Abstract
This lecture given at Birmingham City University School of Law, March 21, 2019 considers the origins of the right to silence in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of the United States and compares the constitutional protections against self-incrimination with those of the United Kingdom. It notes that the effect of the changes introduced by the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994 is that there is now a fundamental divergence in approach between the two jurisdictions and concludes that as the twenty first century progresses, defendants on both sides of the Atlantic will be less likely to exercise their rights without consequence and then when they do choose to speak it will be at their peril.
Abstract
The modern way of life and reflected in modern political philosophy is directed by capitalist activity of both commodities and persons. Entities that do not have commodity value are worthless to the capitalist enterprise, regardless of any intrinsic value in themselves. Modernity is capitalist modernity. Modernity has given preference for objects/commodities over persons. This paper will argue for opening-up the landscape for alternative experiences to capitalism, as an attempt to move away from the capitalist enterprise. That is, be able to provide open space for people to use other than the buying and selling of commodities---where the commodification process breaks down and opens-up spaces for alternative experiences besides the capitalist experience. In other words, this work will attempt to serve as critique of Enlightenment philosophical discourse---that is, serve as a critique of the Age of Enlightenment serving as the foundational head of modernism---a plea for the rebellion against the quantification and mathematization of reality under modernist and industrial societies. It will use the modern landscape as the first effort to break free from the capitalist enterprise.
Abstract
The prevalent approach to the concept of the rule of law among legal theorists puts attributes first, assigning certain features of laws and sometimes legal systems as rule-of-law virtues. Inquiring at a more basic level, this paper advances a novel, structuralist view of the rule of law. While honoring theoretical constraints that guard against diluting the rule-of-law concept too thinly as a remedy for myriad societal ills, this approach shows that the concept implicates inequalities sustained by a society’s social, economic, and political structures. This is accomplished by demonstrating that the rule-of-law project holds a structural position in the collective normative discourse as a vehicle by which people morally evaluate the interplay between the actual capabilities of individuals and groups to participate in law, and the legal system’s treatment of those individuals and groups.
Law’s procedural outputs may formally provide the public with access to the legal system, but the rule-of-law project goes to the actual capabilities of the people to access the system in reality, to have a fair opportunity to participate in the inputs into the system, and to have that participation impartially adjudicated. Conditions impacting a diversity of stakeholders – and particularly the most disadvantaged within the population – perturb the virtues typically associated with the rule-of-law ideal when those conditions, and the power exercised to maintain them, impair capabilities for fair, dignified, and equal access to legal processes.
Understanding the rule of law in structuralist terms, as an informal moral operator, (1) makes sense of the schism we normally accept between the concepts of law and the rule of law, (2) reorients the source of rule-of-law thinking from theorists bent on fixing a conceptual definition to communities engaged in first-order interactions with the legal system, (3) helps explain why citizens come not only to expect law to constrain official coercive powers but also to demand that law promote their actual capabilities to participate in the legal system on an egalitarian and dignitarian footing, and hence (4) implicates a critique of conditions of political and material inequalities that cannot but impair the healthy functioning of the rule-of-law project.
Abstract
The relationship between the law and masculinity has not been as thoroughly examined as the relationship between the law and feminism or, more generally, between the law and gender. Yet, the reach of masculinity stretches deep into the very fiber of the law. Masculinity has for too long served as an invisible bedrock on which the law founded both its substance and method. The struggle for formal equality during the last half century sought the elimination of the masculinist bias, but has only exposed the extent of the entrenchment. The popular idea is that the law exists in a removed and exalted position where it sits in judgement of a preexisting and fully formed masculinity. Indeed, much of the internal coherence of the law is premised on the integrity of the subject and the propagation of sexual difference. Thus, the law is precluded from acknowledging or engaging with its own productive power and vacuously characterizes itself as a neutral arbiter. Today, while significant changes occur in sex and sexuality, the study of masculinity appears theoretically stagnant.
Part I of this paper distinguishes between masculinity studies and the men’s movement and explains the relationship of each to feminist theory. Part II looks at how the power of the law works and how masculinity studies is an effective tool to help understand how that power manifests and is employed. Part III examines the relationship between feminist legal theory and masculinity studies with a particular focus on two areas where I view masculinity studies as having successfully employed insights from feminist theory. Finally, Part IV considers four areas where I suggest masculinity studies could better incorporate certain insights from feminist theory, which would result in a more rigorous understanding of the relationship among power, masculinity, and law, and point masculinity studies in a more nuanced direction. To advance this critique, the paper analyzes underlying arguments that support the power of law based in classic liberal political theory. It employs recurrent critiques of the law, and of liberalism more generally, found in Feminist Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory, Queer Theory, and Critical Legal Studies to reveal the law as always already intertwined with masculinity.
Abstract
Within the United States, legal challenges to the death penalty have held it to be a “cruel and unusual” punishment (contrary to the Eighth Amendment) or arbitrarily and unfairly enacted (contrary to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments). The Eighth Amendment requires that punishments not be disproportionate or purposeless. In recent rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court has adopted a piecemeal approach to this matter. In regard to particular classes of defendant, the Court has sought to rule on whether death is likely to be a proportional and purposeful punishment, as well as whether—given the condition of these defendants—such a determination can be reliably and accurately gauged. This article will suggest a different approach. Instead of asking whether, given the nature of certain categories of human defendant, the death penalty is constitutional in their case, I will begin by asking what—given the nature of the U.S. death penalty—one must believe about human beings for death to be a proportionate punishment. From this, I will argue that to believe that these penal goals are capable of fulfilment by the death penalty entails commitment to an empirically unconfirmable philosophical anthropology. On this basis, it will be further argued that the beliefs required for the U.S. death penalty’s proportional and purposeful instigation (pursuant to the Eighth Amendment) are not congruent with the demands of legal due process.
