Oxford University Press's Blog, page 623

How well do you know the James Bond songs? [quiz]

Very soon now, we’ll find out who sings the next James Bond song. SPECTRE, the superspy’s twenty-fifth outing, will be coming out in the fall. But the song will be more like the thirtieth or so, depending on how you count. Most of us don’t remember most of these … “Goldfinger,” sure, sure, the one that Madonna did, “Live and Let Die.” But beyond that things can get iffy surprisingly fast. So why not make sure you’re ready for the announcement, for the release, and for the film by taking our quick quiz? How well you know the Bond songs?

 

Featured Image: Sean Connery as James Bond. (c) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. and Danjaq, LLC. via 007.com

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Brand management in the internet age: new options, new concerns

Starting in 2012, the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) began to revolutionize the internet with the release of a vast number of new top-level domain spaces. While most attorneys, and indeed the general public, are familiar with many of the commonly-used TLD spaces (e.g., .com, .net, .edu,), with the launch of well over one thousand new spaces (available in the near future), simply registering your client’s business name in one or two extensions may not prove sufficient to reach their target audiences. And, perhaps more importantly, failing to understand the nuances of domain name law sufficiently well to protect their brands from cybersquatters or online counterfeiting shops may land you in a difficult position in years to come.

Domain names are increasingly becoming valuable business assets, the portal through which your clients reach a larger and larger portion of their customers as people become more reliant on online resources. According to Verisign, over 294 million domains are currently registered, a 6.5% increase from 2014; the internet is the business of today. Selecting the correct website (or sites) to showcase your client is a tricky business, requiring not only the calculated choice of instantly recognizable, easily remembered strings, but also the decision as to which TLDs to register in, and which to leave aside. In order to navigate these options, you must become familiar with the registration policies of the various spaces; which are designated for open use, and which are restricted to a select group of individuals or companies. If a suspected cybersquatter employs your client’s name, you must be aware of which dispute resolution mechanisms are at your disposal, and whether your client will qualify as a registrant in the space in order to receive a transfer should your case prove successful.

Image: ‘The Ring of ccTLDs #3’ (Country-Code Top-Level Domain), Photo by Grey Hargreaves, CC by 2.0, via Flickr.

An added consideration are the country-specific domains, which in recent years have skyrocketed in popularity. Each country has a designated code, assigned to the root zone by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and each nation has the right to determine the registration requirements, restrictions, and dispute resolution mechanisms for its space. Although generally less well-known than the generic top-level domains (gTLDs), many of these country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs) are highly popular within their geographic or demographic scope. Although .com is still globally the most highly-utilized space, the both .tk (Tokelau) and .de (Germany) outrank the next most popular gTLD space, .net. If your client conducts business overseas, or has a well-known online presence, it is essential to take ccTLDs into consideration.

It is worth mentioning in this context that both ccTLDs and the new gTLDs covered by ICANN’s launch have the potential to employ non-ASCII characters. This means that even the TLD extension, not just the domain string, may be written in non-English scripts. In ICANN’s latest application round, scripts ranging from Russian to Chinese and Hindi to Arabic were requested, many of which have already been delegated.

To date, 722 of the new gTLD spaces have been delegated, meaning that a whole panoply of new options are now, or will soon be available to your clients. With more choices, however, come more concerns in terms of monitoring and protection. You and your clients must decide whether to adopt an aggressive protection strategy or to maintain defensive registrations (to prevent their use by unauthorized third parties). Developing a consistent, effective approach is essential to good domain portfolio management.

But it is difficult to get a handle on all of these new practices. ICANN’s launch process was a complicated affair, even for industry regulars, and like any specialized area of law domain names employ their own (often highly confusing) jargon. When faced with a series of cyberquatters in unfamiliar spaces, the task of sorting our your client’s options and available remedial methods can feel overwhelming. Few centralized resources exit to assist less-experienced counsel in locating the correct policies and procedures, not to mention the wide array of new protection mechanisms specific to the recently-released gTLD spaces. These include the Trademark Clearinghouse database for registered marks, the Uniform Rapid Suspension mechanism, the Public Interest Commitment Dispute Resolution Mechanism and the oversight process for ICANN Accountability, all of which are recent additions to the domain name legal landscape with the new TLD launch.

Featured Image Credit: ‘Mouse, Startup, Notebooks’, Photo by StartupStockPhotos, CC0 Public Domain, via Pixabay.

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Is the glass half full or will trouble for lawyers prevail?

As new students dive into life as a 1L, recent graduates await their bar results and lawyers continue to soldier on in their ever-changing, ever-growing profession. Legal ethics scholar Deborah L. Rhode, author of The Trouble with Lawyers, and law professor Benjamin H. Barton, author of Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession, joined us to chat about a few hot topics in law including education, diversity, happiness, and the future—is the glass half full or will trouble for lawyers prevail?

With various proposals hoping to overhaul the standard law education, which do you think include the most viable options?

Deborah L. Rhode: The most important reform in legal education would be to change accreditation standards to allow schools to provide one-year, two-year, and three-year degrees, with limited licensing for those who choose to pursue an education shorter than the standard education. This change would allow diversity in light of the different legal tasks that lawyers offer and the different missions of law schools. The current one-size-fits-all structure stifles innovation and leaves many students both under- and over-prepared to meet societal needs. Graduates are overqualified to offer many forms of routine assistance at affordable costs, but are often underqualified in practical and interdisciplinary skills. Accreditation structures have failed to recognize in form what is true in fact. Legal practice is becoming increasingly specialized, and it makes little sense to require the same training for a Wall Street securities lawyer and a small-town family practitioner. Three years in law school and passage of a bar exam are neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee proficiency in many areas where needs are greatest, such as uncontested divorces, landlord-tenant matters, immigration, or bankruptcy. The diversity in America’s legal demands argues for corresponding diversity in legal education.

Benjamin Barton: Law school should be much cheaper—via shorter programs, lower cost instruction, or fewer administrators. Between 1985 and 2011, law school tuition rose more than 1000 percent for in-state residents at public institutions and more than 420 percent at private institutions. Indebtedness has also skyrocketed. In just the last decade, the average amount of law school debt rose from $46,499 to $75,728 at public schools and from $70,147 to a whopping $124,950 at private law schools. Full freight at some law schools can now run over $250,000 including living expenses. These increases in tuition occurred at the same time that the market for lawyers peaked and fell backwards over the last 25 years. Law schools became much more expensive exactly as a legal education became less valuable. 

A recent article in the New York Times offered a survey declaring that lawyers in public service jobs were the happiest. What can be done to improve a lawyer’s quality of life across the board?

Rhode: The most important change would be to reduce the prioritization on profit instead of other measures that improve the delivery of legal services as well as lawyers’ quality of life. More focus on pro bono services and mentoring is critical. Billable hour expectations need to be scaled back to manageable levels. Bleary, burned out lawyers do not provide cost-effective services to clients, and unrealistic hourly quotas make adequate accommodation of family needs impossible. Legal employers should do more to monitor lawyer satisfaction and to respond accordingly.

Barton: Anyone who is familiar with the happiness literature was unsurprised by these survey results. Nancy Levit and Douglas Linder’s excellent OUP book, The Happy Lawyer, lays out many studies that predict that the most highly paid lawyers in America work jobs that are unlikely to produce much life satisfaction. Given the basic elements of corporate law and some small firm jobs—constant pressure to bill more, limited control over one’s schedule, reliance upon third parties (partners or clients) for career advancement, forced personal responsibility for the well-being of (frequently irascible and implacable) clients—it is no wonder happiness rates are down. Alternative/virtual law firms that offer flexible schedules and reward efficiency over simple hours of billing offer the chance to increase happiness rates among private lawyers of all stripes.

The integration of modern technology has certainly helped the legal profession evolve. What are the benefits or downsides?

Rhode: Some forms of technology are a mixed blessing. They make it easier for lawyers to work from home but they also make it harder not to. Lawyers remained tethered to their workplaces, 24/7. Technology has also increased clients’ expectations of an immediate response, which complicates life for those with competing family or professional demands. Other aspects of technology are more of a win-win. They enable more cost-effective services and ways for consumers to access legal information without expensive professional assistance.

Barton: I am an avowed techno-optimist and think that technology has been a massive boon to consumers and lawyers alike. Consumers have more access to free or inexpensive legal information and legal services than ever before, thanks to the internet and public and private entrepreneurs. Consider the availability of statutes, regulations, or case law. An American with a smartphone and Google has more and readier access to the raw materials of American law than a Supreme Court Justice did just 30 years ago.

State Supreme Courts and legal aid societies have also been posting free, downloadable legal forms all over the country. LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer do so for a charge, often with inexpensive legal advice to boot. Modria offers low cost online dispute resolution as an alternative to the expense of litigation. These services are still in a relatively nascent state. As computerization improves, we will see access to justice improve for all but the very poorest Americans.  

Is lawyerly creativity and entrepreneurialism enough to save the legal profession? Is the post-lawyer bubble society of the future—a bleak future or a cause for optimism?

Rhode: I am, on balance, an optimist. The legal profession has been at the forefront of every major social reform movement in American society. The remaining challenge is for the bar to turn its own talents inward, and to insist on changes that will serve both professional and public interests. The challenges that confront lawyers are daunting and inescapable. Lawyers are facing a universe of rising competition from within and outside the profession. Social expectations for more cost-effective and accessible services are also increasing. The profession has no choice but to respond. That said, I think the barriers to innovation in the short term may be hard to surmount. The primary one involves the profession’s control over its own governance. Because courts have asserted inherent authority to regulate the practice of law and have so often deferred to the organized bar, the obstacles to truly progressive reforms are substantial. We can only hope that more leaders of the profession will step up to the challenge and demand structural changes that better serve public interests.

Barton: I am also an optimist. This is partially because the changes we are seeing are excellent news for consumers and the country as a whole. It is also because I believe strongly in the American lawyer. Nimble and entrepreneurial, the American lawyer has been part of America’s DNA from the beginning. Lawyers have faced worse crises than today’s and have always come roaring back.

In the nineteenth century period of Jacksonian Democracy, a broad based attack on American elites left the legal profession virtually unregulated in a majority of states. Any citizen in these states could appear in court or offer legal services for a fee. Bar associations disbanded and it looked like the legal profession might disappear altogether. Lawyers responded during the industrial revolution by becoming irreplaceable partners with all levels of businesses, and lawyer earnings boomed for 40 years.

Lawyers again faced an existential threat during the Depression, when the economy crumbled and earnings collapsed. Lawyer wages fell more than other professions like medicine or engineering. The situation was dire enough in 1935 that 1,500 lawyers, in a country that only had 160,000 lawyers, took a pauper’s oath in order to join a legal relief project under the Works Progress Administration. The post World War II period rang in another 45 years of unprecedented growth. Lawyers may never see multiple decades where earnings outpace inflation again, but it is also unlikely that the American legal profession will fade away any time soon.

In this challenging profession, what’s your best advice to those just entering the field?

Rhode: My most important advice is “Don’t settle.” At least not in the long run. In the short term, constraints of money, geography, family, and training may keep you in a job that is not personally fulfilling. The important thing is not to let inertia and tastes for an affluent lifestyle trap you in the long run. Your degree gives you enormous freedom to carve out a career that is professionally meaningful and that leaves space for family, pro bono, and personal pursuits that are important to your quality of life. Don’t settle for anything less.

Barton: Be entrepreneurial! We are in a period of radical change in the legal profession (and in all knowledge occupations). During times of change, jobs are lost and some skills become outmoded, but fortunes are also made. The successful lawyers of tomorrow will be innovative, by either offering legal services more efficiently and cheaply to more people or by proving to clients of all stripes that the expense of individualized, hourly work is justified. The lawyers that learn to do one or both of these things will have long and fruitful (and more fun) careers.

Image Credit: “Justice” by sparkle-motion. CC BY NC 2.0 via Flickr.

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Silencing Jean Louise: the media and Harper Lee

For a brief moment in July of 2015, the American news media exploded with headline stories about a work of literature, something of an unprecedented turn for the mass media. That this coverage should have focused almost exclusively on race issues and ignored the “new” volume’s revelations about gender issues in Lee’s novels is understandable. The explanation lies in the coincidence of the book’s publication with a series of wrenching racial events from Ferguson to Charleston and summarized in the “Black Lives Matter” campaign. Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, which had lingered for four decades in a vault before “discovery” and publication, turned out to carry a surprisingly realistic message about racism in America. The New York Times put its review about the “dark side” of Atticus Finch on the front page. CNN’s coverage carried the banners “‘Atticus Finch’ Was Racist and Segregationist” and “Readers Shocked by Portrayal of Atticus Finch.” Virtually every review and commentary piece repeated the same story.

Harper Lee’s bombshell of a book. CNN, July 14, 2015. 17 U.S.C. § 107: Fair Use

The New York Times, July 11, 2015 Edition. 17 U.S.C. § 107: Fair Use

Readers in the US and abroad were described as “devastated” and “disappointed” to learn that this version of Lee’s tale featured a bigot rather than a liberal hero. In a follow-up phone survey, the Times reported “that nearly six in 10 Americans, including heavy majorities of both whites and blacks, think race relations are generally bad, and that nearly four in 10 think the situation is getting worse.” Given that To Kill a Mockingbird has been the most frequently taught novel in American schools for decades, its reputed power to teach lessons of tolerance and racial liberalism appears to have been greatly exaggerated. As Isabel Wilkerson saw it, the “unmasking of the nation’s mythical conscience” was as necessary as taking down the Confederate flag.

While all this discussion was valuable, the characterization of Mockingbird upon which they relied often repeated the most wide-spread error in interpretations of the book: the assertion that the book is narrated by the six to eight-year old “Scout” Finch.

To understand Mockingbird, it is vitally important to maintain the distinction between the adult, first-person narrator Jean Louise and her childhood self.  We access Scout only through Jean Louise’s memories and stories. Jean Louise looks back upon her idealization of her father from a distance, rendering the child’s admiration with great success but placing it in a linguistic and social context that should make us aware of Atticus’s limitations and the ultimate practical futility of his liberalism, flaws many scholars have taken pains to demonstrate. Commentators and the general public seem to be remembering the Gregory Peck adaptation instead of Lee’s novel (see the special issue of Life Magazine featuring Peck reading the novel, a cover that unintentionally captures how Peck made the novel his own, and Atticus’s, story). The film silences Jean Louise’s voice, leaving only a few sentences of voiceover and expanding the role of Atticus in comparison to the novel. This creates the illusion that the story is told from the viewpoint of the child Scout, who is often positioned by the camera looking up to her father, an angle the audience must then share. In contrast, Mockingbird’s narrator rarely misses an opportunity to mock her community’s norms, especially about gender. Reacting to Aunt Alexandra’s effort to rein in her tomboy ways, Jean Louise writes, in decidedly adult language: “I felt the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary closing in on me, and for the second time in my life I felt like running away” (182). This exquisite phrasing, which also ties the tomboy’s imprisonment to the fate of Tom Robinson, does not emerge from the mouth of a six-year-old.

The Enduring Power of To Kill a Mockingbird, Life Books, 2015.

In both Watchman and Mockingbird, this distancing stems from Jean Louise’s—and Harper Lee’s—feminism, which is every bit as essential to the rebellious insights of these books as is Lee’s racial liberalism, if indeed they can be separated at all. Something queer is happening in Maycomb, as Truman Capote also saw when he placed his 1948 gay coming-of-age novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms in a fictional version of the town where he shared summers with the young Nelle Lee. Capote had probably discussed the book with Lee during visits back home, and she moved to New York the year after its publication, causing her father, A.C. Lee, to blame Capote for her daughter’s desire to move north to become a writer.

In studying Lee’s development, I puzzled over the change from her college writing to Mockingbird. As a student she penned biting satires, including a farce about Southern race politics that pulled no punches. Clearly Watchman was the missing link, directly addressing the current race events of the 1950s in direct if sometimes awkward and confused ways. Yet the Jean Louise of Watchman reads very much like a fictionalized version of the Nelle Harper from the 1940s. “I didn’t wear anything but overalls till I started having the Curse—“ recounts Jean Louise. She’s a grown-up tomboy, as Henry observes: “she still moved like a thirteen-year-old boy and abjured most feminine adornment.” “How do I go about being an enchantress?” Jean Louise flippantly asks him, only to be answered with these solemn patriarchal platitudes: “First. . . hold your tongue. Don’t argue with a man, especially when you know you can beat him. Smile a lot. Make him feel big. Tell him how wonderful he is, and wait on him.” Eventually Jean Louise unleashes her tongue on her father, denouncing his racism and hypocrisy until exhausted by his gentlemanly response. Reviewers rightly find the novel’s conclusion unsatisfying, as, after being slugged in the mouth by her uncle, Jean Louise ends caught between her knowledge and her love. When the manuscript is rejected by her editor, who tells her to set it twenty years earlier and from the viewpoint of little Scout, Harper Lee takes another one, figuratively, on the chin.

In Mockingbird, Jean Louise remains the narrator, but all the details of her life are expunged, and we know nothing of her, her adulthood, or her life in New York. Yet her irreverent sensibility still informs every sentence in Mockingbird, as it does lines like her rejoinder to Alexandra in Watchman: “Aunty, why don’t you go pee in your hat?” There are many more passages in Watchman of overt description of Jean Louise’s “malignant limbo of turning from a howling tomboy into a young woman.” Her rejection of the “world of femininity” dooms her romance with Henry even more than her discovery of his racism. The fury of Jean Louise’s reaction to the revelation of Atticus’s participation in the White Citizens Council seems fueled by a general need to break with patriarchal Southern norms, especially after her cosmopolitan liberation in New York. “You who called me Scout,” thinks Jean Louise, “are dead and in your grave.” But in order to tell her story, Jean Louise, or Lee, must revive Scout and quiet her own voice, turning much of the work of exposing Maycomb’s fear of the other to the new Boo Radley plot. By inventing that closeted figure, Lee gives Jean Louise an objective correlative for her own ghostly status and queer life of limbo. Lee was able to publish a novel that her hometown, and her nation, could embrace, but not one in which she was ever quite at home.

Headline image credit: “11/366″ by Bear. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Sects, witches, and wizards-from Pythagoreans to Kepler

Over the next few weeks, Snezana Lawrence, co-author of Mathematicians and their Gods, introduced us into a Summer journey around the beauty of mathematics, trying to answer the question: will we ever need maths after school? In this second post, Snezana discusses popular perceptions of mathematics, from Pythagorean sect to the various interpretations of the supposed numerical values and hidden messages in the Bible.

As the summer is safely on its way (certainly in Sicily, where I write this on a terrace of one of its grand hotels) I think of the topics to discuss with friends and acquaintances over a glass of Prosecco when the rest of the party joins me in a week. To start a conversation based on mathematics may seem to some to be one of the tasks inevitably converging towards the plot-line of Mission Impossible. Well, certainly there are more pressing things that would occupy people’s minds, concerning international politics, the future of Europe, and the future of the Middle East. What’s new? These topics have occupied people’s minds for centuries. And inevitably there will be calls (as the amount of Prosecco increases) to discuss plots, pinpoint to patterns, make assumptions.

But there is unfortunately, in this particular sense, a similarity also with some popular perceptions of mathematics. From the Pythagorean sect, via various interpretations of the supposed numerical values and hidden messages in the Bible and other major religions’ sacred texts, to the phenomenon of ‘sacred geometry’ and the patterns upon which cities and institutions are built – mathematics history too has some questions that may be of interest in exploring the similar type of sentiment.

One response that answers all those questions wouldn’t satisfy anyone. So what examples can one come up with? Without going into much detail, one can mention that mathematicians, too, have been at times wrong, not completely, but a bit. Like for example Johannes Kepler whose mathematical model of the universe was, for a want of a better word, perfected over a period of time. One of his most surprising inventions came about when he taught mathematics at a school in Graz in his early career. He pondered: what if the five Platonic solids, are indeed some kind of blueprint upon which the universe is made as Plato suggested centuries earlier?

Kepler’s solar system model. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Plato, who discussed these solids in Timaeus (c. 360BC) associated them with four classical elements – Earth was represented by cube, air by octahedron, water by icosahedron, and fire with tetrahedron. The fifth element (yes just like the Fifth Element, the film by the French director Luc Besson, made in 1997) Plato thought, the dodecahedron, must have been used for arranging the constellations of the heavens. Furthermore, in the history of mathematics and philosophy, it was often identified as the element denoting divine spark, the principle of attraction, and the force that made all other elements come to life.

Forward to 1595 when Kepler worked on Platonic solids and used them to make a model of the universe, in his now famous book Mysterium cosmographicum (1596), illustrating the work with one of the most famous images of the history of science and mathematics. The image shows each Platonic solid encased in a sphere, inscribed in a further solid, encased in a sphere, which Kepler identified with the then six known planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Kepler described that the spheres containing the solids are placed at intervals corresponding to the sizes of each planet’s paths (as they were then known), assuming that they circled around the Sun.

Of course, later, whilst he was living in Prague, Kepler found that the orbital paths of planets of the Solar System were not circular but elliptical, but this beautiful model, even though not perfectly accurate, gave him an impetus for further research.

Kepler’s work on planetary motions and modeling the Solar System were based on his deep religiosity and theological convictions, connecting the spiritual and the physical ideas and imagery in his work. Kepler’s less known work is his Somnium, a novel about an imaginary journey that depicts his flight around the Solar System, guided by his mother. This novel was posthumously published, and not surprisingly, as his own mother Katharina Kepler, was accused of witchcraft in 1617. She was imprisoned and released in 1621, thanks partly to Kepler’s own efforts and involvement in the trial.

So what is one to make with this information? Was Kepler’s mother a witch, and was he a wizard of a kind? Is that how he worked out his laws of planetary motion? Of course our common sense takes over at this point. However, it is worth pointing out that it is much easier to do so with some time between us and Kepler in between, and during which the witches and wizards have safely made a transition from reality into fiction.

So, to get back to Sicily, my grand hotel’s balcony and Prosecco reception. And revisit the potential mathematical conversation, compare it with possible scheming and plotting that can be projected from the example of mathematics, from the secrecy of the Pythagorean sect, to the occult knowledge of Kepler, or the numerology of Newton to what is currently happening in Europe, the Middle East and generally in the world… Safe bet would be to get to know the details, actually know the real maths, and make cautious calculations. History of mathematics teaches us that models are prone to improvements over a period of time, just like Kepler’s model of the universe.

Featured image credit: books, bookshelf, read. CC0 Public domain via Pixabay. 

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Sexual exploitation and abuse by UN Peacekeepers

Sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) by UN peacekeepers is not fresh news. It has been going on for years. It first hit the headlines over ten years ago, and the scandal drove the UN to take action. Yet recent allegations over SEA by French peacekeepers in 2014 have brought the issue to the forefront again, and have motivated the UN Secretary-General to escalate the UN’s response to SEA in its peacekeeping operations.

Ban Ki-Moon’s decision to ‘name and shame’ states whose personnel commit sexual exploitation and abuse whilst serving in UN peacekeeping operations is long overdue. The UN started reporting statistics of SEA in 2003, but naming nationalities of offenders has never been part of the reporting process. The idea behind this was to avoid antagonising current or potential troop contributing states. The UN struggles to obtain personnel (not to mention funding and equipment) for peacekeeping operations, and it feared that embarrassing a troop-contributing state would mean withdrawal of all personnel by that country. Yet SEA persists, and this leads us to ask: are we better off having fewer peacekeeping personnel, none of whom rape and sexually exploit children and women, or having more personnel, some of whom do? Clearly the former is a more attractive option. The commission of SEA by peacekeeping personnel seriously jeopardises the entire operation, with the local community and government losing trust in the peacekeepers. This loss of trust leads to a breakdown in the ability of the operation to fulfil its mission, which depends on host state permission and cooperation at all levels.

The other decision taken by Ban was to request the resignation of the head of mission of the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA). MINUSCA is the mission that has been at the centre of the current scandal, with the majority of SEA cases involving young children and as yet resulting in not one conviction. The same day that Ban announced the dismissal of the head of mission more allegations arose, this time considered to likely be troops from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The decision to dismiss the head of mission is appropriate and long overdue, as heads of mission are responsible, as civilian superiors, for the conduct of all personnel in mission.

The majority of offenders of sexual exploitation and abuse in peacekeeping operations are military personnel, with police the second largest group of offenders. Under Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) and Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs), criminal jurisdiction over military and police is granted to their sending state. The host state expressly agrees not to undertake criminal prosecution of peacekeeping personnel for any conduct that takes place in their territory. The UN undertakes initial investigation of allegations, but has no authority or capability to conduct criminal investigations and trial processes.

Annual reporting by the UN of sexual exploitation and abuse statistics shows that reported cases of SEA peaked in 2004 and 2005, but dropped significantly from 2011 onwards. However, the number of cases annually remains above 50, with 51 reported cases in 2014. After UN investigation, some allegations are found to be unsubstantiated. However, many are found to be valid claims, at which point the personnel in question are repatriated, with the responsibility for the case turned over to the sending state. The UN follows up on state action, but often receives no response. The majority of cases actioned by states result in administrative punishment only, with no criminal proceedings ever taking place. This impunity is shocking, especially given that the majority of allegations relate to sex with children or rape of adults — clearly criminal conduct. A number of allegations also have paternity claims attached.

Given the lack of prosecutions undertaken by sending states, one of the alternative options for accountability of peacekeepers could be the International Criminal Court. Of course, the ICC’s jurisdiction would only be applicable if the crime by a peacekeeper amounted to a war crime, a crime against humanity, or genocide. While genocide is unlikely, the former are possibilities for a peacekeeping operation that takes place in a situation of armed conflict or crimes against humanity — as MINUSCA does. If that is the case, and a sending state does not carry out an effective investigation and/or prosecution of its personnel, then the ICC should be used as an option. Indeed, peacekeepers who do commit atrocities such as rape should be specifically targeted for prosecution, due to their special role of upholding the rule of law and human rights, and protecting civilians. Crimes committed by peacekeepers are especially grave because of who commits them. We need to eliminate impunity for peacekeeper sexual exploitation and abuse, and if states are not taking action to punish this criminal conduct, then the ICC should.

Headline image credit: A multinational UN battalion at the 2008 Bastille Day military parade. Photo © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY 2.5

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Wine around the world [infographic]

It’s a multi-million dollar global industry. It’s been with us since the dawn of civilization. And it’s constantly developing. The wine business is an intriguing marker of human activity – economic changes, consumer fashions, globalization, social and technological developments.

What are the oldest wines still in production? Do Italy or China consume more wine each year? Pour yourself a glass, and enjoy these headline facts picked from latest edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine.

Download the infographic as an interactive pdf or jpg.

You can discover more facts about wine by following #OxCompWine across social media over the next few months.

Featured image credit: “Red, red wine”, by Faisal Akram. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

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Four ways in which policy-makers resolve moral dilemmas

Moral dilemmas are ubiquitous in modern democratic societies. Can we protect the bodily integrity of women and their unborn children at the same time? How can we protect the free will of adults while at the same time denying them to engage in self-harming activities, like (assisted) suicide or drug use? Of course, there is no easy answer to these questions, which have no objectively right or wrong solution. Scientific investigation – which often helps us to identify social, educational, or environmental policies that work best – cannot provide guidance in these moral contexts. Instead, perceptions of right and wrong are always a matter of philosophical perspective, personal values, and deeply rooted moral convictions. Since many feel very deeply about these issues, it can be particularly difficult for policy-makers to find such answers that are acceptable to themselves and the people they represent. And yet, they have to do just that when dealing with public policy in the areas of abortion, euthanasia, pornography, prostitution, or homosexuality.

The question is, therefore, how do politicians in democratic societies resolve such moral dilemmas? Well, it seems that four answers are particularly important.

So how do policy-makers resolve moral dilemmas? The first answer is that they very often don’t! Non-decisions are a typical feature of this policy area. This has been true for euthanasia in many European democracies leaving the task to deal with the resulting legal grey areas to the courts and medical professionals. The fact that many large morality policy reforms have been triggered by referendums – like the Irish referendum approving the constitutional amendment allowing same-sex marriage – also reflects this tendency of governments and legislatives to leave these decisions to others. In fact, there appears to be a particularly strong discrepancy between the rather high frequency with which moral issues are debated in the public sphere and the low frequency of actual policy change.

March for Choice in Dublin On Saturday 29th, September 2012, by infomatique. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

Secondly, policy-makers resolve moral dilemmas by finding compromise solutions. This might sound trivial when in fact, it isn’t. Of course, democratic decision-making is the art of creating compromise. Yet, due to their tight nexus with personal core values and religious beliefs, morality policies are often thought to be least likely areas of political compromise. Instead, policy change is argued to emerge when one advocacy coalition triumphs over the other. Yet, policy solutions today almost always reflect compromise solutions. Regulation hardly ever fully prohibits or permits controversial behavior. When following the public debate on abortion, for example, one might assume that politicians have to decide between the prohibition of abortion (pro-life) and the permission of abortion (pro-choice). Empirically, however, actual abortion policy never reflects this dualistic and polarized debate. Instead, it mostly defines a rather fine-grained set of conditions under which abortion is legal and illegal including time frames, medical, psychological, or even social conditions, and consultation requirements to name just a few. Even in Ireland, which continues to prohibit abortions, prohibition is not absolute. Abortions are allowed under (very, very, narrowly defined) conditions as when the mother’s life is in danger or when she is suicidal.

Thirdly, political compromise in moral dilemma situations often relies on a trade-off between behavioural rules and sanctions for violating these rules. For the last decades, morality policy change in the western world has mostly been a change towards more liberal policy regimes. Yet, often these changes have reflected a particular combination of changes in rules and sanctions. Specifically, the introduction of more permissive rules is often compensated by also introducing tougher sanctions in case these new rules are violated. Reaching compromise over moral issues acceptable to the (often rather polarized) public is rather difficult. The inclusion of trade-offs between these two dimensions appears to be helpful in this regard. The liberalization of basically any form of adult pornography in most western countries has often been accompanied with a strong commitment to strictly prosecute anyone crossing the last remaining legal boundary, which is the provision of child pornography.

Gay pride 2011 à Toulouse, by Guillaume Paumier. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

Similarly, the proposal for a reform of euthanasia in Germany brought forward by Renate Künast (Green Party) and Petra Sitte (Left Party) would remove legal obstacles to assisted suicide provided in a non-commercial setting. At the same time, the proposal would strictly protect the remaining legal border by introducing a three-year prison sentence for anyone providing assisted suicide commercially. Of course, not all instances of morality policy reform reflect such compensation between rules and sanctions. Yet, their combination seems to make reforms more endurable. Take the current prostitution debate in Germany, for example. Since Germany has turned prostitution into a regular profession, it continuously criticized. One major point of criticism is that the remaining legal border – forced prostitution which remains illegal – is not effectively protected. The introduction of tough sanctions for clients crossing the remaining legal barrier – exploiting sex-workers forced into prostitution – therefore ranks prominently among reform proposals attempting to stabilize the liberal policy regime.

Finally, policy-makers resolve dilemmas by turning from discussing what is morally right to debating what is feasible. Conservative politicians who morally object to cannabis use, often no longer insist on maintaining prohibitive cannabis policies as they have come to view these policies to be impossible to enforce at reasonable costs. Similarly, early liberalizations of the general prohibition of homosexual practices in Great Britain were (among other things) triggered the practical difficulties of effective enforcement. Cases could often not hold up in court because investigations of behavior that occurred behind closed doors and in private bedrooms often represented gross violations of privacy rights or relied on witness intimidation. Or, consider pornography regulation, as another example. After Denmark allowed the distribution of adult pornography in the 1960s, massive amounts of illegal pornography were smuggled into Germany. As German enforcers became increasingly overburdened, their representatives soon questioned whether it would make sense to have such a prohibition if it could not be enforced properly. The German reform of the early 1970s, was (among other factors) influenced by very practical concerns about the enforceability of prohibition in the light of widespread noncompliance among the general public. This is not to say that social movements and widespread political mobilization of citizens with demonstrations in the street are not important for morality policy change. Quite clearly they are. Yet, we tend to overlook the impact of hidden and secretive mass behaviour often also important for morality policy reforms: widespread noncompliance among the general public. Value change does not only bring people to the street to voice their discontent with existing policies openly. Value change also leads them to very privately disobey rules they perceive as illegitimate. Widespread noncompliance brings a practical dimension to morality policy debate that can make it more rational for policy-makers to move towards more permissive regimes.

Headline image credit: “What?” by Veronique Debord. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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‘Abrahamic religions’ – From interfaith to scholarship

Together with Ulysses, Abraham is the earliest culture hero in the Western world. More precisely, as Kierkegaard, who called him ‘the knight of faith,’ reminds us, he has remained, throughout the centuries, the prototype of the religious man, of the man of faith. The wandering Aramean from the Book of Genesis, who rejected his parents’ idols and native Mesopotamia to follow the call of the One God to the land of Canaan, started a saga reverberated not only in early Jewish literature, but also in the New Testament (Galatians 3: 6-8), and in early Christian literature. Abraham (Ibrahim in Arabic) is also a leading figure of the Qur’an, where he is called ‘God’s friend.’ From the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an, the figure of Abraham became paradigmatic for Jews, Christians and Muslims. In particular, all argued they were following Abraham’s original conception of religion, and all claimed to be the true followers of Abraham’s religion, his only spiritual heirs. As is so common in families, a common father proved to be an element of discord, not of unity. Much in the sad, long, and complex story of religious intolerance and violence between Jews, Christians, and Muslims goes back directly to the inheritance of Abraham’s original religion. This is also true, of course, about the many other religious groups issued from the Abrahamic trunk, such as Samaritans, Bahais, or Mormons.

In all those early perceptions, it remained a matter of course that, just as Abraham had only one religion (Qur’an 4: 125), only one among the contenders to his inheritance was his true heir. The false pretentions of the other groups were to be rejected, in the name of God, and, if need be, through violent means, as their very claim was perceived as blasphemous. Intolerance may well be a universal propensity, but there is no doubt that the idea of a single, universal God often acts as gasoline over fire. In history, it has only been in a second, reflexive stage that men and women of faith have learned to recognize that there is more than one way to reach the same divine truth. The fable of the three rings, made famous by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his play Nathan the Wise, but the roots of which go back to the eighth century soon after the birth of Islam, tells about the king who had two exact copies of his golden ring made, so that none of his three sons would know whether he received in inheritance the original royal ring or a copy of it. For Lessing, the message was clear: as no one could know if it was Judaism, Christianity or Islam which retained the original divine truth, religious tolerance was both necessary and inescapable.

Qur’an by Doctor Yuri. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr.

We know, of course, that the Enlightenment faith in human moral progress was, at the very least, premature. If Nathan the Wise is today compulsory reading for German schoolchildren, this reflects the inheritance of Hitler, not of Abraham. Indeed, it is not until after the Second World War, mainly as a sign of contrition, as it were, for the genocide of the Jews of Europe, that the expression ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ became current, sometimes replacing the previously ubiquitous ‘Christian tradition.’ It is harder to pinpoint the origin of the expression ‘Abrahamic religions’ (in the plural). I suspect that the French Orientalist Louis Massignon (1883-1962), who taught Arabic at the Collège de France, was mainly responsible for launching the idea of the ‘Abrahamic religions,’ in his oral teaching, as well as in his essay on ‘Abraham’s Three Prayers’, a text which made a deep impression on his Maronite students, whom they permitted to approach their Muslim compatriots in Lebanon in a non-polemical fashion, as common children of Abraham.

It is only in the 1970s, then, that the expression ‘the Abrahamic religions’ became more and more commonly used to describe, together, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The main reason for this fact lies in the massive immigration of Muslim populations to Europe. In order to make them feel at home, one had to use inclusive religious language. ‘Abrahamic religions’ was perfect: just like Christians and Jews, Muslims, too, were the sons of a common father, and the inheritors to the same spiritual family.

This reflects an interfaith approach: believers of different traditions learn to appreciate and accept one another, through the recognition of similarities in their faith (here: they believe in the same God). The comparative student of religion has different aims, and uses different methods. But for her or him too, the recognition of what Wittgenstein called ‘family resemblances’ between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (both from a genetic and a structural viewpoint) is essential in order to understand not only similarities, but, more importantly, differences between them.

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Hey everybody! Meet Elizabeth!

Please welcome another newbie to the Social Media team at Oxford University Press, Elizabeth Furey, who joined the gang in August 2015, just two weeks ago, as an OUPblog Deputy Editor and Social Media Manager! You can learn more about Elizabeth below.

When did you start working at OUP?

17 August 2015

What’s the most surprising thing you’ve found about working at OUP?

That it’s such a huge operation. I’ve never worked for a company that has its own lobby, let alone one that has a fountain in its lobby.

What’s the least surprising?

There are books everywhere.

What was your first job in publishing?

This is! I previously worked in marketing for the restaurant industry and as a copywriter for a small online retail company, where I specialized in writing SEO-friendly product descriptions for Halloween costumes. I’ve come a long way, baby.

Photo of Elizabeth Furey. Used with permission.

What’s your favourite book?

Obviously a tough question for anyone who majored in English and now works for a publisher. The title of overall favourite hovers between The Great Gatsby and The Bell Jar, as I’m partial to twentieth-century American literature. I would like to shout out my favourite poem—as that’s a question I feel doesn’t get asked enough—“Wodwo” by Ted Hughes. I recommend it, in particular, to recent college graduates because it perfectly describes the feeling of being dropped into the real world.

What is the strangest thing currently on or in your desk?

I’m not sure how “strange” this is but I want to mention it anyway. I have a box of Anna’s Ginger Swedish Thins, which is a type of cookie, next to my computer. These cookies are so delicious but I have trouble finding them sometimes. I always jump on the opportunity to buy them.

What will you be doing once you’ve completed this Q&A?

I’m still getting used to the day-to-day tasks, but right now I’m focusing on scheduling posts for the Oxford Academic Google+ account and formatting content for the OUPblog.

What’s the most enjoyable part of your day?

So far, what I like the most is getting to learn new things. When you work in very specific industries, you are basically only exposed to anything that relates to that industry. But working for an academic press exposes you to such a wide array of information.

What is your favourite word?

Cupcake. It’s such a simple, yet perfect word. Saying it tastes almost as good as eating it.

What is your most obscure talent or hobby?

I do improv, but I don’t know how obscure that is. Another serious hobby of mine is thinking about buying a guitar.

What is your favorite animal?

I’m going to go with beluga whale right now.

Image Credit: “Cupcakes” by Kate Andrews. CC BY NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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