Didi Herman

Beyond the Rights Debate

Andrews, 1989). She found her experience with the legal process to be ’a productive use of anger’ (interview), despite losing her case (Andrews v Ont.) and having her grounds for appeal rendered moot. She believes that her litigation made people think about lesbian and gay issues, and have to look at pictures of a lesbian couple on the front page of their newspaper for the first time (interview). According to Andrews, the litigation process was a success, regardless of outcome, as she was able to appear regularly in the media and be a prominent public spokesperson (interview). Brian Mossop and Ken Popert, two gay litigants whose ’family benefits’ case is currently before the Supreme Court of Canada, agree with this assessment. For them, their legal case was simply a ’way of getting yourself on radio or television, so you can say things and millions of people can hear it’ (Mossop, interview).

The New Roman Empire: European Envisionings and American Premillennialists

The subject of Europe, its history, politics, and integration, is an important area of study across a range of academic disciplines and professional spheres. Theorists and policy-makers alike have made European developments, particularly the elements of union, a key area of inquiry. This article seeks to explore a somewhat neglected field of analysis the influence of religion in shaping understandings of Europe. In contrast to much work on Europe, my focus here is on the European perspective of a particular group of outsiders : conservative, premillennial Protestants in the United States.

Globalism's ‘siren song’: the United Nations and international law in Christian Right thought and prophecy

The role of the American Christian Right (CR) as an international social movement has perhaps received less attention than it is due. In this article, I explore the underlying global vision of the CR, and the ways in which this vision shapes the CRs international political activism. I focus on the CRs construction of the United Nations, examining various CR genres including movement publications, fiction, and prophecy writing. I also attempt to analyse the CRs ideological stance in light of the literature on ‘religion and globalisation’. Imperatives for the future include: To take energetic action within the NGO process to blunt or prevent new assaults on family integrity; to identify, protect, and help advance existing ‘friends of the family’ within the U.N. Secretariat; to ‘place’ such friends in positions of current or potential influence within the U.N. Secretariat; And to build an international movement of ‘religiously grounded family morality systems’ that can influence and eventually shape social policy at the United Nations (Carlson, 2000).

Book Review: DAVID SEYMOUR, Law, Antisemitism and the Holocaust. London: Routledge Cavendish, 2007, 138 pp., ISBN 0415420407, £22.99 (pbk)

the book we probably know more about that system than we know about the British one. Part Two of the book is, rather confusingly, supposed to ‘deal with indeterminacy’, though in fact only the first chapter refers to that problem directly. Two others are focused on the important issue of how the Parole Board understands its role, difficulties it has gone through and important questions raised over its legal status. The two remaining chapters of this section focus specifically on the judicial dimension of the Parole Board to discuss the changes it has faced and overview the problems that can be summarized in one simple question (with no simple answer): is the Parole Board a court or not? A question that raises a number of problems and invites lawyers, practitioners and academics to address them. Part Three focuses on the problem of recalling prisoners back to prisons from a legal and a practical point of view. It describes current provisions for recalls, the problems caused by the increase in recalls as well as the problems that have their source in difficult regulations. This part also introduces the issue of risk assessment which is, however, more fully developed in Part Four. This part gives some idea on how risk management really works in practice and the different problems it can cause, moving beyond theoretical elaborations and closer to the social body that it impacts. The authors of three chapters in Part Four invite us to see the problem and the way that the system of risk assessment works from the point of view of offenders. We are also provided with very important information about consequences of risk assessments to local communities. The final section attempts to ‘pull the threads together’. It tries to answer some fundamental questions about the state of the parole system, what are the most important challenges and which steps to take. These are questions that need to be answered if the system is going to be reasonable, coherent and socially accepted. This book is of a great value for two main reasons. First, it raises a variety of questions and tries to answer them from a whole range of perspectives, approaches, theoretical backgrounds and practical experience. That is the most important value of this publication, despite the fact that it certainly can raise some difficulties for particular kinds of readers – mostly those whose knowledge about the topic is not sufficient to follow this sometimes narrowly specified discussion. The book is certainly a significant source of knowledge for those who want to extend their knowledge about the Parole Board and the issues that are inseparably related to this institution. But what is more important is the fact that this book appears to me to reach the important aim it sets out to achieve. The main message of the book is to stress the need for a public debate on all the problems that the parole system in Great Britain has had to face in recent times. The way this book is written provides a platform for a very important process of discussion of those problems.

Reflections, New Directions

THIS SPECIAL issue of Social and Legal Studies emerged out of the Keele Conference on Gender, Sexuality and Law, held at Keele University in June 1998.1 The conference, subtitled ‘Reflections, New Directions’, was organised by the Gender, Sexuality, and Law Research Group in the Department of Law at the University. This issue contains articles based upon four of the plenary speeches at the conference. We have also included an article that we think complements these, also given at the Keele conference, but submitted independently to Social and Legal Studies. As a collection of work, this issue presents leading scholars in the field bringing theory and practice to bear upon a range of historical and contemporary debates. Read individually, each article exemplifies a particular yet complementary approach to socio-legal analysis. Each author offers an exciting, insightful and, at times, personal statement that reflects the diversity, breadth and dynamism of scholarship in gender, sexuality and law. We are grateful to the editorial board of Social and Legal Studies for agreeing to a special issue of the journal and in so doing continuing to support scholarship in this area. The subtitle ‘Reflections, New Directions’ was an invitation to all the conference participants to ‘take stock’; that is, to look back, to consider where we are now, and to ask where this may lead us. Over recent decades, scholarship in the field of gender, sexuality and law has undergone a series of shifts (see also Naffine, 1990). Early work (in this case ‘early’ being the early 1980s) developed in different directions. One trajectory focused on substantive legal inequalities. Its main concern was laws that excluded or acted to the detriment of women. Scholars in this tradition interrogated issues such as women in the legal profession, equal pay, formal discrimination within statutory law and, particularly in the United States, constitutional law questions relating to privacy, autonomy and equality (for example, Fuchs Epstein, 1981; O’Donovan, 1985; Stang Dahl, 1987). This trajectory was pursued by both liberal legal feminists – understanding law as essentially neutral and gender inequality as

Book Reviews : DIANA SCULLY, Understanding Sexual Violence: A Study of Convicted Rapists. London: Harper Collins, 1990, £22 hardback, £8.95 paperback

notions of rights are likely to be of little help to women and many well be counterproductive. Less rarefied than ’rights talk’ would be a new discourse based on women’s ’capabilities, capacities and competences’. Although perhaps lacking the rhetorical appeal of rights, the ’capabilities, capacities and competences’ formulation is one which is more likely to be able to accommodate women’s subjective experiences. Kingdom’s book compels us to think about the creation of a new dialogue between