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Should laws about sex and pornography be based on social conventions about what is disgusting? Should felons be required to display bumper stickers or wear T-shirts that announce their crimes? This powerful and elegantly written book, by one of America's most influential philosophers, presents a critique of the role that shame and disgust play in our individual and social lives and, in particular, in the law. Martha Nussbaum argues that we should be wary of these emotions because they are associated in troubling ways with a desire to hide from our humanity, embodying an unrealistic and sometimes pathological wish to be invulnerable. Nussbaum argues that the thought-content of disgust embodies \"magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity that are just not in line with human life as we know it.\" She argues that disgust should never be the basis for criminalizing an act, or play either the aggravating or the mitigating role in criminal law it currently does. She writes that we should be similarly suspicious of what she calls \"primitive shame,\" a shame \"at the very fact of human imperfection,\" and she is harshly critical of the role that such shame plays in certain punishments. Drawing on an extraordinarily rich variety of philosophical, psychological, and historical references--from Aristotle and Freud to Nazi ideas about purity--and on legal examples as diverse as the trials of Oscar Wilde and the Martha Stewart insider trading case, this is a major work of legal and moral philosophy.

Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss--it’s time to go a-pirating! The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the wily world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pirates. With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the hidden economics behind pirates’ notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior. Why did pirates fly flags of Skull & Bones? Why did they create a \"pirate code\"? Were pirates really ferocious madmen? And what made them so successful? The Invisible Hook uses economics to examine these and other infamous aspects of piracy. Leeson argues that the pirate customs we know and love resulted from pirates responding rationally to prevailing economic conditions in the pursuit of profits. The Invisible Hook looks at legendary pirate captains like Blackbeard, Black Bart Roberts, and Calico Jack Rackam, and shows how pirates’ search for plunder led them to pioneer remarkable and forward-thinking practices. Pirates understood the advantages of constitutional democracy--a model they adopted more than fifty years before the United States did so. Pirates also initiated an early system of workers’ compensation, regulated drinking and smoking, and in some cases practiced racial tolerance and equality. Leeson contends that pirates exemplified the virtues of vice--their self-seeking interests generated socially desirable effects and their greedy criminality secured social order. Pirates proved that anarchy could be organized.

Should \"hate speech\" be made a criminal offense, or does the First Amendment oblige Americans to permit the use of epithets directed against a person's race, religion, ethnic origin, gender, or sexual preference? Does a campus speech code enhance or degrade democratic values? When the American flag is burned in protest, what rights of free speech are involved? In a lucid and balanced analysis of contemporary court cases dealing with these problems, as well as those of obscenity and workplace harassment, acclaimed First Amendment scholar Kent Greenawalt now addresses a broad general audience of readers interested in the most current free speech issues.

This is the story of a group of abolitionist lawyers who devoted themselves to working within a legal system that they considered to be fundamentally unjust and illegitimate. These “resistance lawyers” used the limited and unfriendly procedural tools of the hated Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 to frustrate, oppose, and, if possible, dismantle the operation of that law. Abolitionist resistance lawyers were forthrightly committed both to ensuring that their clients remained free and to using the cases that arose under the Fugitive Slave Law to wage a proxy war against the institution of slavery. Their daily direct service practices were inextricably linked to their movement politics and aspirations for systemic reform. Using new archival research that upends the existing historical consensus, I show that this linked practice was dramatically more effective than previously thought, both in protecting individual clients and as a means of building political opposition to slavery in local and national politics. This history should serve as a provocation for contemporary resistance lawyering. Many lawyers today practice within a legal system that they oppose in the hope of frustrating or dismantling that system. I suggest that today’s resistance lawyers can learn from the abolitionists’ integration of politics and daily practice as they fight to increase the political power and salience of their own work.

This article examines the gender implications of unjust provocation defence, which received little empirical attention than the theoretical. It focuses on the role of masculinity behind the application of unjust provocation defence in hate-motivated killings of LGBTQI in Turkey. By employing a qualitative content analysis to study four cases from Turkish domestic courts, it aims to provide an empirical background to the current theoretical debate on provocation defence. It argues that the non-recognition of hate crimes and the wide judicial discretion power of the courts jeopardise LGBTQI’s right to access the justice system, thus making them vulnerable to violence. Therefore, this article highlights the need to legislate hate crimes towards LGBTQI members to eliminate hostility towards them.

Past research has shown that hostile schemas and adverse experiences predict the hostile attributional bias. This research proposes that seemingly nonhostile beliefs (implicit theories about the malleability of personality) may also play a role in shaping it. Study 1 meta-analytically summarized 11 original tests of this hypothesis (N = 1,659), and showed that among diverse adolescents aged 13–16 a fixed or entity theory about personality traits predicted greater hostile attributional biases, which mediated an effect on aggressive desires. Study 2 experimentally changed adolescents' implicit theories toward a malleable or incremental view and showed a reduction in hostile intent attributions. Study 3 delivered an incremental theory intervention that reduced hostile intent attributions and aggressive desires over an 8-month period.

This article focuses on applying the provisions of the Criminal Intelligence Law to detect criminal offences. Based on the recent case law of the Supreme Court of Lithuania, the author provides insights into the problematic aspects of the application of certain provisions of the Criminal Intelligence Law. It examines the extent to which the tools of criminal intelligence can legitimately invade a person’s private life. The conditions for provocation by criminal intelligence, the criteria for (non-)recognition of evidence collected by private individuals, the problems of establishing a factual basis for initiating a criminal intelligence investigation, and the nuances of the duration of non-public actions are discussed. The Code of Criminal Procedure does not regulate the conditions for the use in criminal proceedings of data obtained in the course of a criminal intelligence investigation; therefore, it is decided on a case-by-case basis, taking into account, inter alia, the case law of the Supreme Court of Lithuania, and whether the information obtained in the course of a criminal intelligence investigation meets the requirements for evidence set out in the Code.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached memory studies in earnest. This partly reflects the hype around recent developments in generative AI (genAI), machine learning, and large language models (LLMs). But how can memory studies scholars handle this hype? Focusing on genAI applications, in particular so-called ‘chatbots’ (transformer-based instruction-tuned text generators), this commentary highlights five areas of critique that can help memory scholars to critically interrogate AI’s implications for their field. These are: (1) historical critiques that complicate AI’s common historical narrative and historicize genAI; (2) technical critiques that highlight how genAI applications are designed and function; (3) praxis critiques that centre on how people use genAI; (4) geopolitical critiques that recognize how international power dynamics shape the uneven global distribution of genAI and its consequences; and (5) environmental critiques that foreground genAI’s ecological impact. For each area, we highlight debates and themes that we argue should be central to the ongoing study of genAI and memory. We do this from an interdisciplinary perspective that combines our knowledge of digital sociology, media studies, literary and cultural studies, cognitive psychology, and communication and computer science. We conclude with a methodological provocation and by reflecting on our own role in the hype we are seeking to dispel.

Building on current research regarding constitutional migration, this article shows how constitutional provisions protecting religious freedom (“subject to public order”) arrived in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, not via colonial British or traditional Islamic sources—both explicitly rejected—but via deliberate constitutional borrowing from “anti-colonial” precursors in Ireland and, especially, India. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s notion of “empty signifiers,” the article highlights the shifting political circumstances that transformed the meaning of Pakistan’s borrowed constitutional provisions. Even as core texts guaranteeing an individual’s right to peaceful religious practice were imported, political, legal, and conceptual modulations ensured that specific forms of peaceful religious practice were refashioned as a source of religious provocation and, therein, public disorder. Far from protecting religious freedom, this repurposing of imported constitutional clauses tied to “the politics of public order” underpinned the formal legal restriction of an otherwise explicit right.

In October 2010, the UK Parliament brought into effect law that replaced the partial defence to murder of provocation with a new partial defence of “loss of control”, applicable to England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Although it retained some key features of its controversial predecessor, the new partial defence was in part designed better to address the gendered contexts within which a large number of homicides are committed. In examining the impact of the reforms, we will focus on long-held concerns about the treatment of sexual infidelity as a trigger for loss of control in murder cases. The article undertakes an analysis of English case law to evaluate the way in which sexual infidelity-related evidence has influenced perceptions of a homicide defendant's culpability, for the purposes of sentencing, both before and after the implementation of reform. The analysis reveals that, in sentencing offenders post reform, the higher courts have failed to follow the spirit of the reforms respecting the substantive law by effecting a corresponding change in sentencing practice.