What Exactly Is It All About? Puzzled Comments from a French Legal Scholar on the NBIC Convergence

The techno-scientific development has no frontier, but the legal systems still take roots in local and cultural references. French Law is built on a continental model and conveys values and preferences of the French population, including an essential role given to the State and to textual requirements. Until now, French law has been modified to cope with new and emerging technologies issues with the idea that they can be taken one after the other, on the fringes of the classic legal problems. Do the announcement of a convergence between Nanotechnologies, Biotechnologies, the sciences of Information and Cognition (NBIC) change the situation? According to “converging technologies” partisans, a lot of other deep perturbations may occur. Therefore, it could be pertinent to assess the legal implications of NBIC convergence. But trying to do so, a French legal scholar may first feel (and express) perplexity. What is the “convergence NBIC”? To answer, do we have to wonder which reality hides behind the expression or is it necessary to admit that the speeches are here more important to analyze than a hypothetical realization? Does it imply new legal questions? Do we need new methods to enlighten what is at stake? Is it a new challenge, stimulating the imagination of lawyers and legal scholars, or, on the contrary, is it a new illustration of the Economy of the promises, revealing big risks of vain (or inappropriate) intellectual and normative production? This article is dedicated to enlighten the important difficulties which mark out the road towards the answers to the legal questions raised by the “NBIC convergence”.     

Aid for Refugees: Religion,Migration, and Poor Relief in Sixteenth-Century Geneva

During the sixteenth century, migration of mainly French Protestants into Geneva resulted in a significant refugee community dedicated to discipline and poor relief. This article examines the ongoing impact of migration on the formation of religious communities and their correlation with the development of poor relief funds in a leading Reformation city. The social dislocation of religious refugees fostered a high commitment to their new identity as advocates of the Reformed religion and proponents of poor relief for foreigners. John Calvin, chief minister and French immigrant, articulated his ideals for establishing a truly Christianized community through the institutions of the church, the consistory and the Bourse française (French Fund) to support the formation of a distinctive religious identity. This article argues that aid for the refugees became an integral part of establishing this religious and social reformation from the 1540s to the 1560s as waves of refugees landed in Geneva.     

Between Theory and Practice: A Dilemma for the Morawetz‐Wittgenstein View of Law

Drawing deeply from Wittgenstein's later works, Thomas Morawetz has articulated a vision of legal decision making according to which it is not a defect, but inherent in the very nature of law, for there to be disagreement among judges regarding their legal decision‐making strategies. Central to Morawetz's account is the notion of a legal grammatical proposition. This essay argues that because legal grammatical remarks lack any truth‐value, they cannot play a justificatory role. This would imply that the rule of law is no more justifiable than the violent alternatives used by anarchists and religious fanatics.     

Power, Medical Knowledge, and the Rhetorical Invention of “Typhoid Mary”

This essay examines the interrelationship between legal, medical, and public knowledge in the case of Mary Mallon. The author argues that although Mallon was never convicted of any crime, she was under the constant surveillance of medical authorities because of her characterization as a recalcitrant “typhoid carrier.” Mallon's physical body became a contested site of controversy as various medical and legal communities fought for the legitimization of their own bodies of knowledge. Modern health care theorists and practitioners still use a plethora of “Typhoid Mary” narratives in their discussions of the relationship between jurisprudence, ethics, and medicine.     

Muslim women’s views on dress code and the hijaab: some issues for education

Recent French and Turkish bans on Muslim women wearing Islamic head coverings in schools, colleges and universities starts this discussion of religious discrimination and the value of inter‐religious open dialogue in which neither side holds entrenched positions. The paper links dialogue with the ethnographic methodology and uses this to examine the varied attitudes of Muslim women towards their dress code. It locates this issue in the critical educational concern for equity and argues for dialogue to inform educational provision to help the next generation tackle global insecurities.     

The venality of human body parts and products in French law and common law

The successive bioethics laws in France have constantly argued that the human body is not for sale and consecrated an absolute principle of free and anonymous donations, whether of semen, ova, blood, tissues or organs. Nonetheless, this position is not shared by all countries. These legal divergences upset today our moral principles and the development of these practices leads us to question the legal status of human biological material and its gradual commodification. This paper outlines the current law principles that protect people's interests in their bodies, excised body parts and tissues without conferring the rights of full legal ownership in French law and in Common law. Contrary to what many people believe, people do not legally 'own' their bodies, body parts or tissues. However, they do have some legal rights in relation to their bodies and excised body material. For lawyers, the exact relationship people have with their bodies has raised a host of complex questions and long debates about the status we should grant to human body parts. The significance of this issue is due to two reasons:first, because of the imperative protection we have to assure to human dignity and then, because of the economic value which is attached to human products.     

Defeasibility,Law, and Argumentation: A Critical View from an Interpretative Standpoint

The phenomenon of defeasibility has long been a central theme in legal literature. This essay aims to shed new light on that phenomenon by clarifying some fundamental conceptual issues. First, the most widespread definition of legal defeasibility is examined and criticized. The essay shows that such a definition is poorly constructed, inaccurate and generates many problems. Indeed, the definition hides the close relationship between legal defeasibility and legal interpretation. Second, this essay argues that no new definition is needed. I will show that from an interpretative standpoint, there is nothing special about legal defeasibility. Contrary to what some authors maintain, no unique or privileged source of legal defeasibility exists, nor are there privileged arguments to justify it. Specifically, legal defeasibility refers to interpretative outcomes deriving from interpretative arguments that, on the one hand, are very different from one another, and, on the other, are often employed to justify different interpretative outcomes. In the legal field, the problems related to defeasibility have little in common with the problems that this label covers in other areas—such as logic or epistemology—and they are nothing but the well-known problems related to legal interpretation. In conclusion, this paper argues that as far as legal argumentation is concerned, the notion of legal defeasibility lacks explanatory power, and it should be abandoned.

     

The law and lawyers: Through psychodynamic eyes

Abstract

This article looks at some of the unconscious processes that operate among solicitors in general practice. In particular it considers various defences against the anxiety felt by solicitors partly because of the nature of their work and partly because of what is projected onto them by their clients. It argues that these defences have become embodied in the legal system itself as ‘socially structured defence mechanisms’ (Menzies Lyth 1989).     

Language and Intersubjectivity: Multiplicity in a Bilingual Treatment

This paper explores the psychodynamics of analytic work conducted between a French patient and an American analyst who are both bilingual in French and English. The depth of the patient's early traumatic relational history is initially bound and cloistered in French, her mother tongue. The author argues that through the symbolization of a series of initially dissociated enactments a transitional space is created in the treatment, facilitating the integration of the patient's (and analyst's) early French-speaking selves. Language is considered as a container for both dissociative and associative forms of multiplicity, as it serves to mediate an external and internal intersubjective expansion both between and within patient and analyst.     

The Conjunction of a French Rhetoric of Unity with a Competing Nationalism in New Caledonia: A Critical Discourse Analysis

France and New Caledonia are currently involved in an ongoing debate surrounding the independence of the latter from the former that will lead to referenda in 2018–2022. The main stakeholders in the negotiation process are France, the Caldoche population of the island agglomeration and its Kanak inhabitants. Most critical discourse studies analyse texts as expressions of power entrenched in monologues. In this paper, however, the debate between the social actors is seen as a plurilogue. The study argues that the dominant interactants propagate a rhetoric of unity and homogeneity, aiming to further marginalise the Kanak people and other minority groups in New Caledonian society by rendering them invisible. It further argues that the French political power aims to persuade the other groups to accept the reality of a common destiny as a given truth. The paper combines Systemic Functional Linguistics and Pragma-dialectics, and incorporates postcolonial and poststructuralist perspectives into a critical study of discourse samples, taken from a larger corpus of French data, across various genres and registers. The analysis reveals that the French rhetoric of unity is built upon Republican principles inherent to neo-colonialist ideology. It also shows that the French rhetoric is being reproduced by local settler interactants, based on values that pertain to Caldoche nationalist ideology. Both French and Caldoche ideologies are in discord with Kanak socialist ideology. By exposing the existing power inequalities the study does not only contribute to defending the Kanak minority discourse, but also emphasises the rights for recognition and self-determination of the Kanak indigenous people of New Caledonia.     

From the stage to the laboratory: magicians, psychologists, and the science of illusion

In 1894, French psychologist Alfred Binet published an article on the psychology of conjuring. By observing five magicians perform in his laboratory, he was hoping to gain a better understanding of the psychological processes responsible for inducing illusions in an audience. This article focuses on the subjects of these experiments and their world. It attempts to explain why five men belonging to a profession in which secrecy was vital agreed to enter the laboratory and reveal their tricks. It argues that magicians saw themselves as men of science and that, by entering Binet's laboratory, they were responding to an opportunity to participate in a world to which they wished to belong.     

Transversal-Universals in Discourse Ethics: Towards a Reconcilable Ethics Between Universalism and Communitarianism

This paper discusses the possibility of an ethics of difference. It begins with an introduction to current poststructural and critical theories in order to show their significance for transcultural politics and ethics. Its theme is formulated in terms of the debate between the affirmation of ethical cognitivism cast in the form of universalism and the advocacy of moral skepticism in the mode of communitarianism. Distancing itself from the idea of universal morality, this paper attempts to respond to the challenge of both communitarians and deconstructionists in contemporary French poststructuralism. In the end, it argues for transversality in place of universality.     

Phonotactic constraints help to overcome effects of schwa deletion in French

In a crossmodal priming experiment, visual targets (e.g. RENARD, 'fox') were auditorily primed by either an intact [see text] 'the fox' or reduced form [see text] 'the fox' of the word. When schwa deletion gave rise to an initial cluster that respected the phonotactic constraints of French (e.g. [lapluz] 'the lawn' in which /pl/ is a legal word beginning in French), there was a processing cost for the targets primed by the reduced form of the word compared to intact primes (e.g. [see text] 'the lawn'). However, when schwa deletion produced an initial cluster that violated the phonotactic constraints of French (e.g. [see text], where /Rn/ is not allowed as a word beginning), there was no penalty for targets primed by reduced compared to intact forms of the word. Assuming that listeners change their phonemic percept when confronted with phonotactically illegal sequences (Segui, Frauenfelder, & Hallé, 2001), phonotactic constraints may help to restore the deleted schwa in sequences like le renard [see text] in French.     

Therapeutic jurisprudence and changing conceptions of legal scholarship

This article traces changes in the nature of legal scholarship and illustrates how therapeutic jurisprudence reflects changing conceptions of the law and legal scholarship. It argues that therapeutic jurisprudence may be regarded as a mental health law counterpart to ?New Public Law,”? and shows that questions asked by therapeutic jurisprudence scholars parallel closely those asked by public law scholars.     

Learning to spell from reading: General knowledge about spelling patterns influences memory for specific words

Adults often learn to spell words during the course of reading for meaning, without intending to do so. We used an incidental learning task in order to study this process. Spellings that contained double n, r and t which are common doublets in French, were learned more readily by French university students than spellings that contained less common but still legal doublets. When recalling or recognizing the latter, the students sometimes made transposition errors, doubling a consonant that often doubles in French rather than the consonant that was originally doubled (e.g., tiddunar recalled as tidunnar). The results, found in three experiments using different nonwords and different types of instructions, show that people use general knowledge about the graphotactic patterns of their writing system together with word-specific knowledge to reconstruct spellings that they learn from reading. These processes contribute to failures and successes in memory for spellings, as in other domains.     

Who May Carry Out Protective Deterrence?

Anthony Ellis argues that institutional punishment occurs automatically in a way analogous to mechanical deterrents, and given that issuing real threats is justified for self-defence, institutional punishment, intended to protect society via deterrence, can be justified without violating the Kantian constraint against using persons as means only. But institutional punishments are not in fact executed automatically: they must be carried out by moral agents. Ellis fails to provide a basis for those agents to justify the performance of their legal duties.     

How much Latin should a rabbi know? State finance and rabbinical education in nineteenth-century France

In 1829, the French government authorized the establishment of anofficial national rabbinical academy charged with creating amodern French rabbinate that would facilitate the integration ofFrench Jewry. The most effective method of achieving this goal,however, remained the subject of continuous debate, both withinthe government and within the Jewish Consistory (the officialJewish administration of France) which oversaw the school operation. State involvementintensified after 1831, when the government assumed theresponsibility for the Jewish religious budget. Thereafter, therabbinical school budget depended upon the government's politicaland financial support. Under these circumstances, the Jewish administration neededto pay careful attention to government expectations for theschool and its students. The study of Latin and Greekconstituted one of the focal points for debate between theConsistory and the State, and generated discussion within bothgovernment and Jewish circles. Rabbinical students studiedclassical languages as a regular part of their education; thedegree of emphasis placed upon these subjects, however, variedover time. This article argues that the Latin issue gainedgreater importance as a result of the financial relationshipbetween Judaism and State in nineteenth-century France, and thatthis relationship gave the State considerable leverage in shapingthe curriculum at the French rabbinical school. For schooladministrators, these political and budgetary issues necessitateda course of study delicately balanced between government andJewish ideological goals and the practical realities of running arabbinical school.     

The Euthanasia Debate in Germany - What's the Fuss?

ABSTRACT Both opponents and proponents of Singer's right to speak about euthanasia have concentrated on the tenability of his claims. They have ignored the question of what legitimate grounds there are for suppressing academic discussion, and have failed to take into account the discussion of freedom of speech in recent legal theory. To do this is the aim of my paper. Section I claims that Singer's position is immoral. Section 2 turns to the question of whether it is protected by freedom of speech, irrespective of its merits. I reject two lines of defence for Singer's opponents, that they had no opportunity to present their case, and the Kantian idea of the primacy of practical reason. Section 3 turns to a defence from legal theory. It argues that Singer's views do not pose the kind of threat to other legal and moral values which would license a suspension of his freedom of expression. I conclude that it is illegitimate to silence Singer, since he does not deny the right to live of his disabled opponents, but legitimate to protest against him, since he denies that some of their lives are worth living, in disregard of their own preferences.     

Exploring New and Renewed Eco‐Spiritualities

This essay discusses five recent books, written in French, that contribute to refection in environmental ethics. Francophone literature on the topic is marked by resonant and divergent concerns, and rooted in a geography, politics, and history different from North America and marked by distinctive lines of intellectual influence. Jean‐Claude Eslin proposes recovering ecological resources from the Christian tradition and also suggests imagining new images of God: notably, God as pilote rather than artisan. Dominique Bourg takes a multi‐disciplinary approach that emphasizes the spiritual conditions for relating to the world ecologically and economically; he argues for sobriété (austerity) as a spiritual disposition and an economic model. Baptiste Morizot develops diplomacy as an ethical, political, and spiritual model for cohabiting with wolves, whose return to the French countryside has been highly controversial. Nastassja Martin offers an anthropological study of the indigenous Gwich’in community of Fort Yukon, Alaska that accentuates the mix of Protestant missional influences and Gwich’in spiritual affirmations and practices at play in their relationship to the nonhuman world. Attending to this literature may helpfully decenter anglophone debates and enrich their conceptual vocabulary.