In Rescuing Justice and Equality, G.A. Cohen argues that the incentive inequalities permitted by John Rawls's difference principle are unjust since people cannot justify them to their fellow citizens. I argue that citizens of a Rawlsian society can justify their acceptance of a wide range of incentive inequalities to their fellow citizens. They can do so because they possess the right to freedom of occupational choice, and are permitted – as a matter of justice – to exercise this right by making occupational decisions on the basis of a wide range of values and preferences.

The post-war reconstruction era was marked by numerous planning exhibitions which provide a window on the contemporary nature of communication and consultation in planning practice. The 1943 Exhibition of the County of London Plan prepared by J.H. Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie was a major event with the king and queen making a high-profile visit. This article describes the making of the exhibition, considers its content, design and historical significance and reflects on its importance as a high water mark in the culture of twentieth-century town planning promotion generally and exhibition culture specifically. Archival research reveals how the London County Council (LCC) negotiated for resources from the central government and the local boroughs in hosting and organizing the event and how crucial these negotiations were in its eventual staging, marketing and impact.

A number of works have recently been published that seek to re-narrate colonial histories, with a particular emphasis on the role of law in at once creating and marginalizing colonial subjects.1 Focusing on mid-twentieth century detention camps in the British colony of Kenya, this article illuminates a colonial history that was deeply buried in a Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) building for many years. As such, the analysis supports the revelatory work of David Anderson and Caroline Elkins, who highlighted the violence that underpinned British detention and interrogation practises in Kenya.2 In particular, the article explores recently declassified colonial files, and pieces together a picture of administrative subterfuge, suppression of facts, and whitewashing atrocities, threaded through with official denial, which long outlived its colonial genesis. Against the hypothesis that detention laws created an architecture of destruction and concomitant custodial violence in Kenya, the article establishes that an accountability deficit is the legacy of detention without trial as it was practiced in colonial Kenya. By untangling a complex web of colonial records and government papers relating to Kenya, this article reveals the often insurmountable pressure that was exerted to conceal evidence of detainee violence, and the role of a highly sophisticated propaganda machine that controlled the public narrative of a violent incident when outright denial was impossible.

On August 28, 1919, Brazil's most famous pediatrician, Dr. Carlos Arthur Moncorvo Filho, addressed his colleagues at the illustrious National Academy of Medicine in Rio de Janeiro, reminding them that consanguineous marriage was the topic of the moment. Dr. Moncorvo Filho's insistence that “everyone knew why” was a reference to a proposal made before the Senate just three months prior by Senators Eloy de Souza of the state of Pernambuco and Álvaro de Carvalho of São Paulo. The senators proposed that language prohibiting marriage between blood relatives in the recently ratified Brazilian Civil Code be amended to allow for special juridical or medical dispensation. Souza and Carvalho, with the backing of the Catholic Church and a minority of members of the Brazilian Institute of Attorneys, supported permitting marriage between third-degree relatives under special circumstances. At issue for the attorneys was how the law would deal with situations in which couples had a compelling need to marry within the third degree of kinship. A recent case of an uncle who had “deflowered” his niece and then offered to “remedy the damage” through marriage brought this issue to public debate. Marriages between uncles and their nieces and aunts and their nephews (third-degree relations) were traditional in Brazil, and Brazilian law had a long history of yielding to custom and context. However, under the new laws of the 30-year-old republic, this type of marriage was no longer legal, having been specifically prohibited by the 1916 Civil Code. Senators Souza and Carvalho, both lawyers by training, proposed reforming the Code, while their ultimately unsuccessful amendment sparked vigorous debate in both legal and medical circles on the validity of marriage restrictions within the third degree of consanguinity. As a result, physicians at Brazil's leading medical schools and their jurist counterparts at the law schools took sides on this critical issue, dividing themselves into rival camps of consanguinistas and anticonsanguinistas.

In 1706, Jamaica's provost marshal received a writ of escheat from the island's Supreme Court of Judicature. The writ directed him to empanel a jury of “Twelve and Lawful Men of the Neighbourhood” who would determine whether the slaves of James Whitchurch, a Jamaican merchant, should be escheated—returned—to the Crown. Did the “Negro Woman Slave Commonly Called Catalina” and her “Seaven Pickaninny” belong to Whitchurch, or could Queen Anne claim her prerogative right to an escheat because the previous owner of the slaves, Charles Delamaine, had died without an heir? The jury found in the Crown's favor, but a dissatisfied Whitchurch petitioned Queen Anne for relief, asking her to return the slaves and quiet his title. Whitchurch's petition, the first Jamaican escheat case to come before the Queen, sparked a transatlantic legal controversy as colonists, Assembly members, and imperial officials weighed the Crown's prerogative right to escheats against local political grievances and the Board of Trade's desire to encourage West Indian settlement and trade. This seemingly mundane conflict over property law quickly acquired constitutional significance, generating the kind of rights talk so familiar to early American historians: Jamaican colonists claimed the rights of Englishmen, and the Jamaican Assembly asserted an institutional capacity akin to Parliament. In this article, I contextualize colonists' rights talk, rooting their claims to English rights in concerns about the administration of property law during a crucial liminal moment in Jamaican history. As the colony transitioned from a small-scale to a large-scale plantation economy and from a society with slaves to a slave society, property and the law that governed it became the focus of intense political conflict.

In recent years, interest in the economic potential of the Arctic has been mounting, facilitated by environmental developments caused by climate change. In this context, the viability of shipping in Arctic waters is pivotal. This article explores the interplay of market considerations and the non-market drivers (climatic, navigational and political components) regarding the viability of the most prominent Arctic shipping route, the northern sea route (NSR), as a global shipping route. In particular, it concentrates on the Russian ice-breaking tariff policy on the NSR and presents a review from 1991, when the route was officially opened to international shipping, until 2014. The study integrates qualitative and longitudinal quantitative data related to NSR traffic, ice-breaking tariffs and ice conditions. The paper shows that the ice-breaking fees play a key role for the functioning of the NSR by providing a source of funding for the ice-breaking fleet, which constitutes a basis for safe shipping. However, the development of the NSR into a competitive transcontinental shipping route is determined by a dynamic mixture of factors in which the Russian ice-breaking fee represents an additional cost item for shipping companies and shippers. It is argued that the development of ice-breaking tariff policy has been guided by structural changes in external factors consequently influencing the demand for ice-breaking services (a derivative of NSR demand), which limits the extent to which tariff policy influences the attractiveness of the NSR in a global context.

A longstanding and contentious issue in Chinese legal history is whether women had the legal right to inherit and own property. During the Southern Song in particular, certain historical and legal sources have been interpreted by scholars in such a way as to propose that they did, at least to a limited extent, as reflected, for example, in the “daughter's half-share law” (nüzi fenfa 女子分法), which stipulated that a daughter would receive half a son's portion upon the death of both parents. The current study, through an examination of documentary sources on the inheritance rights of daughters, clarifies the historical circumstances surrounding the phenomenon, and concludes that no fundamental legal right to inherit and own property such as that enjoyed by men was intended. Rather, laws specifying the inheritance rights of women were the result of legislative measures for the protection of orphaned daughters, out of a concern to ensure that they would not be deprived of property that they would have received (for example, as dowry) had their parents not died. The Song's uniqueness lay not in the elevation of women's property rights, but rather in the implementation of explicit policies for the social good. That similar laws were not continued in the Ming and Qing did not in itself mean that the principle of protecting orphaned daughters had been abandoned, but rather that this principle would be applied through the discretionary powers of magistrates, as records of actual legal judgments demonstrate.

The popular narrative of Arctic development continues to dwell on melting sea ice, untapped oil and gas reserves, an icebreaker arms race and the perils and potential of rapid industrialisation. Rarely is the welfare of Arctic populations considered in a holistic sense and with a precise call for policy change. The recently released Arctic human development report II, echoing the more widely distributed human development reports generated by the United Nations, does just this. Unfortunately, despite the laudable efforts of the authors to embrace the more systemic drivers of poverty and marginalisation, the report fails to account for governmental and policy shortcomings which continue to limit health and opportunity, while obscuring tangible pathways to prosperity for Arctic populations. This comment is intended as a call, amongst the fervour of Arctic exploitation, to refocus attention on the unmistakable disparities in public health and well-being that persist in the Arctic regions of otherwise wealthy countries, and to incorporate globally practised perceptions of human development, including the role of social and political marginalisation in explaining health and prosperity discrepancies, which have been largely lacking in Arctic development discourse, and practice.

This article investigates the grammatical realization of the notion of focus in Colloquial French and Standard French. Based on two production experiments, the article reveals three findings: (i) focus marking is not as categorical as previously acknowledged, (ii) focus marking asymmetry for subjects vs. non-subjects is only supported in CoF and (iii) there is no strict relationship between focus realization and interpretation in either variety. I develop a stochastic optimality-theory analysis, which explains the canonical-cleft sentence alternation in terms of prosody and expands on past literature by accounting for the variation observed both within and across language variety.