Linda Mulcahy

Pathways, Pyramids and Icebergs? Mapping the Links Between Dissatisfaction and Complaints

In this article the authors report the findings of a study of satisfaction, dissatisfaction and complaining, funded by the National Health Service Executive (NHSE). Although interest in these issues has increased with the introduction of the Citizens Charter Initiative and the continued growth of consumerism, few scholars have looked at the relationships between them. Satisfaction and dissatisfaction are commonly viewed as different facets of the same phenomenon. In turn, dissatisfaction is often understood to be a precursor to a complaint, or an embryonic one. The findings presented here suggest that satisfaction and dissatisfaction are linked but are essentially discrete constructs. The authors plot a variety of reactions to dissatisfaction and show that although excessive use is made of formal professional networks, few instances of dissatisfaction emerge as formal complaints. The article concludes that insufficient attention has been paid to understanding the everyday ways in which people cope with dissatisfaction and decisions not to voice a grievance.

Maintaining professional identity : doctors' responses to complaints

This paper reports on the findings of three empirical studies, conducted by the authors, of how doctors respond to complaints about medical care. The authors found that doctors respond to complaints with a range of negative emotions, and interpreted complaints as a challenge to their competence and expertise as professionals, not as issues troubling the complainant or as legitimate grievances. The interview data show that the way in which doctors talked about complaints and accounted for them drew on their understandings of their work world. They suggest that this helped them maintain a sense of control, and argue that this not only sustains individual security but also reinforces professional identity and serves the interests of professional politics. However, they conclude that this reaction to complaints goes against the spirit of resolving complaints to the satisfaction of the complainant which is currently the aim of systems for quality assurance.

The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea? A Critique of the Ability of Community Mediation to Suppress and Facilitate Participation in Civil Life

This article revisits debate between academics and practitioners about the potential of community mediation. While mediation evangelicals make bold claims about the possibility of mediation helping to rebuild communities, academic critics have been suspicious of such contentions and claimed instead that mediation has provided just another route through which the state can interfere in the life of its citizens. It is argued here that debate on the topic has been clouded by unduly high expectations of disputes as agents of social change. Their importance has been understood by reference to their ability to rebuild communities or their potential to become test cases. It is argued here that mediated disputes make much more modest challenges to state authority but that they can be aided in this by the intervention of mediators prepared to take a pragmatic approach to the unachievable ideal of neutrality. The article does not conceive of community mediation as an alternative of the state or its agent. Rather, it suggests that mediators can be embedded within both worlds and act as message-bearers between them.

The market for precedent: shifting visions of the role of clinical negligence claims and trials.

This article considers the interface between the standard setting activity of the NHS Litigation Authority, and the courts and uses the clinical negligence action as a prism through which to examine it. It is suggested that despite its many disadvantages, the clinical negligence action remains an important safety valve when internal regulatory systems fail or are insufficiently transparent to gain full legitimacy. More specifically, it explores the ways in which attitudes about the usefulness of the data contained in claims against the NHS have changed in the aftermath of a number of high profile inquiries which have focused on issues of poor performance. The article concludes that while much greater use is now been made of the data contained in claims when setting standards, strategies for prompting judicial precedent as an alternative way of mobilising standard setting behaviour remain under developed.

Architectural precedent: the Manchester assize courts and monuments to law in the mid-Victorian era

This article looks at a much-neglected topic in accounts of the modern legal system: the architecture of law courts. It is argued that a closer examination of radical changes to the ways in which the internal space of the courthouse and courtroom were organised in the mid-nineteenth century can tell us much about how lawyers came to dominate the trial. The essay focuses on the design and planning of the Manchester Assize Courts, a building which can accurately be described as one of the first, if not the first, modern courthouse. It considers how the courthouse came to symbolise new ideas about the civic sphere, the increased reliance on the segregation of participants in the trial, and the role of law in Victorian society. Particular attention is placed on the link between new social and cultural movements and the architect, Alfred Waterhouse.

Imagining Alternative Visions of Justice: An Exploration of the Controversy Surrounding Stirling Lee’s Depictions of Justitia in Nineteenth-Century Liverpool

In recent years there has been a burgeoning interest in the relationship between law, art and politics. New work in the field encourages us to explore the ways in which art can pose a threat to the supposed rationality of modern law by appealing to imagination and emotion. This article explores these general themes with reference to a specific controversy about a series of bas relief sculptures depicting Justitia which were placed on the side of what was arguably the most spectacular law court to be built in England in the nineteenth century. Although this episode has been explored by art historians, hardly any attention has been drawn to what the episode reveals about the political work that art was, and is, expected to undertake on behalf of the elite and legal establishment. This article attempts to bridge that gap by exploring the extent to which the creator of public artwork, so often a handmaiden of the State when helping us to imagine justice, is also capable of presenting us with subversive images of our Goddess which can, and should, disturb us.

Carey Young’s Palais de Justice

ABSTRACT The symposium for this issue comprises six responses to the video artwork Palais de Justice (2017) by artist Carey Young. The video presents a study of the life of Brussels’ vast, late-nineteenth-century court building. In Palais de Justice, Young presents ‘a legal system seemingly centered on, and perhaps controlled by women’. The respondents are Jeanne Gaakeer, Ruth Herz, Joan Kee, Linda Mulcahy, Jeremy Pilcher and Gary Watt. Jeanne Gaakeer and Ruth Herz have the distinction of being, not only internationally respected scholars, but also experienced judges. Jeanne Gaakeer is a judge practicing in the Netherlands and Ruth Herz was formerly a judge in Germany. The six responses are followed by the artist’s own reflections on her artwork and her response to the commentators’ responses. Joan Kee writes that ‘Young highlights access as a key entry point for thinking about the law. Who can avail themselves of the law? Who may enter (or exit) the courts? Who is excluded and by whose authority? The surreptitious looking and peering that define the experience of watching the film suggests how these questions deny ready answers’.

Making Sense of Law: Pungency, Feel and Rhythm

Socio-legal and critical scholars have long argued that lawyers’ obsession with the word and text limits their appreciation of how law is experienced, or authority is generated, through touch, smell, sight and sound. At the same time, architectural scholars and art historians have contended that the sensory bias of their disciplines towards sight is problematic because it can serve to disengage habitable space and images from a richer experience of their particular place and context. The articles in this issue of Law, Culture and the Humanities argue for the need to explore the phenomenology of law by attending to a panoply of sensory dynamics. By facilitating a broader engagement with experiences of legal spaces, concepts, objects, procedures and their regulation it seeks to consider how spatial experience, scale, depth, sound and tactility inform experiences of substantive law, legal rituals and justice procedures. In short, this special issue seeks to examine how law and the things and processes it controls look, smell and sound.

Limiting Law: Art in the Street and Street in the Art:

Conventional legal responses to street art have tended to characterize it as a problem that is best dealt with through criminal or property law. This is not necessarily perceived of as a problem by street artists who have actively sought to situate understandings of their work outside of the law. But attitudes are changing. Street art is increasingly seen as having commercial value, enhancing the cityscape, creating new local art markets, attracting tourists, and contributing to the gentrification of impoverished areas. The result is that conventional ways of conceiving of street art have begun to pose new challenges to concepts of crime and property. Drawing on an observational study in London, this article proposes a new theorization of the legal problems posed by street art that pays close attention to the sensual experience of encountering it in the city and to street art as performance rather than artefact.

I'm not watching I'm waiting: the construction of visual codes about womens' role as spectators in the trial in nineteenth century England

Accounts of the interface between law, gender and modernity have tended to stress the many ways in which women experienced the metropolis differently from men in the nineteenth century. Considerable attention has been paid to the notion of separate spheres and to the ways in which the public realm came to be closely associated with the masculine worlds of productive labour, politics, law and public service. Much art of the period draws our attention to the symbiotic relationship between representations of gender and prevailing notions of their place. Drawing on well known depictions of women onlookers in the trial in fine art, this essay by Linda Mulcahy explores the ways in which this genre contributed to the disciplining of women in the public sphere and encouraged them to go no further than the margins of the law court.