editors of the Nebraska Law Review to prepare a critical review of Parental Authority: The Community and the Law by Julius Cohen, Reginald Robson, and Alan Bates. The interest of the editors was not in an expository account of the book’s contents but in a critique of the research project as a whole. I shall therefore assume that my readers are acquainted with the book (or will shortly become so). This much about the book may perhaps be said. It is the result of a study designed to apply polling techniques to ascertain the moral sense of the community in a selected area of family law. The investigators were all members of the faculty of the University of Nebraska, Professor Cohen in law and Professors Robson and Bates in sociology. The area studied was the state of Nebraska; the subject matter was certain child-parent relationships as they actually exist in law compared with the views of respondents on what they thought the law ought to be. The result, as might be expected, disclosed marked discrepancies. The study indicates the nature and extent of the discrepancies and points to certain factors that might account for them. This is a pioneering venture. So far as I know it is the first sustained effort to utilize scientific method to measure what is thought to be moral sentiment in the law

Law, Morality, and Scientific Method: A Review Article

I have been asked by the editors of the Nebraska Law Review to prepare a critical review of Parental Authority: The Community and the Law by Julius Cohen, Reginald Robson, and Alan Bates. The interest of the editors was not in an expository account of the book’s contents but in a critique of the research project as a whole. I shall therefore assume that my readers are acquainted with the book (or will shortly become so). This much about the book may perhaps be said. It is the result of a study designed to apply polling techniques to ascertain the moral sense of the community in a selected area of family law. The investigators were all members of the faculty of the University of Nebraska, Professor Cohen in law and Professors Robson and Bates in sociology. The area studied was the state of Nebraska; the subject matter was certain child-parent relationships as they actually exist in law compared with the views of respondents on what they thought the law ought to be. The result, as might be expected, disclosed marked discrepancies. The study indicates the nature and extent of the discrepancies and points to certain factors that might account for them. This is a pioneering venture. So far as I know it is the first sustained effort to utilize scientific method to measure what is thought to be moral sentiment in the law

Rooted flexibility: social reproduction, violence and gendered work in the Indian city

Drawing on feminist marxist and feminist geography scholarship the article develops the concept 'rooted flexibility' to examine the latent frictions between flexible labour regimes and the rooted, gendered demands of social reproduction in worker tenements and factories in Gurgaon, India. The article explores the everyday gendered terrain through which migrant women are incorporated into, disciplined and navigate flexible labour and precarious social reproduction in the city. Unlike the male migrant workers who are made flexible through ideologies and practices of mobility, the mobility of migrant working-class women whose stories are narrated in this article is constrained by patriarchal control and responsibilities to social reproductive labour. In the absence of labour mobility, the article explores how migrant women workers navigate conflicting demands of being both flexible waged-workers and rooted, ‘respectable’ housewives, resisting violent practices of labour discipline on the shop-floors and tenements. In doing so, the article examines how an embodied and differentiated politics of 'respectability' comes to materialise how ‘rooted flexibility’ is lived, contested and secured.publishedVersio