The Passion for Reason
Moral values play a great role in legal argumentation and decision making. To be sure, both are based on such institutional sources as statutes, precedents, legislative history etc. Yet, even justice is obviously relevant in legal reasoning. This has been the case since times immemorial, e.g. in Rome (where the common law, ius gentium was supposed to express justice), England (law and equity) and also Scandinavia (“lov” and “dom”). In modem law, the statutes are sometimes “read” in the way alien to a layman, in order to obtain reasonable decisions.
A Secular Alternative: Primo Levi's Place in American Holocaust Discourse
This essay sketches Primo Levi's emergence from obscurity to near-universal acclaim in the United States, where he is now considered one of the most important witnesses of the Nazi genocide and a significant twentieth-century writer. As he emerged into the American public sphere, Levi came to occupy a particular discursive place as a representative bearer of Enlightenment values. Among intellectuals across the political spectrum his reputation for sobriety and secular reason stands against other, more dominant tendencies in American Holocaust culture, such as the sacralization of the genocide often associated with another survivor-writer, Elie Wiesel.
Reconceptualizing Vagrancy and Reconstructing the Vagrant: A Socio-Legal Analysis of Criminal Law Reform in Canada, 1953-1972
This article explores significant reforms to the vagrancy section of the Criminal Code during the mid-to-late twentieth century. By locating the reforms within their unique social, political, and economic climates, I examine how they reconceptualized the offence of vagrancy and concomitantly reconstructed the vagrant as a social problem. The reforms played a seminal role in reducing the number of vagrancy offences, eventually leading to the demise of vagrancy in the criminal law. Yet, while the "vagrant" ceased to exist in the law, the law still continues to preserve vestiges of the vagrant in a highly gendered manner.