Children's Views on Children's Right to Work:Reflections from Belfast

The purpose of this article is to examine children’s attitudes regarding the right to work. The article is based on comments made by 245 15-year-old children on child employment and is supported by focus group interviews with 56 boys and 38 girls and tape-recorded interviews with 15 working pupils. One of most dominant themes to emerge from the data is children’s perception that they have a right to work. The article examines the legislation regarding child employment in Northern Ireland and the role of the state in determining the legislation. The author suggests that within this legislation, children are seen as vulnerable and in need of protection. Traditionally the protection of children in the workforce has been achieved by limiting the hours they can work and the occupations they can enter. Yet when children’s own views are taken into account, they move beyond the limits of protecting them through exclusion to suggesting frameworks whereby their protection may be achieved by empowering them within the labour market.

Linnaeus was right all along: Ulva and Enteromorpha are not distinct genera.

Ulva, one of the first Linnaean genera, was later circumscribed to consist of green seaweeds with distromatic blades, and Enteromorpha Link was established for tubular forms. Although several lines of evidence suggest that these generic constructs are artificial, Ulva and Enteromorpha have been maintained as separate genera. Our aims were to determine phylogenetic relationships among taxa currently attributed to Ulva, Enteromorpha, Umbraulva Bae et I.K. Lee and the monotypic genus Chloropelta C.E. Tanner, and to make any nomenclatural changes justified by our findings. Analyses of nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer DNA (ITS nrDNA) (29 ingroup taxa including the type species of Ulva and Enteromorpha), the chloroplast-encoded rbcL gene (for a subset of taxa) and a combined data set were carried out. All trees had a strongly supported clade consisting of all Ulva, Enteromorpha and Chloropelta species, but Ulva and Enteromorpha were not monophyletic. The recent removal of Umbraulva olivascens (P.J.L. Dangeard) Bae et I.K. Lee from Ulva is supported, although the relationship of the segregate genus Umbraulva to Ulvaria requires further investigation. These results, combined with earlier molecular and culture data, provide strong evidence that Ulva, Enteromorpha and Chloropelta are not distinct evolutionary entities and should not be recognized as separate genera. A comparison of traits for surveyed species revealed few synapomorphies. Because Ulva is the oldest name, Enteromorpha and Chloropelta are here reduced to synonymy with Ulva, and new combinations are made where necessary.

The Equalization of Effective Communicative Freedom: Democratic Justice in the Constitutional State and Beyond

Jurgen Habermas takes the realization of rights through the democratic self-organization of legal communities to be the normative core of emancipatory politics. In this article I explore the implications of this claim in relation to the requirements of justice. I argue that Habermas's discourse theory of democratic legitimacy presupposes a substantive principle of justice that demands the equalization of effective communicative freedom for all structurally constituted social groups in any constitutional state. This involves the elimination of a range of structural injustices rooted in the complex interrelationships between political, economic and cultural orders. In the final section I sketch briefly the implications of this analysis in the context of ongoing globalization processes. It is suggested that the most effective way to establish a just system of global governance is to equalize effective communicative freedom among nation-states.

La justificación del Derecho de Resistencia en el Estado Constitucional Democrático de Derecho: algunas reflexiones iusfilosóficas

This paper aims to demonstrate how in the constitutional rule of law the right of resistance plays a key role in its development, its adaptation to the changing reality of society and the satisfaction of the interests of all the people involved in this common project. Firstly, we will analyze how individuals or social groups must act when they suffer injustices due to state acts or laws that violate their most basic rights. In some cases, we believe that they have the right to exercise any form of weak resistance that they deem appropriate to present at the public scene a cause that must be socially and politically recognized. Secondly, we will see what happens when the rule of law itself is in danger. In that case, we believe that society will have not only the right but the duty to exercise the resistance in its most extreme form to defend the existing constitutional order of any illegitimate authority that seeks to impose itself on it and the sovereignty of the people.

Tenant Right and Agrarian Society in Ulster 1600-1870

The book has been described by various Irish historians as "the definitive treatment of that most peculiar institution--the Ulster Custom--and its tangled relationship with irish land and politics" (Liam Kennedy), "a brilliantly reconceptualised sketch of the Irish land question" (David Miller). "All previous discussion," according to another reviewer, "must take second place to Dowling's exhaustive survey, which draws on the whole range of surviving estate records to examine the theory and practice of tenant right across three centuries" (Sean Connolly).