Shulamit Almog

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child Meets the American Constitution: Towards a Supreme Law of the World

A common contention among proponents of American ratification of the international Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is that the ratification is necessary in order to protect children from paternal and governmental oppression. The opponents of ratification typically contend that it will lead toward a breach of US sovereignty while harming both family values and interests of children. The authors argue that the impact of CRC ratification upon American law will probably be much less radical than both antagonists and protagonists presume. The moderate and temperate approach of the Convention replicates the similar ambiguity and ambivalence that characterize the domain of children rights under current American law. The fact that a few of the CRC articles stand contrary to American laws should not prevent its ratification by the United States. Yet, the Article maintain that even though the CRC is not anticipated to have a significant effect on internal American law, the American refraining from ratification of the Convention may carry undesirable consequences concerning the rights of children in the global context.

Literature Alongside Law as a Contemporary Paradigm

This article presents and evaluates two paradigms and their relevance within the law and literature discourse. According to the first one, the global law paradigm, the law appears as a huge web or as a unified and orderly metanetwork, which encompasses human experience in all realms, and provides a normative response for every aspect of it. This paradigm may be set against an alternative perception, the paradigm of literature alongside law. Within the framework of this paradigm, vulnerable parts of the law, some of its false pretences as well as the hidden processes shaping it, are exposed. Next, there is the establishment of both hope and the ability to fulfil it, animated by imagination, shaped by literature and reflected in it, to put things right; to arrive at concrete truths and justice in a reality which does not enable comprehension of the whole, and never abandoning the strife towards the complex and the constantly changing equilibrium between human needs and human limitations.

Conceptualizing the Right of Children to Adaptable Education

The contention put forward here is that a conceptualization of the right to adaptable education, derived from international human rights law, may be a key factor in interpreting and reviving the notion of multiculturalism in education. We will begin by analyzing two interrelated dimensions of the right to adaptable education: adaptability to the children’s circles of cultural afffijiliations and adaptability to the children’s preferences. We will continue by describing the need to balance between the right to adaptable education and other features of the right to education - available education, accessible education and acceptable education - as well as with parental rights and social interests. We will conclude by suggesting that the right to adaptable education, as it is defijined by international human rights law, can be employed both as a safeguard against denying children educational rights by using the pretext of multiculturalism and as a means for furnishing the notion of multiculturalism with honed, multilayered relevance.

Windows and 'Windows': Reflections on Law and Literature in the Digital Age

The paper begins by positing a paradigm of literature alongside law that delineates a theoretical framework for addressing the interrelationships between law and literature. The notions of poetic justice and poetic license are then put forward as complementary themes, illustrating the interplay between law and literature. After establishing the need for the poetic enterprise in general, the paper will present authors who underline the importance of specific literary genres, concluding that the form of the narrative as such, not its particular genre, is the most powerful means of instilling a sense of self as well as attentiveness to the other. At this point, there will be made some remarks about the future of narrative in a digital environment, maintaining that the digital age challenges the production of meaningful representations within the legal domain as well as within the literary one, and that the notions of poetic justice and poetic license can help both fields to face these challenges successfully.

Social Protest and the Absence of Legalistic Discourse: In the Quest for New Language of Dissent

Legalistic discourse, lawyers and lawyering had minor representation during the 2011 summer protest events in Israel. In this paper we explore and analyze this phenomena by employing content analysis on various primary and secondary sources, among them structured personal interviews with leaders and major activists involved in the protest, flyers, video recordings made by demonstrators and songs written by them. Our findings show that participants cumulatively produced a pyramid-like structure of social power that is anchored in the enterprise of organizing the protest. Our findings explicate how the non-legalistic and even anti-legalistic discourse of the protest was formed, shaped and generated within the power relations of the protest, and how a pyramid of power produced a new poetics of protest that rejected the traditional poetics of state law. The power relations that generated the discourse regarding state law were embedded in socioeconomic stratification along the divide of center and periphery in Israel.

Where There is No Need to Screen Local Justice: Law and Film in Israel

This chapter describes the minor representation of law in Israeli feature films and demonstrates it by pointing at various films that deal with issues that pertain directly to legal proceeding or legal matters,yet bear merely marginal reference to the legal domain,or avoid it altogether.

When a Robot Can Love - Blade Runner as a Cautionary Tale on Law and Technology

This paper examines Ridley Scot’s 1982 film Blade Runner as a cautionary tale relating to the role of law in a technology augmented environment. Blade Runner presents a regime that uses law first in order to create beings with superior abilities and pre-determined longevity, and then to define them as non-human or non-beings, devoid of legal personhood, and thus exploitable. Blade Runner, alongside other cultural representations created within the science fiction genre, serves as illustration of a society that brings together technology and law, in order to maintain unaccountable and arbitrary employment of authorized power. It provides a warning against uninhibited use of technology in order to crate genetic inferiority, and calls for careful scrutiny of the overt and covert functions of law, as new technologies gradually become available.

Ethics, aesthetics, and law: The Third Man

The chapter explores the role of law in society and its relation to ethical conflicts as reflected through the prism of the film The Third Man. By focusing on the complexities of life in post-war Vienna, the film exposes dilemmas that prevail in ordinary times and in functioning democracies as well. Our analysis suggests that one way to manage these dilemmas and balance the conflicting loyalties and interests they raise is to sustain open channels between the law and other narrative-generating practices from which normative stances are evaluated. The law-and-cinema discourse is one such channel and The Third Man presents, in our eyes, the vitality of that channel, due to its rich aesthetical language and its unique representation of the ethical tensions (and their consequences) in the modern era.