Glass Slippers

'Was it Author's Rights All the Time? Copyright as a Constitutional Right in Ireland' by Rónán Kennedy in (2011) 33 Dublin University Law Journal 253 comments

If property rights are “the Cinderella of the fundamental rights provisions of the Irish Constitution,” copyright may be its glass slipper, seeking its proper owner. The underlying rationale for copyright in Irish law is rarely examined, despite statements from the bench that place it on a constitutional footing. This would make Ireland distinctive amongst common law jurisdictions and may impact on the copyright regime in ways that may surprise those accustomed to looking to the UK and US for guidance. 

In Phonographic Performance Ireland Ltd. v Cody, Keane J (as he then was) said: 

Section 60(4) of the [Copyright] Act of 1963 provides that no right in the nature of copyright “shall subsist otherwise than by virtue of this Act or of some other enactment in that behalf”. The right of the creator of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work not to have his or her creation stolen or plagiarised is a right of private property within the meaning of Article 40.3.2° and Article 43.1 of the Constitution of Ireland, 1937, as is the similar right of a person who has employed his or her technical skills and/or capital in the sound recording of a musical work. As such, they can hardly be abolished in their entirety, although it was doubtless within the competence of the Oireachtas to regulate their exercise in the interests of the common good. In addition and even in the absence of any statutory machinery, it is the duty of the organs of the State, including the courts, to ensure, as best they may, that these rights are protected from unjust attack and, in the case of injustice done, vindicated. The statements in some English authorities that copyright other than by statutory provision ceased to exist with the abolition of common law copyright are not necessarily applicable in Ireland. 

 This article examines the issues that arise from this statement. What was the history of copyright in England? What is the position of copyright in other common law countries? How do other constitutions deal with copyright? Can we find a basis for copyright in Irish constitutional theory and practice? Is it therefore correct to say that intellectual property, and specifically copyright, is a property right in Irish constitutional law? What difference does it make that copyright law has a constitutional basis?

Fishy

Russell Jacoby's 'Stanley Fish Turned Careerism Into a Philosophy' in The New Republic comments that

 The advanced fragmentation of intellectual life in America means that personalities and issues that loom large in one field are often invisible in another. For the sociologist or the economist, the name Stanley Fish probably means little or nothing. For those in more literary domains, however, this scholar, university administrator, and critic has for decades been a familiar figure. To be sure, he has gained wider acclaim inasmuch as David Lodge apparently drew upon Fish for the character of Morris Zapp in his novels satirizing academic life. He also shows up regularly as an opinion writer for The New York Times. Fish’s importance resides mainly in that he is an exemplar of recent academic trends. He chiefly represents himself—he does that quite well—but he may also represent something of the postmodern academic life: its self-satisfaction, its self-promotion, its glibness. If the humanities are in trouble today, humanists like Fish are one of the reasons. 

Unlike the jargon-filled writings of his colleagues, Fish’s work has a utilitarian and readable style. Many of his books are collected essays and reflect a relaxed public self. They are larded with “I think this,” “I hasten to add,” and “I am aware.” He does not shy away from distilling his arguments, and even presenting them in bullet points. He writes short declarative sentences. “By ‘there’s no such thing as free speech,’ I mean three things.” Compare the prose of Fish with that of a high priest of academic gibberish: the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature and Language and the director of the Humanities Center at Harvard University. Homi K. Bhabha writes, in a typical passage, “The politics of difference lives on to rethink the minority not as an identity but as a process of affiliation ... that eschews sovereignty and sees its own selfhood and interests as partial and incipient in relation to the other’s presence.” This is not Fish. .... Fish’s original claim to fame was his idea of “interpretive communities,” which was presented in 1980 in his book Is There a Text in This Class? The answer to the title’s question is no. For the early as well as the late Fish, disciplinary or historical realities overwhelm old-fashioned principles. (Another one of his collections is called The Trouble with Principle.) The notion of the scholar eliciting textual truth is as quaint as the general store. For Fish, the reader—or the consumer—is king. It is we scholars who decide what a text means. The text itself disappears. “Meanings are not extracted but made.” How do we decide on meanings or their validity? It depends. On what? It depends on what you bring to a text: what your training is; what issues bother you; what “interpretive strategies” you use; and—in general—what “interpretive communities” you belong to. 

This is a version of “different folks, different strokes,” which Fish basically admits. One group of scholars uses this approach; another uses that approach. “Those outside that community will be deploying a different set of interpretive strategies.” The question of which is true does not interest Fish. Disputes about what a text means devolve into group membership. How do you settle disputes? You don’t. You check the membership card. You make certain you are talking to an ally. “The only ‘proof’ of membership is fellowship, the nod of recognition from someone in the same community, someone who says to you what neither of us could ever prove to a third party: ‘we know.’ I say to you now, knowing full well that you will agree with me ... only if you already agree with me.” Group thought and solidarity trump everything. 

Of course, Fish throws in important caveats. The communities are unstable and shifting; one person can belong to many communities, and membership can get confusing. Hence a scholar frequently argues across communities, as Fish himself does. But the basic point remains. Interpretation becomes the province of like-minded professionals who constitute a community with its own preconceptions, conceptions, and rules. Little or nothing exists outside these communities. They constitute texts, interpretations, and even facts. 

... More than fifteen years ago, Alan Sokal, a professor at NYU, pilloried the literary theorists in what became a famous put-down. He submitted to a leading journal of literary theory an article of high academic balderdash that heavily cited French pooh-bahs. After it was accepted and published, he revealed the prank. Of course Fish came to the defense of his hoodwinked confrères. He lectured Sokal, who is a professor of physics, about how science, like baseball, was “socially constructed.” Balls and strikes are “socially constructed” inasmuch as the rules can change. They are the product of history and choice. And the physics of baseball are also socially constructed. How so? Here Fish gets uncharacteristically vague. After making these acerbic points, Fish appealed to his version of his interpretive communities. Sokal was not part of the literary-theory community; he was a presumptuous outsider. He does not understand that “the criteria of an enterprise will be internal to its own history,” which depends on colleagues, traditions, and issues. We have our “own goals and protocols.” In other words, if we English professors trade in advanced nonsense, this is our own business. ... 

It would take a scholar of prodigious energy and inexhaustible masochism to document the extent to which the professoriate, decade after decade, remains thunderstruck by the most basic insight into the historical reality of life and thought, which Fish regularly rehearses. Thus the jaws of academics collectively drop when someone declares for the zillionth time that everything is historical, contextual, or situated. With the added imprimatur of Foucault or Althusser, this banal idea turns academic dross into academic gold. Althusser had the habit of dating exactly when he completed an essay, which he considered “important” to do. Without a date indicating when it was written, we would presumably imagine that his essay was a missive from the beyond. The new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders missed this obsessive-compulsive disorder of literary professors: repeating sans cesse the pedestrian observation that everything is contextual and contingent. Fish has taken this historicist principle and run with it forever. He is still agog over it. 

It is not an evil principle, and sometimes it can be salutary. It is also profoundly conservative and—despite Fish’s good cheer—deeply cynical. To be sure, Fish positions himself as a critic of both left and right. On most things, however, he is a solid academic liberal warmly defending new academic fields such as women’s studies and African American studies. He eschews “the neo-conservative assault on the humanities.” (In fact some neoconservatives have been the most ferocious defenders of the humanities.) On certain issues, however, Fish has roundly attacked the pretensions of academic leftists. He is not wrong to do so. We have all experienced the deluded Che Guevara–citing professors who cannot teach or write. Save the World on Your Own Time runs the title of one of Fish’s books. Yet it must be said that, for every leftist professor who makes waves by berating his students with Chairman Mao, there are a thousand—no, ten thousand—who bore their students with professional platitudes. A problem of the contemporary professoriate is not vociferous leftism but blatant quiescence, not political posturing but relentless careerism. 

The issue is not that Fish challenges political bombast, but the way he does it, by defending professionalization. He cites Samuel Goldwyn, the movie mogul, who responded to criticism that his movies lacked social significance with the comment, “If I wanted to send a message, I’d use Western Union.” Fish reformulates the idea: “If you want to send a message that will be heard beyond the academy, get out of it. Or, if I may adapt a patriotic slogan, ‘the academy—love it or leave it.'" Fish loves it. Fine, but his love always devolves into celebrating the woof and warp of the discipline. The rank solipsism of his position inevitably surfaces. What do English professors do? We do literary criticism. What’s that? “It’s what I do.” And “I do it because I like the way I feel when I’m doing it.” Fish does it in journals, jargon, and junkets. “The structure of a fully articulated profession is such that those who enter its precincts will find that the basic decisions, about where to look, what to do, and how to do it, have already been made.” Join in or leave us alone. 

The empirical truth that Fish proffers can hardly be challenged—intellectual life in this country has been highly professionalized—but its banality is hard to beat. In response to criticisms of an argument or questions about a particular interpretation, Fish merely outlines how the profession functions, as if this were an answer. The cult of theory ends in the cult of facts. Fish’s default position describes the activities of professionals. He seems convinced that this is a powerful sally—and advances it in perhaps his most consequential discussion, when he weighs in on the role of liberal education. 

Here Fish is at his best and worst. He is at his best because he punctures some “grandiose claims” for liberal education—for instance, that it fosters moral uprightness, community involvement, or global justice. “What is really at stake” in the controversy over liberal education, Fish writes, are not large philosophical principles but “administrative judgment with respect to professional behavior and job performance.” What happened to the idea that liberal education is more than just skills and job performance? That it entails, as John Henry Newman put it in The Idea of a University, overcoming “narrowness of mind”? That it leads to comprehension, even enlightenment? Newman described the narrow mind this way: “Nothing has a drift or relation; nothing has a history or a promise. Everything stands by itself, and comes and goes in its turn.” Newman could be describing Fish’s educational ideal. 

Fish wants academics to respond with aggression, even arrogance, to the perpetual calls to slash the funding of humanities departments and programs. He wants the professors to stop rolling over and playing dead. He is right. But when Fish comes out shooting, he turns out to be packing a water pistol. His aggressive rejoinder has nothing to do with first principles or with philosophical fundamentals. He offers conformity in the name of iconoclasm. His take-no-prisoners comeback retreats to the facts of academic life—with the kicker “take it or leave it.” What is liberal education to Fish? It’s what we do, that’s all. It is “entirely self-referential.” “We are responsible for the selection of texts, the preparation of a syllabus, the sequence of assignments and exams, the framing and grading of a term paper, and so on.” If you are busy with this, then the bigger questions, like “what is this good for,” are irrelevant. “You have already answered that question by sticking with the job: it’s good because it’s what you like to do.” 

Thus Fish gives these instructions for those who resist the calls to gut the university: “Instead of saying, ‘Let me tell you what we do so that you’ll love us,’ or ‘Let me explain how your values are really our values too,’ say, ‘We do what we do, we’ve been doing it for a long time, it has its own history, and until you learn it or join it, your opinions are not worth listening to.'" So much for a ringing defense of liberal education! Fish merely puffs himself, his colleagues, and his allies. From his criticism of “blind submissions” to his recent defense in the Times of favoritism and nepotism, Fish elevates those close to him—because they are close to him. “What counts is who your friends and allies are.... Your loyalty is to particular people and not to an abstraction.” You cannot fault him for gilding his credo. 

What is one to make of all of this? The crisis of the humanities—at the very least, the declining interest in the humanities—cannot obviously be attributed to Fish and his like-minded colleagues, but they have certainly abetted the decline. The lax concept of “socially constructed” flattens out cultural distinctions, so that baseball, physics, serious novels, and sitcoms all appear as kindred inventions, all worthy of full-time study. Not only students, but also interested outsiders and literate citizens, might wonder what is the point of going into the humanities to study comic books. Fish has been unable to uphold the liberal arts as anything more than a vehicle to provide jobs for liberal-arts professors, who do what they do. After all, the liberal tradition has served him and his friends quite nicely. “I believe fully in the core curriculum,” he wrote in one of his Times columns on the crisis of the humanities, “as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists.” Bully for him. But if this is the best defense of the liberal arts by one of its most celebrated practitioners, who needs it? 

Fish has raised careerism to a worldview. In this way, he is a man for our time. His writings incarnate the cheerful, expedient self-involvement that is part and parcel of contemporary life: everyone is out for himself. Fish has burnished this credo for the professoriate (who already knew it). He seems to believe that frank self-promotion is somehow subversive in this society. Fish also likes to see himself as the perpetual bad boy of literary criticism, provoking left and right. Fish is anything but. He is much too practical to be dangerous. He closes one of his defenses of the humanities with a little vignette of an encounter with a university lobbyist. He offers to accompany the fellow to the next legislative committee investigating the university. But the lobbyist has doubts about Fish’s conduct and asks, “Will you behave?” Fish concludes his chapter, “Some people never learn.” The self-satisfaction is palpable—as is the self-mystification. The unexciting truth is that Stanley Fish has always behaved. He has always bravely defended self-interest. With friends like him, the humanities needs no enemies.

Corruption

'Two Concepts of Corruption' (Edmond J. Safra Working Papers, No. 16) by Dennis F. Thompson comments

 To combat institutional corruption, we need to distinguish it clearly from individual corruption.

Individual corruption occurs when an institution or its officials receive a benefit that does not serve the institution and provides a service through relationships external to the institution under conditions that reveal a quid pro quo motive. Institutional corruption occurs when an institution or its officials receive a benefit that is directly useful to performing an institutional purpose, and systematically provides a service to the benefactor under conditions that tend to undermine procedures that support the primary purposes of the institution.

Institutional corruption does not receive the attention it deserves partly because it is so closely (and often unavoidably) related to conduct that is part of the job of a responsible official, the perpetrators are often seen as (and are) respectable officials just trying to do their job, and the legal system and public opinion are more comfortable with condemning wrongdoing that has a corrupt motive. Yet institutional corruption, which is usually built into the routines and practices of organizations, is usually more damaging to the institution and society than individual corruption, which in advanced societies typically consists of isolated acts of misconduct with effects limited in time and scope.

Reviews

'Taking Fake Online Consumer Reviews Seriously' by Justin Malbon in (2013) 36(2) Journal of Consumer Policy 139 argues that

 consumers rely heavily upon consumer reviews when making decisions about which products and services to purchase online. Sellers and their marketeers are aware of this, and as a result, some of them succumb to the temptation to generate fake consumer reviews. This article argues that policymakers and regulators need to take fake reviews seriously. This is because they undermine a (potentially) effective and efficient mechanism for overcoming information asymmetry between online sellers and buyers. Consumer reviews also offer a powerful mechanism for regulating the marketplace. Sellers who sell sub-standard products or engage in sub-standard selling practices risk reputational damage. Genuine consumer reviews can therefore moderate bad seller behaviour and assist in improving the quality and efficiency of the marketplace. Although there are laws in many jurisdictions that prohibit misleading and deceptive conduct, detecting fake reviews is complex and difficult. This article proposes that one way of increasing the effectiveness of regulatory oversight is for regulators to add an “alliance approach” to their existing arsenal of regulatory systems and mechanisms.

APPs Consultation

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) is seeking comment on first tranche of draft guidelines regarding the Australian Privacy Principles (APP), ie the unified privacy principles in the amended Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

The guidelines are not a legislative instrument. They instead outline how the Information Commissioner interprets and applies the APPs when exercising functions and powers under the Privacy Act relating to the APPs.

The draft Introduction to the guidelines states that

The APPs are the cornerstone of the privacy protection framework in the Privacy Act.

The APPs set out standards, rights and obligations in relation to handling, holding, accessing and correcting personal information. They apply to most Australian and Norfolk Island Government agencies and some private sector organisations – collectively referred to as APP entities (see paragraphs A.7 – A.9).

The APPs are principles-based law. This provides APP entities with the flexibility to tailor their personal information handling practices to their diverse needs and business models, and to the diverse needs of individuals. They are also technology neutral, applying equally to paper based and digital environments. This is intended to preserve their relevance and applicability, in a context of continually changing and emerging technology.

The APPs are structured to reflect the personal information lifecycle. They are grouped into five parts:

Part 1 – Consideration of personal information privacy (APPs 1 and 2).

Part 2 – Collection of personal information (APPs 3, 4 and 5).

Part 3 – Dealing with personal information (APPs 6, 7, 8 and 9).

Part 4 – Integrity of personal information (APP 10, APP 11).

Part 5 – Access to, and correction of, personal information (APP 12, APP 13)

In developing the APP guidelines, the Information Commissioner has had regard to the objects in s 2A of the Privacy Act, which are:

• promoting the protection of the privacy of individuals  

• recognising that the protection of the privacy of individuals is balanced with the interests of entities in carrying out their functions or activities 

• providing the basis for nationally consistent regulation of privacy and the handling of personal information

• promoting responsible and transparent handling of personal information by entities 

• facilitating an efficient credit reporting system while ensuring that the privacy of individuals is respected 

• facilitating the free flow of information across national borders while ensuring that the privacy of individuals is respected 

• providing a means for individuals to complain about an alleged interference with their privacy, and 

• implementing Australia’s international obligation in relation to privacy.

Cosmopolitanism

'Arendt, Human Rights, and French Philosophy' (APSA 2013 Annual Meeting Paper) by Justine Lacroix comments that

Contemporary French thought provides an especially instructive ‘laboratory’ for examination of the meaning and present-day relevance of Hannah Arendt’s famous chapter ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’ (1951). The polarised interpretations the piece has elicited (and continues to) in France raise issues that also form the core of contemporary debates about the possibility and meaning of cosmopolitan citizenship. This paper shows that Arendt’s article furnishes two distinct interpretations in Francophone analysis that correspond respectively with two contemporary critiques of cosmopolitanism. According to the first, Arendt’s meaning was that human rights can only be realised within a determined national collectivity. The second interpretation reads Arendt’s text as an invitation to pronounce human rights obsolete, on the grounds that they are inextricably linked to an assertion of the sovereign violence of the nation-state. In counterpoise to these two interpretations, this paper foregrounds alternative readings by Miguel Abensour, Etienne Balibar and Etienne Tassin, suggesting that Arendt’s work in fact embodies a ‘political’ conception of human rights that neither devalue abstract humanism, nor launch an assault on hypocrisy in human rights rhetoric, nor restrict human rights to the framework of a national collectivity. Finally, the paper explores Arendt’s positions further with an examination of the European ‘case’, which provides a contemporary illustration of the real achievements – yet also the limits – of this embryonic form of cosmopolitan citizenship.

Lacroix concludes with an endorsement of "Etienne Tassin’s view that far from mere ‘collateral damage’ from European unification, clandestinity in fact represents the heart of the European conundrum; its importance far surpasses the boundaries of ‘a mere question of border policing, which would leave intact the radically new logic on which political Europe is built’"

It is as well to recall, indeed, that Renaissance humanists and Enlightenment thinkers also dreamed of freedom of movement, and that Kant based his theory of cosmopolitan rights on the principle of universal hospitality. In this perspective, the political recognition of foreigners, and beyond it a generalized right to free movement, is a useful criterion to evaluate how far public power succeeds in honouring its cosmopolitan goals.

In this sense, rather than constructing a European people on an extended scale, it would be more in harmony with the cosmopolitan spirit to pursue this movement towards the ‘denationalisation of rights’, to the benefit of Europeans of course but also of those who do not belong to ‘its’ nations, in order gradually to make Europe an arena for the construction of a ‘universal field of rights’ premised on a partial dissociation of nationality and citizenship, hitherto all but inseparable. Another possibility to take into account is Pierre Hassner’s suggestion of conferring European citizenship upon those who, as refugees or stateless persons, do not, or no longer, have a territorial state within the framework of which they may access. Hassner referred to groups with an ambiguous or incomplete status, and argued that if European citizenship, if it must in any case be partial and paradoxical, may as well embrace these qualities by welcoming those who are unable to be citizens elsewhere. This would, Hassner argued, be one way of circumventing the dilemma between the stark abstraction of human rights and national citizenship. Though Arendt’s federalist views remained vague in institutional terms, her insistence on the necessity of breaking the automatic equation of nationality with citizenship can hardly be in doubt. A pluralisation of demoï would in this regard be more consistent with her reasoning than a mere translation of the national demos into a European demos, which could only ever reproduce national logic on a larger scale.

This is particularly relevant to the endeavour of conceiving rights in relationship to democracy by recalling that the demands of right and those of democracy ‘are connected by a doubly unstable definition. Rights are sought and consolidated. Democracy submerges them and sets the bar higher. This is its untameable essence, which can never be reduced to mere institutional mechanisms’. Yet here we must remain cautious: if it is doubtless necessary to leave behind an overly institutional or formal definition of democracy in order to conceive of cosmopolitan citizenship, it seems a little precipitous simply to substitute ‘struggles for rights’ for the principle of a self-legislating people. Conceiving of cosmopolitan citizenship means rather to seek a possible connection between the national and the transnational, between approaches to political commitment termed ‘liberal’ and those of a more ‘republican’ bent, between struggles for equal rights and collective self-determination initiatives. To reflect on democracy in an age of globalisation means to ‘complicate’ it, following Pierre Rosanvallon’s expression, but not necessarily to change conceptual register completely.

Beyond this, conceptualising cosmopolitan citizenship means recalling too that citizenship is also a status. This is important in counterpoise to a tendency, prevalent among several theorists of radical democracy, to think about citizenship merely as a form of political action and to deconstruct it as a status. On this specific point I therefore disagree with James Ingram – to whom we owe, beyond this, a remarkable elucidation of Arendt’s political conception of human rights – when he writes that ‘she (Arendt) conceives of rights not as a status but as an activity’ and that ‘“a right to have rights” is not a right to a status in a political community but what Balibar calls a “right to politics itself” – to participate in political processes aiming, among other things, at the invention of new rights, new forms of inclusion and empowerment’.

However, citizenship must not be recognised only as an attribute of those actively involved in political mobilisation. Many individuals who do not wish to or cannot demonstrate in the public sphere nonetheless enjoy its rights. As Alison Kesby demonstrates in her critical exploration of the conception of the political subject in Jacques Rancière’s writings, Rancière appears to take as given an ability to demand ‘the rights that one does not have’; hence the danger of excluding those who cannot be directly involved in political action, whether because of a handicap or, for instance, imprisonment or seclusion preventing meaningful action. We may add that ‘ordinary’ citizens who do not wish to be involved in public life also have the ‘right to rights’ even if they only enjoy what has been won by others. As the French philosopher Alain put it: ‘No one is worthy of rights. This is the very foundation of rights.’ And returning to Arendt, we find that she also repeatedly emphasised in her article ‘We refugees’ (1943) that it is the loss of a legal status in the world that has made pariahs of stateless persons. ‘Very few individuals’, she wrote, ‘have the strength to preserve their own integrity if their social, political and legal status is simply thrown into doubt’.

Surprises

Apropos Spark's Ms Brodie on this cold black Canberra afternoon -

Fully to savour her position, Sandy would go and stand outside St. Giles' Cathedral or the Tolbooth, and contemplate these emblems of a dark and terrible salvation which made the fires of the damned seem very merry to the imagination by contrast, and much preferable. Nobody in her life, at home or at school, had ever spoken of Calvinism except as a joke that had once been taken seriously. She did not at the time understand that her environment had not been on the surface peculiar to the place, as was the environment of the Edinburgh social classes just above or, even more, just below her own. She had no experience of social class at all. In its outward forms her fifteen years might have been spent in any suburb of any city in the British Isles; her school, with its alien house system, might have been in Ealing. All she was conscious of now was that some quality of life peculiar to Edinburgh and nowhere else had been going on unbeknown to her all the time, and however undesirable it might be she felt deprived of it; however undesirable, she desired to know what it was, and to cease to be protected from it by enlightened people.

In fact, it was the religion of Calvin of which Sandy felt deprived, or rather a specified recognition of it. She desired this birthright; something definite to reject. It pervaded the place in proportion as it was unacknowledged. In some ways the most real and rooted people whom Sandy knew were Miss Gaunt and the Kerr sisters who made no evasions about their belief that God had planned for practically everybody before they were born a nasty surprise when they died. Later, when Sandy read John Calvin, she found that although popular conceptions of Calvinism were sometimes mistaken, in this particular there was no mistake, indeed it was but a mild understanding of the case, he having made it God's pleasure to implant in certain people an erroneous sense of joy and salvation, so that their surprise at the end might be the nastier.

Sandy was unable to formulate these exciting propositions; nevertheless she experienced them in the air she breathed, she sensed them in the curiously defiant way in which the people she knew broke the Sabbath, and she smelt them in the excesses of Miss Brodie in her prime. Now that she was allowed to go about alone, she walked round the certainly forbidden quarters of Edinburgh to look at the blackened monuments and hear the unbelievable curses of drunken men and women, and, comparing their faces with the faces from Morningside and Merchisten with which she was familiar, she saw, with stabs of new and exciting Calvinistic guilt, that there was not much difference.

In this oblique way, she began to sense what went to the makings of Miss Brodie who had elected herself to grace in so particular a way and with more exotic suicidal enchantment than if she had simply taken to drink like other spinsters who couldn't stand it any more.