Society has historically not taken a benign view of genetic disease. The laws permitting sterilization of the mentally re tarded~ and those proscribing consanguineous marriages are but two examples. Indeed as far back as the 5th-10th centuries, B.C.E., consanguineous unions were outlawed (Leviticus XVIII, 6). Case law has traditionally tended toward the conservative. It is reactive rather than directive, exerting its influence only after an individual or group has sustained injury and brought suit. In contrast, state legislatures have not (...) been inhibited in enacting statutes. Many of their products can be characterized as hasty, unnecessary, ill-conceived, and based on the heart rather than the head. Moreover the lack of expert consultation sought has also been remarkable. One state legislature, for example, has advocated immunization for sickle cell anemia! Many others have enacted laws for the screening of inborn errors of metabolism, e.g., phenylketon uria, but have poorly defined the lines of responsibility to secure compliance. A spate of specific disease-related bills has emerged in the u.S. Congress, each seeking recognition and appropriations. Sickle cell anemia, hemophilia, Cooley's anemia and Tay-Sachs disease have been among the front-runners for support. Finally, in 1975, Congress has begun to examine an omnibus bill concerning all forms of genetic disease. The bill, termed the National Genetic Diseases Act is, however, still far from being enacted. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to intervene in debates about the digital and, in particular, framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilize and materialize social and other relations. In doing so, (...) our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to ‘know’ the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CRESC on the social life of methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by social worlds, and can in turn become agents that shape those worlds. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer the following nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods: transactional actors; heterogeneity; visualization; continuous time; whole populations; granularity; expertise; mobile and mobilizing; and non-coherence. (shrink)

"End-Of-Law week drinkS @ ACT Magistrates Court: Friday 20 May 2005." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (198), pp. 24.

Although much recent social science and humanities work has been a revolt against simplification, this volume explores the contrast between simplicity and complexity to reveal that this dichotomy, itself, is too simplistic. John Law and Annemarie Mol have gathered a distinguished panel of contributors to offer—particularly within the field of science studies—approaches to a theory of complexity, and at the same time a theoretical introduction to the topic. Indeed, they examine not only ways of relating to complexity but complexity _in (...) practice._ Individual essays study complexity from a variety of perspectives, addressing market behavior, medical interventions, aeronautical design, the governing of supranational states, ecology, roadbuilding, meteorology, the science of complexity itself, and the psychology of childhood trauma. Other topics include complex wholes in the sciences, moral complexity in seemingly amoral endeavors, and issues relating to the protection of African elephants. With a focus on such concepts as multiplicity, partial connections, and ebbs and flows, the collection includes narratives from Kenya, Great Britain, Papua New Guinea, the Netherlands, France, and the meetings of the European Commission, written by anthropologists, economists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, and scholars of science, technology, and society. _Contributors._ Andrew Barry, Steven D. Brown, Michel Callon, Chunglin Kwa, John Law, Nick Lee, Annemarie Mol, Marilyn Strathern, Laurent Thévenot, Charis Thompson. (shrink)

We all know that we have and are our bodies. But might it be possible to leave this common place? In the present article we try to do this by attending to the way we do our bodies. The site where we look for such action is that of handling the hypoglycaemias that sometimes happen to people with diabetes. In this site it appears that the body, active in measuring, feeling and countering hypoglycaemias is not a bounded whole: its boundaries (...) leak. Bits and pieces of the outside get incorporated within the active body; while the centre of some bodily activities is beyond the skin. The body thus enacted is not self-evidently coherent either. There are tensions between the body’s organs; between the control under which we put our bodies and the erratic character of their behaviour; and between the various needs and desires single bodies somehow try to combine. Thus to say that a body is a whole, or so we conclude, skips over a lot of work. One does not hang together as a matter of course: keeping oneself together is something the embodied person needs to do. The person who fails to do so dies. (shrink)

Law's article begins by restating the classical ANT position that objects do not exist `in themselves' but are the effect of a performative stabilization of relational networks. In addition, these material enactments inevitably have a spatial dimension; they simultaneously establish spatial conditions for objectual identity, continuity, and difference. Space must not be reified as a natural, pre-existing container of the social and the material, but is itself a performance. Moreover, there are multiple forms of spatiality beyond the Euclidean space of (...) regions, and objects may exist and achieve homeomorphism within several different spatial systems. Technologies such as the Zimbabwe Bush Pump present a fluid object which is able to exist and cohere without the presence of fixed boundaries or the permanence of a particular functional definition. The network logic, however, which gravitates towards stability and functionality, tends to exclude and silence this spatial Other. An alternative political ontology is needed which goes beyond the reification of network space in order to give voice to the fluid objects which escape its unidimensional functionality. (shrink)

"Case notes." Ethos: Official Publication of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, (199), pp. 34–35.

In a secular society, does Christmas mean anything anymore? As we stuff ourselves with plumped-up turkeys, unwrap the latest useless gadget, and gather round the family tree, what real relevance does the festive season have and why do we perpetuate it? The Philosophy of Christmas is designed to be a fun book but one underpinned by an exploration of serious philosophical issues. The way we celebrate Christmas says a lot about the way we relate to each other, our (...) class='Hi'>society and values. For instance, did you know that Santa's outfit is only red and white because those are the colours of the Coca Cola company? Already a bestselling author, Stephen Law takes a look at such things as the virgin birth (David Hume's theories on miracles), Bertrand Russell's turkey, the existential angst of Santa, and peace on earth to produce a humourous, varied and thought-provoking collection. (shrink)

This paper asks whether geographically localised, or ‘hyperlocal’, uses of Twitter succeed in creating peer-to-peer neighbourhood networks or simply act as broadcast media at a reduced scale. Literature drawn from the smart cities discourse and from a UK research project into hyperlocal media, respectively, take on these two opposing interpretations. Evidence gathered in the case study presented here is consistent with the latter, and on this basis we criticise the notion that hyperlocal social media can be seen as a community (...) in itself. We demonstrate this by creating a network map of Twitter followers of a popular hyperlocal blog in Brockley, southeast London. We describe various attributes of this network including its average degree and clustering coefficient to suggest that a small and highly connected cluster of visible local entities such as businesses form a clique at the centre of this network, with individual residents following these but not one another. We then plot the locations of these entities and demonstrate that sub-communities in the network are formed due to close geographical proximity between smaller sets of businesses. These observations are illustrated with qualitative evidence from interviews with users who suggest instead that rather than being connected to one another they benefit from what has been described as ‘neighbourhood storytelling’. Despite the limitations of working with Twitter data, we propose that this multi-modal approach offers a valuable way to investigate the experience of using social media as a communication tool in urban neighbourhoods. (shrink)

This article considers the changing perceptions, expressions and representations of violence in South Africa post-1994, with particular reference to photography. Following the evolution of the documentary tradition in its relationship to the political history of South Africa, I will suggest that since the release of Nelson Mandela and the first democratic elections in South Africa, photography has taken a new turn, particularly with regard to its representation of violence, which had been its primary iconography up to that watershed moment. I (...) will follow three arguments in my explication of the ways in which violence has both altered South African society and assumed a different place in the collective mind of South Africans living in a country that is politically free but grappling with an ever-rising wave of violent crime. (shrink)

This article considers the changing perceptions, expressions and representations of violence in South Africa post-1994, with particular reference to photography. Following the evolution of the documentary tradition in its relationship to the political history of South Africa, I will suggest that since the release of Nelson Mandela and the first democratic elections in South Africa, photography has taken a new turn, particularly with regard to its representation of violence, which had been its primary iconography up to that watershed moment. I (...) will follow three arguments in my explication of the ways in which violence has both altered South African society and assumed a different place in the collective mind of South Africans living in a country that is politically free but grappling with an ever-rising wave of violent crime. (shrink)

In this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies,” the authors, all of whom work in the field of science, technology, and society, begin from the assumption that, as Bruno Latour has put it, “we have never been modern.” They accept the STS thesis that, while modern practices purport to be entirely rational and coherent, on closer inspection they turn out to be as much noncoherent as coherent. This article poses the question of what forms “noncoherences” take and (...) how they are managed. The basic argument is that there is a range of styles of noncoherence or “modes of syncretism.” In small case studies, the authors identify six such modes or styles, which they term denial, domestication, separation, care, conflict, and collapse. Given that consistency and coherence seem less important now than they were once taken to be — and given that the conditions of possibility for purity are, in any case, in decline — this list and its supporting case studies, while not meant to be definitive, are offered as a way of understanding how practices that do not cohere may still function and fit together admirably. (shrink)

Many computational tools for the simulation and design of emergency evacuation and egress are now available. However, due to the scarcity of human and social behavioral data, these computational tools rely on assumptions that have been found inconsistent or unrealistic. This paper presents a multi-agent based framework for simulating human and social behavior during emergency evacuation. A prototype system has been developed, which is able to demonstrate some emergent behaviors, such as competitive, queuing, and herding behaviors. For illustration, an example (...) application of the system for safe egress design is provided. (shrink)

The Law Society recently published a practice note titled 'Prosecutions of victims of trafficking'. This practice note comes many years after many lawyers had highlighted the problem and after the government machinery had chuntered into action and passed the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 with explanatory notes and non-statutory guidelines for corporations. Since 2012 there had been issued warnings about the way defence lawyers, the Crown Prosecution Service and the UK police were dealing with trafficking and the Criminal Cases (...) Review Commission as far back as 2012 had note the severe failings by defence solicitors, prosecution and police, leading to many appeals and potential miscarriages of justice. Even in 2012 there were 946 known human trafficking victims, including 234 children. There was an attempt at a Human Trafficking Bill in 2010 which came to a halt and several reports including one by the Prison Reform Trust and Cambridge University Press, notwithstanding many books by notable academics for many years before today. This article examines the inadequacies of the Law Society practice note on defending victims and the jumble of high-ideals but short-sighted and impractical parts of the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015. (shrink)

This centenary volume of essays explores a number of related themes which differentiate and characterize the approach of the LSE. Central to this, is the assumption that law is one of the social sciences and that law should be studied "in context" as a social phenomenon. The contributors have been chosen both for their distinction and for their connection with the LSE, and include such eminent figures as Mrs Justice Arden, Judge Rosalyn Higgins, Sir Stephen Sedley, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. (...) The essays focus on three main subject areas: Law and Economy; Dimensions of Law; and Courts and Process which are discussed against the broader canvas of the School's approach to Law. Thus, Comaroff, Cohen, Unger and Teubner adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, stressing both legal and social theory, while the contributions of Cranston, Cornish and others stress an internationalist approach. A characteristic LSE focus on the dynamic nature of law runs through the work of Collins, Higgins and Lord Wedderburn, while a reformist tradition is explored alongside the introduction of new legal subjects into the curriculum. Fascinating and thought provoking, this volume is an accesible summary of current thought and debate presented by today's leading scholars and practioners. Law, Society and Economy will be of enduring interest to scholars and practioners worldwide, akin to Ginsberg's celebrated and widely cited volume of essays which marked the School's fiftieth anniversary. (shrink)

This centenary volume of essays explores a number of related themes which differentiate and characterize the approach of the LSE. Central to this, is the assumption that law is one of the social sciences and that law should be studied "in context" as a social phenomenon. The contributors have been chosen both for their distinction and for their connection with the LSE, and include such eminent figures as Mrs Justice Arden, Judge Rosalyn Higgins, Sir Stephen Sedley, and Roberto Mangabeira Unger. (...) The essays focus on three main subject areas: Law and Economy; Dimensions of Law; and Courts and Process which are discussed against the broader canvas of the School's approach to Law. Thus, Comaroff, Cohen, Unger and Teubner adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, stressing both legal and social theory, while the contributions of Cranston, Cornish and others stress an internationalist approach. A characteristic LSE focus on the dynamic nature of law runs through the work of Collins, Higgins and Lord Wedderburn, while a reformist tradition is explored alongside the introduction of new legal subjects into the curriculum. Fascinating and thought provoking, this volume is an accesible summary of current thought and debate presented by today's leading scholars and practioners. Law, Society and Economy will be of enduring interest to scholars and practioners worldwide, akin to Ginsberg's celebrated and widely cited volume of essays which marked the School's fiftieth anniversary. (shrink)

The UK has been slack in fulfilling its international obligations regarding human trafficking. The UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 has apparently nothing to say about the demand for women trafficked into prostitution, although it addresses the demand for other forms of trfficking though the supply chain provisins in the Act. The UK has disappointed many in condoning prostitution, as Lady Butler-Sloss describes as 'one of the longest standing industries'. However it is one of the longest-standing forms of exploitation. The Act (...) instead, has given much importance to modern -day slavery. An effective way of tackling demand for prostitution and the attendant exploitation would be to make it an offence to purchase someone for sex. Yet perhaps the point is that to curb modern-day slavery is to curb prostitution and pornography, through curbing the supply side. However the UK hasragged its feet over many years, especially when one considers that Internet pornography brings in over £4 billion annually to the UK Gross Domestic Product. (shrink)

The Politica as a specific genre of academic reflection on civil life developed from the later sixteenth century and flourished until at least the mid-seventeenth century, especially at universities in the Holy Roman Empire and where their influence was felt, as in the Dutch Republic. Theologians, Philosophers, Jurists, and Medical Doctors contributed books. Aside from few and only with difficulty accessible surveys, and a few individual well-researched authors, research into this genre remains a task for the future. This survey collects (...) contributions from a number of senior and younger researchers and their various approaches and arguments. In particular, by providing examples of the heterogeneity of current research, it serves as an introduction to the genre and to a more complete assessment of the development of Early Modern political thought. The volume also stresses the importance of this genre for several transformations of political thought in the Early Modern Age. (shrink)

Classical thinkers -- The consensus tradition -- Critical perspectives -- Feminism and law -- The interpretive tradition -- Postmodernism and difference -- Legal pluralism and globalisation.

Hall discusses the ideas of modern day legal philosophers such as Duguit, Geny, Ehrlich, & Kelsen, & what their conceptions mean to a democratic society.

The chief executive of the Law Society proposes that the Mental Capacity Bill is a progressive initiative enhancing personal autonomy. Laing replies to this by showing that the Bill, for from enhancinging personal autonomy explodes it by inviting homicide by unaccountable third parties, allowing non-therapeutic research and organ-removal without consent and creating a secret and unaccountable court with a lethal power over the vulnerable incapacitated.

When this edition was published, all competent students of the history of jurisprudence and political thought at once recognized that Professor Barker had made ...

A theoretical and sociological exploration of the relationship between law and society, this book constructs an approach to law that integrates legal theory with sociological approaches to law. Law is generally understood to be a mirror of society--a reflection of its customs and morals--that functions to maintain social order. Focusing on this common understanding, the book conducts a survey of Western legal and social theories about law and its relationship within society, engaging in a theoretical and empirical (...) critique of this common understanding. (shrink)