A snippet from the recent Guardian piece on the trade in paper bags from elite retailers
On resale sites such as eBay, empty paper carrier bags from luxury brands such as Chanel and Balmain can sell for as much as £65. Prices for a paper Hermes bag start at £45, while the box begins at £200. A Smythson bag with matching tissue paper tends to go for £40, while a set including eight different brands – spanning Gucci, Burberry and La Mer – starts from £114.
'Returns to education in criminal organizations: Did going to college help Michael Corleone?' by Nadia Campaniello, Rowena Gray and Giovanni Mastrobuoni in (2016) 54 Economics of Education Review comments
Is there any return to education in criminal activities? This paper is one of the first to investigate whether education has not only a positive impact on legitimate, but also on illegitimate activities. We use as a case study one of the longest running criminal corporations in history: the Italian-American mafia. Its most successful members were capable businessmen, orchestrating crimes that required abilities that might be learned at school: extracting the optimal rent when setting up a racket, weighting interests against default risk when starting a loan sharking business or organizing supply chains, logistics and distribution when setting up a drug dealing system. We address this question by comparing mobsters to a variety of samples drawn from the United States 1940 Population Census, including a sample of their closest (non-mobster) neighbors. We document that mobsters have one year less education than their neighbors on average. We find that mobsters have significant returns to education of 7.5–8.5% , which is only slightly smaller than their neighbors and 2–5 percentage points smaller than for U.S.-born men or male citizens. Mobster returns were consistently about twice as large as a sample of Italian immigrants or immigrants from all origin countries. Within that, those charged with complex crimes including embezzlement and bookmaking have the highest returns. We conclude that private returns to education exist even in the illegal activities characterized by a certain degree of complexity as in the case of organized crime in mid-twentieth century United States.
Additional years of education are known to increase earnings in legitimate labor activities. But, what about illegal ones? In this study we will not discuss the activities of common criminals. Our focus is professional criminals who belonged to one of the most successful and long-lasting criminal organizations: the Italian-American mafia between the 1930s and the 1960s. We match a list set up by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) of 712 mobsters belonging to the Italian-American mafia with the 1940 United States (U.S.) Census of Population. This gives us information about income, housing values, education, job characteristics, as well as the precise address of residence for each individual. We create a sample of white, male, similarly aged, neighbors of these mobsters that serves as the closest comparison group and we also present estimated returns to education for other samples drawn from the 1940 Census, including all working-age white men; whites born in the U.S.; all U.S. citizens; all immigrants; all Italian immigrants; and second-generation Italians (who are born in the U.S. but have at least one parent born in Italy).
Economists have shown that increased levels of education reduce criminal participation. This implies that education is valued more by legitimate firms than by illegitimate ones. This is consistent with our first finding: mafia mobsters have on average one less year of education when compared to the sample of neighbors.
But, this finding does not imply that annualized returns to education are smaller for organized crime members than for ordinary workers. Criminal careers are known to start very early and are likely to be interwoven with schooling choices. Individuals who choose to be part of the mafia are likely to trade off income and power for risk of injury, prison, and death. This alone, without the need of lower returns to education, would predict a lower investment in education as there would be fewer years of working life in which to recoup foregone wages (Mincer, 1974). Indeed, economic theory predicts that individuals with lower (working) life expectancy should have larger annualized returns to education.
This is true unless the extra schooling is not marketable. So, is schooling marketable in the mafia? This question really involves the mafia’s complex business model and the link between human capital and schooling. Let us start with the latter. If one takes Bowles and Gintis (2002)’s view that schools “prepare people for adult work rules, by socializing people to function well (and without complaint) in the hierarchical structure of the modern corporation” it would seem that schools are an ideal training environment for aspiring mobsters.
While we do not fully embrace this view of schooling, many of the skills students acquire at school are likely to be useful when setting up a racket (i.e. extracting the optimal rent), a loan sharking business (i.e. weighting interests against default risks), a drug dealing system (i.e. setting up supply chains), etc. It is ultimately an empirical question as to whether the returns to education in the mafia are similar to the ones ordinary workers enjoy. This comparison, we believe, is also informative about the workings of the mafia. The results presented below hold, we argue, for criminals engaged in complex criminal activities, but may not be more generally true of petty criminals or criminals operating at the lowest levels of criminal organizations, whose everyday tasks are much simpler and do not involve the planning, risk evaluation, and communication skills needed of those higher in the network. We are therefore providing a counterpoint to Carvalho and Soares, and Levitt and Venkatesh (2000), who study the characteristics of regular gang members.
We estimate Mincer-type regressions using log income and log housing value as the main outcomes. The main independent variable of interest is years of education. We present results for the mobster sample and compare to other reasonable comparison groups: all men; U.S. citizens; immigrants; Italian immigrants and second-generation Italian men; and a sample of mobster neighbors, who lived on the same block (and usually the same exact street) in 1940.
We find large returns to education within the mafia, no matter the model, or the outcome variable, that we use. This shows that private returns to education exist not only in legitimate but also in the illegitimate activities that imply a sufficient degree of complexity. Mobster returns (in terms of income) to a year of schooling are around 7.5–8.5% , compared to 9–10% for the neighbor sample and 10.5–13% for the U.S. born and U.S. citizen samples. Interestingly, mobster returns are substantially larger than we find for the immigrant and, especially, the Italian immigrant, samples, while they are only about one percentage point higher than we find for second-generation Italians. Moreover, for mobsters who, according to the FBN records, were involved in white-collar crimes or in crimes that require running an illegal business (i.e., racketeering, loan sharking, bootlegging, etc.) we find returns to education that are about three times as large as for those who are involved in violent crimes (i.e., robberies, murders, etc.).
To our knowledge, this is the first systematic attempt to estimate the returns to education in criminal activities and provides intuitive insights into the workings of complex criminal gangs such as the mafia and into the factors considered by those deciding to become criminals in the first place. Carvalho and Soares provide some evidence on the returns to education for low level Rio de Janeiro gang members but it is not the main focus of their study.
The paper proceeds as follows. We first discuss the existing literature on education and crime, before providing a brief overview of the history of mafia organizations and members in the U.S. before 1960. We then present our novel dataset as well as our comparison samples drawn from the U.S. Census. We then discuss the empirical methodology before finally presenting our results, discussing mechanisms, and concluding.
In Mohareb v Fairfax Media Publications Pty Limited [2017] NSWSC 288 McCallum J refers to an asserted imputation in defamation litigation that 'The plaintiff is such an evil man that he is probably related to Satan'.
Fairfax argued that 'the imputation is drawn from material falling in the category of propositions that it is impossible for the reader to take literally'.
The judgment states
It is trite principle that an imputation must specify with clarity and precision an act or condition allegedly attributed to the plaintiff by the defamatory matter complained of. The importance of that task derives from the fact that it is the imputation that defines the issues in the proceedings, in particular informing some of the defences under the Defamation Act. The definition of the issues in turn informs the interlocutory processes of discovery and interrogatories (where allowed) and the scope and course of the trial. Finally, the specificity of the imputation is important at the stage of assessment of damages which, in accordance with the terms of the Defamation Act, is undertaken by the judge.
It should go without saying in that context that, implicitly, the requirement for clarity and precision in the specification of an imputation assumes that the imputation will be something capable (in theory) of being true. That is where I understood Mr Richardson's submission to land. An imputation based on material which it is impossible for the reader to take literally will, in all likelihood, not be capable of being factually true or false.
Mr Rasmussen, who appears for the plaintiff, did not take issue with any of those propositions but, as I understood his submissions, sought to defend the imputation on the basis that it does not fail that test. Specifically, he submitted that many people believe Satan is not a mythical character and that he (Satan, not Mr Rasmussen) is in fact the progenitor of all evil.
I would respectfully understand those propositions to be matters of faith, not fact. But even if that is wrong, the imputation is not capable of being literally true, in that it seeks to attribute the plaintiff with being "probably related to Satan". Whatever belief one has as to the status of Satan, the proposition that a human being could be related to him is one I am comfortably satisfied is incapable of being literally true. It is an attribution of shared genetic material, the impossibility of which does not turn on the existence or otherwise of any god or devil. It is not capable of being literally true and that is its vice. That imputation will be struck out.
Theodore Dalrymple on a besetting vice of academia
Cant is more destructive than hypocrisy because it is harder to expose and because a humbug deceives himself as well as others, while a mere hypocrite retains some awareness; he is a rogue rather than a villain. Cant is the vehement public expression of concern for others, or of anger at an opinion casting doubt on some moral orthodoxy that is not, and cannot be, genuinely felt, its vehemence being a shield for insincerity and lack of confidence in the orthodox opinion. Doctor Johnson defined cant as “a whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms.” Cant is contagious, and, when widespread, it creates an atmosphere in which people are afraid to call it by its name. Arguments then go by default; and if arguments go by default, ludicrous, bad, or even wicked policies result.
I think that we live in an era of cant. I do not say that it is the only such age. But it has never been, at least in my lifetime, as important as it is now to hold the right opinions and to express none of the wrong ones, if one wants to avoid vilification and to remain socially frequentable. Worse still, and even more totalitarian, is the demand for public assent to patently false or exaggerated propositions; refusal to kowtow in such circumstances becomes almost as bad a sin as uttering a forbidden view. One must join in the universal cant — or else.
Wherever people are punished, legally or socially, for expressing an opinion contrary to some recently adopted orthodoxy, or for failing to express the tenets of that orthodoxy, cant is bound to flourish; further, people who begin with an awareness that they are uttering cant come to believe that it is true because no one likes to think that he has spoken only from mere conformity or pusillanimity, or to avoid unpleasantness and the ruination of reputation. Hence, cant spreads rapidly once it takes hold in a society, and it becomes difficult to challenge, let alone eradicate.
Cant also has a built-in tendency to inflation. When it becomes generalized, it’s necessary for anyone who desires to distinguish himself from the majority of people in some way to go even further in his own cant. It is like fundamentalism in Islam: you can always be outflanked by someone more orthodox than thou. Once a new canting doctrine becomes orthodox, it will, in turn, be outflanked.
Leaders in cant are not inquirers after truth but seekers of power, if only the power to destroy, which is often a delight in itself. Cant is the weapon of the ambitious mediocrity, a class of person that has become much more numerous with the extension, but also dilution, of tertiary education. Such people believe that social prominence is their due.
(a) If a woman who has received a ring in contemplation of marriage refuses to fulfil the conditions of the gift she must return it.
(b) If a man has, without a recognised legal justification, refused to carry out his promise of marriage, he cannot demand the return of the engagement ring.
(c) It matters not in law that the repudiation of the promise may turn out to the ultimate advantage of both parties. A judge must apply the existing law as to the limits of justification for breach.
(d) If the engagement to marry be dissolved by mutual consent, then in the absence of agreement to the contrary, the engagement ring and like gifts must be returned by each party to the other.In Papathanasopoulos v Vacopoulos [2007] NSWSC 502 Smart AJ found that if a woman refuses without legal justification to marry her fiancé, she cannot keep the engagement ring and must return it.
If a party rejects the gift of an item as the magistrate found, it is not open to her, if she later takes control of the item, to claim the item as a gift when she continues to assert that she does not want it and asks for it to be thrown out. A party cannot be forced to take or accept a gift … Upon VP rejecting the gift she became a bailee of that item so long as she had it in her control. It is not open to a bailee to cause the item bailed to be thrown into the garbage bin. This is especially so where the item is valuable and no proper notice was given and but a short time had elapsed. Holding a small item, such as an engagement ring is not a great chore. I do not accept the contention that it was irrelevant that VP rejected the gift of the engagement ring.The Supreme Court found that Papathanasopoulos was the holder of a “conditional gift”: the engagement ring would only become her property after their marriage took place. He said that, legally, a woman who receives a ring in contemplation of marriage, and who later refuses to marry, must return the ring unless there is some legal justification for her decision - for example acts of violence towards her, or evidence that her fiancé was unfaithful.
Whether due to the beauty, the cost, or the sentiment of an engagement ring, it is an asset that people hold valuable. In recent years, Australian popular media has been captured by stories of celebrities who have broken off engagements, but then quarrelled over who is entitled to the engagement ring. James Packer, Mariah Carey, former Australian cricket captain Michael Clarke and Lara Worthington (then Bingle), have all supposedly been involved in disputes surrounding expensive engagement rings. The rule of thumb that a man should spend two to three months of annual salary on an engagement ring meant that Packer and Carey were dealing with a 35 carat, 10 million dollar ring, and Clarke and Bingle a 4.7 carat, $200,000 ring. It is hard to tell whether these disputes were real or fabricated (Bingle allegedly flushed her engagement ring down the toilet). Whatever the case, they do raise an interesting question as to who is legally entitled to keep the ring on dissolution of an engagement.
As will be outlined in this article, the law surrounding engagement rings has been quite stable in Australia. Australian courts have adopted the thorough reasoning of Justice McCardie in the 1926 English High Court (King's Bench Division) decision of Cohen v Sellar. It came as a surprise when in 2017, the New South Wales Local Court in Toh v Su questioned whether Cohen v Sellar still represented good law. The Magistrate did not follow the reasoning in Cohen v Sellar, and suggested that a more modern view regarding the treatment of engagement rings was required. This article suggests that there are conceptual difficulties with the substance of the decision in Toh v Su, and procedural issues relating to the doctrine of precedent, which mean that this decision should not be adopted by other courts. As a decision of the New South Wales Local Court, the judgment (at present) may not be of great moment. Difficulties will arise however, if other courts in the New South Wales jurisdiction or beyond, adopt the reasoning contained in the judgment.The authors comment
Given the adoption of Cohen v Sellar principles into Australian common law, it came as a surprise that Magistrate Brender in Toh v Su questioned the modern relevance of Cohen v Sellar and refused to follow the decision. The case involved Mr Toh proposing to Ms Su on 5 December 2015 and giving her an engagement ring. On 5 March 2016, Toh said to Su (in the presence of a friend) that he no longer wished to marry Su or be in a relationship with her. He also stated that "everything that belongs to each party will be returned to each party".
Toh brought an action in a New South Wales Local Court (Downing Centre) seeking the return of the engagement ring, as well as several other gifts. Toh sued for the engagement ring on the basis that it was a gift conditional on marriage, and as the marriage did not go ahead, he was entitled to its return. If Cohen v Sellar was applied in this case, the result would be that as Mr Toh, without recognised legal justification, refused to carry out his promise of marriage, he could not demand the return of the engagement ring. The Magistrate held however that Mr Toh was unable to reclaim the engagement ring, on the basis that it was an unconditional gift and therefore became the absolute property of Ms Su.
The fact that the marriage did not go ahead was irrelevant, as there were no conditions attached to the giving of the ring. While his Honour acknowledged that it would be possible to give an engagement ring with conditions (borne from words or conduct), his Honour felt that the default position for any engagement ring is that it should be viewed as a gift given without condition.
Magistrate Brender reached this conclusion based on the supposed effect of two pieces of legislation. First, his Honour held that, given the abolition of action for breach of promise to marry in s 111A of the Marriage Act, "there is arguably no room for the operation of the rule of recovery [of the engagement ring] in the event the marriage does not proceed".
Second, given the passing of the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) and the principle of no-fault divorce, his Honour stated that, "it would be surprising, given that statute, if the common law still determined legal rights between parties to a proposed marriage by reference to whether or not their conduct in breaking off an engagement was justified or not".
The first criticism that can be made of his Honour's judgment is that there are jumps in logical reasoning. It is not clear why the enactment of s 111A of the Marriage Act abolishing the action of breach of promise to marry should affect a decision as to who should keep an engagement ring. It is simply suggested as a matter of fact, that it does. One possibility is that the Magistrate was concerned (despite the presence of s 111A(2), considered in the next paragraph) with the "deposit or pledge" analogy of an engagement ring. If one party breaches their promise to marry they forfeit the deposit of the ring. Breach of promise to marry was previously recognised as a legal wrong, with attendant legal consequences regarding the loss of a deposit. Given the abolition of action for breach of promise to marry, it could be argued that since there is no legal obligation to honour a promise of marriage, you should not be liable to lose a deposit if you default on your promise. ...
Comparative law and case law aside, treating an engagement ring as an unconditional gift would seem inconsistent with the current wording of s 111A of the Marriage Act. Subsection (2) states that the abolition of the "breach of promise" action in subs (1) "does not affect an action for the recovery of any gifts given in contemplation of marriage which could have been brought if this section had not been enacted". An action brought for recovery of an engagement ring in Australia prior to the enactment of s 111A(1) would be subject to common law Cohen v Sellar principles. Cases such as Kais v Turvey, Papathanasopoulos v Vacopoulos and Loumbos v Ward all make it clear that an engagement ring is properly characterised as a conditional gift. It is difficult to understand how the fundamental nature of this gift can be changed by abolishing a separate (though somewhat related) cause of action in breach of promise to marry.
Whatever reasoning informed Magistrate Brender's decision, it does not account for the clear intention of the Commonwealth Parliament in 1975, as contained in s 111A(2), that the law relevant to the disposition of gifts given in contemplation of marriage is undisturbed by the abolition of the action for breach of promise in s 111A(1). The contemporary meaning and symbolism of an engagement ring is a social question. On that basis, it would seem more appropriate for the Commonwealth Parliament to decide how such a gift should be characterised, and the attendant consequences that flow from such a characterisation for those who terminate an engagement.
Similar legislation from different countries around the world highlight how this task could be achieved. In England and Wales, the Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1970 (UK) removed any cause of action for breach of promise to marry. The British Parliament acted upon a 1969 report by the English Law Commission, suggesting that the action be removed. As a separate question, the Law Commission (and subsequently the Parliament) dealt with the legal entitlement to gifts conditional upon marriage, where the marriage did not proceed. Section 1(1) of the Act removed any action for breach of promise to marry: An agreement between two persons to marry one another shall not under the law of England and Wales have effect as a contract giving rise to legal rights and no action shall be brought in England and Wales for breach of such an agreement, whatever the law applicable to such an agreement.
Section 3 of the Act deals with gifts given in contemplation of marriage: (1) A party to an agreement to marry who makes a gift of property to the other party to the agreement on the condition (express or implied) that it shall be returned if the agreement is terminated shall not be prevented from recovering the property by reason only of his having terminated the agreement. The gift of an engagement ring shall be presumed to be an absolute gift; this presumption, may be rebutted by proving that the ring was given on the condition, express or implied, that it should be returned if the marriage did not take place for any reason.
The effect of this s 3 in England and Wales is that the decision in Cohen v Sellar no longer represents good law in those countries. [74] Perhaps this is what influenced the Magistrate in Toh v Su (and earlier Justice McPherson in Wynen v Jenkins) to question whether Cohen v Sellar was still good law in Australia. It is important to note however, that the law governing entitlement to engagement rings in England and Wales is determined by the clear wording in s 3(2) of the Law Reform (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1970 (UK). The law was not changed, by implication, from the wording of s 1 (the equivalent of s 111A(1) of Australia's Marriage Act) in isolation. This was the implication that the Magistrate sought to draw in Toh v Su, and absent more direct statutory language in the Marriage Act, it is argued that it was not a logical implication to make.
The next criticism of the judgment is his Honour's reliance upon the "no-fault" divorce provisions of the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth). His Honour argued that given fault was no longer relevant to obtaining a divorce (and subsequent property settlements), it should not be relevant to determining property rights upon dissolution of an engagement. At face value, this argument has some appeal, but the analogy breaks down when one considers the status of the engagement ring before, and after, marriage occurs. When a marriage has occurred, an engagement ring is no longer a conditional gift. The gift becomes unconditional, and is the absolute property of the donee (traditionally, a wife). The "no fault" provisions of the Family Law Act simply mean that the issue of who called off the marriage cannot be used as leverage to determine who should keep the engagement ring. The ring may stay with the wife or be returned to the husband as part of a property settlement, but there is no question that, until such time, the wife would be the legal owner of the engagement ring.
The situation is different when a marriage does not occur, because the condition on which the engagement ring was given has not eventuated. This means that legal entitlement to the engagement ring is in issue. Based on Cohen v Sellar principles, the idea of fault (who called off the engagement) is important to determining who gets to keep the ring. It would certainly be possible to extricate the notion of "fault" from who is entitled to keep an engagement ring, but this would mean a retreat from Cohen v Sellar principles. The result would be that the engagement ring is returned to the person who gave it, regardless of who called off the engagement. There are many who would consider this a fair result, and in Toh v Su, Mr Toh pleaded his case on this basis. Such a change however, should ultimately come from the legislature, and the overruling of Cohen v Sellar principles in the absence of clear legislative guidance was not an appropriate step for a Magistrate to take.
Looking forward, whether fault should continue to play a role or not in who keeps an engagement ring upon dissolution of an engagement is an interesting social question. No fault divorce is an expedient that makes property settlements simpler and less acrimonious. Whether the policy drivers applicable to no fault divorce should extend to legal entitlements to an engagement ring is a debate worth having, but not a debate that should be decided by a Local Court of New South Wales. In any event, that debate is a different one to whether an engagement ring is a conditional or unconditional gift. This article contends that neither the Marriage Act or the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth), separately or in combination, have the effect of changing the essential nature of an engagement ring, which is a conditional gift.
A Russian billionaire has held a lavish ceremony at a castle in Austria to declare himself the leader of a new, independent "space nation" called Asgardia.
The self-funded event was held at the opulent Hofburg palace in Vienna and included a choral performance of the nation's anthem, an official oath, and a video message from Russian cosmonaut Oleg Artemiev on the International Space Station. ...
Asgardia is the brainchild of Russian rocket scientist Igor Ashurbeyli. He wants it to be the first fully independent "nation" in space, with its own government, virtual currency, justice system and calendar. ... While functioning as a real nation, Asgardia would also help protect the Earth and keep the peace in space, according to the project's official website.
"Is it pioneering, futuristic and visionary — or madness? Call it what you will, and time will tell," Dr Ashurbeyli says.
At the moment, anyone can become a citizen of Asgardia. But Dr Ashurbeyli has said he wants to attract the world's most creative minds, and may eventually bring in a mandatory IQ test for potential Asgardians.
More than 200,000 people have already signed up via the nation's website, including thousands of Australians, but Dr Ashurbeyli wants to recruit a total population of about 150 million within the next 10 years.The promo for Asgardia is somewhat confusing; on occasion the Asgardia site refers to it as a "space kingdom" in "low earth orbit".
We examine economic themes surrounding the superhero Captain America. When Steve Rogers became a super soldier, his production and consumption opportunities were expanded greatly, and yet the effect on his lifetime realized utility seems ambiguous. We explore the possibility that Captain America became wealthy through the power of compound return on investment during his stay of nearly 70 years under the Arctic ice. The society and economy that he returned to were much different from what he left behind, and these differences are used to illustrate the nature of economic growth and dynamism. We also show how Captain America’s story illustrates the nature of inflation and major themes in the provision of public goods and public choice.The New Zealand domain known as Mount Taranaki is closer to gaining legal personhood alongside Te Urewera under the Te Urewera Act 2014 (noted here) and Te Awa Tupua, a matter discussed in my doctoral dissertation.
The recognition that ‘other-than-human’ persons can be legal subjects has previously been adopted in forms of customary law but has been denied in most modern jurisdictions until recently. The legal concept of juristic personhood is rooted in jus gentium of Imperial Rome, which was also the basis of ‘public trusts’. Juristic personhood has been expanded in some jurisdictions to include other ‘legal subjects’ with specific rights and obligations. Judges in India, for example, have recognised enspirited idols as having legal status with the same legal rights as human beings ever since the nineteenth century. Recently, several additional jurisdictions have recognised certain spiritual-natural entities as legal persons, making sacred rivers and mountains ‘juristic persons’. In this article we review a number of recent cases from around the world that highlight this evolution of jurisprudence over time. The legal regime of juristic personhood may be an effective tactic for safeguarding enspirited sacred natural sites, because it conceptually resonates with the animistic world-view and relational ontologies of many Indigenous peoples. Further study (and litigation) is required for such an approach to become widely recognised, but it could become an effective tool for conservation of nature within community-conserved areas and protected areas.They argue
With the realisation that loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services have become global crises (Ceballos et al., 2015; Ripple et al., 2017), there has been a recognition of the need to vastly increase the area of most landscapes and ecosystems under conservation management (Venter et al., 2014; Butchart et al., 2015; Wilson, 2016). Butchart et al. (2015) and others have pointed out that this will require approaches that go beyond conventional Western conservation frameworks, and have particularly advocated community-based management. Community-conserved areas have considerable potential as another form of area-based conservation, which could be enhanced and better secured for the long-term if they could also be endowed with legal recognition. Indeed, the 11th Aichi Target in the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020, drafted under the Convention on Biological Diversity, mentions “other effective area-based conservation measures” (OECM) as a basis for achieving 2020 targets of protection for ecologically representative areas (CBD, 2010, p. 9). Jonas et al. (2014) have suggested that these OECMs should include Indigenous Peoples’ and Community Conserved Territories and Areas (ICCAs) that effectively conserve nature, even if that conservation is an ancillary outcome, not a primary objective, and only if the governance authority wants them to be recognised as such.
Many sacred natural sites (SNS) include biodiverse habitats or refugia that benefit from ritual protection in the context of animistic beliefs as distinct from protection motivated by a ‘conservation ethic’ (Kopnina, 2012) or legal prescriptions. While this may not apply to most SNS of mainstream religions, these SNS are often still important for biodiversity conservation. As far as many Indigenous peoples and local communities are concerned, the ‘spirits of place’ or numina that enspirit1 most SNS are endowed with certain rights –‘juristic persons’, in all but name – and these communities regularly invoke the numina enabling them to engage in ‘spiritual governance’ (Studley & Awang, 2016; Studley and Horsley, 2018).
SNS would be most effective as conservation areas if legal recognition was given to complement communitybased customary ritual protection that is already in place. One possible nascent approach is to bestow juristic personhood on selected landscapes. Most conservation initiatives aimed at the legal protection of the environment are undertaken by Homo sapiens acting as the plaintiff (e.g. a person who brings a case against another in a court of law) and beneficiary. Under the aegis of juristic personhood, the numina that inhabit the SNS are themselves granted standing as plaintiffs in the defence of their domain, represented by a guardian, agent or ‘next friend’.
Historically most legal systems have “denied legal personhood to natural-spiritual entities” (Jonas pers. comm. 29/6/2017). This article highlights recent cases and trends in legislation that seem to be reversing that denial, based on notions of juristic personhood or nature rights. It can be argued that conceptually juristic personhood falls under the rubric of animism predicated on a posthuman world-view and ecocentric ‘rights of nature’ under the aegis of a pan(en)theistic world-view (Berry, 1988; Berry, 1996; McDermott, 2012; Nash, 1989; Zaleha, 2008).'Environmental Personhood' by Gwendolyn J Gordon in (201) 43(1) Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 50 comments
Parks are people too, my friend. So quipped an August 2016 headline making reference at once to Mitt Romney's flip commentary on corporations and to recent developments in New Zealand law enabling landscapes to be named as legal persons - that is, as entities possessing juridical rights akin to those of corporations. In the wake of this and other developments of the concept, legal personhood has struck observers as a promising tool for protecting nature-an idea overdue given the now seemingly unexceptional nature of corporate personhood in protecting corporate rights. Far from being the settled, stolid doctrine that its long tenure might have it appear to be, however, corporate personhood is quicksilver; it seems an endlessly adaptable concept. How might we come to understand the environment as a similarly flexible rights-holder in a way that is robustly protective of environmental interests? This Article argues that, as an example of how we came to see a non-human entity as a rights holder, corporate personhood may be a useful tool in moving toward understanding the environment as a rights holder.
Legal personhood is not binary; it is not a yes-or-no proposition. The differentiation of legal rights and responsibilities starts, not ends, at the question of whether something may or may not be considered a person in the meaning of a statute.' The real issue here is what, given the legal personhood of corporations or the environment, that means for how much that legal, practical, rhetorical entity-that category-for-legal-convenience-should be allowed to claim the rights of other shades of personhood. There is, after all, no such thing as a plain-old person; it is law that defines the categories of persons.
The development of a concept of corporate personhood in American law was anything but inevitable. Although we are familiar now with "the idea of a corporation having 'its' own rights, and being a 'person' and 'citizen' for so many statutory and constitutional purposes," the idea was perhaps as unsettling to contemporary jurists as that of environmental personhood might sound today. Just as "[t]hroughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been.., a bit unthinkable, so too does their contingency become practically unthinkable after they are normalized. Before environmental personhood becomes unremarkable, and thus unremarked-upon, we would do well to consider some of the contingencies in the development of the personhood concept as applied to corporations.
Even among the very few jurisdictions that have developed concepts of environmental personhood, conceptions of that "personhood" are diverse. In 2014, Te Urewera, formerly a New Zealand national park, was declared to be a legal entity. The act making this designation transformed the land from government- owned national park to freehold land owned by itself.' The country's Whanganui River followed suit in 2017. Years prior to the movement in New Zealand law, Ecuador proclaimed under its constitution the rights of nature "to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles."" Nature here, instead of being named as a legal person directly, instead is given these rights by analogy to "persons and people." In Bolivia, nature is defined as a juridical entity that "takes on the character of collective public interest." In the United States, a number of local governing bodies promulgated ordinances recognizing the rights of nature.
These new global legal developments arrive alongside what appears to be a wholesale re-evaluation of the place of human interests in relation to nature. New Zealand's Te Urewera Act in particular is seen to be novel for its changes to the very nature of property ownership. It is an unequivocal rejection of a human-centered rights regime for protecting nature as property.
In the end, our capacity to imagine a politics capable of encompassing things and places far outside of human lives or business interests has more to do with how well legal personhood will protect the environment than does any particular deployment of legal arguments for environmental personhood-just as has been the case in the development of the doctrine of corporate personhood in American law. To show why this is so, the Article is arranged as follows. Part II describes recent advances made in the concept of environmental personhood in locations as varied as Bolivia, Ecuador, India, and New Zealand. Part III examines the usefulness of corporate personhood doctrine as an analogy for proponents of the protection of the environment by means of the concept of personhood. Part IV examines the terms of the debate in more detail, considering the development of rights of nature arguments and the stakes of ontological claims regarding divisions between nature and people. Part V considers the significance of holistic theories of environmental protection to discourses of personhood. Finally, the Article offers some conclusions regarding the development of environmental personhood. Legal personhood may come to be as protective for environmental interests as it has been for corporate interests; it can become so by referencing the latter's protean, politically fluid nature.'The Whanganui River as Te Awa Tupua: Place‐based law in a legally pluralistic society' by Liz Charpleix in (2017) The Geographical Journal comments
A landmark political decision recognising the legal personhood of a river provides insights into how legal pluralism may evolve and how relationships with non‐human nature may be recognised into the future. The decision in respect of the Whanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand, although not a legal precedent, has resulted in a new and vital Māori/Pākehā legal arrangement, which, in addressing the injustices of the country's colonial history, may also address environmental challenges such as resource exploitation. Since colonisation in 1840, the Māori of the Whanganui River have been fighting to assert their rights in relation to the river. The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, made between Māori chiefs and British colonisers as the basis of future governance in Aotearoa/New Zealand, was flawed due to differences between the Māori and English versions of the Treaty. Conflicting expectations regarding the constitution and administration of “law” emerged, as did incompatibilities between Māori and English ontologies, particularly involving interactions between humans and (non‐human) nature. In 1975, a tribunal was established to resolve Māori grievances regarding application of the principles of the Waitangi Treaty. In 1999, the Tribunal settled Claim 167 (known as Wai 167, after the Tribunal), recognising Māori ownership of the Whanganui River. Subsequent negotiations resulted in declaration of the river's legal personhood; the enacting legislation was passed on 20 March 2017. An association of place‐based law and the dominant legal system has been instigated. This paper explores how this less anthropocentric approach, in an era commonly called the “Anthropocene” due to the influence of humans on planet Earth, has a critical role to play in environmental management, particularly in relation to water.'From Inside the Cage To Outside the Box: Natural Resources as a Platform for Nonhuman Animal Personhood in the U.S. and Australia' by Randall S Abate and Jonathan Crowe in (2017) 5(1) Global Journal of Animal Law 54 comments
Nonhuman animals are currently treated as property under U.S. and Australian law, leaving them open to various kinds of exploitation. There has been a gradual evolution away from this property paradigm in both countries, but significant work remains to ensure that nonhuman animals are afforded adequate legal protections. This article considers the legal avenues available to protect nonhuman animals in the U.S. and Australia, focusing particularly on the attribution of legal personhood. Section 2 of the article reviews attempts by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to establish legal personhood protections for nonhuman animals through writ of habeas corpus petitions under U.S. common law. Section 3 surveys the options for recognition of animal personhood under Australian law, discussing issues of standing, habeas corpus, and guardianship models. Section 4 discusses the growing movement to assign legal personhood rights to natural resources. The article proposes that to the extent that natural resources have received legal personhood protection to recognize their inherent value, similar protections should be afforded to animals. In the meantime, habeas corpus, standing, and guardianship theories provide valuable procedural platforms for incremental progress toward protecting nonhuman animals in both the U.S. and Australia.
imagine that science and technology have advanced to the point where it is only a matter of time before accurate and reliable devices will be available for us to continue our relationships with our loved ones who have “passed on,” but definitely not “passed away.”
The Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health (LACH) at the University of Arizona is actually progressing toward a working prototype of what my colleagues and I call the “SoulPhone.” We express this emerging historic development as the evolution from the cell phone, through the smart phone, to the SoulPhone.
Now, imagine that this technology exists, and that you can literally text, speak to, or video conference with your child who has physically died. What we call “death” will have been radically transformed from “passing away” to “moving to” a different realm (like a different city, state, or country). The site helpfully provides answers to several concerns -
Q. When contacting those “on the other side,” might we be intruding upon their rest or privacy?
Two decades of contemporary research with genuine mediums clearly indicate that cooperating spirits want to communicate with their loved ones on earth. “Departed” loved ones and luminaries want to continue to be with us just as we wish to be with them. The evidence reveals that we on earth are not intruding upon the rest or privacy of those in spirit. We are, rather, enabling them to experience and express their love for us and the planet.
Q. Could SoulPhone devices be used in negative or harmful ways as has occurred with the Internet and other technologies in the world today?
There will always be those who use surgical knives to kill rather than cure. Some will use smart phones to trigger bombings instead of sending loving messages. Potential abuse of the SoulPhone is no different than for any other technology. Society must be educated in respecting the gift and power of this technology for humanity.
Q. Will using the SoulPhone and communicating with spirits possibly leave ones self open to evil interference?
We are very mindful of this possibility and have considered it for years. Here is not the place to describe how we address this profound question. There are technical ways to minimize abuse from “negative” spirits, but for reasons of intellectual property cannot be shared here. Insights from the science of Quantum Electro-Dynamics (QED) indicate that you get what you intend. For people who believe in evil spirits, those are very real. On the other hand, for example, evidential mediums who do not believe in negative spirits can truthfully say they have never observed one. So both those who perceive evil spirits, and those who don’t, are telling their truth.
When using out-of-body (OBE) techniques, Robert Monroe of the Monroe Institute recommended intending that you will connect only with those on your energetic level or above. Another of his techniques involved encasing one's self in a protective shield. The SoulPhone technology may incorporate using one or more of these approaches to protect being “spiritually hacked.”Potential consumers of the service or the 'protective shield' might want to read works such as Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Duke University Press, 2000) or John Durham Peters, Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (University of Chicago Press, 2000).
If you have ever been caught fumbling for your Opal card at the ticket gate, a Sydney man may have found the solution. He had the chip from an Opal card inserted into his hand and is now tapping on using the technology that is implanted underneath his skin.
Bio-hacker Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow, his legal name, had the Opal near-field communication (NFC) chip cut down and encased in bio-compatible plastic, measuring 1 millimetre by 6 millimetres. He then had the device implanted just beneath the skin on the side of his left hand.
"It gives me an ability that not everyone else has, so if someone stole my wallet I could still get home," he said. He is able to use the Opal just like other users, including topping the card up on his smartphone. However, his hand needs to be about 1 centimetre from the reader, closer than traditional cards, and he sometimes needs to tap more than once, due to his device's smaller antenna.
"My goal is to have frictionless interaction with technology," he said.
Mr Meow-Meow had his device implanted by a piercing expert, in a procedure lasting approximately one hour. He warned others not to do the same without expertise and research. "Most certainly don't try this at home unless you know what you're doing," he said.
Mr Meow-Meow said there was a risk of bacterial infection whenever anything was implanted beneath the skin, so it was important to consult professionals. "Be aware of the risks involved and make a wise judgement based on that."
He also said his actions were a breach of Opal's terms of service, which prohibit tampering. "It will be really interesting to see what happens when the first transit officer scans my arm," he said.The officer might be more impressed by Mr Meow-Meow's given and surnames, which gained some attention when he stood for parliament.
If your name is Meow Meow, there’s a decent chance you’re an unusual dude. This holds true for Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow, a polyamorous, trans-humanist bio-hacker in Sydney. In 2014, Meow Meow opened Australia’s first do-it-yourself bio-hacking lab, in which anyone could pay a membership fee to experiment with DNA and make whatever creatures they could imagine.For people familiar with the VeriChip controversy there is more bite in 'Towards insertables: Devices inside the human body' by Kayla Heffernan, Frank Vetere and Shanton Chang in (2017) 22(3) First Monday or 'The security implications of VeriChip cloning' by John Halamka, Ari Juels, Adam Stubblefield and Jonathan Westhues in (2006) 13(6) Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 601-607.
two areas of present ethical concern that are distinctive to implanted RFID chips, and in partic- ular the VeriChip.
Disclosure of Risks
A central ethical principle holds that individuals have a right to know about possible adverse effects of a treatment, in this case implantation of a chip. Should VeriChip have disclosed the results of the rodent studies before anti-chip activists raised this issue? A finding of carcinogenic effect of an im- plant in rodents is, at least, suggestive of the possibility of a similar effect in humans. Predictably, the issue has assumed major importance to VeriChip, which saw a large drop in its stock price following media reports of this issue. The company commissioned a consultant to write an article for its website that downplayed risks to humans. While regulatory agencies might not give much weight to indications of foreign-body induced tumorigenesis in rodents, there is clearly a diversity of opinion among experts. “I think the evidence from the animal studies is indeed alarming,” one prominent cancer researcher told one of the present authors “and one should refrain from chipping people unless the mechanisms and long-term effects are known.” (A. Lerchl, Jacobs University Bremen [Bremen, Germany], personal communication [e-mail] to K. R. Foster October 16, 2007). Should the possibility of cancer be added to the rather long list of potential adverse effects provided by the FDA, most of which are seemingly highly unlikely?
Truth in Advertising
VeriChip markets the VeriMed system for identification of patients who might present to emergency rooms incapable of communicating their identity to caregivers. Its promo- tional literature lists a wide variety of conditions, which, the company believes, would justify the cost of implantation of a chip and subscription to its medical database.
However, we know of no studies showing that being chipped gives a better outcome at the emergency room or otherwise improves public health in comparison with sim- pler and noninvasive technologies, such as medical alert bracelets, USB drives with personal health information, identification cards in wallets, fingerprint scanners, biometric identification, for example. An independent assessment of the risks and benefits of the use of implanted RFID tags in humans for medical identification purposes is badly needed, if only as a consumer protection measure to help consumers make informed decisions whether to buy into the system. For most individuals, we suspect, chipping would be a poor investment with slight prospects of resulting in a better outcome in a health crisis given other options available to the patient.
So far, only preliminary studies are underway which address this issue. A pilot project using this system was announced in June 2006 by VeriChip Corporation with Hackensack University Medical Center (Hackensack, NJ), a large provider of medical services in the state, and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey (Newark, NJ). A larger test, with 200 Alzheimer’s patients, was announced in February 2007 by VeriChip Corporation and Alzheimer’s Community Care, Inc (West Palm Beach, FL).
From the brief descriptions of these studies, it not clear whether they are designed to assess benefits of the technology to individuals or to the healthcare providers. To make an informed choice, the consumer needs to know the likelihood that being chipped will result in a better outcome in a health emergency than with other identification technologies. A well-designed study to examine that endpoint would have to be far larger than either of the two studies mentioned previously. The pilot studies may be better suited to demonstrate the benefits to the healthcare system in accessing patient insurance and health records data, which is a different matter entirely. (The second of these studies raises issues of obtaining consent from Alzheimer’s patients, a thorny bioethical issue in itself).
Given the uncertainties about the safety of implanted RFID chips, and uncertainties in the benefits that they may bring, caution is warranted. We agree with the caution reflected in a recent report of the Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs of the American Medical Association on the technology (Sade 2007):
Radio frequency identification (RFID) devices may help to identify patients, thereby improving the safety and efficiency of patient care, and may be used to enable secure access to patient clinical information. However, their efficacy and security have not been established. Therefore, physicians implanting such devices should take certain precautions: 1) The informed consent process must include disclosure of medical uncertain- ties associated with these devices. 2) Physicians should strive to protect patients’ privacy by storing confidential information only on RFID devices with informational security similar to that required of medical records. 3) Physicians should support research into the safety, efficacy, and potential non-medical uses of RFID devices in human beings.
Coercion
If receiving an RFID tag were purely a matter of consumer choice, few serious ethical issues would arise apart from generic concerns about consumer protection. Thus, for example, a consumer might reasonably choose to be chipped — preferably not in a tattoo parlor — to avoid having to carry a credit card or RFID tag on a key chain.
By far the most important and distinctive ethical issues connected with implanted RFID transponders result from the very real possibility that the chips might be implanted under real or implied coercion, coupled with the deep aversion — or at least unease — with which many individuals view the technology.
Despite extensive, and at times hyperbolic, discussion of the uses of implanted RFID chips in humans to be found on the Internet, few systematic studies have been reported on the acceptability of implanted RFID chips to average people. A small survey in 2003 (Hiltz et al. 2003) found that 18 of 23 people questioned objected to the idea of implantable chips. ”If they are putting something inside of you”, one respondent replied, ”it’s like you’re changing yourself. It’s not right” (Hiltz et al. 2003, 7).
People from different cultures will certainly differ in their acceptability of implanted RFID chips. In some cultures, altering the bodily image may ostracize individuals from their sociocultural networks. In the United States, some fundamentalist Christian groups vehemently object to implanted RFID tags as “marks of the beast.” Both Judaism and Islam prohibit tattoos, and their religious authorities may forbid implanted RFID tags for similar reasons. Other cultural and religious factors in acceptability of the technology have hardly been explored in discussions to date about implanting RFID chips in people for identification.
In view of widespread popular apprehension about the technology, proposals to “chip” individuals would raise extremely serious ethical issues if an element of coercion were involved, either direct or tacit. This can easily come about if RFID tags were to become widely adopted for access control or identification in nonmedical settings.
Indeed, a variety of proposals have been floated in public discussions that would involve coercive implantation of RFID chips, some on face value highly impractical. In March 2006, a columnist for The New Republic Online defended a proposal to implant RFID tags in sex offenders (Cottle 2006), pointing out that such people are already subject to extensive restrictions, and that tracking individuals through implanted RFID chips might be preferable to present practices, for example, residency restrictions based on Megan’s Law legislation that in some jurisdictions force convicted sex offenders to sleep under bridges or in their vehicles. However, the proposal raises obvious objections on practical grounds. Must every entrance to every school be equipped with an RFID reader to detect chipped individuals? Would it not be easy for a chipped individual to conceal the transponder from the reader? A more practical way to implement the plan would be to chip the teachers instead, and use the RFID readers to provide positive identification when they enter a school. We suspect that teachers’ unions would fiercely oppose such a plan.
Far more troubling (and thankfully very far from reality) is the proposal by Silverman (VeriChip’s Chairman of the Board) to “chip” guest workers entering the United States. One might argue that receiving implants would be voluntary for such individuals. But which immigrant, facing poverty at home and the prospects of a job in a new country, would be in a position to argue with demands to have a chip implanted as a condition of entry into the coun- try? Would college professors or bioethicists headed to the United States for a brief sabbatical or training be chipped as well as agricultural workers? If not, who would decide, and on what basis? If being chipped becomes a requirement for work by a noncitizen in the United States, what impact would there be on the global labor market? The prospects of being chipped will surely be a strong deterrent to others from coming here to work and learn.
Forcing immigrants to be chipped is deeply offensive on human rights grounds. It would frame the RFID chip as a branding device similar in theory to the brand of the western cowboy on cattle or to the tattoo of an inmate in a Nazi concentration camp. Arguably, it is a violation of Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), which guarantees everybody the right to “life, liberty and security of person.” To the extent that forced implantation of a RFID chip in a person’s body is a violation of his/her privacy, it would also violate the privacy provision of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), to which the US is a party.
While implantable RFID technology is presently being marketed as a measure for patient protection, its chief benefit — convenient and reliable identification of an individual by means of a device that is difficult for the subject to lose — might well be more significant to organizations than to individuals, and the issue is intrinsically more complicated than one of consumer choice alone. In institutions that have adopted the use of implanted RFID tags for identification purposes, pressures will inevitably build on individuals to receive the tags. Suppose, for example, healthcare organizations with electronic records systems gave their patients a choice between maintaining possession of an identification card or receiving a chip? Would elderly, forgetful patients be pressured to receive a chip? What about a soldier in an army that decided to replace dog tags with implanted chips? Are these individuals less vulnerable to coercion to receive a chip than the hapless immigrants considered in Silverman’s proposal? Other technologies, such as fingerprint identification or retinal scans, allow reliable identification of individuals without the need to compromise bodily integrity.
Faced with widespread public concerns about coercive implantable RFID chips, several states have passed legislation regulating their use. In May 2006, for example, Wis- consin passed a bill (Assembly Bill 290) that would prohibit requiring anybody to have a microchip implanted. North Dakota and California have also passed similar bills. Enforcing such laws might be difficult if implanted chips, like drivers’ licenses, remain legally voluntary but become de facto requirements for many kinds of employment, voting, or receipt of health care.
Because of concerns discussed previously, a national dis- cussion is needed about the use of implanted RFID chips among the many groups potentially affected by the technology. Decisions about the use of the technology need to be made by a broader group of stakeholders than the engineers and companies involved in the field. A commitment must be made to restrict the technology to people who freely choose to be implanted, and to shield other individuals from real or implied coercion. As Anderson and Labay remarked (2006), a “decision about where to draw the line of acceptable use must be made soon, before the technology becomes rampant and it becomes too late to prevent misuse.” Or, in more specific terms, we have already implanted RFID tags in our dogs and cats. Is Aunt Millie next?
The respondent, Rodney Norman Culleton, a Senator duly elected for the State of Western Australia makes the following submissions in support of an adjournment:
In Breach of S1 Constitution since 1990 in Act no 138 of 1900, it appears the Parliament of the Commonwealth has not been constituting itself with the Queen, and renamed itself without a Referendum the Parliament of Australia.
By S 32 Judiciary Act 1903. (Cth) now we are in the High Court on one matter on referral from the Senate, all the grievances, I have with the Government of Australia can and must be aired and all such remedies shall be granted to the respondent as it appears to be just. Consequently this submission is substantial.
That renamed Parliament of Australia appears to be held in contempt by the Judges and Magistrates of Australia after it started, on the 8th January 1991, enacting Legislation as “The Parliament of Australia enacts.” Because the Queen has been removed from the enacting words of the Parliament of the Commonwealth a reign of terror for which only physical violence or the threat of it, and the good common sense of Swat Teams and Police called upon to commit proxy violence in the name of Banks, Financiers and non compliant Courts, created by the States of Australia on any individual or family or corporation that dared to make a Political protest causing suicides family breakups, destruction of the family unit, and immense heartbreak to thousands of committed hard working Australians.
One such Court in my personal experience is the Supreme Court of Western Australia which appears to have been constituting itself with a single Registrar and making orders to be executed by the Bank's agents including the Police, without a trial or any proper judicial proceeding under Order 62A R4(1) Supreme Court Rules of Western Australia, even if the victim is in Court as I was, Registrar Whitbread made orders giving a shell lender possession of another entity of my own personal property and other third party assets which had nothing to do with the case. Under the guillotine Order you only have three days to Appeal which has recently been extended. Under this Order the WA Supreme Court had shut its doors preventing me from having my case heard.
The seeds of this disastrous failure in the delivery of peace order and good government started in 1952 when the High Court Rules 1952 were promulgated and approved by somnolent and irresponsible Parliament allowing the so called High Court to depart from the promised and mandated Federal Supreme Court to a selective, isolated, elitist High Court with power given to a Registrar and a Judge sitting alone, not the minimum of three Justices, mandated by S 71 Constitution, and without a hearing, just on the papers, to refuse access to the High Court as it now calls itself.
The Original published version, of the High Court of Australia Act 1979 as published in 1979, while outside the scope of S 71 Constitution, did in fact have the proper enacting words, but the latest version, obtained from the Table Office in the Senate has no enacting words at all in it. It is no wonder Banks, Trustees, their liquidators, receivers and agents have been able to use the Supreme Court of each State to get arbitrary orders stripping the assets of hard working Australians and giving them with the help of Armed Swat Teams, to the legal thieves, condoned by the State Governments of Australia.
This should never have been allowed to happen but for a series of incompetent, hopeless, Attorneys-General in both the Commonwealth and in the States. Who have been delivering law but not justice, since 1991, using armed swat teams, created as a Private Army by every State mostly from ex Army personnel, trained in assault weapons, in breach of S 114 Constitution.
These 150,000 odd strong armed organisations one in every State have been protected since 1983, by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, who since 1983 has had the power to deliver protection from the application of the common law and Part III Crimes Act 1914 (Cth) by Complaint and Summons in a Magistrates Court in the State of Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales and in Western Australia, by using S 9.5 Director of Public Prosecutions Act 1983 to take over and discontinue any proceedings started by a person authorised by S 13 Crimes Act 1914 (Cth) or S15F Crimes Act 1914 (Cth) and deny access to justice to aggrieved Australians unless their Political Masters, in whatever Government happens to be in power directs.
An physically intimidating thug in a 550 horsepower Tow truck came to a property unannounced I was leasing in Guyra, without any paperwork, or other documentation or identification. He attempted to repossess a company vehicle by force ,and I physically resisted him on his failure to leave, and we had a fight about it. The individual was adamant he was coming in, and in order to stop him stealing or trespassing I switched his idling truck off, and removed the single key from the ignition. The thug started punching me, I punched back, and during the altercation, the key allegedly got lost, although he could have put it in his pocket. I was not worried about a key but where I would land my next punch. I was searched but he was not.
He alleges that he hot-wired this Turbo Charged Truck and got it going but since modern trucks have several layers of protection against theft, he almost certainly had the key. He drove away.
On the 12th September 2016, in the Senate I raised as an Issue for the Senate to consider, the fact that since the High Court Rules 2004, no longer issued process in the name of the Queen the High Court was out of order, and in contempt of Parliament, as 33 High Court of Australia Act 1979 mandates that Process be issued in the name of the Queen.
In fact it has been out of order since 1952, when Order 58 rule 4 Subrule 3 was approved by the Parliament of the Commonwealth and this malpractice continued in the High Court Rules 2004 in Rules 6.5, 6.6 and 6.7.which means no political pressure relief valve through the courts, and revolving door government.
In fact the High Court and Attorney-General were informed by action in the County Court in Bendigo in 2006, over ten years ago, and used the Australian Government Solicitor and political pressure on the County Court in Victoria to overturn a Default judgment entered against the Commonwealth in that action by one Judge Davis. The State of the Judiciary in Victoria being hopeless since 1986, no further action was taken by the Community Law Resource Group but the paperwork, letters from the High Court Registrar, the Office of Legal Services Coordination the Writ and most of the paperwork, is still available for filing.
The High Court is authorised to make Rules for the purposes of carrying into execution, the purposes and objects of the Judiciary Act 1903 by S 86 Judiciary Act 1903. It has been granted original jurisdiction under S 30 Judiciary Act 1903 to try on indictment any offence against the Laws of the Commonwealth.
To achieve this, requires Rules providing for Grand Juries, to investigate and commit to trial offenders caught offending against the Laws of the Commonwealth, but neither the High Court Rules 1952, nor the High Court Rules 2004, contain Rules to facilitate this very important function of a Federal Supreme Court no matter what it is called. Breach of Statute Law was always an Indictable Offence at Common Law, but without access to the High Court or rules that regulate such a proceeding, the State Governments of Australia may have embarked on a reign of terror against the subjects of Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second living within their borders.
In Breach of S 90 Constitution which gives exclusive jurisdiction over Excise to the Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments have levied an internal taxes including vehicles, property and transfers, a tax on the right to drive by selling driving Licences, acquired private property without paying compensation, all taxes and actions that are absolutely prohibited to the Queen, unless legislated for in Her name, with the consent of both Houses of Parliament.
In New South Wales where the incident prompting this referral to the High Court occurred the Parliament of New South Wales in 1970 legislated to give a rules Committee of nine Judges power, under S 6 Supreme Court Act of New South Wales power, by Rules of Court to overrule any prior inconsistent Act, including the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 and Constitution, thereby depriving the Australians in New South Wales of the protection of a court of Judicature as required by Ch III Constitution.
In 1986 an Oxymoron of an Act was agreed between the States and Commonwealth that both abolished the Australian Constitution and continued it and the Australian Courts Act 1828. This inconsistency was presented to the High Court by Senator Len Harris of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation around one year prior to the election where he was defeated, and it was rejected under Order 58 Rule 4 Subrule 3 High Court Rules 1952, and this capricious and unreasonable conduct by the Registry of the High Court and the Judges of it has resulted in Revolving Door Governments in every State and the Commonwealth since 1952.
It appears to be clear the Family Court of Australia has never required the Judges of that Court to swear Allegiance to the Queen, and as a consequence it puts a big question over its legitimacy, never been legitimate, because Allegiance to the Queen is the cornerstone of representative democracy, because the Queen, before She can assume Office, must take an Oath Herself, and that Oath incorporates the Principles of Protestant Christianity into the fabric of society.
Those principles are: (a) That no one shall be subject to arbitrary judgment by one individual over another. (b) No one shall be compelled to worship false gods. (c) Only a panel drawn from the electoral Roll, comprising more than one, can find a verdict or the truth. (d) No one shall be the slave of another and all persons shall be equal before Almighty God , and therefore the Law. (e) A conscience of Almighty God is exercised by the Queen in all her judgments, and the Conscience of Almighty God is called equity, and it was exercised by the Archbishop of Canterbury as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the Chancery Court until 1873, when the Court of Chancery and Courts or Law were amalgamated, to make the courts of Judicature.
The Court of Chancery as the conscience of Almighty God was charged with executing and maintaining the Statute Laws of the Realm, and it was a simple matter of a pleading of Statute in that Court to instil respect in the deliberations of the Parliament. As a safeguard, the principles of the Magna Carta were observed by that court and all parties since 1275, and the Statute of Westminster the first, had the right to elect mode of trial: at Bar before Judges or with a jury of their peers.
The Principals outlined in Paragraph 18 above are incorporated into the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. As Schedule 2 to the Australian Human Rights Commission Act 1986, by s 13 Acts Interpretation Act 1901 this is law, but its application has been frustrated by Judges and Magistrates whose allegiance to the Queen must be questioned, because it was enacted properly in 1986 at the same time as the Australia Act 1986 gave the States a licence to do as they pleased to Parliaments in every State by removing Judicial Review as envisaged by Alfred Deakin in the second reading speech to the Judiciary Bill 1902.
Without Judicial Review as a right to peace order and good government no one can truly live in peace in this country, because if he does anything at all to upset a government official, a nasty vindictive Judiciary will be engaged to attack him.
To protect Parliamentarians, who under Parliamentary Privilege may bring the grievances of the people to the Parliament S 14 Parliamentary Privileges Act 1987, one of the Acts properly enacted before 1990, is enacted and it provides that no Parliamentarian ‘shall be required to attend before a court or a tribunal…on any day: (c.) on which the House of which that member is a member meets. (e.) which is within five days before or five days after a day referred to min Paragraph (c.) or (d.)”
Consequently on the above submissions, I humbly request that the hearing be adjourned to another date and time agreeable to both parties.
Signed Rodney Norman Culleton proudly Representing Western Australia in the Commonwealth Senate.
Alabama Code s 13A-12-5: Unlawful Bear Exploitation
(a) A person commits the offense of unlawful bear exploitation if he or she knowingly does any one of the following:
(1) Promotes, engages in, or is employed at a bear wrestling match.
(2) Receives money for the admission of another person to a place kept for bear wrestling.
(3) Sells, purchases, possesses, or trains a bear for bear wrestling.
(4) For purposes of exploitation, subjects a bear to surgical alteration in any form, including, but not limited to, declawing, tooth removal, and severing tendons.
(b) Unlawful bear exploitation is a Class B felony and is punishable as provided by law.
(c) Upon the arrest of any person for violating this section, the arresting law enforcement officer, conservation officer, or animal control officer shall have authority to seize and take custody of any bear in the possession of the arrested person.
(d) Upon the conviction of any person for violating the provisions of this section, any court of competent jurisdiction shall have authority to order the forfeiture by the convicted person of any bear, the use of which was the basis of the conviction. Any bears ordered forfeited under this section shall be placed in the custody of a humane shelter, a society that is incorporated for the prevention of cruelty to animals, or the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.
(e) In addition to the fines, penalties, and forfeitures imposed under this section, the court may require the defendant to make restitution to the state, any of its political subdivisions, or a humane shelter or a society that is incorporated for the prevention of cruelty to animals for housing, feeding, or providing medical treatment to bears used for unlawful wrestling.Section 13A-12-6 deals with 'hog and canine fighting' thus -
(a) As used in this section, the term "hog" shall mean a pig, swine, or boar.
(b) The crime of hog and canine fighting occurs when a person organizes or conducts any commercial or private event, commonly referred to as a "catch," wherein there is a display of combat or fighting between one or more domestic or feral canines and feral or domestic hogs and in which it is intended or reasonably foreseeable that the canines or hogs would be injured, maimed, mutilated, or killed.
(c) The crime of hog and canine fighting occurs when a person intentionally does any of the following for the purpose of organizing, conducting, or financially or materially supporting any event as provided in subsection (b):
(1) Finance, commercially advertise, sell admission tickets, or employ persons.
(2) Own, manage, or operate any facility or property.
(3) Supply, breed, train, or keep canines or hogs.
(4) Knowingly purchase tickets of admission.
(d) This section shall not apply to the lawful hunting of hogs with canines or the use of canines for the management, farming, or herding of hogs which are livestock or the private training of canines for the purposes enumerated in this subsection provided that such training is conducted in the field and is not in violation of this section.
(e) A violation of this section is a Class A misdemeanor upon conviction for a first offense. A second or subsequent violation is a Class C felony. After a first violation, a judge shall inform the defendant of the enhanced penalty upon a second or subsequent violation.In Missouri s 578.176 deals with bear wrestling thus -
Any person who commits any of the following acts is guilty of a class A misdemeanor:
(1) Bear wrestling;
(2) Permitting bear wrestling to be done on any premises under his charge or control;
(3) Promoting, conducting, or staging bear wrestling;
(4) Advertising bear wrestling;
(5) Collecting any admission fee for bear wrestling;
(6) Purchasing, selling, or possessing a bear which he knows will be used for bear wrestling;
(7) Training a bear for bear wrestling;
(8) Subjecting a bear to surgical alteration for bear wrestling.
From the Bible to the popular song
There's one theme that we find right along
Of all ideals they hail as good
The most sublime is motherhood
There was a man though, who it seems
Once carried this ideal to extremes
He loved his mother and she loved him
And yet his story is rather grimI'm reminded of that in reading 'Gangsta Rap Lyrics and Early Childhood Cruelties: are These Artists Searching for Enlightened Witnesses and Seeking to Reveal the Real Truth of Black Mother-Son Love' by Reginald Robinson in (2015) 5(1) Journal of Research in Gender Studies 73–92.
few writers, feminists, and cultural commentators have actually understood why gangsta rap artists vilify women, especially blacks, with demeaning lyrics, often decrying words that wound as patriarchal oppression. Such critiques deny access to the deeper, more repressed sources for the murderous rage and corrosive hatred that such artists appear to have for black females. Rather, the author posits that the source of such rage and hatred is childhood cruelties of black infants and toddlers in the earliest years of their lives by black parents, especially females. That cruelty gets repressed, surfacing again as nearly autobiographical lyrics because these artists unconsciously need to reveal the truth of their cruel sufferings to others, and they need others like enlightened witnesses to validate their lyric-based personal histories, without at the same time directly confronting their cruel mothers.
The aim of this paper is to show the demonological origin of modernity, which entails a "sublime" aspect of the political exceeding the words by which we try to capture its nature.
My paper proceeds using the lexicon of the Italian Theory (Agamben and Esposito) to analyse the parallel between King James I and Jean Bodin. Both authors developed the modern conceptions of political sovereignty and both were engaged in witch-trials, writing extensive treatises on the matter. This parallel locates the question of heterodoxy/orthodoxy in the very threshold of modernity.
My tentative conclusion is the possibility of a link between the politicization of the magic world and the genealogy of modernity, reversing, in a way, the standard approach of political theology in favour of a demonological archeology of modern European concepts of law and politics.Monateri refers to “the strange interconnections between the rise of the modern concept of sovereignty and the political, and the Jurisdiction over the magic and witchcraft, especially in two different but parallel figures as king James I of England and Jean Bodin in France”, going on to comment
Both authors have indeed written extensively on withcraft, the former in his Demonolgie and the latter in his Demonomanie, and both, as it is well known, have crafted, by practice and in theory, key features of the modern purely political concept of sovereignty.
As such this work is part of an ongoing project of rethinking the origin of modernity and its genealogy pointing at the the sublime aspects of the political. From this standpoint I use what is now labeled as "Italian Theory" and its lexicon to push it into a contingent but different aspect, targeting the "ineffable" of the political.
According to this recent intellectual path, here I use the term political as the English translation of the German term "Das Politisch", to designate the concept of what is political beyond the standard reference denoted by words as politics or policies.
Secondly for "sublime" I mean to make reference to those features of human sensibility re-discovered by Edmund Burke, pointing to what is "beyond words" and probably beyond explicit and clear thought. So everything which is at the same time terrific but attractive, hazardous but seducing, too large or too huge but unescapable, is "sublime". To capture the idea it is enough for the moment to remember that from the standpoint of Burke's aesthetics the sunny mediterranean in daylight is a piece of beauty, but the stormy north sea swaddled in darkness is sublime.
My investigation is then about the dark side of the genealogy of the modern political which happened to be denied by rationalism and to fall into latency, but that persists as a remnant, a residue, exceeding our capacity to verbalise thoroughly what politics is at national and international level.
What, then does it lie at the heart of our political conceptions? What is exactly defeating rationalism in the domain of politics? What is the existential nature of political decisions? Which kind of ghosts are still dominating a globalized world, and isn't the West, after all, one of the most exotic places in this world today?
Of course, having to do with witchcraft and the romantic sublime my theory copes with the place of heterodoxy within the transformations which moulded the surface of European rationalism, as a standard for global orthodoxy, in the scientific appraisal of the political and legal domain. I would like to stress the use of these categories instead of the more common divide between rationalism and irrationalism.
Those who had to do with witches weren't irrationalist at all, they simply had a social ontology different from ours, whereas it is true that many of them, as Bodin, have been condemned as heterodox by the Church.
Also Burke was certainly not an irrational politician, but a very thoughtful and practical one, even if romanticism and its aesthetics raised as a form of heterodoxy in the field of aesthetics and in definition of beauty.
Having to do with witchcraft and the sublime my research tries also to supersede the theory of political theology as an historical account on the genealogy of modernity following the plot of the fall: once there were theological concepts moulding our understanding of the world and the law; these concepts decayed into pure political and legal conceptions, and, as a consequence, modern political orders are but broken pieces of a fallen theology, haunted by its memory.
According to me, these accounts, as long as they follow this plot, are themselves a form of self-improving theological understanding of our political tradition, implying a sense of nostalgia for the pre-politcal world. From this standpoint they can be labeled as "orthodox" as they still believe in a lost paradise of theological ontology surviving under the surface of modernity. On the contrary I think that the birth of the political represented a major fracture in the history of the West, and that its origins were much more heterodox than expected.
My main claim is, indeed, that of a demonological origin of modernity, which lies also at the heart of the romantic aesthetics of the sublime, reversing Schmitt's paradigm, as long as it entails a condemnation of political romanticism, seeing it as a form of eternal discussion avoiding the central point of decision.
At the opposite my project is to show how the pure political element in Western thought emerged from the heterodoxy of magic, and that its "ineffable" dimension was a major concern of romantic aesthetics. In this way my project, following what has recently be labeled as an "aesthetic turn in political thought", will be developed here only in its premises, and, henceforth, my present attempt will focus only on just two main works: James's Demonologie and Bodin's Demonomanie.
Following this path, in the second paragraph I shall present the evolution of the English legislation on magic, to see how it started, at the threshold of modernity, transforming witchcraft into a felony, a political crime of high treason, performing a strong politicization of it. In the third paragraph I shall discuss King James's conceptions about witchcraft and the arcana imperii, the mysteries of prerogative royal. Then in the fourth paragraph I shall cope with the book of Jean Bodin on the Demonomanie and his reflections on the Republic, which led him to his famous definition of sovereignty. My main point will be to remember that the Church condemned the books of Bodin as heterodox, precisely because they offered a political theory of magic.
On this basis I shall formulate my first tentative conclusions in the fifth paragraph, linking, as I said, demonology, heterodoxy and the aesthetics of the sublime.I have meanwhile pointing students to New York Supreme Court filing by Richard Luthmann in a dispute with Foley and others (Court index 150175/2014) which features both robust language and a reference to sttlement of a commercial dispute though trial by combat.
when viewed in a light most favorable to opposing counsel - [can] only be termed as a glorified comic book piled on top of pure and adulterated extortion wrapped in a transparent abuse of legal process.Trial by combat? Luthmann provides the reader with an eight page outline of UK and US law regarding trial by combat, noting that
The last certain trial by battle in England occurred in 1446: a servant accused his master of treason, and the master drank too much wine before the battle and was slain by the servant. ... The last certain judicial battle in Britain was in Scotland in 1597, when Adam Bruntfield accused James Carmichael of murder and killed him in battle.Luthmann notes
Pronouncing judgement in favor of the accused's plea claiming the wager of battle, Justice Bayley of the King's Bench said that:
'One of the inconveniences of this procedure is, that the party who institutes it must be willing, if required, to stake his life in support of his accusation'.
The accusation was quickly withdrawn after this judgment. Parliament abolished wager of battle the following year, in 1819, and at the same time they also abolished the writ of right and criminal appeals.He goes on to argue that
At the times of the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791, trial by combat was not outlawed in any of the Thirteen Original United States (including the State of New York), all of whom inherited British common law upon independence in 1776.
Since then, no American court in post-independence United States to the undersigned’s knowledge has addressed the issue, and thus trial by combat remains a right reserved to the people and a valid alternative to civil actionbefore concluding
The allegations made by Plaintiffs, aided and abetted by their counsel, border upon the criminal. As such, the undersigned respectfully requests that the Court permit the Undersigned to dispatch Plaintiffs and their counsel to the Divine Providence of the Maker for Him to exact His Divine Judgment once the Undersigned has released the souls of the Plaintiffs and their counsel from their corporeal bodies, personally and/or by way of a Champion.