An empirical exploration of the effects on legislative structure, distribution of influence, power, and decision outcomes, of recent changes in the Congress and state legislatures. The book focuses on changes in rules, parties, and committees and the impact or lack of impact of these changes on subsequent activity. Originally published in 1978 by D.C. Heath and Company. Co-published with the Policy Studies Organization.

The phenomenon of domestic violence is as old as humanity itself, but legal protection against violence both internationally and nationally begins to be provided very late. In the Republic of North Macedonia, until 2004, there was no legal protection of victims of domestic violence, nor was adequate sanctioning of perpetrators. Only since 2004, with the amendments and additions to the Criminal Code in the criminal sphere, and the Law on the Family in the civil sphere, the phenomenon of domestic violence (...) began to receive due legal attention, with the application of provisions for the sanctioning of perpetrators and temporary measures protection for victims. The adoption of the Istanbul Convention (The Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence) and its ratification in 2018 undoubtedly contributed to the Republic of North Macedonia undertaking a series of reforms in the field of domestic violence. So initially, in 2021, the new Law on domestic violence was adopted in harmony with the principles of the Istanbul Convention, whereas in 2023 the Law on the amendment of the Criminal Code was adopted. This law focused on changes in criminal offenses related to domestic violence and gender-based violation, as well as the incorporation of new criminal offenses in this regard. These legislative reforms, especially the amendments approved in February 2023 which are of particular importance in the prevention and fight against domestic violence and violence against women in the Republic of North Macedonia are the focus of this research. Here we have analyzed and commented the approved changes to the Criminal Code of RNM. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer „Entwurf eines Gesetzes zur strukturellen Weiterentwicklung der Pflegeversicherung“ vom 17. 10. 2007 sieht Regelungen zur Einbeziehung von stationären Pflegeeinrichtungen in die ambulante ärztliche GKV-Versorgung vor. Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert und bewertet den Ansatz zur „heimärztlichen Versorgung“ unter rechtlichen Aspekten vor dem Hintergrund der Problematik der Psychopharmakaversorgung von Heimbewohnern und schon bestehender Möglichkeiten der Verzahnung der ambulanten ärztlichen und der stationären pflegerischen Versorgung. Das geplante Modell verfolgt das begrüßenswerte Ziel, die gelegentlich als unzureichend beschriebene ambulante ärztliche Betreuung von Pflegebedürftigen in (...) Pflegeheimen zu verbessern, Schnittstellenprobleme abzubauen und gleichzeitig der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung unnötige Transport- und Krankenhauskosten zu ersparen. Es ist jedoch nur ein rudimentäres Heimarztmodell, da es gerade keine flächendeckende Versorgung der Heimbewohner mit Heimärzten erreichen will. Auch fehlen Anreize für eine Optimierung der ärztlichen und der pflegerischen Zusammenarbeit. Insofern können die Probleme, die sich im Rahmen der Psychopharmakaversorgung von stationär zu pflegenden Heimbewohnern abzeichnen, nur punktuell durch diese Reform verbessert werden. (shrink)

While the decision of the House of Lords in Re F in [1990] clarified somewhat the law concerning the treatment of the mentally incapacitated adult, many uncertainties remained. This paper explores proposals discussed in a recent government green paper for reform of the law in an area involving many difficult ethical dilemmas.

On May 3, 1999, at the Cato sponsored conference, "Forfeiture Reform: Now, or Never?", Representative Henry Hyde announced that he was, once again, introducing Forfeiture Reform legislation to Congress. For six years, he has been trying to get legislation passed that would..

Mixed member legislative systems have proliferated in the last twenty years, and while our knowledge of the institutional impacts has grown, we have had difficulty in separating institutional and contextual (namely party) influences. Through an analysis of Taiwan before and after the implementation of a mixed member majoritarian (MMM) system, the level of contamination between tiers and variance between parties becomes clearer. Survey results show a marked shift in constituency focus for district candidates, moving from multimember to single-member districts, (...) while party list seats focus on district factors at higher rates post-reform. Variance between the two major parties further suggests differing levels of party pressure. (shrink)

In an effort at ethical reform, Taiwan recently revised the Hospice Palliative Care Law authorising family members or physicians to make surrogate decisions to discontinue life-sustaining treatment if an incompetent terminally ill patient did not express their wishes while still competent. In particular, Article 7 of the new law authorises the palliative care team, namely the physicians, to act as sole decision-makers on behalf of the incompetent terminally ill patient's best interests if no family member is available. However, the (...) law fails to provide guidance as to what constitutes the patient's best interests or what specific procedures the treating physicians should follow, and so has raised constitutional concerns. It may be difficult to translate ethical reform into law but it is not impossible if essential requirements are carefully followed. First, there must be substantial nexus between the purpose of the statute and the measures provided under the statute. Second, advocates need to convince the public that futility or waste has amounted to a public health emergency so as to justify lower procedural requirements. Third, a remedy or compensation should be available if the surrogate decisions have not been appropriately made. Fourth, minimum procedural safeguards are necessary even though the statute is intended to reduce the procedural burdens of making surrogate decisions on behalf of incompetent patients who lack family members and did not express their wishes while still competent. (shrink)

HIV-related state laws are being created transnationally though the use of omnibus model laws. In 2004, the US Agency for International Development funded the creation of one such guidance text known as the USAID/Action for West Africa Region Model Law, or N'Djamena Model Law, which led to the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS laws, including the criminalisation of HIV transmission, across much of West and Central Africa . In this article, I explicate how an epidemic of highly problematic legislation spread across (...) the region as a result of a text-mediated work process enabled through model laws. I theorise the textual genre of model laws arguing that these texts are best understood as ‘preoperative documents’ which, when activated, can lead to swift legislative reform in and beyond the field of HIV/AIDS governance. The legislative process being investigated was made visible through participant observation, archival research, textual analysis and informant interviews with national and international stakeholders . This involved ethnographic research in Canada, the USA, Switzerland, Austria, South Africa and Senegal . The untold policy processes and narratives explored in this article make evident how the work of contesting problematic HIV/AIDS model laws and newly drafted state laws involves both creating new texts and contesting the legitimacy and efficacy of others. (shrink)

We should now be able to come to some general conclusions about the main lines of Cuvier's development as a naturalist after his departure from Normandy. We have seen that Cuvier arrived in Paris aware of the importance of physiology in classification, yet without a fully worked out idea of how such an approach could organize a whole natural order. He was freshly receptive to the ideas of the new physiology developed by Xavier Bichat.Cuvier arrived in a Paris also torn (...) by many overlapping debates on the nature of classification, and in particular that between the natural and artificial systems. The very validity of the enterprise of classification was questioned in many quarters. Cuvier's achievement on his entry into the Parisian world of science was not simply to establish himself as a highly competent anatomist: far more important, he also began to use ideas from many different specialties to change completely the notion of what was involved in natural history.124 At the same time that he himself swung away from the guiding image of the field naturalist as the ideal of the specialty, he took ideas from the new physiology to answer questions about the order of the animal world, and from comparative anatomy to resurrect extinct creation — and to come to conclusions from that creation about the history of the forms of life and the manner of their succession. He showed himself able to alter the relationships between natural history and many other fields of study in a way that implied, rightly or wrongly, his own complete mastery over such a movement. Partly he was able to do this because the ideas he borrowed were not themselves logically articulated and thus could be easily adapted and refocused for many different specific purposes. The value of the heuristic possibilities inherent in the idea of life, for example, far outweighed its inability to generate full systems of classification. Cuvier also consistently refused to consider in science matters relating to the first causes of events. Freed from the consideration of first-order phenomena, he was able to use second-order explanations across a far wider field of applicability. Personal doubts about the validity of a theology that had used science in order to bolster its own claims were combined here with the strong influence of the Kantian critique of the limits of human reason.125Cuvier's characteristic mode of procedure was that of intellectual appropriation and a bold capacity for altering the relationships between different fields of knowledge, rather than, with the exception of taxonomy, the technique of expanding their subject matter. His claims to originality came, first, from this reappropriation and reorientation and, second, from the sheer scope of his work, which aimed at nothing less than the cataloging and classification of all animate objects.126 They rested also on his acute use of his assertion of a certain relationship with the past of his subject. Very often he would present this history in such a way as to obscure his own intellectual genealogy, and often too he would give differing accounts of the priority of use of an idea in order to distract attention from the questionable exactitude of his own claims to originality. Cuvier came to Paris at precisely the time when society and institutions were most profitably malleable for a newcomer; it was also a time when many scientific disciplines had reached a stage advanced in terms of their factual content, yet relatively inadequate in conceptual organization. They were ripe for takeover by large-scale organizing ideas such as the animal economy and the subordination of characteristics. Paleontology is a particularly good example of a specialty in this particular form of underdevelopment in 1795.Cuvier paid a high price for his initial success. His electic applications of large-scale organizing ideas tended to mean that little of his own work had complete coherence at all levels. Ideas, as we have seen, that proved capable of providing a complete reform of the larger groups of the animal kingdom were incapable of producing its detailed working-out in the taxonomy of smaller groups, which had to be supplied from observed analogical correlations. Further, his physiological approach to classification involved the breakdown of strict correspondence between organs and functions, which left the way open for workers such as Geoffroy St. Hilaire gradually to tilt the balance away from the study of the correlations of hierarchies of functions, and toward morphology as the basis of the order of nature. Cuvier's brilliant appropriations from physiology from the beginning, therefore, contained the seeds of conflict with Geoffroy.Cuvier's eclectic approach made it very nearly impossible for him to present a clear idea of the ways in which the life sciences could be said to be lawful. In spite of his efforts to assimilate them to the position of the physical sciences in this respect, he was forced in the end to accord only an ambiguous status as “laws” to observational correlations. From this area of failure came much of the attempt to give his own two laws — the correlation of parts and the subordination of characteristics — predictive qualities, particularly in relation to paleontological research.It is not surprising that Cuvier's title as the “legislator” of natural history should represent more a claim than a reality. How, then, was he able to emerge as the leading French naturalist of his day? First of all must be adduced the sheer scale of his undertakings. Then comes his expertise as a practical anatomist, and the range of different topics toward which he turned his interest. His collaborators cannot be given credit for his output nor, as we have seen, for slavish adherence to his ideas. Cuvier was able to successfully claim to have dominated the underdeveloped specialties, such as paleontology, and turned them into a major heuristic input into both geology and comparative anatomy; but in other fields, such as physiology, he appropriated concepts and encouraged research but made little impact on the field himself. His attempts in 1812 to head off, or neutralize and absorb the growth of morphological studies landed him in a dangerously rigid position, which despite his encouragement of the new physiological research under the Restoration made further elaboration of his own conceptual underpinnings almost impossible.Cuvier's authority in the scientific world would in any case have been great because of his substantive achievement in taxonomy, but the rest of his work had enough ambiguities and dislocations for it to need the support of his political and social power. Cuvier's detractors seized on a vital fragment of the truth when they accused him of finding the political dimension all-important: it obscured the disjunctions in his theories and at the same time gave him the authority to make new claims for the status of the observational sciences - and for their relations of power with their surrounding specialties. Cuvier's science both thrived on and was halted by the power games of intellectual appropriation, manipulation of the past to confirm the present, and continual claims for hegemony. (shrink)

While some descriptive and normative theories of legislation account for an extensive role of legal interpretation in legislation, others see its legislative role as marginal. Yet in contemporary constitutional democracies, where legislation is limited and guided by constitutional norms, as well as international and supranational law, legal interpretation must play some role in legislation—even if all or most of legislative activity may not be adequately described and evaluated as legal interpretation. In this chapter, I aim to explore some (...) implications of recognizing the role of legal interpretation in legislation—notably, for the conceptualization and significance of legal expertise in the legislative process, as well as for determining the moral duties of legislative representatives. First, I argue that the role of legal interpretation in legislation calls for institutional reforms in legislatures in order to ensure that legal expertise is adequately channeled into the legislative process, including agenda-setting. Second, I argue that interpreting legal norms through legislation implies specific moral duties for legislative representatives, both in their relations to one another and in their relations vis-à-vis their constituents. I show that giving legal interpretation its due in a descriptive and normative account of legislative activity does not imply an elitist understanding of legislation, and it does not compromise our conception of legislatures as loci of political and moral disagreement and democratic representation. (shrink)

Recently (2010–2011) new criminal legislation to combat illegal income and corruption was passed and publicly discussed in Lithuania. Within the list of the new legal measures, special attention should be paid to criminalisation of illicit enrichment, establishment of a model of extended property confiscation, reinforcement of responsibility for corruption-related offenses, a provision that not only property but also personal benefits may constitute a bribe. It can be seen from the explanatory letters attached to the draft laws and the political debate (...) that the new regulation is expected to achieve decisive breakthrough in the fight against corruption and illegal income. However, without any doubt as to the necessity to fight against those social evils, the author presents critical evaluation of the reform by applying the test of principles of criminal law, legal language and practical effectiveness. By making critical conclusions that the new criminal legislation deliberately lightens the prosecution’s goal of incrimination and the burden of proof, the author warns about the purposive instrumental nature of the new laws, which are balancing on the threshold of legitimacy. In the article the author reveals crucial shortcomings of the new legislation: in some aspects it lacks legal certainty, in other aspects it ignores the principles of guilt, presumption of innocence and proportionality as well as the conception of criminal law as a last resort (ultima ratio). As a result, the new legal means against illegal income and corruption leave space for applying inadequate repression beyond their intended purpose, in addition, they criminalise human conduct that is insufficiently dangerous and create preconditions for senseless criminal prosecutions and violation of human rights. (shrink)

Health care costs and affordability are critical issues to consumers. Just as we assess the coverage impacts of a health reform proposal, we should be able to evaluate how the plan will constrain health care costs: its theory of cost control. This essay provides a framework to assess health reform plans on their theories of cost control, identifying the key policy tools to constrain health care costs organized in a two-by-two matrix across the following dimensions: price vs. utilization (...) and public vs. private payers. It then applies the framework to the Affordable Care Act and the Republican's 2017 legislative efforts to repeal and replace the ACA to identify their general theories of cost control, revealing on the plans' strengths, blind spots, and incoherence. (shrink)

A comprehensive account of English legal thought in the age of Blackstone and Bentham for nearly a century, The Province of Legislation Determined advances an ambitious reinterpretation of eighteenth-century attitudes to social change and law reform. Professor Lieberman's bold synthesis rests on a wide survey of legal materials and on a detailed discussion of Blackstone's Commentaries, the jurisprudence of Lord Kames and the Scottish Enlightenment, the chief justiceship of Lord Mansfield, the penal theories of Eden and Romilly, and the (...) legislative science of Jeremy Bentham. The study relates legal developments to the broader fabric of eighteenth-century social and political theory, and offers a novel assessment of the character of the common law tradition and of Bentham's contribution to the ideology of reform. (shrink)

This article analyzes the epistemological aims and justification of character education legislation passed by the North Carolina General Assembly. I take this specific state law as representative of the broader national trends in the character education movement. I primarily use the work of Richard Rorty as the theoretical lens for the analysis and critique. I conclude by commending aspects of the legislative effort, but I suggest that greater emphasis must be placed on strengthening students' ethics through democratic action inside (...) and outside schools and not on a right-leaning, conservative, and didactic curriculum. Further, as social foundations educators, it is imperative to make strides in our classrooms to expose preservice teachers to the apparent and hidden contradictions of using character education as a tool of educational reform. (shrink)

Marie Madeleine Jodin, actress, philosophe and feminist, published in 1790 her Vues legislatives pour les femmes, addressed to the National Assembly, one of the first signed, woman-authored, feminist works of the Revolutionary period, which has been largely neglected by scholars. This study analyses her treatise's arguments in detail, relating its two principal themes; the reform of prostitution and a plea for the Assembly to pass laws permitting divorce, to the context of Enlightenment thought, as well as to Jodin's own (...) experience. The pivotal figure of Rousseau, figured by Jodin as an apostle of liberty and moral regeneration, is also viewed as a focus of contention, given his views on women's incapacity for public life. It will be argued that Jodin's proposal to set up a separate legislative body for women to deal with domestic issues (family violence etc.) and for the reform of prostitutes, whilst seemingly subscribing to Rousseau's separate spheres ideology, is in fact a repudiation of it. Though lauding the model of the bourgeois family and the maternal ideal, Jodin's treatise gravely undermines patriarchal authority in the private and the public spheres. (shrink)

The Koizumi Administration got off on the right foot with a high approval rate over 85 % in April 2001, and swept Upper House Election held three months later (Inoguchi, 2002). However, it lost the support of legislators, media, and constituents because of his failure to get the reform process off the ground. Most salient of the legislative records is that the batting average of the cabinet sponsored bills has experienced a dramatic fall in the 153rd (27 September (...) to 7 December 1001) and 154th (21 January to 31 July 2002) sessions, registering the second lowest figure for the last decade. Clearly the Prime Minister's legislative coalition has been significantly weakened (see Table 1; see Table 2 for the distribution of seats by political party). (shrink)

In the opinion of many Slovenian and Croatian scholars, the constitutional and legislative design of citizen-initiated referendums in their respective countries was in many ways flawed. Referendums initiated by citizens have caused, at least from the point of view of governments in these two countries, many unexpected constitutional, political and/or economic problems. Over the years, several unsuccessful constitutional reforms of the institute of referendum have been attempted both in Slovenia and Croatia. In 2013, Slovenia finally attained its ‘constitutional moment’ (...) in which it was possible to reach an almost universal consensus in the National Assembly on constitutionally redesigning the legislative referendum. On the other hand, several attempts by the Croatian Parliament to amend the constitutional provision relating to citizens’ initiatives have come to nothing due to the interests of the major parties in the constitutional amendment process being different. (shrink)

When it comes to the matter of human embryo research law plays a crucial role in its development by helping to set the boundaries of what may be done, the sanctions for acting outside those boundaries and the rights and responsibilities of key parties. Nevertheless, the philosophical challenges raised by human embryo research, even with the best will of all concerned, may prove too great for satisfactory resolution through the legal process. Taking as its focus the position of Ireland, this (...) paper explores the distinctive constitutional approach taken on this issue and addresses the difficulty of translating sound philosophy into judicial decrees and the difficulty of establishing expert commissions to make law reform proposals on matters of profound normative controversy. It concludes that the Irish experience does have useful lessons for those in other countries who are concerned with the legal approach to research on human embryos and points to the desirability of a diversity of normative positions in order to enrich the quality of the analysis so as to encourage more informed debate in society. (shrink)

Until 1996, poor single mothers in the United States could claim welfare benefits for themselves and their children under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program if they had no other source of income. With the 1996 passage of the Personal Responsibility Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), paid work and work-related activities became a mandatory condition for receiving aid. At the same time, the law promotes marriage as a route out of poverty. Using a feminist reinterpretation of Althusser’s (...) concept of interpellation, I turn to Job Clubs, mandatory week-long workshops that teach job search skills, to analyze the citizen-subject generated by front-line representatives of the state in the context of this new legislation. Based on participant-observation, I conclude that while PRWORA ostensibly promotes both marriage and paid employment, Job Club trainers enforced a masculine worker-citizen subject through the deployment of three discursive strategies. These discursive strategies 1) promoted paid work over welfare-receipt as both a pragmatic and moral choice, 2) posited an individual-psychological account of women’s welfare receipt, and 3) portrayed parenting skills as marketable skills. In the conclusion, I speculate that current welfare reform efforts require the generation of a self-reproducing worker-citizen and that workshops like Job Club become a site in which the existence of this autonomous citizen is affirmed. (shrink)

This book on privacy and data protection offers readers conceptual analysis as well as thoughtful discussion of issues, practices, and solutions. It features results of the seventh annual International Conference on Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection, CPDP 2014, held in Brussels January 2014. The book first examines profiling, a persistent core issue of data protection and privacy. It covers the emergence of profiling technologies, on-line behavioral tracking, and the impact of profiling on fundamental rights and values. Next, the book looks (...) at preventing privacy risks and harms through impact assessments. It contains discussions on the tools and methodologies for impact assessments as well as case studies. The book then goes on to cover the purported trade-off between privacy and security, ways to support privacy and data protection, and the controversial right to be forgotten, which offers individuals a means to oppose the often persistent digital memory of the web. Written during the process of the fundamental revision of the current EU data protection law by the Data Protection Package proposed by the European Commission, this interdisciplinary book presents both daring and prospective approaches. It will serve as an insightful resource for readers with an interest in privacy and data protection. (shrink)

: Can passing antidiscrimination laws ever be a bad idea? Yes, if broad policy reform is abandoned in favor of genetic-specific legislation. But in spite of its serious flaws, both in concept and in practice, genetic-specific legislation is sometimes worth passing anyway—sometimes a bad idea is reasonable.

Is realism in political theory compatible with utopianism? This article shows that it is, by reconstructing a highly restrictive realist approach to political theory for guiding legislation and public policy, drawn from the work of Adam Smith, and showing how it can accommodate Piketty’s utopian proposal for a global tax on capital. This shows not only that realism and utopianism are compatible; but how realist and utopian political theory can be carried out in concrete cases. This moves debates to more (...) interesting questions of which forms of utopianism are permissible within which forms of realism; contributes to moving the contemporary realism debates from a Methodenstreit to questions of how it can and ought to be done; and contributes to an important contemporary debate about the permissibility of utopian proposals for political and economic reform in general and Piketty’s proposed global tax on capital in particular. (shrink)

The controversies in Bristol, Alder Hey and elsewhere in the UK surrounding the removal and retention of human tissue and organs have led to extensive law reform in all three UK legal systems. This paper reports a short study of the reactions of a range of health professionals to these changes. Three main areas of ethical concern were noted: the balancing of individual rights and social benefit; the efficacy of the new procedures for consent; and the helpfulness for professional (...) practice of the new legislation and regulation. Recognition of these concerns may help in forging a new partnership between professionals and patients and their families. (shrink)

In all probability, future generations will outnumber us by thousands or millions to one. In the aggregate, their interests therefore matter enormously, and anything we can do to steer the future of civilization onto a better trajectory is of tremendous moral importance. This is the guiding thought that defines the philosophy of longtermism. Political science tells us that the practices of most governments are at stark odds with longtermism. But the problems of political short-termism are neither necessary nor inevitable. In (...) principle, the state could serve as a powerful tool for positively shaping the long-term future. In this chapter, we make some suggestions about how to align government incentives with the interests of future generations. First, in Section II, we explain the root causes of political short-termism. Then, in Section III, we propose and defend four institutional reforms that we think would be promising ways to increase the time horizons of governments: 1) government research institutions and archivists; 2) posterity impact assessments; 3) futures assemblies; and 4) legislative houses for future generations. Section IV concludes with five additional reforms that are promising but require further research: to fully resolve the problem of political short-termism we must develop a comprehensive research program on effective longtermist political institutions. (shrink)

The project of the comprehensive reform of Japanese insolvency law started in October 1996. After many enactments and amendments, there are now two types of judicial proceedings for personal insolvencies in Japanese insolvency law. The first category is straight bankruptcy proceedings in which the debtor can be discharged; the other is special Civil Rehabilitation proceedings for individual debtors. In this Article, I will first give a brief overview of the special Civil Rehabilitation proceedings for individual debtors, including a short (...) description of two types of proceedings, and legislative issues. Then I will give a brief overview of major amendments of the Bankruptcy Law concerning individual bankruptcies, including amendments relating to the scope of exemption and discharge proceedings. (shrink)

Health care reform that includes universal coverage could lower a major barrier to care for people of color and ethnic minorities—the inability to pay for care. But universal coverage alone, even with comparable fee-for-service payment or appropriately risk-adjusted capitated reimbursement, will not eradicate the racial and ethnic inequities in health care delivery. Restrictive admissions practices, geographic inaccessibility, culture, racial stereotypes, and the failure to employ minority health care professionals will still create barriers to minority health care. In addition to (...) universal financing, health care reform should include new civil rights legislation to address and reduce these noneconomic barriers to minority health care. (shrink)

Health care reform that includes universal coverage could lower a major barrier to care for people of color and ethnic minorities—the inability to pay for care. But universal coverage alone, even with comparable fee-for-service payment or appropriately risk-adjusted capitated reimbursement, will not eradicate the racial and ethnic inequities in health care delivery. Restrictive admissions practices, geographic inaccessibility, culture, racial stereotypes, and the failure to employ minority health care professionals will still create barriers to minority health care. In addition to (...) universal financing, health care reform should include new civil rights legislation to address and reduce these noneconomic barriers to minority health care. (shrink)

The new critical edition of the works and correspondence of Jeremy Bentham is being prepared and published under the supervision of the Bentham Committee of University College London. In spite of his importance as jurist, philosopher, and social scientist, and leader of the Utilitarian reformers, the only previous edition of his works was a poorly edited and incomplete one brought out within a decade or so of his death. Eight volumes of the new Collected Works, five of correspondence, and three (...) of writings on jurisprudence, appeared between 1968 and 1981, published by the Athlone Press. Further volumes in the series since then are published by Oxford University Press. The overall plan and principles of the edition are set out in the General Preface to The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1, which was the first volume of the Collected Works to be published.An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham's best-known work, is a classic text in modern philosophy and jurisprudence. First published in 1789, it contains the important statement of the foundations of utilitarian philosophy and a pioneering study of crime and punishment, both of which remain at the heart of contemporary debates in moral and political philosophy, economics, and legal theory. Printed here in full is the definitive edition, edited by the distinguished scholars J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart. An introductory essay by Hart, first published in 1982 and a widely acknowledged classic in its own right, is reprinted here. It contains an important analysis of Bentham's principle of utility, theory of action, and an account of the relationship between law and morality.A new introduction by the leading Bentham scholar F. Rosen, specially written for this Clarendon Paperback edition, provides students with a helpful survey of Bentham's main ideas and an extensive bibliographical study of recent critical work on Bentham. Professor Rosen's essay also contains a new analysis of the principle of utility in Bentham's philosophy which is compared with its use in Hume and J. S. Mill. (shrink)

A UK doctor was recently acquitted of charges of reinstating a variety of female genital mutilation after delivering a child. In this paper, I contend that this incident reflects a broader confusion concerning the ethico-legal status of non-therapeutic genital surgeries for children and adults, which are not derivable from tenets of medical ethics, but rather violate them. I argue that medical professionals have an obligation to announce and address this confusion in order to motivate legislative reform, since the (...) inconsistency of the current law entrenches the underlying sexism and ethnocentrism upon which its sense depends. Without convincing arguments for condoning male circumcision and female cosmetic genital surgery and for treating adult women of colour as lacking the capacity to consent, the current legislation stands in need of urgent revision. (shrink)

Can passing antidiscrimination laws ever be a bad idea? Yes, if broad policy reform is abandoned in favor of genetic‐specific legislation. But in spite of its serious flaws, both in concept and in practice, genetic‐specific legislation is sometimes worth passing anyway.

In 1974, the belgian House of representatives as well as the Senate have decided to bring about some deep changes in their respective rules of procedure. These changes, worked-out within the rank and file of theresearch centres of the three principal political forces, are based on the specialization which is naturally met within an assembly. The Senate and the House of representatives, while respecting the proportional representation of the groups, got divided respectively into four and six sections destined to discuss (...) definitively projects and propositions of law, budgets, as well as hear interpellations. The final vote is, in any case, left to the plenary assembly.This is the way the belgian Houses put into practice the idea of specialized chambers, which was evoked within the Association of the Secretaries general of Parliaments, in the early fifties, following the procedural innovation of the 1947 italian Constitution.The reform functions fully in the Senate, whereas the House of representatives calls up the sections to discuss only budgets and interpellations in relation to them. (shrink)

In 1988 a piece of higher education reform legislation titled The Higher Education Funding Act was devised by the Labor Government and enacted by the Commonwealth of Australia to become law. The te...

This article explores the challenge of developing a feminist law reform proposal to decertify sex and gender based on research conducted for the ‘Future of Legal Gender' project. Locating the proposal to decertify within a do-it-yourself, prefigurative approach to law reform, the article asks: Can a law reform proposal be both instrumental and radical? Can a proposal take shape as a viable legislative text and as a more subversive intervention to unsettle and reimagine gender’s relationship to (...) law? This article explores this at two levels. First, it considers the ontological challenges of developing a controversial law reform proposal in terms of its realness (or fictiveness), contours, and temporality, turning to ‘slow law' as a credible way of approaching radical reform. Second, it explores the design-based challenges of legal prototyping—foregrounding questions of legitimacy, participation, and purpose, which arise in designing a decertification law. At the heart of this discussion is the relationship between representation and enactment—between what a proposal presents and what its presentation does and does not accomplish. (shrink)

Health care reform is a perennial issue in elections — partly because of the challenges facing health care and especially because health care is an important issue for the swing voters. Making reform happen is harder. There are deep divisions within each of the parties — not apparent during elections. Bipartisan support — and the willingness to accept the best legislation that can be passed as “good enough”— will be key.

Jeremy Bentham's work on The Principles of Morals and Legislation emerges from its historic roots in hedonism and teleology as a scientific attempt to assess the moral content of human action by focusing on its results or consequences. Proceeding from the assumption that human beings desire pleasure (and avoid pain), Bentham's unique perspective, known as utilitarianism, is used to construct a fascinating calculus for determining which action to perform when confronted with situations requiring moral decision-makingthe goal of which is to (...) arrive at the "greatest happiness of the greatest number." Toward this end, he endeavors to delineate the sources and kinds of pleasure and pain and how they can be measured when assessing one's moral options. Bentham supports his arguments with discussions of intentionality, consciousness, motives, and dispositions. Bentham concludes this groundbreaking work with an analysis of punishment: its purpose and the proper role that law and jurisprudence should play in its determination and implementation. Here we find Bentham as social reformer seeking to resolve the tension that inevitably exists when the concerns of the many conflict with individual freedom. The Principles of Morals and Legislation offers readers the rare opportunity to experience one of the great works of moral philosophy, a volume that has influenced the course of ethical theory for over a century. (shrink)

American policymakers delegate the administration of many welfare programs to states, where officials implement them in increasingly diverse ways. Welfare state scholarship has little to say about this subnational policy divergence, and it portrays the complexity of delegated governance as a barrier to nonelite legislative influence. Drawing on an ethnographic study of one state’s Medicaid program, this article shows that delegated governance offers ample opportunity for nonelite influence and policy divergence, but through regulatory governance rather than legislative advocacy. (...) Medicaid is opaque to politicians, whose inability to monitor program details creates conditions of bureaucratic autonomy and even activism: health-care agency personnel sequence regulatory tweaks to protect and expand entitlements. But budget cuts, outsourcing, and fraught provider relations also deprive bureaucrats of street-level know-how, and bureaucrats depend on beneficiaries’ advocates who selectively illuminate a path to reform. A full rendering of subnational divergence in American federalism requires attention to underexamined factors such as bureaucratic activism, agency advocacy, and regulatory governance. (shrink)

Recent revisions in child support and paternity establishment legislation enacted under the 1996 welfare reform act, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, significantly alter the American welfare state's relationship to men's fathering. Through a critical review of prior research and social service literature, the authors argue that PRWORA actively constructs fatherhood not only through state policies that maintain males as “breadwinners” but also through state-sponsored social service programs that seek to influence men's identities as fathers. PRWORA's policies (...) and their accompanying discourses simultaneously reproduce and undermine gender hierarchy yet tacitly maintain structural race and class inequalities. (shrink)

This paper examines the implications of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), the World Trade Organization’s agreement governing trade in health-related services, for health policy and healthcare reform in the United States. The paper describes the nature and scope of US obligations under the GATS, the ways in which the trade agreement intersects with domestic health policy, and the institutional factors that mediate trade-offs between health and trade policy. The analysis suggests that the GATS provisions on market (...) access, national treatment and domestic regulation, which are designed to eliminate ‘regulatory barriers’ to global trade in health services, limit the range of options that state and federal regulators and legislative bodies can employ to regulate the health sector and implement healthcare reforms. As such, the paper identifies the broader social and ethical implications of free trade policy. (shrink)