bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing
Authors: Downham Moore Alison M.
Published: October 2022

Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by Frenchmen medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of doctors’ professional identities in postrevolutionary biomedicine. Older women were identified as an important patient cohort for the expanding medicalisation of French society and were advised to entrust themselves to the hygienic care of doctors in managing the whole era of life from around and after the final cessation of menses. However, menopause owed much of its conceptual weft to earlier themes of women as the sicker sex, of vitalist crisis, of the vapours, and of astrological climacteric years. This book is the first comprehensive study of the origins of the medical concept of menopause, richly contextualising its role in nineteenth-century French medicine and revealing the complex threads of meaning that informed its invention. It tells a complex story of how women’s ageing featured in the demographic revolution in modern science, in the denigration of folk medicine, in the unique French field of hygiène, and in the fixation on women in the emergence of modern psychiatry. It also reveals the nineteenth-century French origins of the still-current medical and alternative-health approaches to women’s ageing as something to be managed through gynaecological surgery, hormonal replacement, and lifestyle intervention.
Crises, Critical Ages, and the ‘Invention’ of la Ménopause, c.1770–1812
Authors: Downham Moore Alison M.
Published: October 2022

In the period of crisis, chaos, competition, and the collapse of tradition in French medicine following the 1789 revolution, the first specialist French medical theses were written on women’s final cessation of menses, depicting it as a ‘critical time’ in the female life cycle. Central to such ideas was the vitalist view of women’s nature espoused especially in the Montpellier medical faculty, which characterised menstrual changes as ‘critical times’, emphasising Hippocratic concepts of crisis as a form of positive adaptation of the organism to a new mode of vital organisation. Post-revolutionary Paris medical interpretations of such ideas influenced by the work of Bordeu, Vigarous, Cabanis, and Pinel instead fixated on the neologism la ménopause for the performance of a new kind of anti-pathological insistence that marked trainee doctors as scientific moderns. Inter-institutional rivalries helped to drive the proliferation of menopause medical theses, as indicated by the wave of new Montpellier dissertations on women’s ‘critical age’ over the four decades following Charles-Paul-Louis de Gardanne’s thesis and other Paris works after 1812. Paris scholars responded in turn with a veritable flood of at least forty new books and theses focused on menopause throughout the period between 1813 and 1865, slightly less than one every year. Crucial in the spread of vitalist ideas about women’s ageing was the influence of the Aquitaine-born and Montpellier-trained Parisian medical writer and journalist Pierre Roussel (1742-1802), who had so sharply differentiated the biology and psychology of the sexes. Section Headings: • The Meaning of Crisis in Montpellier Vitalism • The First Specialist Medical Works on Women’s Critical Age
Menstruation, Vapours, Hypochondria, and Hysteria
Authors: Downham Moore Alison M.
Published: October 2022

The final cessation of menses became medicalised in part through its marginal association with three categories of nervous pathologies which flourished in medical writing from the end of the seventeenth century, enduring into the nineteenth century: the vapours, hysteria, and hypochondria. These pathologies were not particularly thought to affect older women. Nonetheless, because nervous diseases were increasingly discussed in relation to young women’s menstruation, plethora, pre-menstrual times, pregnancy, and suppressed menses, post-menstruating women were sometimes also included in the grouping of states of uterine change which made women more susceptible to nervous and mental illness. Nervous diseases, it was thought, were a product of luxury and civilisation—urban life, stale air, sedentary lifeways, overeating, exotic foods and beverages, licentiousness, and corporeal laziness. Menopause medicine absorbed ideas about the confluence of uterine change with the effects of modern affluent lifeways previously elaborated in earlier works describing hysteria, hypochondria, and the vapours. A medical view emerged of urban elite women in modern France as generally more prone to nervous diseases during times of uterine change, including around the final cessation of menses, via the ‘sympathies’ of the uterus with the nervous system and the brain.Section Headings: • Uterine and Ovarian Reductionism • Vapours, Hysteria, and the Assemblage of Menopause • The Nineteenth-Century Assimilation of Vapours and Hysteria to Emerging Discourses of Menopause • The Emergence of Menopausal Nervous Pathology • Menopausal Hypochondria and Hysteria • The Longevity of Menopausal Nervous Pathologies
Instrumentalising the Ancient Past and Folk Traditions
Authors: Downham Moore Alison M.
Published: October 2022

French doctors in the nineteenth century were exquisitely conscious of themselves as modern subjects in the history of medicine and told a variety of historical stories about their place in the development of science. Their accounts of folk medicine, and of both continuity and rupture with the ‘ancients’ and with early modern medicine, misattributed ideas to these concurrent and earlier traditions in order variously to lean upon them, or to posture against them. The first half of this chapter considers doctors’ use of the ancient and early modern medical past in formulating ideas about menopause. The second part focuses on doctors’ claims about folk healers, empirics, charlatans, midwives, and commères giving purgative remedies to women as a treatment for menopause. In developing a symptomatology of menopause, French doctors claimed to be resisting traditional popular assumptions, while in fact introducing a novel reductionist account of women’s entire physiology as dominated by the uterus, which they characterised as traditionally Hippocratic. Section Headings: • Menopause and the Invention of Hippocratic Tradition • Inventing Ancient Traditions of Menopause Pathology • Androgynous Ageing • Charlatans, Empirics, Midwives, and Commères in the Medical Reclamation of Women’s Health • Purgatives, Empirics, and Menopause
Menopause, Erotomania, and Degeneration in French Psychiatry
Authors: Downham Moore Alison M.
Published: October 2022

The role of French psychiatric ideas between 1850 and 1912 in pathologising menopause was significant in developing the cultural stigma associated with this stage of women’s lives, and for medical ideas about the need to treat menopause in general. Alienists and psychiatrists were entranced by the notion of women’s generative organs exerting a negative ‘sympathetic’ influence on their nervous systems and minds, and with the idea that moments of physiological change (such as puberty, pregnancy, lactation, menstruation, and menopause) produced madness, effectively accounting for most of women’s lives between the end of childhood and old age. They also characterised many forms of older women’s sexuality as necessarily perverse and degenerate, focused on the concept of menopausal ‘erotomania’. From the 1870s until around 1920, French psychiatric and neurological writers discussing menopause began increasingly to use the term involution to describe the tissue changes in the uterus and ovaries following the cessation of menses. Like the words dégénération or dégénérescence, involution suggested a reversal of progress, and was used in French works to refer to the ageing process in which the sex-specific traits of women after puberty reverted to the pre-pubescent state, where menstruation did not occur and conception was not possible. Section Headings: • Sexual Ageing as Degeneration • The Absorption of Women’s Ageing into French Degenerationist Psychiatry • Menopausal Erotomania and Degeneration
Women Writers’ Fictional, Autobiographical, and Epistolary Responses to Medical Discourses About Women’s Ageing, 1900–1930
Authors: Downham Moore Alison M.
Published: October 2022

This chapter considers how other kinds of women writers, who were not medical researchers, doctors, or midwives, responded to medical discourses about their ageing during the period of particular French fascination with women’s reproductive ageing in the late nineteenth century and up to 1930. For the generation of educated women born in the second half of the nineteenth century, reaching midlife between 1880 and 1930, the medical concepts of their ‘critical age’ around the ages of 45–50 years—when their ageing suddenly began but which they should also not worry about, because that too would make them sick—was now widely disseminated in French society. The chapter compares four women writers who were all born and raised in the nineteenth century and who wrote about ageing in fictional, epistolary, or autobiographical ways through the peak period of French medical discourses of the critical age, the âge de retour and menopause. Section Headings: • Yvette Guilbert, Les Demi-vieilles, 1902 •Comtesse de Tramar (Marie-Fanny de Lamarque de Lagarrigue), L’Amour obligatoire, 1900 • Marthe Bertheaume (Anne Darcanne-Mouroux), L’Âge mystique, 1928 • Colette, La Naissance du jour, 1928
The ‘Force of Law’ under Construction—Sensibility, Authority, Performativity
Authors: Van Den Meerssche Dimitri
Published: October 2022

While the introductory chapter set out the central objectives and methodological approach of the book, Part I presents the first stage in the empirical account of how the material practice and professional orientation of international law(yers) in the World Bank have evolved in the past three and a half decades. This part focuses on the tenure of General Counsel Ibrahim Shihata (1984–2000)—a figure who had a tremendous impact on the power and practice of law in the World Bank and whose shadow still looms large in its legal vice presidency. Chapter 2 focuses on Shihata’s arrival in the World Bank and the various strategies through which he sought to enhance and embody the authority of the legal department. The institutional attitude that Shihata cultivated epitomizes a professional ideal of liberal legalism that was institutionally enforced through specific bodily habits, strategies of enrolment, transactional procedures and forms of operational leverage. In bringing an unexplored empirical archive (consisting of previously undisclosed meeting transcripts, oral archives, interviews with former legal advisors and Shihata’s academic writings) in relation with the language of performativity theory, the chapter provides an account of the fragile construction and assemblage of (a particular ideal of) legal authority inside the organization. This reveals the professional ideology and socio-technical repertoire of a salient strand of liberal legalism which Shihata enacted and which reflected a specific esprit de corps. This chapter thereby sheds light on the cultural technique of international law(yering) in this era as well as the significant authority it entailed.
Literary Rebels
Authors: Jaillant Lise
Published: October 2022

The first transatlantic history of creative writing programmes in universities, from the 1930s onwards. How many times have you heard that creative writing programmes are factories that produce the same kind of writers, isolated from real life? Only by escaping academia can writers be completely free. Universities are profoundly conservative places, designed to favour a certain way of writing—preferably informed by literary theory. Those who reject the creative/critical discourse of academia are the true rebels, condemned to live (or survive) in a tough literary marketplace. Conformity is on the side of academia, the story goes, and rebellion is on the other side. This book argues against the notion that creative writing programmes are driven by conformity. Instead, it shows that these programmes in the United States and Britain were founded and developed by literary outsiders, who left an enduring mark on their discipline. To this day, creative writing occupies a marginal position in Anglo-American universities. The multiplication of new programmes, accompanied by rising student enrolments, has done nothing to change that positioning. As a discipline, creative writing thrives on opposition to the mainstream university, while benefiting from what the university has to offer. Even when creative writing is located within literature departments, relationships with scholars remain uneasy. Creative writers and scholars are not, and have never been, natural bedfellows.
‘I’m afraid I’ve got involved with a nut’
Authors: Jaillant Lise
Published: October 2022

Turning from the Midwest to the South, Chapter 2 focuses on the story of James Culpepper, a young would-be writer who tried to convince William Faulkner to help him succeed in the literary world. While young Southern writers such as Flannery O’Connor launched their careers through the newly created creative writing programmes, Culpepper relied on what can be called the ‘informal mentorship model’. In this model, new writers established informal links with successful authors to gain access to publication. Drawing on previously unknown documents in the Random House records at Columbia University, the chapter highlights a key moment in the history of the American literary field: the moment when the informal mentorship model was being challenged by the model of university education and affiliation. The new model was designed to help outsiders like Culpepper get their foot on the literary ladder, without having to get sponsorship from a famous writer or move to New York City.
Fame, Fortune, and Freedom
Authors: Jaillant Lise
Published: October 2022

The re-discovery of the individual creative writer in the 1960s benefited institutions outside the traditional academic system—including private correspondence schools. Chapter 5 takes the example of the Famous Writers School (FWS), which promised fame, fortune, and freedom to anyone who had the aptitude to become a writer. This marketing pitch addressed the aspirations of many Americans, who yearned for an autonomous life, liberated from daily commutes and household chores. The immense success of the FWS shows the consolidation and appeal of the discourse on freedom as a central characteristic of the writing life outside academia (what can be called the model of radical individualism).
Myth Maker
Authors: Jaillant Lise
Published: October 2022

Chapter 6 addresses the emergence of creative writing programmes in Britain, focusing on Malcolm Bradbury at the University of East Anglia. Throughout his career as writer-scholar, Bradbury cultivated a positioning on the margins of the establishment. Being based in Norwich, at a university deeply influenced by the American academic model, he was able to replicate what Paul Engle had done at Iowa: to create a new literary powerhouse outside traditional centres. This chapter adapts Bourdieu’s model of the ‘loser wins’ to show that creative writing in Britain was, from the start, positioned as an outsider’s discipline—built as a reaction against existing models of literary success. The enduring influence of Bradbury on the discipline is illustrated through the myth of 1970, which is often presented as the founding year in the history of university creative writing in Britain.
Kazuo Ishiguro
Authors: Jaillant Lise
Published: October 2022

Creative writing programmes have continued to position themselves on the margins of the literary field—despite obvious signs that they are now part of the ‘system’. In his 2017 Nobel Prize lecture in Stockholm, Kazuo Ishiguro talked about his experience studying creative writing at the University of East Anglia. His tutors Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter helped him develop his writing style and offered practical help to launch his literary career. Chapter 8 argues that Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize award was a moment of triumph for the Anglo-American model of university creative writing, and a symbolic victory over the European model of literary production, long endorsed by the Nobel Prize Committee. But this was a double-edged victory. By consecrating a bestselling writer, the Swedish Academy also gave ammunition to the criticisms of creative writing programmes as factories producing crowd-pleasing products for the mass market.
The Future of Creative Writing Programmes in Continental Europe
Authors: Jaillant Lise
Published: October 2022

In an ultra-competitive literary world, the global rise of creative writing courses (within and outside academia) has been largely driven by a quest forself-fulfilment and access to publishing networks. More needs to be done to understand the rapid development of these programmes around the world. There is ample scope for a spatial expansion of the field, towards Europe and Asia in particular. This book touches on the expansion of creative writing in Continental Europe in the Epilogue. It then concludes with an overview of the three models of writing careers that have shaped the literary landscape since the early twentieth century, and with an afterword by Mark McGurl.
Conclusion
Authors: Jaillant Lise
Published: October 2022

In an ultra-competitive literary world, the global rise of creative writing courses (within and outside academia) has been largely driven by a quest for self-fulfilment and access to publishing networks. More needs to be done to understand the rapid development of these programmes around the world. There is ample scope for a spatial expansion of the field, towards Europe and Asia in particular. This book touches on the expansion of creative writing in Continental Europe in the Epilogue. It then concludes with an overview of the three models of writing careers that have shaped the literary landscape since the early twentieth century, and with an afterword by Mark McGurl.
Promoting and Democratizing Literature
Authors: Bjerke Paul , Fonn Birgitte Kjos , Halvorsen Lars Julius
Published: October 2022

Norway’s literary policy as a central part of the cultural policy was etablished in the 1960s with the aim to preserve and protect Norwegian language and culture, improve the writers’ economy and thus also secure an aftergrowth of new voices, a stable production infrastructure and—according to library studies—public accessibility to Norwegian literature. The system is among other things based on a purchasing scheme for new Norwegian quality books for public libraries, which provides equal service throughout the country. A VAT-exemption for books contributes to stability and predictability. A library compensation fund compensates authors for income they lose from sales when their books are available in libraries, and a copy compensation fund compensates writers collectively for the use of copyrighted material. The system was originally established for fiction writers. Over the years it has—through extensive political processes—been expanded with a limited number of titles for other genres, most notably non-fiction. All evaluations conclude that it has been highly successful. The main features of the policy have been remarkably stable despite varying governments, due to a largely political consensus on objectives like democratization, free speech and diversity. This does not mean that the system has not been contested. Scholars from the fields of sociology of literature and cultural economics have shown that internationalization and liberalization have gone hand in hand with an enhanced pro-competition stance and that digital distribution contributes to putting the policy under pressure. In later years, the public-management logic has also strengthened its position at the expense of the independence of the field. There is however still robust demand for Norwegian fiction and non-fiction written by award-winning authors as well as new and interesting voices.
Negotiating Dilemmas of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund
Authors: Øvald Camilla Bakken , Tranøy Bent Sofus
Published: October 2022

The Norwegian state’s ability to combine investing abroad, with relatively moderate and rule-based fiscal spending, compares favourably with most other cases where governance structures have been exposed to large resource-driven income streams. This chapter homes in on two critical junctures in the development of the Norwegian sSovereign Wealth Fund and shows how dilemmas found stable solutions through two conceptual innovations. Established in 1990, the fund’s institutional framework evolved, with the development of a fiscal rule in 2001 and ethical guidelines in 2004 as key decision points. The fiscal rule connecting expected real return and government spending is critical for Norway’s economic policy and the ability to balance spending versus the need to save and protect the non-petroleum sector. Ethical guidelines similarly relieved the Norwegian political system of a potentially debilitating tension between the aim of maximizing financial returns and ethical considerations. However, for 30 years it has been taken for granted that the interest of future generations equals wealth which in turn equals financial savings abroad. The climate agenda and the emerging consensus on the need for a green transition may challenge the terms upon which the two great dilemmas described in this chapter has been resolved until now.
The Swedish Child Vaccination Programme
Authors: Blomqvist Paula
Published: October 2022

The Swedish child vaccination programme (CVP) has a long history and can be seen as a successful policy in several ways. First, it has had programmic success in that it has led to all serious infectious diseases it covers having been eliminated or reduced so that they no longer pose a public health threat in Sweden. This success is explained by the endurance of the programme and the high level of vaccine uptake it managed to create early on after its establishment in the 1950s. The programme also enjoys processual and political success in that the scientific evidence and considerations on which it is based are presented openly to the public, while the actors involved in its creation and maintenance typically express pride in this. The universal CVP offers vaccines free of charge to all children residing in the country against altogether 11 communal diseases. During the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccination became a hot topic in the public debate and anti-vaccination sentiments grew. Despite this, the willingness to take Covid-19 vaccines turned out to be very high in Sweden, an outcome that is believed to have been facilitated by the documented high level of trust in the CVP.
Civil Protection Policies in Iceland
Authors: Bernharðsdóttir Ásthildur Elva , Hrafnsdóttir Steinunn
Published: October 2022

In this chapter we analyse the level of success of the co-production between civil protection authorities and voluntary organizations in the development and operation of Iceland´s emergency system. The voluntary organizations in focus are the Icelandic Search and Rescue Team (ICE-SAR) and the Icelandic Red Cross (IRC). In our analysis we use the PPPE assessment framework and McConnell´s (2010) spectrum approach to assess the level of success of the collaboration between these parties. Our key argument is that this collaboration between authorities and associated policymaking can be classified as a full to resilient success.
Quality in Finnish Comprehensive Schools
Authors: Kauko Jaakko , Pitkänen Hannele , Varjo Janne
Published: October 2022

Evaluation of Finnish comprehensive schools is based on an enhancement-led evaluation model. The model is rooted in historical features of the education and governance systems and a gradual articulation since the 1990s. It builds on the idea that evaluation must benefit, not control, the system being evaluated. The model’s entrenchment has made it possible to oppose the global push for test-based accountability. Finnish education policy supports sample-based testing instead of high-stake standardized testing for whole age cohorts; it is also impossible to form ranking lists that make schools compete through their performance. The chapter concludes that the original programme has successfully endured for decades and has faced little opposition. In addition, the legitimation of a trust-based model is high and can bring political kudos to all the actors involved. Processual shortcomings lacking transparency and discussion make the success only partial. An unresolved contributing feature is the relationship between local and national evaluations. These principles and the process of evaluation have become better articulated through the establishment of the Finnish Education Evaluation Centre, and centralization also brings risks of more radical changes.
Housing First
Authors: Juhila Kirsi , Raitakari Suvi , Ranta Johanna
Published: October 2022

The chapter focuses on the public policy to reduce long-term homelessness in Finland, and especially on the success story of this policy starting from 2007 onwards. The year 2007 has been described as a turning point in the policy, as since then, combatting long-term homelessness in Finland had been based mainly on the idea of Housing First. The chapter presents the outset and narrative of this success story and addresses possible signs of non-success of the Finnish Housing First model. It first describes the turn of the Finnish homelessness policy towards Housing First and how it has been narrated as an accomplishment of certain key actors and constructed as a unique and internationally appreciated model. The chapter then explicates the contents and achievements of the four governmental programmes on reducing long-term homelessness (2008–2022). Finally, the level of success of the Finnish Housing First model is evaluated; depending on the viewpoint it can be described as a full success, a resilient success, or as a conflicted success (see McConnell 2010).
The historian’s craft (1)
Authors: Gheeraert-Graffeuille Claire
Published: October 2022

This chapter compares Lucy Hutchinson’s earlier relation of her husband’s role during the Civil War between 1642 and 1645—‘the Notebook’ now kept at the British Library—with the corresponding account in the Memoirs. In the Notebook, Lucy Hutchinson was offering a defence of her husband as a governor of the town and castle of Nottingham; she had not conceived the full project of the Memoirs as a monument to his memory yet. But this does not mean she lacked historiographical and literary ambition. This chapter first charts how, in both narratives, Lucy Hutchinson exploits romance tropes so as to give shape and meaning to the confused realities of the Civil War. Second, it shows how she unremittingly fathoms the treacherous motives of the Colonel’s alleged friends and adversaries during the same period.
Conclusion
Authors: Gheeraert-Graffeuille Claire
Published: October 2022

The conclusion highlights the superimposition of two views of history in the Memoirs. They first offer a disenchanted, tragic vision of the English Revolution, associated with the defeat of the Good Old Cause and the death of Colonel Hutchinson. But taken as a whole, the Memoirs propose a way out of this tragic perplexity at the time of Puritan defeat. Through the Colonel’s martyrdom, they convey the promise of a godly republic and better times to come for the saints. From this perspective, Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs may be construed as a counter-history of the English Revolution capable of challenging official historiography in the Restoration age.
Disciplining Meter
Authors: Eldridge Hannah Vandegrift
Published: October 2022

This chapter outlines the stakes of nineteenth-century metrical theory and practice by situating metrical thinking within the context of nineteenth-century German culture, the years after Klopstock’s death and leading up to Nietzsche’s career. It demonstrates that for the nineteenth century, questions of meter overlap with and even determine questions of disciplinary identity and cultural difference. The chapter tracks the migration of metrical theory through classical philology’s disciplinary crisis in the years between 1801 and 1870 as well as into new disciplines such as Germanic and historical linguistics, musicology, and music theory. It reveals that obscure figures such as Gottfried Herrmann, Carl Fuchs, and Rudolf Westphal as well as better known ones such as Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Eduard Hanslick were crucial parts of the nextwork of Nietzsche’s interlocutors.
Achieving Consistency in Sentencing
Authors: Harris Lyndon
Published: October 2022

Consistency in sentencing is widely considered to be an essential component of a fair sentencing system; but what is consistency? This work argues that it incorporates both procedural and substantive elements, focusing upon the proper application of principle. In doing so, the notion of comparing ‘like’ cases is rejected as simplistic, impractical, and unprincipled. It is argued that a more principled approach reconciles the tension between consistency and individualized justice which has been argued to exist. In the face of clear and consistent empirical evidence—from multiple jurisdictions—of inconsistency in the face of an absence of structure, it is vital that discretion at sentencing is structured in a way which encourages sentences to be imposed in accordance with the principles underpinning the scheme while maintaining the ability to individualize sentences. It seeks to analyse various methods of structuring discretion and in doing so, uses England and Wales as a ‘case study’. England and Wales has a developed system of appellate guidance at sentencing in addition to a narrative guidelines system which is now two decades old. As such, there is much to analyse and many lessons to be learned, for England and Wales and other jurisdictions. The latter part of this work therefore examines the tripartite relationship between the primary givers of guidance: Parliament, the Court of Appeal (Criminal Division), and the Sentencing Council, and draws conclusions (good and bad) as to way in which consistency can be achieved.
Are individualized justice and consistency incompatible?
Authors: Harris Lyndon
Published: October 2022

This chapter explores the perceived tension between the concept of consistency and individualized justice. There is literature which suggests that the two concepts are ‘in perennial conflict’. Chapter 4 argues that this view is based on a misunderstanding of the concept of individualized justice. Rather, it is argued that viewing the concept as loose and tending towards a rehabilitative disposal in a particular case is incorrect; on the contrary, a conception of individualized justice which focuses on the proper application of the principles underpinning the particular sentencing scheme in question to the unique aspects of the case at hand promotes principled sentencing which, in accordance with the definition offered in Chapter 2 promotes consistency. With such an approach, the apparent tension between the two concepts evaporates.
Mistake and Misrepresentation in Hong Kong Contract Law
Authors: Lee Rebecca
Published: October 2022

This chapter examines the doctrines of mistake and misrepresentation in Hong Kong contract law. It shows that whilst the relevant laws are largely Anglo-centric, Hong Kong courts have become more receptive to developments in other common law jurisdictions. In commercial cases, where commercial certainty and protection of the freedom of contract are paramount, the Hong Kong courts have arguably gone even further than their English counterparts in entrenching a restrictive doctrine of mistake and misrepresentation in practice. Further, the chapter also shows that the scope and remedial consequences of the two doctrines are very different, reflecting the different policy considerations underlying the formation and vitiation of contract.
Defects of Consent: Fraud and Mistake in Indonesian Contract Law
Authors: WICAKSONO Muhammad Rifky
Published: October 2022

This chapter examines defects of consent due to fraudulent actions (fraud) and erroneous beliefs (mistake), with their legal effects and the remedies available under Indonesian law. Indonesia adopts the notion of ‘legal pluralism’. Hence, there are three sources of law which co-exist in the Indonesian legal system: the Dutch colonial Civil Code for Indonesia, the Islamic laws on agreements, and Indonesia’s indigenous adat laws. This chapter focuses on the Indonesian Civil Code and will not deal with the Islamic or adat laws of contract. In doing so, it will delve into the relevant doctrinal developments and landmark decisions which have shaped the contours of the law in this area. This chapter is divided into three substantive parts. The first part deals with defects of consent caused by fraud. It elaborates the elements of fraud under Article 1328 of the Indonesian Civil Code, and the remedies available to the victim. The second part addresses defects of consent arising from mistake. It discusses the two categories of mistake under Article 1322 of the Indonesian Civil Code, namely: error in substantia (mistake as to the object) and error in persona (mistake as to the person). It also describes the available remedies for the parties. Finally, the last part concludes by analysing six hypothetical scenarios with varying fact patterns related to fraud and mistake, in order to illustrate how Indonesia’s contract law can be applied to real life situations.
Threats and Unfair Exploitation in Indonesia
Authors: BELL Gary F
Published: October 2022

This chapter focuses on the law of duress in Indonesian contract law (geweld in Dutch, or paksaan in Indonesian, i.e. force or violence). Duress is caused by a threat that causes fear of harm to a person, or to his property or wealth, whether the threat is to commit an unlawful or, in some circumstances, a lawful act—the threat to file a legitimate criminal complaint in order to get a money or contractual concession from someone is a form of duress—an abuse of right. The threat may come from a contracting party or a third party. Threatening not to perform one’s contractual obligations in order to obtain concessions may be seen by some as an efficient breach of contract compensated by damages, but in a civil law system where a party is entitled to specific performance, such a threat could be considered a form of duress. The chapter finally looks briefly at the Dutch and French concept of abuse of circumstances (misbruik van omstandigheden) which could find its way into Indonesian law, although abusive contracts can also easily be dealt with under other doctrines of Indonesian law.
The Regulation of Mistake, Fraud, and Misrepresentation in Japan
Authors: KIHARA Hiroyuki
Published: October 2022

This chapter examines how Japanese contract law deals with mistake, fraud, and misrepresentation. Firstly, the regulation of mistake and fraud under the Japanese Civil Code—including the new revised Civil Code—will be discussed, to clarify the requirements for each doctrine to be engaged, the relief given, and the third party protection afforded. Secondly, the regulation of misrepresentation under the Consumer Contract Act will be examined. Thirdly, a number of hypothetical questions are analysed to illustrate how Japanese law regulate the issues on mistake, fraud, and misrepresentation. Finally, as a conclusion, the interrelationship between mistake, fraud, and misrepresentation in Japan will be discussed. Overall, there is a tendency in Japan to rely too heavily on the doctrine of mistake, rather than on the provisions regarding fraud and misrepresentation. The law of mistake focuses on the psychological state of the mistaken party; the criteria are inevitably subjective and difficult to judge. In contrast, the law on fraud and misrepresentation presents inherently more objective criteria. Therefore, the role of mistake should be reduced, while extending the role of fraud and misrepresentation.
Mistake, Fraud, and Misrepresentation in Malaysian Contract Law
Authors: San TAY Pek
Published: October 2022

The Malaysian Contracts Act 1950 provides that all agreements are contracts if they are made by the free consent of the contracting parties. Where one or more of the contracting parties are erroneous in their belief about some relevant issues pertaining to the contract, free consent does not exist. This can arise where there is mistake, fraud or misrepresentation. Each of these is dealt with in separate provisions of the Contracts Act 1950 and different legal principles apply to each of them. While the principles governing innocent and negligent misrepresentation are the same as in English common law, the position under the Act on mistake and fraud differ to some extent from the English position. The differences are highlighted in the relevant parts of the chapter. This chapter discusses the scope of mistake, fraud and misrepresentation under the Act, their legal consequences upon contracts that are formed and the reliefs available to the innocent party.
Contracts Resulting from Threats and Unfair Exploitation: The Position under Malaysian Contract Law
Authors: CHEONG May Fong , LEE Yin Harn
Published: October 2022

This chapter discusses provisions under the Malaysian Contracts Act 1950 that have the effect of vitiating a party’s free consent to a contract, and sets out the legal consequences of these vitiating factors and the remedies that are available to a contracting party to whom these vitiating factors apply. These vitiating factors are those resulting from ‘abuse or exploitation’, such as coercion, undue influence and unconscionability. Two major themes emerge from this discussion. The first is the extent of the Malaysian courts’ power to receive legal developments occurring elsewhere in the common law world in the absence of express statutory language in the Contracts Act either prohibiting or permitting their adoption. The second is the extent to which the current provisions can be interpreted so as to incorporate these external developments, and the willingness of the Malaysian courts to do so. The chapter notes the dichotomy in the approach taken by the Malaysian courts. While the courts show a keen interest in legal developments occurring elsewhere in the common law world, and have made genuine efforts at applying these developments in order to achieve justice in suitable cases, they have overlooked the potential for accommodating these developments within the Contracts Act’s surprisingly expansive language. The courts have shown a preference for English case law over the literal language of the Contracts Act. As a result, the potential of—for example—section 16 of the Act to cover a much wider range of vitiating factors has remained untapped.
Duress, Undue Influence, and Unconscionability in Contract Law: A View from Singapore
Authors: ONG Burton
Published: October 2022

This chapter presents an overview of the legal principles in Singapore that relate to the vitiation of contracts on grounds of ‘procedural’ or ‘substantive’ unfairness. It discusses and analyses leading judgments of the Singapore courts that have dealt with different categories of reprehensible conduct that one contracting party may have engaged in towards another contracting party when their contractual relationship was established. These categories of misconduct involve: (i) the application of overt pressure by the stronger party on the weaker party (Duress); (ii) the improper exertion of influence by the stronger party over the weaker party (Undue Influence); and (iii) the unfair exploitation by the stronger party of the weaker party’s infirmity (Unconscionability).
Blank Verse
Authors: Stagg Robert
Published: October 2022

The first chapter, the groundwork of the book, tests what might happen if we conceive of Shakespeare’s blank verse as in some sense ‘bad’. It takes seriously Robert Greene’s 1592 attack on Shakespeare’s blank verse for being ‘bombastic’ by recognizing that Shakespeare’s verse included a ‘metrical end-stop’ (a stressed tenth syllable) which necessarily risked or incurred bombast. It proceeds to tell a history of early blank verse—from the Earl of Surrey’s Aeneid translations to Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc to George Gascoigne’s Steel Glass to Christopher Marlowe’s dramas—through the metrical end-stop before reading Shakespeare’s career-long effort to reply to Greene’s criticism, culminating in an interpretation of The Winter’s Tale as a sort of revenge drama upon Greene.
Occupations and Collective Skill Formation in the Knowledge Economy
Authors: Ebner Christian , Hirtz Sandra , Rohrbach-Schmidt Daniela
Published: October 2022

Most scholars argue that collective skill formation systems are a promising way to integrate workers into the employment system. Whether this is also true in a knowledge economy, however, is an open question. Following a market segmentation approach, this chapter argues that risks of insufficient integration measured by low wages, unskilled work, and temporary employment can vary significantly depending on the occupation graduates were trained for. The idea of investigating an occupation-specific integrative function of collective skill formation is promising for at least two reasons. First, the concept of occupation has been central to vocational training since the middle ages; in Germany, occupations play a decisive role in structuring training content and labour market processes. Second, taking different occupational segments into account is complementary to existing studies exploring differences between organizations. Drawing on representative survey data for Germany (BIBB/ BAuA Employment Survey 2018), this chapter identifies some occupation-specific integration problems within the framework of dual vocational education and training (VET). Nevertheless, graduates trained in occupations classified as ‘knowledge work’ can be guaranteed decent wages, skilled jobs, and stable employment in most cases. This chapter discusses these findings and points out implications for future research.
Efficiency, Social Inclusion, and the Dutch Pathway towards Vocational Education and Training Reform
Authors: Nijhuis Dennie Oude
Published: October 2022

For a variety of reasons that are closely connected to the rise of the knowledge economy, collective skill formation systems increasingly struggle to deliver on the twin goals of meeting firms’ skill demands and offering access to stable and relatively well-paid jobs for large groups of the population. Moreover, in many countries, attempts at progressive reform have faltered because of employer—and often also union—resistance to the introduction of non-firm-based alternatives to firm-based training. By analysing the inclusive pathway towards vocational education and training reform pursued by the Netherlands since the 1980s, this chapter shows that such opposition is by no means inevitable. This chapter shows how institutional legacies explain why Dutch employer groups did not view the development of a non-firm-based pathway to skill formation as a threat to the operation of the apprenticeship system and also supported other measures to improve the integrative function of the Dutch vocational education and training system.
Employers’ Cooperation in the Knowledge Economy
Authors: Maio Gina Di , Trampusch Christine
Published: October 2022

What leads employers to co-finance and collectively provide transferable skills? This study analyses employer cooperation in four sectors with varying levels of employer cooperation in the provision and financing of transferable (general) skills in post-secondary vocational training. It finds that employers’ associations cooperate in order to provide and finance skills when: (1) they rely on internal labour markets for recruitment, (2) there are institutional spill-over effects between employers’ cooperation in initial and continuous vocational training, (3) large firms are committed to collective training, (4) there is a tradition of collective labour agreements, (5) employers’ associations’ logic of organization building includes training policies as an important means to attract members, and (6) they do not prefer universities (of applied sciences) as an alternative and substitutive track to enhance the general skills of their employees. These findings contribute not only to the literature on employers’ collective action in vocational and further training but also to studies of business associations.
Enhancing Permeability through Cooperation
Authors: Bernhard Nadine , Graf Lukas
Published: October 2022

Given rising skill demands on the part of business and the increasing aspirations of young people for higher skills, the relationship between vocational and academic worlds of learning has become a major policy challenge in collective skill formation systems. While the need to enhance institutional permeability between these two worlds of learning is increasingly felt by all stakeholders, the actual building of programmes that promote such permeability is highly demanding as it often requires the cooperation of actors who have been largely isolated from each other and often have diverging interests. How is permeability made possible through cooperation? While various initiatives to increase permeability have recently been launched, little is known about how actors cooperate in the establishment and implementation of these permeability-enhancing projects. This chapter develops a conceptualization combining institutional permeability and types of cooperation in collective skill formation systems. This enables exploring the intensity of cooperation between key actors from the largely separate worlds of vocational and academic learning—which contributes to understanding how actors in collective skill formation systems adapt to the demands of the knowledge economy. Based on document analysis and expert interviews, the chapter provides an in-depth study of double qualification programmes in Germany in which vocational and academic learning are systematically combined. It is shown that increasing permeability is by no means a trivial task and that a fine-grained understanding of both permeability and cooperation can help uncover how actors take a differentiated approach to enhancing institutional permeability in collective skill formation.