The current BIALL President, Julie Christmas, talks to LIM Co-Editors Mike and Jas Breslin about how she became a legal information manager, how she's trying to upgrade the technology to allow the organisation to function smoothly, and why she believes that the job title ‘law librarian’ should – just perhaps – be consigned to history.

While the federal government continues to pursue a punitive “War on Drugs,” some states have adopted evidence-based, human-focused approaches to reducing drug-related harm. This article discusses recent legal changes in three states that can serve as models for others interested in reducing, rather than increasing, individual and community harm.

In recent years, the issue of Jewish settler violence in Israel and its territories has garnered increasing attention. The claimed motivations for such violence are that it is a response to Palestinian-Arab violence and perceived government inaction, as well as perceived selectivity in the formal response toward violence perpetrated by these two populations. These claims point to Jewish settler violence as being a crime as a form of social reaction, self-help and social control. We test this hypothesis by combining and analysing data from the Israel Security Agency, the Palestinian Authority, the United Nations and open sources for the period of 2009–2022 (n = 168 months) using a series of generalized negative-binomial models and Newey–West ordinary least squares models. We find that Jewish settler violence increases as serious Arab violence increases and decreases when formal responses toward Arab violence are higher. We also find iatrogenic effects for harsh measures targeting Jewish violence, namely administrative detention orders. The results imply that to reduce collective violence, it is necessary to take a more consistent and balanced approach in formal responses against opposing groups.

This article studies some major shifts in the relationship between law and Sufism in South Asian Islam between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. It does so by focusing on Shah Wali Allah of Delhi (d. 1762) to examine, first, how these two key facets of Islam interact with each other in his thought and, second, how some influential Muslim intellectuals of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries have understood and positioned themselves in relation to this aspect of his thought. Though one would be hard pressed to know this from the sanitized modern image of Wali Allah as a scholar of the Quran and hadith, and of a Sufi piety uncompromisingly anchored in them, his Sufism reveals a wide and, from many a modern Muslim perspective, unwieldly range of ideas and practices. Yet it was precisely in that unwieldy breadth and depth that it was generative of some of his key insights into matters of the law. Even as many people have continued to insist on the imbrication of law and Sufism, a sanitization of Wali Allah’s Sufi image serves to highlight wider processes whereby an earlier era’s generative relationship between the two has come to be increasingly attenuated since the late nineteenth century.

When evaluating factors shaping the Australian home front during World War I, the impact of preaching is generally overlooked, though historians have identified it as one of the most influential sources of public speech. This paper examines preaching in Melbourne just before and during the war, as reported in the influential Melbourne Herald. It asks how preaching was affected by the outbreak of war, and explores its developments, its reporting and its impacts. It points to conclusions about the nature and place of religion in the life of the city, and the interplay of preaching and war that highlight gaps in our understanding of the interaction of religion and war in Australia at that time. It challenges notions about Australian secularity, the degree of sectarianism, and the place of religion in our understanding of the war in both Australia and the wider British world.

English comparative modals are combinations of the adverbs rather, sooner and better with an auxiliary. There is recent consensus that the comparative modals rather and sooner have over time developed a different syntax and semantics than better. However, potential differences in the syntax of rather and sooner with respect to patterns of complementation haven’t been explored. This article reports the results of a corpus study of these two modals and finds that rather patterns like object-raising verbs, allowing a range of complements that are unavailable for sooner. Our analysis of these patterns draws on recent work in the Construction Grammar framework, with forays into its formal implementation, Sign-Based Construction Grammar, and we propose that rather differs from sooner in that it constitutes a micro-construction whose features are licensed by both the Modal Construction and the Object-Raising Construction, the latter a subtype of the Transitive Construction.

Annetta Pedretti studied cybernetics and architecture early in the 1970s – beginning at the Architectural Association in London and later culminating in a Ph.D in 1981 at Brunel University – and her training continued to influence her lifelong practice just as much as her everyday surroundings. From 1980 to 2018, Pedretti’s life and work revolved around one particular site: 25 Princelet Street in Spitalfields, Tower Hamlets. During these years, Spitalfields was grappling withquestions of heritage, conservation, and change that were taking place in response to intensifying gentrification, all bound by particular ideas about futures and time. Pedretti spoke very early on about faulty assumptions about time and the need for ‘jerking ourselves out of the habit of taking time as a given’ and ‘extracting time from the relations, e.g., economics, in which we have allowed it to be seized up and used up’. In this paper, I turn to what Pedretti called her ‘intermedia’ practice. I follow a thread in her work – from her experiments in design writing and running a printing press, to flag-making as a form of protest, to the long-spanning project of repairing and remaking the house at Princelet Street – that points towards her interest in reclaiming time as a form of designerly resistance. In so doing, I will explore how these practices come together, exploring the broader challenges of navigating the dialectical complexity related to negotiating between the ‘lived time’ (experiential) of entities fundamental to their internal processes of unfolding and ‘clock time’(measurable time) that is significant for social negotiations such as design decisions related to conservation or development. Pedretti’s work is an invitation to imagine a reflexive practice in which claiming time and working contra to different forms of oppression becomes about writing, repairing, working with the evolving community, and working on the self. All of these processes are recursively entangled, unfolding, creating feedback and feedforward loops that connect in a myriad of different ways.

The way robots move often evokes horror. Dance—as an embodied, movement-based art form open to possibility—can expand motion-based Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) beyond popular approaches based on anthropomorphism and late-capitalist efficiency. The “super-machinic” robotic system coopts human-centered movement and perpetuates neoliberal capitalist agendas. Dance offers a provocation for HRI and an invitation to reimagine how we move.