bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Prevalence and Phylogenetic Characterization of Hepatitis C Virus Among Indian Men Who Have Sex With Men: Limited Evidence for Sexual Transmission
Authors: Clipman Steven J , Duggal Priya , Srikrishnan Aylur K , Saravanan Shanmugam , Balakrishnan Pachamuthu , Vasudevan Canjeevaran K , Celentano David D , Thomas David L , Mehta Shruti H , Solomon Sunil S
Published: January 2020

Background

Data from high-income countries suggest increasing hepatitis C virus (HCV) prevalence/incidence among human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)–infected men who have sex with men (MSM), but limited data derive from low-and-middle-income countries.

Methods

We recruited 4994 MSM from 5 states across India using respondent-driven sampling. Logistic regression incorporating respondent-driven sampling weights and machine learning feature selection were used to identify correlates of prevalent HCV, and Bayesian phylogenetic analysis was used to examine genetic clustering.

Results

The median age was 25 years, the HIV prevalence was 7.2%, and 49.3% of participants reported recent unprotected anal intercourse. The HCV prevalence was 1.3% (95% confidence interval, 1.0%–1.6%; site range, 0.2%–3.4%) and was 3.1% in HIV-positive versus 1.1% among HIV-negative men. HCV infection was significantly associated with injection drug use (odds ratio, 177.1; 95% confidence interval, 72.7–431.5) and HIV infection (4.34; 1.88–10.05). Machine learning did not uncover any additional epidemiologic signal. Phylogenetic analysis revealed 3 clusters suggestive of linked transmission; each contained ≥1 individual reporting injection drug use.

Conclusions

We observed a low HCV prevalence in this large sample of MSM despite a high prevalence of known risk factors, reflecting either the need for a threshold of HCV for sexual transmission and/or variability in sexual practices across settings.
Obesity Paradox in the Burn Patient
Authors: Lester Erica L W , Dvorak Justin E , Maluso Patrick J , Bendjemil Samy , Messer Thomas , Poulakidas Stathis , Bokhari Faran
Published: January 2020

Despite the fact that obesity is a known risk factor for comorbidities and complications, there is evidence suggesting a survival advantage for patients classified by body mass index (BMI) as overweight or obese. Investigated in various clinical areas, this “Obesity Paradox” has yet to be explored in the burn patient population. We sought to clarify whether this paradigm exists in burn patients. Data collected on 519 adult patients admitted to an American Burn Association Verified Burn Center between 2009 and 2017 was utilized. Univariable and multivariable logistic regression were used to determine the association between in-hospital mortality and BMI classifications (underweight <18.5 kg/m2, normal 18.5 to 24.9 kg/m2, overweight 25–29.9 kg/m2, obesity class I 30 to 34.9 kg/m2, obesity class II 35 to 39.9 kg/m2, and extreme obesity >40 kg/m2). For every kg/m2 increase in BMI, the odds of death decreased, with an adjusted odds ratio of 0.856 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.767 to 0.956). When adjusted for total BSA (TBSA), being obesity class I was associated with an adjusted odds ratio of mortality of 0.0166 (95% CI 0.000332 to 0.833). The adjusted odds ratio for mortality for underweight patients was 4.13 (95% CI 0.416 to 41.055). There was no statistically significant difference in odds of mortality between the normal and overweight BMI categories. In conclusion, the obesity paradox exists in burn care: further investigation is needed to elucidate what specific phenotypic aspects confer this benefit and how these can enhance the care of burn patients.
A Review of Breast Pain: Causes, Imaging Recommendations, and Treatment
Authors: Sivarajah Rebecca , Welkie Janelle , Mack Julie , Casas Rachel S , Paulishak Melody , Chetlen Alison L
Published: January 2020

Over two-thirds of women will experience breast pain in their lifetime. As one of the leading breast symptoms for which women seek medical attention, breast pain is suspected to be underreported and under-studied. Cyclical breast pain is related to hormonal changes. Noncyclical breast pain is independent of the menstrual cycle and can be idiopathic and related to chronic pain syndromes, infections, ill-fitting bras, musculoskeletal abnormalities, pregnancy, perimenopause, and postsurgical causes. Breast pain can also present in transgender patients and may require additional considerations as to the underlying cause. Imaging of mastalgia depends upon the suspected etiology. Inappropriate imaging for breast pain is associated with significant utilization of health care resources. Cyclical breast pain does not require an imaging work-up. The work-up of focal, noncyclical breast pain includes ultrasound for women aged younger than 40 years, and mammography and ultrasound for women aged 40 years and older. Management of breast pain is often supportive, as most breast pain resolves spontaneously. If pain persists, imaging and management should follow a step-wise approach. If conservative measures fail, second-line therapy is topical nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. If breast pain is severe and resistant to conservative methods, additional third-line therapies can be added by breast care specialists with specific knowledge of the potential deleterious side effects of these medications. While the causes of mastalgia are overwhelmingly benign, breast pain can significantly impact quality of life, and the breast radiologist should be familiar with causes, management, and treatment recommendations from a multidisciplinary approach.
Reconciling Lambek’s restriction, cut-elimination and substitution in the presence of exponential modalities
Authors: Kanovich Max , Kuznetsov Stepan , Scedrov Andre
Published: January 2020

The Lambek calculus can be considered as a version of non-commutative intuitionistic linear logic. One of the interesting features of the Lambek calculus is the so-called ‘Lambek’s restriction’, i.e. the antecedent of any provable sequent should be non-empty. In this paper, we discuss ways of extending the Lambek calculus with the linear logic exponential modality while keeping Lambek’s restriction. Interestingly enough, we show that for any system equipped with a reasonable exponential modality the following holds: if the system enjoys cut elimination and substitution to the full extent, then the system necessarily violates Lambek’s restriction. Nevertheless, we show that two of the three conditions can be implemented. Namely, we design a system with Lambek’s restriction and cut elimination and another system with Lambek’s restriction and substitution. For both calculi, we prove that they are undecidable, even if we take only one of the two divisions provided by the Lambek calculus. The system with cut elimination and substitution and without Lambek’s restriction is folklore and known to be undecidable.
The Impact of Robotic-Assisted Technology on Attitudes of Host Nation Individuals Participating in Pacific Partnership 2018: Improving Partnerships Through Technology
Authors: Worlton Tamara J , Braden Jacqueline , Gadbois Kyle , Lefringhouse Jason , Lockrow Ernest
Published: January 2020

The USNS Mercy (T-AH 19) on Pacific Partnership 2018 was the first mobile, expeditionary platform to utilize the da Vinci Surgical System. Using a de-identified, web-based survey, the impact of this new technology on Pacific Partnership 2018 on the attitudes of host nation surgeons was examined.
Quantifying Training Load During Physically Demanding Tasks in U.S. Army Soldiers: A Comparison of Physiological and Psychological Measurements
Authors: Canino Maria C , Foulis Stephen A , Cohen Bruce S , Walker Leila A , Taylor Kathryn M , Redmond Jan E , Sharp Marilyn A
Published: January 2020

Introduction

There are many ways to quantify the training loads required to perform soldiering tasks. Although indirect calorimetry may provide the most accurate measures, the equipment can be burdensome and expensive. Simpler measures may provide sufficient data, while being more practical for measuring soldiers in the field. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between total relative oxygen uptake (TotalRelVO2) measured by indirect calorimetry during three soldiering tasks, with two field-expedient measures of training load: summated heart rate zone (sumHR) and session rate of perceived exertion (sRPE).

Materials and Methods

33 male and 28 female soldiers performed three soldiering tasks while wearing a 32.3-kg fighting load: sandbag fill, sandbag carry, and ammunition can carry. Metabolic measurements were monitored and completion times were recorded (min). TotalRelVO2 (average relative VO2*time) and age-predicted maximal heart rate (220-age) were calculated. SumHR was calculated by multiplying time spent in each of the five heart rate zones by a multiplier factor for each zone (50–59% = 1, 60–69% = 2, 70–79% = 3, 80–89% = 4, and ≥90% = 5). RPE (Borg 6–20 scale) was collected at the end of each task, then sRPE was calculated (RPE*time). Pearson and Spearman correlations were performed to examine the relationship between TotalRelVO2, sumHR and sRPE. Wilcoxon signed rank tests were conducted to determine if there was a difference in median rankings between the three variables for each task. Linear regressions were performed to determine predictability of TotalRelVO2 from sumHR and sRPE. The study was approved by the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine Institutional Review Board.

Results

Significant, positive correlations were revealed for all three tasks between TotalRelVO2, sumHR and sRPE (r ≥ 0.67, p ≤ 0.01; rho≥0.74, p ≤ 0.01). Wilcoxon signed rank tests revealed no significant differences in rankings between TotalRelVO2, sumHR and sRPE for all three tasks (p ≥ 0.43). Both sumHR and sRPE are significant predictors of TotalRelVO2 (p ≤ 0.01).

Conclusions

SumHR and sRPE are acceptable alternatives to TotalRelVO2 when attempting to quantify and/or monitor training load during soldiering tasks.
Guideline Adherence and Hearing Outcomes of Sudden Sensorineural Hearing Loss in the Military Health System
Authors: Hughes Charlotte K , Ryan Matthew T , Adams Jason , Esquivel Carlos R
Published: January 2020

Introduction

The American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery Foundation clinical practice guideline (CPG) proposes several treatment recommendations regarding sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL). The treatments for this disorder have been controversial and remain varied. We sought to determine CPG adherence and hearing outcomes of SSNHL within the Military Health System (MHS).

Materials and Methods

This was a retrospective case series with chart review of the MHS’s electronic medical record. Patients with SSNHL (n = 112) were treated between March 1, 2012 and September 30, 2015. Clinical improvement was defined as a 20-dB improvement in pure tone averages or a 20% increase in word recognition scores.

Results

Oral steroids were used in 63 (56%) patients, intratympanic (IT) steroids were utilized in 11 (10%) patients, and combination therapy was used in 38 (34%) patients. Average pure tone averages improvements with oral steroids, IT steroids, and combination therapy were 31.2 dB (95% CI, 24.4–38.0), 13.4 dB (95% CI, 0.4–29.6), and 17.3 dB (95% CI, 9.32–25.3), respectively. Average word recognition scores improvements with oral steroids, IT steroids, and combination therapy were 29.64% (95% CI, 19.5–39.7), 14.43% (95% CI, −8.32 to 45.3), and 18.48% (95% CI, 5.48–31.5), respectively. Clinical improvements with oral steroids, IT steroids, and combination therapy were 65, 46, and 50%, respectively.

Conclusion

The MHS is uniquely positioned to evaluate adherence to CPGs on a national and international level given the robust and standardized electronic medical record. Areas identified for improvement include more timely initiation of treatment, standardization of IT steroid dosing, more accurate coding for diagnosis and treatment, and standardization of audiology evaluation.
The emergence of the first star-free atomic cooling haloes in the Universe
Authors: Regan John A , Wise John H , O’Shea Brian W , Norman Michael L
Published: January 2020

Using the Renaissance suite of simulations, we examine the emergence of pristine atomic cooling haloes that are both metal free and star free in the early universe. The absence of metals prevents catastrophic cooling, suppresses fragmentation, and may allow for the formation of massive black hole seeds. Here we report on the abundance of pristine atomic cooling haloes found and on the specific physical conditions that allow for the formation of these direct-collapse-black hole (DCBH) haloes. In total, in our simulations we find that 79 DCBH haloes form before a redshift of 11.6. We find that the formation of pristine atomic haloes is driven by the rapid assembly of the atomic cooling haloes with mergers, both minor and/or major, prior to reaching the atomic cooling limit a requirement. However, the ability of assembling haloes to remain free of (external) metal enrichment is equally important and underlines the necessity of following the transport of metals in such simulations. The candidate DCBH-hosting haloes we find have been exposed to mean Lyman–Werner radiation fields of J21 ∼1 and typically lie at least 10 kpc (physical) from the nearest massive galaxy. The growth rates of the haloes reach values of greater than 107$\rm {M_{\odot }}~$ per unit redshift, leading to significant dynamical heating and the suppression of efficient cooling until the halo crosses the atomic cooling threshold. Finally, we also find five synchronized halo candidates where pairs of pristine atomic cooling haloes emerge that are both spatially and temporally synchronized.
Dietary sugars and related endogenous advanced glycation end-products increase chromosomal DNA damage in WIL2-NS cells, measured using cytokinesis-block micronucleus cytome assay
Authors: Deo Permal , McCullough Caitlin L , Almond Theodora , Jaunay Emma L , Donnellan Leigh , Dhillon Varinderpal S , Fenech Michael
Published: January 2020

This study investigated the effect of glucose and fructose, and advanced glycation end-products (AGEs) on genome damage in WIL2-NS cells, measured using the cytokinesis-block micronucleus cytome (CBMN-Cyt) assay. The effect of AGEs was investigated using the bovine serum albumin (AGE-BSA) model system induced either with glucose (Glu–BSA) or with fructose (Fru–BSA). Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) analysis showed higher Nε-carboxymethyllysine (CML; 26.76 ± 1.09 nmol/mg BSA) levels in the Glu–BSA model. Nε-Carboxyethyllysine (CEL; 7.87 ± 0.19 nmol/mg BSA) and methylglyoxal-derived hydroimidazolone-1 (MG-H1; 69.77 ± 3.74 nmol/mg BSA) levels were higher in the Fru–BSA model. Genotoxic effects were measured using CBMN-Cyt assay biomarkers [binucleated(BN) cells with micronuclei (MNi), BN with nucleoplasmic bridges (NPBs) and BN with nuclear buds (NBuds)] following 9 days of treatment with either glucose, fructose, Glu–BSA or Fru–BSA. Fructose treatment exerted a significant genotoxic dose–response effect including increases of BN with MNi (R2 = 0.7704; P = 0.0031), BN with NPBs (R2 = 0.9311; P < 0.0001) and BN with NBuds (R2 = 0.7118; P = 0.0091) on cells, whereas the DNA damaging effects of glucose were less evident. High concentrations of AGEs (400–600 µg/ml) induced DNA damage; however, there was no effect on cytotoxicity indices (necrosis and apoptosis). In conclusion, this study demonstrates a potential link between physiologically high concentrations of reducing sugars or AGEs with increased chromosomal damage which is an important emerging aspect of the pathology that may be induced by diabetes. Ultimately, loss of genome integrity could accelerate the rate of ageing and increase the risk of age-related diseases over the long term. These findings indicate the need for further research on the effects of glycation on chromosomal instability and to establish whether this effect is replicated in humans in vivo.
Association between urbanicity and surgical treatment among patients with primary glioblastoma in the United States
Authors: Cioffi Gino , Cote David J , Ostrom Quinn T , Kruchko Carol , Barnholtz-Sloan Jill S
Published: January 2020

Background

Glioblastoma (GB) is the most common and most lethal primary malignant brain tumor. Extent of surgical resection is one of the most important prognostic factors associated with improved survival. Historically, patients living in nonmetropolitan counties in the United States have limited access to optimal treatment and health care services. The aim of this study is to determine whether there is an association between urbanicity and surgical treatment patterns among US patients with primary GB.

Methods

Cases with histologically confirmed, primary GB diagnosed between 2005 and 2015 were obtained from the Central Brain Tumor Registry of the United States (CBTRUS) in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Cancer Institute. Multivariable logistic regression models were constructed to assess the association between urbanicity and receipt of surgical treatment (gross total resection [GTR]/subtotal resection [STR] vs biopsy only/none) and extent of resection (GTR vs STR), adjusted for age at diagnosis, sex, race, US regional division, and primary tumor site.

Results

Patients residing in nonmetropolitan counties were 7% less likely to receive surgical treatment (odds ratio [OR] = 0.93, 95% CI: 0.89-0.96, P < .0001). Among those who received surgical treatment, metropolitan status was not significantly associated with receiving GTR vs STR (OR = 0.99, 95% CI: 0.94-1.04, P = .620).

Conclusions

Among US patients with GB, urbanicity is associated with receipt of surgical treatment, but among patients who receive surgery, urbanicity is not associated with extent of resection. These results point to potential differences in access to health care for those in nonmetropolitan areas that warrant further exploration.
A Symmetrical View of Disability and Enhancement
Authors: Campbell Stephen M. , Wasserman David
Published: January 2020

Disability and enhancement are often treated as opposing concepts. To become disabled in some respect is to move away from those who are enhanced in that same respect; to become enhanced is to move away from the corresponding state of disability. This chapter examines how best to understand the concepts of disability and enhancement in this symmetrical way. After considering various candidates, two types of accounts are identified as the most promising: welfarist accounts and typical-functioning accounts. The authors ultimately defend a complex typical-functioning account as the best way to achieve a symmetrical understanding of disability and enhancement.
North–South, East–West
Authors: Stavans Ilan
Published: January 2020

This article is divided into two halves: the first offers nineteen theses on the role of topography in the shaping of Hispanic identity in general and Latinidad in particular; and the second is a rumination on the impact of geography on identity. The style of each of these parts is deliberately dissimilar yet they are built through continuities. The contributions of Oswald de Andrade, Gloria Anzaldúa, Walter Benjamin, Jorge Luis Borges, Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, José Hernández, Claude Lévi-Strauss, José Ortega y Gasset, Octavio Paz, José Enrique Rodó, Juan Rulfo, and José Vasconcelos are placed in dialogue and concepts like Mestizaje and Tropicalismo are considered.
Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Latina/o Culture
Authors: Arrizón Alicia
Published: January 2020

This article begins delving into the intersectionality of the conceptual knowledge embedded in the terms “women,” “gender,” and “sexuality.” The evolution of these three concepts has transformed the field of women, gender, and sexuality studies. While drawing on feminist and interdisciplinary methods to center on women’s issues, the field examines constructs of gender power relations, systems of oppression, and privilege. Students and scholars in the field examine these concepts as they intersect with other identities and social sites such as race, sexual orientation, inequality, class, and disability. The article begins with a general examination of the epistemological inquires considered in the title. It then traces the interdisciplinarity of women’s studies and feminist theory while contextualizing Latina feminism within Third World feminisms as conceptualized in the twentieth century. The article also argues that in Latina/o culture, the epistemology of these terms is reinforced by the power of heterosexuality, patriarchy, and the ramifications of colonial history. In this framework, the article examines the dichotomy of marianismo and machismo as markers of the legacy of colonialism. In what contexts this legacy influences Latina feminist discourses and views in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? What type of genealogies have been fundamental in tracing the colonial history of Latina/American feminism across borders? What kinds of methodological considerations for studying sexuality, and non-conforming gendering processes in Latina/o/Latinx culture in the twenty-first century are currently relevant? Are Latinas becoming more visible and influential in the twenty-first century? These inquiries are considered important for engaging with contemporary issues in Latino/a studies.
Notes on Latino Philology
Authors: Stavans Ilan
Published: January 2020

This article reflects on the importance of language studies as an essential yet forgotten portal through which to appreciate politics, society, and culture. Written in an accessible tone in direct response to the insistently obtuse academic style that isolates such explorations from the reading public, it looks at grammar, semantics, syntax, and lexicography as interconnected disciplines always linked to the history and currents defining culture. Structurally, the article is divided into two parts: the first part is a personal reflection of linguistics as a discipline; the second is a proposal for a never-before attempted history of the Spanish language written from the perspective of a Latino scholar.
Disability, Law, and the Humanities
Authors: Belt Rabia , Dorfman Doron
Published: January 2020

Disability studies is a relatively new academic discipline that approaches disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon and has a firm foothold within the humanities. This chapter will offer a broad, interdisciplinary overview of the achievements and challenges of disability law in both the American and international contexts using a disability studies-humanities-oriented approach. The chapter emphasizes the notion of intersectionality and the ways disability correlates with other identity groups such as people of color, women, LGBTQI, and immigrants and their treatment under the law. The use of philosophical, historical, literary, and artistic perspectives will help demonstrate the “disability angle” to the legal story of rights and recognition for individuals with disabilities, as well as for other civil rights groups, while looking ahead and exposing remaining challenges.
Psychoanalysis and Law
Authors: McNulty Tracy
Published: January 2020

This chapter attempts to tease out the most important implications for law and legal theory of Sigmund Freud’s speculative essays on the origins of human society, and in particular his thesis that the first laws were created in response to the prehistoric murder of a primitive father whose power and authority they alternately preserve, displace, or transform. Putting Freud’s cultural writings in dialogue with later writings on law by Jacques Lacan, Mladen Dolar, and Pierre Legendre, the essays suggests that psychoanalysis allows us to distinguish two fundamentally different registers of law, imaginary authority, and symbolic constraint, whose stakes it explores through readings of totemism, the group psychology, and the Mosaic law.
Agonism, Democracy, and Law
Authors: Minkkinen Panu
Published: January 2020

This chapter begins by examining the origins of agonism in the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s early text “Homer’s Contest.” It then attempts to formulate a political interpretation of agonism that could provide law and legal studies a post-Marxist and Nietzschean critical position in which democracy is central. A first attempt at the formulation is an analysis of the constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt’s “antagonist” and “polemical” notion of politics that is based on a friend-enemy distinction, and of the consequences of such a notion for state constitutions and law. Schmitt serves as the background for the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, whose “agonistic pluralism” represents a conscious effort to moderate Schmitt’s existentially belligerent critique of liberalism into a workable politics in late modernity. Interpretations of agonism provided by William E. Connolly and Bonnie Honig and their possible links to law and legal studies are then briefly discussed. The chapter concludes that there is a kinship between political agonism understood in this way and a contemporary strain in political theory represented by, for example, Jacques Rancière. The roots of this kinship are traced finally to a post-Marxist tradition of “radical liberalism.”
Facing Justice
Authors: Mukherji Subha
Published: January 2020

Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation between face and intent, surface and significance, truth and semblance, nature and artifice. Using the legally attuned dramatist John Webster’s The White Devil as its central example, this chapter probes law’s preoccupation with legibility and the way in which drama enters into dialogue with it. In the process, law emerges an interface between an expressive mode and a hermeneutic model, and thus an imaginative resource for literary writers interested in selfhood and inwardness. Ultimately, the argument intimates how the gaps and dualities of the interrelation between the theatre and the law are used by early modern dramatic practice to conceptualize the larger interrelation between literary and legal epistemologies.
Boundaries, Walls, Envelopes, Rooms, and Other Spatialities of Law
Authors: Hyde Timothy
Published: January 2020

This chapter outlines the several scales at which material arrangements of architecture, urbanism, and territory are bound up with surrounding legal contexts. Using these three scales, the chapter elucidates the reciprocity of law and space, a reciprocity through which the law is spatialized by its distributions across places and locales and space is differentiated and particularized by law. A courtroom, for example, is a physical space and a locus for legal process; a city street is a material conjunction of objects and persons as well as a concretization of codes and regulations; a territorial boundary is a demarcated section of land and an inscription of legal permissions and constraints. These different mediums of social inhabitation, of such different scales, are imperfectly coordinated, yet with their often inextricable connections they comprise a domain of great relevance to law and humanities. Within this domain, which consists of disciplinary intersections of law with architectural history and theory, with geography, and with urban studies, the complex interactions of norms with the contingencies of myriad cultural productions come into view. Regulatory instruments, plans, buildings, pillars, rooms, regions, and other arrangements can be seen to function as techniques for the projection and translation of juridical and spatial orderings.
Family Law
Authors: Bridges Khiara M.
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the dual system of family law in the USA. It observes that the USA has a set of laws that regulates more affluent families and an entirely distinct set of laws that regulates poor families. Moreover, the family law for the poor is uniquely punitive. The chapter offers that the dual system of family law, and the brutal nature of family law for the poor, can be explained in terms of the moral construction of poverty—the idea that poverty is a result of an individual’s shortcomings. The chapter proposes that the moral construction of poverty offers a unique framework through which to view and critique the family law for the poor. It demonstrates the utility of the framework through an analysis of the Court’s 1970 decision in Dandridge v. Williams, upholding the constitutionality of family cap policies that restrict the size of the grants that welfare beneficiaries receive to support their families.
Human Rights
Authors: Anker Elizabeth S.
Published: January 2020

Debates about human rights in many ways represent one of the original sites of law and the humanities. This chapter canvasses the different ways that humanistically minded thinkers have understood rights, both today and over history. On the one hand, human rights have been the target of sustained critique, as scholars have probed their many errors and limits. But on the other, different humanists have instead affirmed rights, seeing them as enabled by the same openings and indeterminacies that are broadly constitutive of democracy. Attention to the limits of rights has also brokered that embrace. By exploring these competing responses to human rights, this chapter construes those disputes as a referendum on larger ideas about law and legality that inform law and the humanities. Analyzing human rights has therefore often seemed to fulfill an almost autobiographical function for thinkers across a number of humanities disciplines, meaning that the status of human rights can tell us a lot about received accounts of the value of the humanities.
Immigration and the Imperial
Authors: Munshi Sherally
Published: January 2020

In legal scholarship on immigration, as in public discourse, we often take for granted the normative and conceptual priority of nation state borders—as though borders were here first, and migrants came second. But people have been migrating since long before the establishment of nation state borders. European imperialism was sustained by mass migration. The British imperial system consisted of the voluntary migration of settlers and administrators as well as the involuntary or forced migration of enslaved Africans, Asian “coolies,” and criminal convicts. U.S. settler imperialism continues to effect mass displacements. Because the conventional nation-state framing of immigration law often obscures the imperial histories that have shaped the inequalities that now compel migration, this chapter asserts that scholars of immigration law and history have much to gain by displacing the nation-state framework, through which questions about immigration law and policy are raised, and replacing it with an expanded framework of the imperial.
History, Literature, and Authority in International Law
Authors: Warren Christopher N.
Published: January 2020

One consequence of international law’s recent historical turn has been to sharpen methodological contrasts between intellectual history and international law. Scholars including Antony Anghie, Anne Orford, Rose Parfitt, and Martti Koskenniemi have taken on board historians’ interest in contingency and context but pointedly relaxed historians’ traditional stricture against presentist instrumentalism. This chapter argues that such a move disrupts a long-standing division of labor between history and international law and ultimately brings international legal method closer to literature and literary scholarship. The chapter therefore details several more or less endemic ways in which literature and literary studies confront challenges of presentism, anachronism, meaning, and time. Using examples from writers as diverse as Anghie, Spinoza, Geoffrey Hill, Emily St. John Mandel, China Miéville, John Hollander, Pascale Casanova, Matthew Nicholson, John Selden, Shakespeare, and Dante, it proposes a “trilateral” discussion among historians, international lawyers, and literary scholars that takes seriously the multipolar disciplinary field in which each of these disciplines makes and sustains relations with each of the others.
An Anti-Liberal Defense of Free Speech
Authors: Heinze Eric
Published: January 2020

Western democracies have determined the extent and limits of free expression largely within rights-based frameworks. As captured by Mill’s classically liberal “harm principle,” expression is permitted except insofar as legislatures and courts deem it to cause some unacceptable harm. Through a review of certain texts foundational for democracy, however, we can identify principles different from the standard liberal principles. Beginning in ancient Athens, we discover that questions of legal legitimacy invariably become questions of civic participation; and civic participation is nothing if not expression. It is no exaggeration to suggest that Western political philosophy altogether begins with that observation: Plato’s Crito presents the West’s first systematic inquiry into the question of legal legitimacy—that is, the question of when the law can bind us through moral rightness, beyond sheer physical coercion. The law binds us precisely to the extent of the freedom we have enjoyed to disagree with it.
Materialism and Legal Historiography, from Bachelard to Benjamin
Authors: Tomlins Christopher
Published: January 2020

As the linguistic/cultural turn of the last fifty years has begun to ebb, sociolegal and legal-humanist scholarship has seen an accelerating return to materiality. This chapter asks what relationship may be forthcoming between the “new materialisms” and “vibrant matter” of recent years, and the older materialisms—both historical and literary, both Marxist and non-Marxist—that held sway prior to post-structuralism. What impact might such a relationship have on the forms, notably “spatial justice,” that materiality is assuming in contemporary legal studies? To attempt answers, the chapter turns to two figures from more than half a century ago: Gaston Bachelard—once famous, now mostly forgotten; and Walter Benjamin—once largely forgotten, now famous. A prolific and much-admired writer between 1930 and 1960, Bachelard pursued two trajectories of inquiry: a dialectical and materialist and historical (but non-Marxist) philosophy of science; and a poetics of the material imagination based on inquiry into the literary reception and representation of the prime elements—earth, water, fire, and air. Between the late 1920s and 1940, meanwhile, Benjamin developed an idiosyncratic but potent form of historical materialism dedicated to “arousing [the world] from its dream of itself.” The chapter argues that by mobilizing Bachelard and Benjamin for scholarship at the intersection of law and the humanities, old and new materialisms can be brought into a satisfying conjunction that simultaneously offers a poetics for spatial justice and lays a foundation for a materialist legal historiography for the twenty-first century.
Responsa
Authors: Bryen Ari Z.
Published: January 2020

Responsa—answers to discrete legal questions—are one of the oldest juristic technologies. Though an ancient mode of responding to legal uncertainty, responsa were also highly dependent upon the authority of the jurist offering them. This posed a tension between juristic authority and other modes of authority, and between the learned opinion of a trustworthy man and the demands of reason. Although responsa are found in many premodern legal cultures (including Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu traditions), this chapter focuses on the experience of Roman jurists. Starting from the earliest period in which responsa were given by jurists who were also priests, this chapter traces their history through the Roman late Republic and Empire (c. 50 bce–c. 250 ad) as they increasingly became a written genre crafted by jurists whose position was at times tenuous.
Comics
Authors: Chute Hillary
Published: January 2020

The art form of comics has been at center of heated global free speech debates, which remain among the defining issues of our time, particularly as they map onto cultural and religious difference. In the past ten years, the hybrid word-and-image medium of comics has also entered the legal arena through comics-form amicus briefs and comics-form contracts, to name a few examples. The examples suggest that comics is understood today not only as a medium with the potential to be sophisticated, literary, and entertaining but further as one with the concision and clarity that legal discourse values. The growing international energy around the intersection of comics and law, evident in the emergence of comics-form documents and comics as a mode of legal pedagogy, is also reflected in the academy, where there has been a large recent increase in legal academic attention to comics. Other comics genres, particularly nonfiction genres (e.g., comics journalism and graphic memoir), have also proven to be richly engaged with the juridical. Comics that address complicated ethical and material realities through content and form alike model productive ways of engaging with aesthetics and the juridical imaginary, including compelling but fraught legal discourses like that of human rights. This chapter focuses in particular on the non-fiction work of Malta-born cartoonist Joe Sacco, suggesting that Sacco, perhaps more than any other cartoonist, helps readers to see how the comics form can reveal the law-driven focus on “rights” differently than in traditional accounts, especially through the medium’s approach to layered temporalities.
Legal Paratexts
Authors: Spoo Robert
Published: January 2020

This chapter offers an overview of a genre that has attracted little attention qua genre: the legal paratext. Gérard Genette likened the paratext to a vestibule that operates as a zone of transition and transaction, a liminal space that prepares the reader’s experience of the text. Yet there are other, more cautionary paratexts that crowd, often invisibly, the vestibules of books and other cultural forms. This chapter surveys the transatlantic (American and British) repertoire of legal paratexts appearing in books, including copyright notices, once mandatory in the United States but now permissive there and in many countries; statements of US manufacture, deriving from a period in American publishing when copyright protection turned on strict compliance with the statutory requirement that books be physically manufactured on US soil; “all characters are fictitious” disclaimers, which urge readers to put aside their instinct to sue for libel or for privacy invasion and to engage with the text as a fictive and aesthetic creation; “no-obscenity” statements—a feature of many controversial modernist works—which seek to discourage official attempts at censorship and assure readers that books have been or are likely to be deemed by a court to be safe for consumption. Legal paratexts continue to crowd the vestibules of books, movies, musical recordings, and other works, warning readers, scolding them, and attempting to regulate their behavior in accordance with legal and corporate norms. They are linked to other literary genres, such as parody, satire, the apologia, and the palinode.
Uncovering Credibility
Authors: Simon-Kerr Julia
Published: January 2020

The project of evidence law is in many ways analogous to that of the author or artist. All seek to expose deeper truths. While the novelist can freely invent character and corresponding behavior, evidence law uses fictive devices to recreate a coherent narrative from ostensibly unimagined facts. It does this, in part, by structuring the ways in which we assess witness credibility. What witnesses say is at the heart of most trials and whether to believe those witnesses is an overarching concern. The novelist or painter can show us the inner life of characters through an omniscient narrator or a telltale blush. Evidence law employs a different, though no less evocative, means for signaling credibility. It makes otherwise irrelevant information admissible at trial as credibility evidence, encouraging fact-finders to consider the kind of person whose word they are being asked to accept by digging into that person’s past. In admitting this evidence, the law relies on a false equivalence between a propensity to lie, which will allegedly be uncovered through credibility evidence, and evidence tailored to the question of whether a witness should be believed, which is what is actually being offered to the fact-finder. This chapter seeks to disentangle the two concepts—propensity to lie and worthiness of belief—and in so doing to reveal the danger in mistaking a fundamentally authorial impulse to use worthiness and status-based distinctions to color in the narratives of the courtroom in service of a hyper-rational process of proof.
Legal Treatise
Authors: Wilf Steven
Published: January 2020

The legal treatise is a subject with a pedigree. Previous essays by A. W. B. Simpson, Morton Horwitz, Angela Fernandez and Markus Dubber, and Christopher Tomlins identify different ways that the treatise genre captures the essence of existing law and aspirations. Disembarking from these important contributions, this chapter draws upon such diverse fields as the history of the book, literary genre studies, information management, and the sociology of knowledge. It underscores the multiplicity of the treatise’s genre ecosystem. The legal treatise simultaneously serves as a site for the production of knowledge, a stepping stone or even substitute for codes, fabricated order, a mechanism for establishing authorial authority, a professional talisman, a technic of systematizing and organizing information, a legitimization of existing norms, and a means of constructing a national jurisprudence akin to the way a dictionary might define a national language. Focusing largely on common law treatises of the long nineteenth century, it interrogates how these competing goals might exist within a single literary artifact. What pressures threaten to unravel the legal treatise’s claims to monumental authority? And how can its power erode? The chapter’s salient contribution will be its highlighting the importance of time. The legal treatise is a genre which simultaneously asserts its place as a summa of legal knowledge and—as the commonplace historical introduction often underscores—while continuing to be subject to countless revisions. It is a text readied for obsolescence. Beneath the treatise’s façade of professional authority lies a profound anxiety about its own timelessness.
Personhood
Authors: Frow John
Published: January 2020

Legal personhood is distinct from and dependent on ordinary understandings of what it means to be a human person. Yet not every human being is a person (slaves are not, for example), and there are some non-human entities (such as corporations) which are. The legal category of the person is thus at once continuous and discontinuous with that of the natural person, designating a subject of rights and duties along a spectrum from full to very partial personhood. Moreover, the mode of being of natural persons is by no means self-evident, because the status of the “natural” person is itself constituted by a juridical demarcation of the boundaries of embodied human being and by distinct institutional and practical conditions of constitution, and natural persons are not necessarily coextensive with their bodies. While Western models of personhood are based on the coherence and continuity of the self as rational or ethical substance, quite different ways of understanding personhood are found in other cultures, where persons may be taken to be the sum of their social relations or of the exchange of substances between their bodies and the rest of the social and material world. Similarly, in most cultures persons are constituted by their relation to the generations of the dead from whom they inherit, to the gods, and to the unborn descendants to whom property and some of the components of kinship (a name, a status, a genetic inheritance) are to be passed on.
A Menu of Clientelist Methods to Buy and Coerce Voters
Authors: Serra Gilles
Published: January 2020

This chapter provides a new typology of clientelist methods of manipulating voters based on three characteristics: the nature of the inducements to voters, the broker providing the inducements, and the voters receiving the inducements. The chapter postulates two types of inducements (positive and negative), three types of brokers (bureaucrats, partisans, and employers), and three types of voters (supporters, undecided, and opposed). Combining the types of brokers and the types of voters with the types of inducements leads to twelve possible methods of manipulation that patrons (i.e., politicians) may use to influence their clients (i.e., citizens). These subcategories are illustrated with empirical cases from the large and rapidly growing literature on clientelism around the world. Developing such typology may bring conceptual clarity to a series of important phenomena that hinder the proper functioning of elections in many new and old democracies, and which have been collectively labeled “clientelism.”
When, How, and Why Persuasion Fails
Authors: Cotter Ryan G. , Lodge Milton , Vidigal Robert
Published: January 2020

All citizens, including the most sophisticated and attentive, possess a powerful drive to defend their opinions, attitudes, and worldviews in the face of challenges. This bias manifests as an active effort to rationalize what they want to believe rather than accepting incongruent viewpoints. This propensity to dismiss or counterargue perspectives we do not like is evident across political identities and raises serious obstacles to successfully shifting others’ attitudes. This article presents an integrated understanding of these information processing phenomena under the John Q. Public model and explains how prior beliefs, confirmation bias, and disconfirmation bias interact to produce persistence in evaluations. It then goes on to explain how network analysis and experimental designs can be leveraged to illuminate the black box of communication effects and deepen our understanding of when persuasion is successful. Mapping out the cognitive relationships between semantic concepts and connecting these to a raw, affective charge provides a clearer view of citizens’ understanding of issues and how their thoughts and feelings shift in response to targeted political messaging.
Coda
Authors: Marks Laura U.
Published: January 2020

In the twentieth-century Arabic-speaking world, communism animated anticolonial revolutions, workers’ organizations, guerrilla movements, and international solidarity. The communist dream was cut short by Arab governments, deals with global superpowers, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and historical bad luck. But recently a remarkable number of Arab filmmakers have turned their attention to the history of the radical Left. Filmmakers from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco have been urgently seeking models for grassroots politics in the labor movements, communist parties, and secular armed resistance of earlier generations. This coda explores two strata of communist audiovisual praxis: the radical cinema that supported labor movements and guerrilla actions from the 1950s to the 1980s, and recent films that draw on that earlier movement. The coda argues that the Arab audiovisual archive holds flashes of communism that have been neither fulfilled nor entirely extinguished. The new films release their unspent energy into the present, diagnosing earlier failures of Arab communism and making plans for new forms of solidarity.