ADR and the Professional Responsibility of Lawyers
Should the meaning of “ethical” lawyering change in the ADR context? This article contains several essays arguing that change is needed, that current ethics rules and codes must be adjusted, and new rules must be drafted that respond to the subtleties and complexities of the issues raised in ADR legal practice. Professor Carrie Menkel-Meadow provides an overview of the major ethical issues facing lawyers in ADR practice and reviews the current ethics rules landscape in ADR. Professor Robert Cochran offers a proposal to amend the current professional responsibility rules to include a mandate for advising clients of ADR options. Professor Kimberlee Kovach argues in favor of a new ethic for non-adversarial representation. Finally, Professor Stephen Huber addresses a number of critical ethical issues implicated by arbitration practice.
SOCIAL MEDIA AND PROTESTS ENGAGEMENT: WHAT’S GENDER GOT
TO DO WITH IT?
The interpretation of RDA Rule 9.7 regarding gender when identifying persons by Library of Congress (LC) and the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) reinforce regressive conceptions of gender identity. The rule instructs catalogers to record gender when identifying persons, and although RDA gives catalogers the flexibility to record more than two gender labels, LC limits Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) catalogers to a binary label: male, female, or not known. In this article, the authors challenge gender as a descriptive attribute for personal names, critique how LC is instructing NACO catalogers to record elements about gender, and make recommendations to address describing persons in LC authority records. INTRODUCTION It is a rare and exceptional experience for a library cataloger to catalog a work with its actual creator sitting at their side. One of us had this opportunity recently, and it was revelatory. The author was fascinated with the various codes and the nuanced rules we follow to create our MARC records; our work wasn‟t boring to this author. Once the bibliographic record was complete and to the author‟s liking, we moved on to the authority record. We worked our way through the elements to create a perfect RDA compliant authority record. But when we reached MARC tag 375, the field for the RDA element for gender, the author was confused about why that information mattered. This author did not feel comfortable disclosing and codifying gender in the authority record. Interestingly, this author was a cisgender woman with a name that our culture commonly reads as female; “cisgender” is a term commonly used to refer to non-transgender people who identify with the gender which they were assigned at birth. Most catalogers would simply transcribe the gender as female from a glance at the title page, the author‟s biographical information, or physical appearance. But the author explained that gender was simply not an important aspect of the work in question, or the body of work the author intended to produce. Indeed, the author expressed hope that one day gender would no longer be a social marker. It made no sense that the Library of Congress would be interested in the author‟s gender; why would LC care about that! Once the cataloger explained that 375 was an optional field, we decided together to omit that information. By the end of our meeting, we had a lovely authority record that would give the reader multiple ways to identify the author and access this work--but not by the gender of the author. This exchange highlights the problems related to recording gender as directed by the Library of Congress interpretation of the RDA rule. Had the cataloger not known that the author didn‟t want to disclose gender, they would have included that information in her authority record in accordance to LC/NACO best-practices to include as much information as possible. According to LC, the fact that the author had a “feminine” name was sufficient to direct the cataloger to assume female gender identity and encode the 375 field as such. In the Library of Congress online training webinar, RDA for NACO Catalogers: 2d. MARC 21 in NACO RDA Authority Records: Personal Names at the 07:14:02 minute mark, LC trainer Melanie Polutta says, “We're interested in knowing what your gender is--you know, what's your physical equipment? Not who you go to bed with.” Polutta goes on to explain how to make a “safe assumption” of someone‟s gender based on their name and biographical information. For LC, gender is easy: to know about oneself, to determine on behalf of others, and to codify forever in a MARC authority record. QUEERING GENDER While this simplistic approach to understanding gender is resonant to many catalogers, authors, and readers, it rings much less true from the perspective of a queer analytic. Our critique of the RDA rule is grounded in queer theory, a field that provides a useful theoretical frame for rethinking the stable, fixed categories and systems of naming that characterize library knowledge organization schemes. Queer theory is particularly useful for understanding new ways of conceptualizing sex and gender that challenge LC and NACO‟s narrow articulation of these complex identities. Arguing against the idea that sex and gender can be fixed for all time, scholars like David Halperin, Eve Sedgwick, and Judith Butler have articulated the ways that our social understanding of sex and gender is dependent on social, political, and historical location. Critical to queer theory is a resistance to social practices that freeze identities in time and universalize them, erasing the real differences that accompany same-sex sexuality on the scales of time and place. For example, David Valentine has convincingly shown in his work on the development of categories of gender in public health scenarios that emergent gender identities are always negotiated by the individual in relation to a structure or system of authority. The adoption of an identity category often says more about the category and its context than it does about the people who take on that identity category. For queer theorists, gender and sex are always negotiated and socially constituted; fixing them as RDA asks catalogers to do denies the shifting and contextual nature of gender identities. Given this analysis, RDA rule 9.7 poses problems on two grounds. First, the rule directs the cataloger to describe the gender of the author as part of the project of constructing access points and relationships between bibliographic entities. In this sense, the gender marker is like format or the number of pages: an objective description of reality. The author really has a single gender that could really be captured by the cataloger. Queer theory, as well as the lived experience of authors of non-normative genders, tells us this is not so. The second problem concerns retrieval. By marking the gender of the author using a fixed category, the LC interpretation of RDA reifies contemporary understandings of gender as a binary system with only two acceptable gender markers (male or female). Even if catalogers indicate gender using alternate labels, RDA‟s insistence on the relevance of gender as a descriptive attribute reifies regressive social binaries and is passively hostile to transgender individuals. The implications of this queer analysis for both descriptive cataloging and future retrieval systems are explored in more detail below. QUEERING LIBRARIES Using queer theory to describe problems with and interventions in cataloging and classification systems has produced a small but significant strand of research in information studies. Grant Campbell focused on the aboutness and meaning of gay and lesbian classification and the effect of subjectivity as a social construct. 6 Ben Christensen has described the tension between cataloging that emphasizes the particularity of an entity and that which emphasizes relevant sameness. Patrick Keilty uses Foucauldian understandings of borders and belonging to argue for classification as both productive and flattening of queer identities and desires. Roberto analyzed and critiqued LC classification as “passively hostile” for transgender users, arguing that both the classification and subject headings reinforce normative cultural boundaries that alienate transgender individuals. Melodie Fox critiqued the use of classical theories for library classification and subject construction, and applied prototype theory to concepts of sex and gender that raised many questions about the effectiveness of such categories. Drabinski used queer theory to ask whether the cataloging and classification of LGBTQ resources can ever be correct. While this literature has done much to bring queer theory to bear on critical questions in the field, this work has been confined to questions of subject access and classification. Queer theory has yet to be used as a frame for understanding and critiquing the contextual attributes--description of persons and names--found in authority files. While recent literature has addressed evolving name authority standards, the discussion has focused on international collaboration rather than descriptive construction. GENDER IN AUTHORITY FILES RDA is the first occurrence that library catalogers are being asked to describe people in a formal set of attributes. Gender is one of these new additions to the attributes recorded in the LC Name Authority File to adhere to the changes outlined in RDA. It is somewhat unclear how and why the element was even added in the first place. Before RDA rule 9.7, there was no specific directive by NACO to include any information about a person‟s gender in their authority file. How did gender become a descriptive element in RDA approved LC Authority Files? One primary objective of RDA was to incorporate the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model into the updated standard (RDA 0.3.1). The final draft of FRBR was published by IFLA in April 2009 and makes no mention of gender when defining the attributes of a person. By March 2009, the IFLA Working Group on Functional Requirements and Numbering of Authority Records (FRANAR) published the Functional Requirements for Authority Data (FRAD). In Section 4.1 Attributes of a Person is the first formal mention of gender. FRAD cites several sources for deriving the list of attributes for persons: IFLA‟s FRBR and Guidelines for Authority Records and References (GARR), the UNIMARC Manual -Authorities Format, Mandatory Data Elements for Internationally Shared Resources Records (MLAR), and the International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (ISAAR)(CPF)). FRBR, GARR, and MLAR make no mention of gender. ISAAR(CPF) makes only a mention of gender as part of its History element. The only resource that specifically mentions gender is the UNIMARC Manual -Authorities Format where it is a fixed lengt
Research on integral error calibrating system of high-voltage electric energy measurement device
To the question that there is no accuracy grade to the existed HV energy measuring system, a design scheme to calibrate the integer error of HV energy measuring device is provided in this paper. The hardware of the calibrating system, including test power source, signal source, power benchmark system, power source measuring and regulating circuit, has been introduced in detail. The function of the monitoring and operating software is also discussed in the paper.