Recent theorising about feminist judging has concentrated on appellate courts and their judgments. This paper develops a conceptualisation of feminist judging in lower, first instance courts, which are dominated by high case volume and limited time for each matter, with decisions given orally and ex tempore rather than in elaborated written judgments. Through careful accounts of the philosophy, goals and practices of conventional as well as newer, more engaged approaches to judging, the paper compares and contrasts feminist judging with other approaches to judging in the lower courts. This entails considering dimensions such as the judicial officer's orientation to substantive law and practice in court, concepts of fairness, ethical commitments, the view of the defendant, and judicial qualities and capacities.

Images of oil-covered seabirds or radioactive fallout from nuclear disasters easily evoke concerns over the risks to personal integrity and environmental degradation. The energy-extraction industry, like others, is profit-driven – a competitive enterprise, with little regard for the social impact of its activities beyond corporate social responsibility (CSR) rhetoric. CSR is neither a precautionary measure nor a remedial framework. Outsider stakeholder influence from government is limited and CSR is written on companies’ terms. What emerges is a distortion between companies’ responsibility and accountability for breaches. We propose a hybrid form of accountability that incorporates public international law to ensure the state, as a guardian of society, plays a more definitive role. This will require more binding obligations on states and companies beyond the current soft-law principles, to curtail jurisdictional constraints and forum shopping of large corporations, through an international court of reparations to guarantee effective remedies for victims.

This article investigates the occurrence and distribution of referential null subjects in Middle English. Whereas Modern English is the textbook example of a non-null-subject language, the case has recently been made that Old English permits null subjects to a limited extent, which raises the question of what happens in the middle period. In this article we investigate Middle English using data drawn from the Penn–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English Prose and the new Parsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry, aiming to shed light on the linguistic and extralinguistic factors conditioning the alternation between null and overt subjects. Generalized mixed-effects logistic regression and random forests are used to assess the importance of the variables included. We show that the set of factors at play is similar to that found for Old English, and we document a near-complete disappearance of the null subject option by the end of the Middle English period.

While null subjects are a well-researched phenomenon in pro-drop languages like Italian or Spanish, they have not received much attention in non-pro-drop languages such as English, where they are traditionally associated with particular (written) genres such as diaries or are discussed under a broader umbrella term such as situational ellipsis. However, examples such as the one in the title – while certainly not frequent – are commonly encountered in colloquial speech, with first-person singular tokens outnumbering any other person.

This article investigates the linguistic and non-linguistic factors influencing the (non-) realisation of first-person singular subjects in a corpus of colloquial English. The variables found to contribute to the observed variation are drawn from a variety of linguistic domains and follow up on research conducted in such different fields as first language acquisition (FLA), cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics and language variation and change. Of particular interest is the finding regarding the link between null subjects and complexity of the verb phrase, which patterns in a clearly linear fashion: the more complex the verb phrase, the more likely is a null realisation. Not discussed in this form before, this finding, given its high significance and its robustness in light of alternative coding, may prove to be an important candidate for inclusion in future studies on (English) null subjects.

In the United States, informal elder care is principally the responsibility of younger relatives. Adult children perform the majority of elder care and non-relatives perform only 14 percent of care. Caregiving in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, or LGBT, community follows a very different pattern that reflects the importance of “chosen family” in the lives of LGBT older adults. Instead of relying on relatives, LGBT older adults largely care for each other. Relatives provide only 11 percent of all elder care. This article explores the high level of caregiving by non-relatives in the LGBT community. It asks what motivates friends, neighbors, and community members to provide care for someone whom the law considers a legal stranger. It also asks what steps policy makers can take to facilitate and encourage this type of caregiving. Finally, it asks what lessons can be learned from LGBT older adults about the nature of both caregiving and community. As the aging population becomes more diverse, aging policies will have to become more inclusive to address the differing needs of various communities, including LGBT older adults. The potential lessons learned from the pattern of elder care in the LGBT community, however, extend far beyond a simple commitment to diversity.

Buddhist scholars like Kenneth Ch'en have argued that the teaching of filial piety was a special feature of Chinese Buddhism as a response to the Chinese culture. Others, among them John Strong and Gregory Schopen, have shown that filial piety was also important in Indian Buddhism, but Strong does not consider it integral to the belief system and Schopen did not find evidence of it in early writings he examined. In this article, through an analysis of early Buddhist resources, the Nikāyas and Āgamas, I demonstrate that the practice of filial piety has been the chief good karma in the Buddhist moral teaching since its inception, although it is not as foundational for Buddhist ethics as it is for Confucian ethics. The Buddha advised people to honor parents as the Brahmā, the supreme god and the creator of human beings in Hinduism, as parents have done much for their children. Hence, Buddhism teaches its followers to pay their debts to parents by supporting and respecting them, actions that are considered the first of all meritorious deeds, or good karma, in Buddhist moral teachings. Moreover, according to the Buddhist teaching of karma, matricide and patricide are considered two of the five gravest bad deeds, and the consequence is immediate rebirth in hell. Mahāyāna Buddhism developed the idea of filial piety further and formulated the four debts to four groups of people—parents, sentient beings, rulers, and Buddhism—a teaching that became very popular in Chinese Buddhism and spread to other East Asian countries.

OE verb-initial main clauses are associated with a number of stylistic functions and they are said to co-occur with specific verb types, including verbs of saying (Mitchell 1985; Petrova 2006; Ohkado 2005). It has also been observed that the general frequency of the V-1 pattern in OE is text-specific and that the structure is exceptionally well represented in Bede (Calle-Martín & Miranda-García 2010; Ohkado 2000; Mitchell 1985). Latin influence has been suggested as a possible explanation for the high frequency of V-1 in this text, but this hypothesis has never been tested (Ohkado 2000). The aim of this study is to analyse V-1 main clauses containing verbs of saying in order to determine the motivation for the use of the pattern in OE and the possibility of foreign influence on the Bede translation. The analysis shows that OE V-1 clauses with verbs of saying are to a great extent lexically recurrent formulas used for turn-taking in conversations as well as marking transition in a story, and that their frequent use in the OE Bede is only partly influenced by the source text.

Spain is one of the few countries in the EU where Islam has had a historical role in the social and cultural construction of its identity. However, its modern history is marked by acts of repudiation of non-Christian cultures. Opinion polls indicate that certain groups of immigrants from North Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, but mainly Muslims, are considered to be incompatible with the popular conception of Spanish identity. The reason for this perception is related to the social construction of the immigrant as the ‘other to govern’ by political, academic and media discourses. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that immigration law also plays a fundamental role in this strategy of ‘orientalisation’, namely the attribution of certain qualities to immigrant groups (illegal, antisocial, criminal, inassimilable, terrorist), the aim of which is to legitimise the selective control of immigration. The Spanish immigration and citizenship regime contributes to the construction of otherness, and therefore to the political and legal (re)definition of what ‘being Spanish’ means.