Amanda Whiting

Federalism and Legal Unification in Malaysia

Malaysia exhibits such a high degree of centralization that some scholars argue it may best be classified as a quasi-federation rather than a true federation. The Malaysian Constitution enumerates areas of federal and state legislative competency. Most important areas of law are reserved for federal legislation, though the states of Sabah and Sarwak retain some additional legislative authority due to special conditions on their entry into the Federation. All states may in some cases legislate concurrently with the federal government, but any state legislation that conflicts with federal law is invalid.

‘Some Women can Shift it Well Enough’: A Legal Context for Understanding the Women Petitioners of the Seventeenth-Century English Revolution

The story of the English Civil Wars and Revolution (1640-1660) is inevitably told through the evidence of mass public petitions. The petitioners and their campaigns have been extensively studied and accounts of womens involvement in the revolution have drawn heavily upon this material. However little attention has been paid to the genre of the petition and what this means for womens access to this means of political and social communication. In particular, existing accounts do not devote much attention to the routine use of the petition as a legal and administrative form of communication, so they do not consider womens routine involvement in that practice as a relevant context or history that might explain their capacity to participate in public petitioning campaigns during the Revolution. This article undertakes that task. With one exception, it does not examine the revolutionary era womens texts themselves; instead it provides a legal and administrative context for our better understanding of them.