Punishment, youth justice and cultural contingency: Towards a balanced approach

Reflecting developments in the broader penological realm, accounts have been advanced over the last number of decades about a ‘punitive turn’ in the youth justice systems of Western democracies. Against the background of this work, this project seeks to identify convergent and divergent trends in the youth justice systems of England, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland as well as the rationalities and discourses animating these. The results lend support to research emphasising the continued salience of national, regional and local factors on penal outcomes but also suggest the need to steer an analytical path somewhere between nomothetic (convergent) and idiographic (divergent) accounts.

Ageing, Justice, and Resource Allocation

Around the world the population is ageing in ways that pose new challenges for health care providers. To date these have mostly been formulated in terms of challenges created by increasing costs, and the focus has been squarely on life prolonging treatments. However, this focus ignores the ways in which many older people require life enhancing treatments to counteract the effects of physical and mental decline. This paper argues that in doing so it misses important aspects of what justice requires when it comes to older people.

Experiencing Youth Justice and Penality

Much of the recent literature on youth justice has focused on administrative aspects of the system and the socio-political contexts that have led to the ‘production’ of the youthful offender as a subject and locus of intervention. This has largely been driven by the extent to which youth justice has been crafted as a distinct penal sphere, evident in its unyoking from universal children’s services (Muncie and Goldson, 2013) and the establishment of separate agencies to administer and govern this ‘system’ (Souhami, 2014). Driven by policy hyperactivity and a plethora of legislation expanding the reach of the system, for much of the 1990s and 2000s increasing numbers of young people were brought under its gaze.

Particular attention has been paid to the impact of neo-liberal governance on the discourses, rationales and philosophies underpinning contemporary youth justice policy and practice. Writing specifically in the English and Welsh context, several authors have identified that the resulting ‘system’ embodies multiple, contradictory and competing discourses (Muncie, 2006; Fergusson, 2007; Gray, 2013). Within this ‘melting pot’ Fergusson (2007) notes the disjuncture between policy rhetoric, implementation and lived experience and Phoenix (2015) argues that systems-based analyses, much in favour amongst academics, foreclose a wider consideration of questions of what ‘justice’ actually means.

Recent attention towards the perspectives of practitioners working in this sphere has pointed to greater nuances than broader penal narratives suggest (see: Field, 2007; Briggs, 2013; Gray, 2013; Kelly and Armitage, 2015). Yet similar attention has not been given to experiences of youth justice (for an exception see – Phoenix and Kelly, 2013). However, it is precisely young people’s experiences, which would add significantly to current knowledge and potentially bridge the gap between discussions about penal philosophies, how youth justice policies are framed, how they are enacted and how they are experienced.

This chapter provides an overview of recent developments in the field of youth justice and penality in the United Kingdom. The chapter argues that a theoretical focus on macro-level trends (Hannah-Moffat and Lynch, 2012), alongside a narrowly defined research agenda, have largely excluded young people’s experiences of justice and punishment from contemporary analysis. Drawing on young people experiences of different aspects of youth justice in Northern Ireland and beyond, the chapter illuminates what a close understanding of lived experience can add to knowledge. In particular it demonstrates that the effects of interventions can be different to their aims and intentions; and that re-instating the youth experience can add support to calls for greater attention to wider issues of social justice.

Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language

This book provides the reader with a critical insight into the history and theory of copyright within contemporary legal and cultural discourse. It exposes as myth the orthodox history of the development of copyright law in eighteenth-century Britain and explores the way in which that myth became entrenched throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To this historical analysis are added two theoretical approaches to copyright not otherwise found in mainstream contemporary texts. Rethinking Copyright introduces the reader to copyright through the prism of the public domain before considering how best to locate copyright within the parameters of traditional property discourse. Underpinning these various historical and theoretical strands, the book explores the constitutive power of legal writing and the place of rhetoric in framing and determining contemporary copyright policy and discourse.

Commentary on Pope v. Curl (1741)

Decision of the Chancery Court concerning the unpublished correspondence of Alexander Pope, in which Lord Chancellor Hardwicke draws a distinction between the ownership of a letter, as a physical document, and the right to authorise the first publication of that letter, a right which he concludes remains with the author of the same.
Drawing upon the Public Records Office Archives the commentary explores the background to, and substance of, the decision, the nature and significance of epistolary correspondence in eighteenth century society, and subsequent related commentary and case-law. The commentary argues that the decision is of particular significance in the development of the concept of the author's text as intangible property.

Courts and Consociations:How human rights courts may destabilize power-sharing settlements

We consider the use of consociational arrangements to manage ethno-nationalist, ethno-linguistic, and ethno-religious conflicts, and their compatibility with non-discrimination and equality norms. Key questions include to what extent, if any, consociations conflict with the dictates of global justice and the liberal individualist preferences of international human rights institutions, and to what extent consociational power-sharing may be justified to preserve peace and the integrity of political settlements. In three critical cases, the European Court of Human Rights has considered equality challenges to important consociational practices, twice in Belgium and, most recently, in Sejdic and Finci, concerning the constitutional arrangements established for Bosnia Herzegovina under the Dayton Agreement. The Court’s recent decision in Sejdic and Finci has significantly altered the approach it previously took to judicial review of consociational arrangements in the Belgian cases. We seek to account for this change and assess its implications. We identify problematic aspects of the judgment and conclude that, although the Court’s decision indicates one possible trajectory of human rights courts’ reactions to consociations, this would be an unfortunate development because it leaves future negotiators in places riven by potential or manifest bloody ethnic conflicts with considerably less flexibility in reaching a settlement. That in turn may unintentionally contribute to sustaining such conflicts and make it more likely that advisors to negotiators will advise them to exclude regional and international courts from having standing in the management of political settlements.

From Francis Hutcheson to James McCosh: Irish Presbyterians and Defining the Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

This article examines the disputes amongst Irish Presbyterians about the teaching of moral philosophy by Professor John Ferrie in the college department of the Royal Belfast Academical Institution in the early nineteenth century and the substantive philosophical and theological issues that were raised. These issues have largely been ignored by Irish historians, but a discussion of them is of general relevance to historians of ideas as they illuminate a series of broader questions about the definition and development of Scottish philosophy. These are represented in the move from two philosophers who had strong connections with Irish Presbyterianism—Francis Hutcheson, the early eighteenth-century moral sense philosopher and theological moderate from County Down, and James McCosh, nineteenth-century exponent of modified Common Sense philosophy at Queen's College Belfast and a committed evangelical. In particular, this article addresses three important themes—the definition and character of ‘the Scottish philosophy’, the relationship between evangelicalism and Common Sense philosophy, and the process of development and adaptation that occurred in eighteenth-century Scottish thought during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Elaborating Justice for Victims at the International Criminal Court: Beyond Rhetoric and the Hague

Justice for victims has often been invoked as the raison d’être of international criminal justice, by punishing perpetrators of international crimes. This article attempts to provide a more holistic account of justice for victims by examining victims’ needs, interests, and rights. The International Criminal Court itself includes participation, protection and reparation for victims, indicating they are important stakeholders. This article also suggests that victims are integral to the purpose of the ICC in ending impunity by ensuring transparency of proceedings. However, there are limits to the resources and capacity of the ICC, which can only investigate and prosecute selected crimes. To overcome this justice gap, this article directs the debate towards a victim-orientated agenda to complementarity, where state parties and the Assembly of State Parties should play a greater role in implementing justice for victims domestically. This victim-orientated complementarity approach can be achieved through new ASP guidelines on complementarity, expanding universal jurisdiction, or seeking enforcement and cooperation through regional and international bodies and courts, such asUniversal Periodic Review or the African Court’s International Criminal Law Section. In the end, ifwe are serious about delivering justice for victims we need to move beyond the rhetoric, with realistic expectations of what the ICC can achieve, and concentrate our attention to what states should bedoing to end impunity.