bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Analyzing the Effectiveness of Vaccination as a Preventive Measure in Combating COVID-19 and Recommendations for Future Health Emergencies in India
Authors:   National Health Systems Resource Centre, India, Saraswat Avani , Varekar Tejal ,   National Health Systems Resource Centre, India
Published: August 2023

In order to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, India launched the world’s most extensive vaccination drive. Almost 1.9 billion vaccination doses were given until May 13, 2022, since the beginning of the drive, with 1 billion people vaccinated for the first dose and 0.87 billion people for the second dose. The objective of the study is to analyze the impact of vaccination on the control of SARS-CoV-2 infection. The secondary data was obtained by the World Health Organization for COVID-19 cases and the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare for vaccination from January 22, 2022, to May 13, 2022. Exponential regression was performed for total cumulative vaccinations (18 years and older received at least one dose) as an independent variable and the rate of COVID infection (0.1million per week) as a dependent variable. The p-value is 0.001, with a negative slope emphasizing that the correlation is significant for the selected time period. Further, the predictive model with R2 = 0.96 shows the model is best fitted. The mathematical model supports the role of vaccination in decreasing cases of COVID-19. Predicting the rate of occurrence of infection against the backdrop of a vaccination drive can be a valuable tool for assessing vaccine effectiveness and planning for future actions. Keywords: COVID-19, vaccination, health emergencies, preventive measures
The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Child Health: A Case Study in Japan
Authors:   Osaka Metropolitan University, Japan, Yamano Noriko
Published: August 2023

This study examines the impact of COVID-19 on child and parent health and the institutes’ support for children with difficulties during the pandemic in Japan. Two surveys were implemented from October to November 2020. The “Parents and Children” survey included questions about demographic and household characteristics, the impact of COVID-19 on work and daily life, applications for financial support, relations with children and partners, and health conditions. The final sample comprised 2,582 parents with a child aged 0–18 and 1,032 children aged 9–18. The “Institutions” survey included questions about the impact of COVID-19 on services and cooperation with other related institutions. The final sample comprised 2,298 institutions responsible for education or healthcare services. The response rate was relatively high compared with similar surveys: 53.0% for maternal and child health divisions and 56.5% for child consultation centers. The parents’ and children’s survey revealed that around 90% of children felt stressed during the pandemic. The institutions’ survey revealed that child consultation centers received a greater number of inquiries about children’s sexual behavior problems and game addiction. A preventive social work approach is required to give a greater level of support to all children, even in unusual situations like the COVID-19 pandemic. Keywords: COVID-19, social work, child health
Environmental Health Risk Assessment Carcinogen and Non-Carcinogen Analysis: Arsenic in Rice
Authors:   Universitas Sriwijaya, Indonesia, Islamiati Dian , Putri Dini Arista ,   Universitas Sriwijaya, Indonesia
Published: August 2023

Rice is the staple food of most Indonesian people. The process of planting rice using pesticides can cause contamination, one of which is arsenic contamination. Arsenic is a heavy metal that can cause various health problems such as disorders of the nervous system, respiratory system, digestive system, cardiovascular and kidney. This study aims to assess the health risks of both carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic risks due to consumption of rice containing arsenic. This research uses environmental health risk analysis method. The sample in this study amounted to 9 samples of rice which were analyzed by the Inductively Coupled Plasma (ICP) method. The sample of respondents was 96 people who were taken by purposive sampling method. Through this study, it was found that the average concentration of arsenic was 0.01 mg/kg, the respondent's body weight was 45.74 kg, the frequency of exposure was 365 days, the intake rate of 200 grams and the duration of exposure adjusted for each respondent's exposure. The final result of the calculation of the carcinogenic analysis (ECR) was 1.02 X 10-4 and the non-carcinogenic analysis (RQ) was 0.29. The results of these two analyzes indicate that the consumption of rice containing arsenic is still within safe limits. Continuous efforts should be made to keep arsenic concentrations within safe limits. Keywords: Pesticides, rice, Arsenic, EHRA
Braving Uncertainty in the Quest for a Cure: Cancer Care Access During the COVID-19 National Lockdown
Authors:   School of Health Systems Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India, Kuru Dindi
Published: August 2023

This paper examines cancer care access during the nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19 in two states of India’s northeast. A semi-structured interview was conducted by purposive sampling of fifteen participants with cancers of the oral, lungs, stomach, breast and cervix, six key informant oncologists and four Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) facilitating cancer services. Ethical clearances were received from the study institutes. The data was coded and transcribed verbatim on emerging themes. The emerging themes were treatment delay, financial constraint, alternative medicine and bridging gaps by NGOs. Whereas, if financial status hampered access, harassment on availing care was encountered with choosing herbal medication in fear of chemotherapy, surgery and testimonials of relatives. However, support through NGO collaborations enhanced care efficiency for the health systems and cancer patients alike during the challenging times due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Lessons learnt during the COVID-19 pandemic extend beyond the functioning of a robust health system. Collaboration via sectors became pronounced during this uncertainty, thus, emerging resource pooling and zeal to take charge of one’s health. Cancer institutes could magnify these lessons on strengthening health systems for combating unforeseen pandemics. Keywords: cancer, COVID-19, India
The Incidence of Micronutrient Intake on Cognitive Development in Children Under 5 Years of Age: A Cross-sectional Study for the Ecuadorian Case
Authors: Moreira-Moreira Zoila , Quimbiulco-Martínez Ana , Troya-Pintado Christie
Published: August 2023

Analyzing the relationship between micronutrient powder intake from 6 months of age and cognitive development in children contributes significantly to the literature since nutritional status is one of the determinants of health and cognitive and psychosocial development in early childhood. Malnutrition at these stages may cause imbalances between nutritional needs that could lead to malnutrition and influence cognitive development. We used a representative sample of 3877 children aged 3-5 years from the 2018 National Health and Nutrition Survey (ENSANUT). We used a linear regression and binary logistic regression model where we estimated the Odds Ratio (OR) and marginal impacts with their 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) for each of the independent variables. Our results show that the odds ratio (OR) associated with the micronutrient intake variable is significant and greater than 1. This demonstrates that a child who consumes micronutrient powder between 6 months and 2 years of age is approximately 1.56 times more likely (CI=1.35- 1.85) to have high cognitive development. In addition, boys are more likely to have higher cognitive development, with an OR of 1.592 (CI=1.341- 1.978). Another important finding is that a greater number of siblings at home reduces 1.032 times the probability of having high cognitive development. Our data also reveal that the mother's age (very young) may decrease the risk of high cognitive development, while the number of hours of play causes an opposite effect, as the OR reveals that children with a higher number of hours of play are 1.68 times more likely to have high cognitive development. Based on our findings, we can determine that it is important to explore the neurodevelopmental processes that may be involved in malnutrition. Thus, in this article, we recommend the importance of micronutrient intake and a balanced diet as key factors for proper cognitive development.
Causas de afastamento do trabalho de coletores de resíduos de serviços de saúde
Authors: Grandi Joao luiz , Oliveira Cristiane da Silva
Published: August 2023

Objetivo: analisar as causas de afasta[1]mento do trabalho de coletores de re[1]síduos de serviços de saúde. Método: Estudo epidemiológico descritivo com delineamento de Coorte retrospectivo (STROBE). Os dados foram coletados entre todos os atestados médicos e odon[1]tológicos fornecidos pelos 57 coletores de resíduos que trabalharam na coleta de resíduos de serviço de saúde, de janei[1]ro de 2015 a dezembro de 2021, em um hospital de ensino de alta complexidade, localizado na cidade de São Paulo e que gera em média quatro toneladas de resí[1]duos por dia. Resultados: Foram analisa[1]dos 370 atestados de saúde, os coletores eram homens adultos jovens, com média de 37,8 anos e mediana de 36 anos. O período de afastamento foi em cerca de 40% entre dois e cinco dias de ausência ao trabalho. As doenças mais prevalen[1]tes foram a dor musculoesquelética com 21,3% do total dos afastamentos, segui[1]da das doenças do aparelho respiratório (17,2%). Cerca de 48% dos afastamen[1]tos foram associados às doenças crôni[1]cas não transmissíveis. Os acidentes e traumas representaram 5,6% do total dos afastamentos. Conclusão: As causas mais frequentes registradas nos atesta- dos médicos foram as doenças relaciona- das ao sistema ostemuscular e do tecido conjuntivo, sendo a dor lombar baixa e outras dorsopatias as mais prevalentes.
Pluralism and Empire: From Rome to Robert Cover
Authors: Ando Clifford
Published: August 2023

In his famous engagement with pluralism and sub-political associations, “Nomos and Narrative,” Robert Cover invokes empire as both an exemplar of statal power and an alternative to contemporary liberal democratic regimes.  This essay takes his reflections as a point of departure, in order to explore two themes.  First, Cover posits a dynamic relationship between jurispathic and jurisgenerative regimes.  This invites reflection on the stability of pluralist regimes in practice.  This essay takes up that challenge in the case of Rome where, it is argued, structural features of both politics and practice impelled a standardization of legal regimes in both procedural and positive law, despite a principled commitment on Rome’s part to the autonomy of alien communities within the empire.  Second, Cover seeks to elide the true object of his inquiry, the autonomy of religious groups, by assimilating them to voluntarist associations.  This brings certain advantages in respect to constitutional law and anticipates potential liberal and feminist critiques of religious law.  But it also raises problems of political theology, by surrendering the ontological priority vis-à-vis the state that in the self-understanding of religious groups normally justifies their claims to self-regulation.  One form such problems might take is illustrated by Hobbes, in his theory of sovereignty by acquisition, which draws on Roman theory.  That theory has been now been vindicated by Roman legal instruments, discovered in the 19th and 20th centuries and therefore unknown to Hobbes, in which conquered parties were ordered to continue their ancestral legal practice, on sufferance of Rome.
Why Constitutionalism Matters: The Case for Robust Constitutionalism
Authors: Harel Alon
Published: August 2023

This article is founded on disillusionment with a dominant approach to justifying the legitimacy of constitutions and of judicial review. In the prevailing tradition, constitutionalism is justified by its desirable consequences, e.g., the promotion of justice or democracy. This article disputes this methodological starting point and defends robust constitutionalism. Robust constitutionalism refers to a mode of justification that does not rest on contingent facts. Instead robust constitutionalism defends constitutionalism on the basis of values that are embedded in the very concept of a constitution and in the very essence of judicial review. Constitutional entrenchment of rights is valuable because it constitutes public recognition that the protection of rights is the state’s duty, rather than a mere discretionary gesture on its part. Judicial review is valuable not because it is likely to result in “better” or just decisions, but because judicial review is nothing but a hearing to which individuals are entitled.
The Case for Penal Modernism: Beyond Utility and Desert
Authors: Whitman James Q.
Published: August 2023

Our literature uniformly describes American criminal law as the product of a great clash between utility and desert. In the mid-twentieth century, the literature explains, utilitarianism dominated in American criminal law, in the form of what is sometimes called penal modernism, which emphasized incapacitation and rehabilitation. Beginning in the 1970s, however, America witnessed a revolt against penal modernism, as retributivists demanded a criminal law that respected the central importance of blame. That account of American criminal law is repeated so often and so confidently that it may seem obviously true. Yet this article argues that it is wrong, in ways that have led to deep misconceptions about criminal law. The clash between retributivism and penal modernism is not in fact a clash between utility and desert, but a clash between two different understandings of the place of blame in criminal law. Penal modernists were the great advocates of individualization: they argued, not that blame has no place in criminal law, but that we must blame offenders not offenses. Correctly understood, penal modernist individualization represents a serious challenge to retributivist approaches, and offers the foundation for a different and healthier moral attitude toward the criminal law.
Penal Modernism in Theory and Practice
Authors: Brown Darryl K.
Published: August 2023

This paper develops three observations triggered by Whitman’s account of penal modernism; all relate to criminal law in the context of American politics and criminal justice. One suggests why “judicial conscience,” which Whitman describes as playing a central role in penal modernism, may be more problematic in the U.S. than Europe. The second speculates that certain barriers to penal modernism in U.S. political and legal culture are less significant than they seem. Finally, I question the extent to which retributivism displaced penal modernism and suggest a lesson this may hold about criminal law theory in the political and policymaking arena.
Penal Modernism: An American Tragedy
Authors: Farmer Lindsay
Published: August 2023

This paper discusses Whitman’s analysis of penal modernism. While I am in agreement with the central claim that penal modernism has been ignored and caricatured, I argue here that Whitman’s account of the penal modernist theory of judging must be understood in the context of a wider reframing of the social functions of the criminal law in penal modernism. This is explored by considering the unusual connection that the novel An American Tragedy (1925) has to the history of American criminal law, and the light that this can shed on the question of the meaning of penal modernism.
Private Law Realism
Authors: Singer Joseph William
Published: August 2023

Hanoch Dagan argues that the legal realists conceived of law as “a dynamic institution, or set of institutions, that embodies three constitutive tensions: between power and reason, between science and craft, and between tradition and progress.” One tension that Dagan mentions but does not emphasize sufficiently is the tension between adjudication and legislation. Understanding the ways judge-made common law influences legislation and the ways that statutes affect the development of common law will improve our understanding of legal reasoning, the rule of law, and the role of judges in a free and democratic society.
Defending Legal Realism: A Response to Four Critics
Authors: Dagan Hanoch
Published: August 2023

My recently published book, Reconstructing American Legal Realism & Rethinking Private Law Theory (Oxford University Press, 2013), seeks to revive our understanding of law as a set of institutions accommodating three sets of constitutive tensions: power and reason, science and craft, and tradition and progress. This issue of Critical Analysis of Law honored me with the publication of thoughtful and generous book reviews by Alan Brudner, Dan Farbman, Joseph Singer, and Laura Underkuffler. This short essay reflects upon their insightful and important observations and attempts to provide some answers to their interesting and intriguing critiques of my account. I begin with some observations on the relationships between law and politics and on the nature of legislation. I then turn to address the interplay between idealism and reality in law and legalese as well as the ways in which legal theory can be distinctive and at the same time both critical and synthetic. I conclude with some comments on the nature of private law and on the way it serves our right of self-authorship.
Liberalism and the Private Law of Property
Authors: Dagan Hanoch
Published: August 2023

This essay reviews Alan Brudner’s neo-Hegelian theory of property. It critically analyzes Brudner’s conceptualization of the moral significance of property for private sovereignty, his understanding of the relationship between individual independence and selfdetermination, and his account of what makes private law private. I argue that Brudner is wrong on all three fronts and, furthermore, criticize his account of the market’s putative legitimation of property and public law’s alleged amelioration of the injustices entailed by a private law libertarian scheme.Notwithstanding these failures, I salute Brudner’s ambitious and provocative project not only due to its many insights, but also because it helpfully elucidates the main strands of justification that property law must face. Indeed, a credible theory of property-for-self-determination must begin by remedying Brudner’s errors as per the moral significance of property for private sovereignty, the relationship between independence and selfdetermination, and the distinctive nature of private law. This essay provides preliminary suggestions on all three fronts.
Uncovering the Latent Disunity of Property Law?
Authors: Shoikhedbrod Igor
Published: August 2023

This essay questions Alan Brudner’s central claim about the unity of property law by subjecting his account of property to an immanent critique. While Brudner attempts to resolve the contradictions of formal right in the dialogical state, his account falls short of demonstrating the unity of property law because it preserves the institutional mechanisms that give rise to self-estrangement. Unless the material conditions that give rise to self-estrangement are themselves overcome in the dialogical state, property law will reveal disunity. I show a possible way out of this predicament by making a conceptual distinction between individual property and productive property.
New Historical Jurisprudence: Legal History as Critical Analysis of Law
Authors: Dubber Markus D.
Published: August 2023

This modest manifesto--or minifesto--portrays legal history as a mode of critical analysis of law, using the historical analysis of American penality as an illustration and the fullfledged manifestos by Piketty and Guldi & Armitage as points of reference. Historical analysis of law, in this light, appears as one mode of critical analysis among others, including, notably, comparative analysis of law, along with economic, philosophical, sociological, or ethical analysis of law, and so on. Historical analysis of law, in other words, is itself a mode of legal scholarship, not a subspecies of law or history. It is a comprehensive view of law from a particular critical vantage point: a way of doing law, rather than of doing things with law. Historical analysis of law in this sense is less “law and history” than “law as history,” less legal history than historical jurisprudence.
Regarding Untimeliness: Medieval Legal History and Modern Law
Authors: Shoemaker Karl
Published: August 2023

This essay offers an account of the task of medieval legal history, suggesting that its importance lies in its ability to recognize and explain the most alien features of our legal past. In so doing, the discipline of medieval legal history makes what is alien intelligible while preserving its essential differences. It is the delicate and difficult task of engaging with our past without judging the past by the needs of the present, without taking our own limited perspective to be universal, but also without relegating our past to a mere object of antiquarian curiosity, thus cutting off the possibility of understanding the relation of our past to ourselves.
Tragic Choices and the Law
Authors: Zaibert Leo
Published: August 2023

Alon Harel’s Why Law Matters is a laudable attempt to sharpen our understanding of how the law deals with complicated moral phenomena, and of why and how these phenomena should matter to the law. I wholeheartedly agree with the non-reductionist spirit of Harel’s project. But I here offer a handful of objections to the letter of some of Harel’s positions, in the hopes that they may contribute to the advancement of the debate surrounding these difficult and important issues.
“An Absurdly Quiet Spot”: The Spatial Justice of WW1 Fraternizations
Authors: Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos Andreas
Published: August 2023

Recent research on WW1 shows that incidents of fraternization across enemy lines took place regularly. However, fraternization remains a taboo in many contexts. The fact that the 2005 film Joyeux Noel by Christian Caron, which explicitly deals with the subject, encountered resistance from the authorities, is an indication of the kind of difficulty associated with the issue. I am drawing my inspiration from the way fraternizations are depicted in the film and in the literature in order to explore the concept of spatial justice. I define spatial justice as the question that emerges when a body desires to occupy the same space at the same time as another body. Defined like this, the question of spatial justice opens up in the dread of No Man’s Land and in particular the exchange of affects, objects and narratives that went on during fraternizations. I trace the movement of spatial justice as one of withdrawal from the asphyxiating atmosphere of the war and the propaganda machine. This withdrawal is not one of unpatriotic stance but of a courageous and difficult detachment from the supposed legality of the war that could only function on the basis of hate and demonization. While fraternizations did not end the war, they allowed for the possibility of spatial justice to emerge, as an opportunity to reorient the space and the bodies within.
Too Much Property
Authors: Reichman Ravit
Published: August 2023

Property’s role in postwar justice has been dominated primarily by litigation, with its emphasis on the restitution of valuable cultural or financial goods. The prominence of such litigation, however, has eclipsed a far more common experience of property, namely inheritance--the grounds of a social rather than a public or legal realm. With the recent Israeli documentary The Flat as its case study, this article proposes to shift the focus on postwar property to ownership’s other life, that of the passing on of trivial things outside the public interest. The sheer volume of these ordinary things opens the door to a different understanding of justice, one invested in the excess and unpredictability of property, yet still unable to shed fully the adversarial tenor that has largely constituted our sense of ownership after the Holocaust.
Order in the Archives: The Victorian Art of Legal History
Authors: Krueger Christine L.
Published: August 2023

English historical jurisprudence evolved in the context of nineteenth-century movements in Western historiography, but it cannot be understood without attention to the pioneers of archival historical research who brought order to the archives in the decades following the Public Records Act of 1838. In remarkable collaboration with legal professionals, historians and literary authors shaped not only the narratives of English legal history, but the very methods and materials of historical legal research. This lesser-known story, illustrated here by Thomas Carlyle and Mary Anne Everett Green, helped make possible not only historical jurisprudence, but our own multidisciplinary art of legal studies.
Means and End(ing)s: Nomos Versus Narrative in Early Rabbinic Exegesis
Authors: Dohrmann Natalie B.
Published: August 2023

Rabbinic literature shares a suggestive array of literary features with later Latin literary sources: commentary, fragmentation and quotation, and a granular attention to language. In this material narrative tends to be lost; classical source texts, such as Vergil, are fetishized, broken apart, and repurposed. In this essay I ask of one corpus--early rabbinic midrash (biblical commentary)--what is the origin and impact of its fragmented and finally incoherent narrative project? At the risk of over-simplifying, I will focus on the rabbis as a case study in the etiology of a more general phenomenon. I will argue that the fragmentation so typical of aggadic midrash is the result of the application of a specifically legal hermeneutic to nonlegal, specifically narrative, sources. As a result, rabbinic midrash beginning in the third century consistently undercuts its own narrative aims. Metaliterary, anthologized, pastiched, commentarial forms become standard in the late antique Roman repertoire, with rabbinic texts we can historicize and contextualize one such transformation, and in so doing center law, legal thinking and forms into literary genealogies.
America, Christianity, and Beyond
Authors: Moyn Samuel
Published: August 2023

This response essay surveys the argument of Anna Su’s new book Exporting Freedom, before going on to wonder how much America innovated in propagating religious freedom under imperial auspices, and to inquire whether Su ultimately believes that propagation amounts to a specifically Christian project, either for better or for worse.
“The Guilt of Fragile Sovereigns”: Tyranny, Intrigue, and Martyrdom in an Unchanging Regime (Virginia, 1829-32)
Authors: Tomlins Christopher
Published: August 2023

This essay canvasses how far meanings of “regime change” can be stretched beyond their current invocation as anodyne neologistic cover for the illegality of a “coup d’état.” Some years ago the anthropologist John Borneman made one attempt to extend the compass of regime change beyond simple realist “topplings” of governments one disfavors to responsibility for legal reconstruction of the target regime because he wished to argue that idealistic interventions against tyrannical rule should always be legitimate. This essay asks whether the term can be stretched in a different direction, to encompass instances of intervention against tyrannical rule beyond the sphere of interstate relations where it is currently lodged. To test the proposition I turn here to a particular event—the Turner Rebellion, a slave rebellion that took place in Virginia in 1831—and to recent work in political theory that dwells on the politics of counter-sovereignty. Here regime change encompasses a rebellion of slaves against a tyrannical slaveholding regime, a failed attempt to deploy a revolutionary politics of counter-sovereignty against the regime’s pretensions to legality. Here tyranny remains the target of regime change. But rather than the solvent of tyrannical rule, law in this case is the instrument of its expression.
Paradoxes of Constitutional Faith: Federalism, Emancipation, and the Original Thirteenth Amendment
Authors: Spaulding Norman W.
Published: August 2023

This essay explores the paradoxical circumstances of emancipation and constitutional reform during the Civil War and Reconstruction in light of Lincoln’s role in sponsoring and endorsing an unamendable constitutional amendment in 1861 to avert the war. That amendment, the original thirteenth amendment, would have protected slavery where it then existed. Historians, the Supreme Court, and constitutional theorists have generally resisted interpreting the original thirteenth amendment in order to avoid the constitutional paradoxes it raises, paradoxes both for those who consider the period a “refounding” and for those who seek to render the dramatic legal, social and political upheavals of the period continuous with the Constitution of 1787. This essay places the proposed amendment at the center of structural constitutional analysis and asks what kind of constitutional republic Lincoln can be said to have “saved” through the war and emancipation, and if the Constitution was not in fact saved with the Union, how one might theorize a refounding grounded in democratic paradox rather than heroism and hagiography.
“Government by Injunction,” Legal Elites, and the Making of the Modern Federal Courts
Authors: Collins Kristin A.
Published: August 2023

The tendency of legal discourse to obscure the processes by which social and political forces shape the law’s development is well known, but the field of federal courts in American constitutional law may provide a particularly clear example of this phenomenon. According to conventional accounts, Congress’s authority to regulate the lower federal courts’ “jurisdiction”—generally understood to include their power to issue injunctions— has been a durable feature of American constitutional law since the founding. By contrast, the story I tell in this essay is one of change. During the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, many jurists considered the federal courts’ power to issue and enforce equitable decrees to be an essential, constitutionally endowed dimension of the judicial function. Charting the demise of that theory over the first four decades of the twentieth century, this essay highlights the roles of social movements and, especially, of legal elites in forging and canonizing a new understanding of judicial power, and in normalizing debate over “who decides” as a routine dimension of ideologically divisive socio-legal disagreements in American political life.
Making Modern Criminal Law Theory: Reflections on Farmer
Authors: Chiao Vincent
Published: August 2023

This brief review essay is devoted to a discussion of Lindsay Farmer’s recent book, Making the Modern Criminal Law. I focus on the following themes: a formal and material interpretation of criminal law in facilitating “civil order”; the relation between criminal law’s history and its justification; and the idea that the criminal law forms a sufficiently cohesive and distinctive body of law that it makes sense to ascribe moral principles to it that we would not be prepared to ascribe to public institutions, and public law, more generally.
Making Abuse Offenses in the Modern Criminal Law
Authors: Schneebaum Galia
Published: August 2023

The following essay discusses abuse offenses as a means to explore and criticize Lindsay Farmer’s Making the Modern Criminal Law. Specifically, it considers the civil order framework and shows how the book’s contextual and institutional approach enables developing fresh perspectives on abuse offenses that are largely absent from contemporary accounts. The essay concludes by addressing the broader concept of a descriptive theory of criminal law, and highlights the value of the descriptive account of criminalization that is offered in the book.
Disruptive Agents and Our Onlife World: Should We Be Concerned?
Authors: Brownsword Roger
Published: August 2023

Responding to Mireille Hildebrandt’s recent book, Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law (2015), this essay considers whether we should be concerned about the development of “smart” agent-like machines—that is, machines having the capacity to interact with, to profile, to pre-empt, to classify, and to risk-assess human agents. Moreover, should we be concerned that these machines, in conjunction with other technologies, might replace legal rules and challenge the values of the Rule of Law? Arguing that we should be so concerned, the essential terms and conditions of any defensible social license for these machines are sketched and a new agenda for jurisprudence is introduced.
The Devil Is in the Defaults
Authors: Kerr Ian
Published: August 2023

This review essay explores the notion of “shifting defaults” as discussed by Mireille Hildebrandt in her book Smart Technologies and the End(s) of Law. Although readers might mistakenly see defaults as a fleeting topic within Hildebrandt’s text, this review essay demonstrates their central significance, identifying and elaborating on fundamental characteristics of four categories of shifting defaults: (i) natural defaults; (ii) technological defaults; (iii) legal defaults; and (iv) normative defaults. The essay concludes by reframing Hildebrandt’s central question, considering whether the Rule of Law is itself merely our current legal default, and whether it could be legitimately displaced by smart technologies.
Law and Macroeconomics as Aggregate Demand Externalities: An Application to Optimal Tort Law
Authors: Listokin Yair
Published: August 2023

This paper presents one method for introducing macroeconomic concerns into the standard microeconomic models of law, using the canonical economic model of tort law as an example. When an economy suffers from inadequate aggregate demand, expendi-tures on precautions to avoid injuries have aggregate demand externalities. In addition to reducing damages from injury, expenditures on precautions raise incomes for the sellers of precautions (e.g., car brake mechanics). With higher incomes, the sellers, in turn, con-sume and invest more. This multiplier effect of the original expenditure on total spending and output can be modelled as an aggregate demand externality and incorporated into the standard economic models of law. When I introduce aggregate demand externalities into the seminal economic model of tort law, we come to very different conclusions than is standard. Specifically, the strict liability rule and the Hand Rule for negligence both pro-duce inefficient outcomes with respect to expenditures on precaution and activity levels. Instead, negligence rules with more stringent standards of care than the Hand Rule be-come more efficient. If standards of care get too high, however, then an enhanced negligence rule no longer yields a better outcome than strict liability or the Hand Rule. Optimal tort law therefore looks very different when we introduce aggregate demand ex-ternalities. If efficient tort law changes when we introduce macroeconomic effects, then we can presume that our law and microeconomic conclusions regarding other areas of law will change as well.
Defining the Economic Pie, Not Dividing or Maximizing It
Authors: McCluskey Martha T.
Published: August 2023

This essay challenges the question that drives much of legal analysis: whether to maximize or divide the “economic pie.” Regardless of the answer, this question skews legal analysis and rests on dubious economics. This framing binary inherently presents economic maximizing as the presumptive norm, represented as superior to socioeconomic distribution in both spatial and temporal dimensions. By definition, economic “maximizing” stands larger in scope and first in order. The essay first critiques the idea that legal analysis can aim to make the economy bigger without engaging contested questions of value and politics, showing how this misleading separation of quantity from quality closes off rigorous thinking about legal institutions and processes vital to meaningful economic prosperity. Second, the essay challenges the binary’s sequential presentation of social justice as “redistribution” occurring after an imagined step of economic maximizing. That sequence sets up a narrative that distorts and narrows our vision of both the causes and solutions to problems of inequality and other social and environmental qualities. Instead, law and economic analysis should focus on how law should define the “economic pie,” recognizing that moral and political questions of justice are fundamentally inseparable from questions of economic gain.
Emotion Experiments in Legal Thought
Authors: Mar Maksymilian Del
Published: August 2023

This essay argues that the simulation of emotion, which also results in multiple shifts of moral perspective, can generate insight into matters of value, and thereby also assist in making potential justificatory resources in legal reasoning. The essay examines two practices that both, though in different ways, enable the simulation of emotion and the multiple shifting of moral perspective: first, the practice of inventing and exchanging colores in the ancient Roman pedagogical practice of declamations; and second, the practice of using hypothetical narratives in common law reasoning. In the case of the declamations, emotion is simulated, and moral perspective is shifted, by an intensively interactive process of inventing, critiquing and improving upon possible and alternative motivations and intentions of characters in the declamatory themata. Similarly, in common law reasoning, emotion is simulated, and moral perspective shifted, by the construction of hypothetical narratives, offering alternative or counter-hypothetical narratives, amplifying existing ones, and distinguishing hypothetical narratives from the facts of the instant case. Ultimately, the essay argues that one of the most effective ways of reasoning about matters of value is through the affectively-laden multiple shifting of moral perspective.
Roman Law and Equity in John Milton’s Divorce Tracts
Authors: Chapman Alison A.
Published: August 2023

Critics have often observed that Roman law plays an outsized role in Milton two major divorce tracts, Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and Tetrachordon. This essay argues that Milton turns so repeatedly to Roman law because it offers a model of equitable interpretation, one that allows statutes to be read flexibly in light of their perceived intent. While canon law too prided itself on being an equitable system, the canonists’ approach to equity was crucially different from that of Roman jurists. For centuries, theologians had read the Bible’s passages on divorce through the lens of canonical equity, and the upshot was that divorce had been effectively banned. But Milton wants his readers to view these same Biblical passages as Roman jurists would and thus to bring a different understanding of equity to bear. Read in this way, he argues, the Bible allows divorce to all. Milton’s ultimate goal is to put divorce outside the cognizance of all forms of temporal law. Ironically, his argument relies upon the approach to statutory interpretation that he finds in Roman law and applies to the Christian Bible.
Geometry & Mechanism: Material Metaphors and the Force of Uncertainty in Legal Thought
Authors: Huerta Monica
Published: August 2023

This essay takes up the metaphors through which realists and Critical Legal Studies scholars created an idea of legal formalism. These insistently material metaphors emphasized that the errors of so-called formalist jurisprudence arose from two things: first, the material location of law; and second, the purpose of law in relation to the material world. The essay shows how metaphor in particular was rhetorically suited to this kind of dual work. The material metaphors helped to mark and differentiate realists’ intellectual interventions. These metaphors were also part of the aim to reorient law toward the material world by resignifying its materiality. Last, this essay shows that this reorientation toward the material was forged through making material forces precisely out of the immaterial of contingency and uncertainty.
The Book Has Two Faces: Trevor Ross’s Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Authors: Kendrick Leslie
Published: August 2023

Trevor Ross’s Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press in Eighteenth-Century Britain traces the evolution of laws regulating public discourse after the decline of English print licensing. Ross argues that the development of the public sphere in eighteenth-century Britain left literature in a strange, contradictory position: simultaneously central to civic society and wholly apart from it. This claim has its contemporary counterparts. It echoes current debates about what literature is “for” among critics and philosophers. It also echoes debates about literature within contemporary free speech law, where Robert Bork and others have argued that literature should not receive protection because it is not sufficiently political, while literature’s defenders have argued for its protection with varying levels of plausibility. Literature’s relationship to public discourse continues to bedevil us, and Ross offers a stimulating account of how this might have come to be.
Literature in Public: or, All About Us Is Noise
Authors: Visconsi Elliott
Published: August 2023

This article elaborates upon the contribution Trevor Ross’s Writing in Public makes to a new understanding of the history of free expression, the public function of literature within the eighteenth century. Those years witness a transition to modernity in which the boundaries of permissible speech and the accepted purpose of writing both are realigned to suit a vision of rational public deliberation and freedom of mind. A consequence of that new intellectual paradigm is the alienation of literature from its traditional role as an instrument of public persuasion; instead literature assumes a high-prestige role as a repository of national heritage, a domain for the cultivation of liberal self-actualization, a laboratory for the encounter with private life and the riskless exploration of norms and customs, and an illustrative counterweight to the coercive potential of propaganda.
Still Comfortable After All These Years: A Response
Authors: Ross Trevor
Published: August 2023

In Writing in Public: Literature and the Liberty of the Press (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), I describe how the public function of literature changed as a result of developing press freedoms during the period from 1760 to 1810. I examine contests over the laws of copyright, defamation, privacy, and seditious libel to show what happened to literary writing once certain forms of discourse came to be perceived as public and entitled to freedom from state or private control. This issue of Critical Analysis of Law offers reviews of my book by Brian Cowan, Leslie Kendrick, Karen Petroski, and Elliott Visconsi. In this brief article, I address some of the reservations these reviewers express about my argument in the book, and in particular about its approach and tone. I note my own similar concerns, and I elaborate on what I see as some of the repercussions for my argument of having to limit its scope. I also restate my findings more forcefully to make clear that the position I take on the history I relate is not quite any of the several divergent positions that the reviewers attribute to me. My aim in the book, I emphasize, is to describe the consequences of a kind of cultural trade-off between literature and the law, among other discourses, that occurred in the transition to democracy, but I refrain from taking a position on these consequences.
Incomplete Commodification: Book Review of Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright
Authors: Bracha Oren
Published: August 2023

This review essay offers an interpretation of the history of proprietary rights in news as a process of incomplete commodification. Like other species of information, news increasingly came to be treated as a commodity whose exchange value is extracted in markets through the support of property rights. This process of commodification, however, was incomplete because it was hampered and resisted due to three distinctive features of news: its information-intensive character, its close entanglement with public-sphere speech, and its precarious relationship with the modern construct of authorship. The essay identifies three eras in which these distinctive features played out differently with respect to proprietary rights in news: the period of proto-copyright privileges; early, thin copyright; and modern, increasingly commodified copyright. It concludes by suggesting a few lessons from this history relevant for contemporary renewed pressures to further commodify news through proprietary rights.
News as “Content”: Instances and Implications
Authors: Gitelman Lisa
Published: August 2023

Will Slauter’s recent Who Owns the News? traces questions of what news is via questions of what copyright is for. Focusing on the Anglo-American tradition from before 1710 and into the twentieth century, Slauter explores the interplay of publishing and law that helped to produce facts as distinct from copyrightable expressions. By implication this is a history of journalistic objectivity as an orienting ideal. By extension it aims at ways of knowing that crucially remain the epistemic conditions of modern life.
Who Owns (What We Characterize as) the News?
Authors: Heymann Laura A.
Published: August 2023

Will Slauter’s Who Owns the News? (2019) is subtitled A History of Copyright, but it could just as easily have been subtitled A History of Journalism. Slauter’s thoughtful and detailed story of the battle among newspaper publishers to secure legal and other protection for their work product is inseparable from questions about what it means for something to be “news” in the first place—and, indeed, whether “journalism” is something different from “news.” Developments subsequent to Slauter’s history—the emergence of the journalist as a literary figure, the heightened need to see news publishing as an economic (and profitable) enterprise, and the expectations of the audience as to what requires payment and what should be freely available and shareable—both reinforce and extend his narrative.
Copyrighting Fact: Truth, Timeliness, and Types of Texts in the Making of New(s) Media
Authors: Slonimsky Nora
Published: August 2023

To understand the history of the relationship between copyright and news, one must also unravel consistent and shifting perceptions about the social and economic value of fact. Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright approaches this relationship with a multi-century, transnational, multimedia approach that considers the ways in which copying, with or without permission, influenced content. This essay explores how Will Slauter’s work in the overlapping histories of copyright and journalism makes both a historiographical and historical intervention in ensuring reliable, truthful information is shared with the public. It does so first by examining the relevance of this foundational study on copyright in news to a wide range of disciplines, including the digital humanities, and second, how the language of authoritative claims over fact were buttressed, or limited, by the language of claims over literary property.