The politics of prisoner legal rights

The article begins by locating human rights law within the current political context before moving on to critically review judicial reasoning on prisoner legal rights since the introduction of the Human Rights Act 1998. The limited influence of proportionality on legal discourses in England and Wales is then explored by contrasting a number of judgments since October 2000 in the domestic courts and European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the restricted interpretation of legal rights for penal reform and proposes an alternative radical rearticulation of the politics of prisoner human rights

When Are Events Parts?

In this paper I propose a mereological account of ordinary macro-events of experience that is based on two central features of these entities, namely their spatio-temporal character, and their status as things that belong to event-kinds. I argue that, from the perspective of descriptive metaphysics, these features must be incorporated in the analysis of the part-whole relations of events, and I show the steps involved in achieving this task. Furthermore, I argue that the program initiated here is quite promising: the analysis of event-part that I propose stands up quite well against the more serious objections, and the apparatus I provide for the mereological conditions of events can be easily modified to yield similar conditions for material objects