Although little explored, regulations – in the form of laws and byelaws – formed an important technique of nineteenth-century government. This article explores the implementation and enforcement of two sets of regulations regarding the keeping and disposal of dirt imposed by Scottish local authorities: one on behaviours around the disposal of domestic refuse, the other on the keeping of dung – a form of property. While behaviours around refuse were more stringently policed than those affecting property, in both cases regulations were not the basis of a strict disciplinary regime, but a means of informing, educating and persuading residents into cleanly habits.

Poa annua is the only flowering plant species that has established a breeding population in the maritime Antarctic, through repeated anthropogenic introduction. The first appearance of this species in the Antarctic was observed in 1953. Annual bluegrass inhabits mainly anthropogenic sites, but recently has entered tundra communities. The functioning of P. annua in the Antarctic could not have been possible without adaptations that enable the plants to persist in the specific climatic conditions typical for this zone. Poa annua is highly adaptable to environmental stress and unstable habitats: huge phenotypic and genotypic variability, small size, plastic life cycle (life-history types ranging from annual to perennial forms). The spreading of P. annua in the Antarctic Peninsula region is a classic example of the expansion process following anthropogenic introduction of an invasive species, and illustrates the dangers to Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems that are associated with increasing human traffic.

In 1898–1899, the first American polar expedition to Zemlya Frantsa-Iosifa [Franz Josef Land], under the leadership of journalist Walter Wellman, added at least forty place names to the islands, of which many survive on modern charts. These include the main discovery of the expedition, the large island named for Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell, then president of the National Geographic Society, along with numerous smaller islands, capes and waterways. The origins of several of these names are now confirmed using recently discovered notes in the papers of Wellman's brother and business manager, Arthur Wellman. They demonstrate the close relationship between Walter Wellman and the political, financial and scientific elites of turn-of-the-century Chicago, Illinois, Washington, D.C., and the state of Ohio, associations derived from Wellman's profession as a Washington correspondent for Chicago newspapers.

This article investigates uses of the adverb again in Early Modern English (EModE) correspondence. The study collects occurrences of again and analyses their interpretation. It reveals interesting differences in the use of again between EModE and Late Modern English (LModE) as well as Present-day English (PDE). To bring out the grammatical significance of the results, we connect the study methodologically as closely as possible with Beck, Berezovskaya & Pflugfelder's (2009) study of LModE/PDE correspondence. We show that the key diachronic alteration we observe when considering EModE is not just numerical in nature but also qualitatively distinct from the later change at the transition between LModE and PDE. At the heart of our proposal is the finding that while a structural approach to again (Rapp & von Stechow 1999; Beck 2005) is successful for characterizing the transition between LModE and PDE, a uniform analysis for the entire diachronic trajectory is not warranted; a combined theoretical modelling is required instead. Specifically, a lexical analysis relying on counterdirectionality (e.g. Fabricius-Hansen 2001) is required to capture the differences in the EModE data.

The 2008 global financial meltdown, commonly called the ‘Great Recession’, was the most serious crisis in capitalism since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and a fundamental repudiation of neoliberal governing assumptions. This paper focuses on the contexts that informed two governmental responses to this economic crisis — restoration and retrenchment through public austerity. It explains that these responses were contingent, experimental, inequitable and, in the end, unsuccessful. Restoration and retrenchment, however, were entirely consistent with previous neoliberal crisis-responses and the abiding ambitions of this governing project. As the economic crisis crawled into the second half of a decade, the idea of inequality was increasingly identified as an underlying cause of crisis and its amelioration as a necessary part of rebuilding economies and communities in a post-crisis era. The paper tracks the case for the revival of equality politics and policies in the early twenty-first century.

Despite the fact that the Millennium Development Goals promised to achieve gender equality and maternal health by 2015, equality remains elusive for too many women. Indeed, austerity, the rise of fundamentalism and the continuing gendered division of labour, especially when it comes to socially necessary but unremunerated care work, have contributed to the increase in gendered inequalities in many areas of social life and in most regions of the world. There is a plenitude of international, transnational and national equality instruments and strategies at the same time as gendered inequality is increasing both within and between nations. These equality instruments and strategies have also had an uneven impact: some women benefit more than others. Moreover, if interpreted in a formal manner, equality can be achieved as much through levelling down men's employment opportunities as by elevating women's life chances.

Despite international and national human rights norms and standards, gender equality remains a goal in most countries. The recent discourse on substantive equality as a strategy for addressing the gender discrimination, disadvantage and deep-rooted social biases has reinforced the importance of working towards indivisible human rights for girls and women under CRC and CEDAW. This paper uses international and comparative national experiences on law and policy to argue that the failure to adopt an indivisibility of rights approach in relation to girl children has made it more difficult to achieve a norm of substantive equality for women. It is argued that the adoption of an intergenerational and rights-based, rather than a social welfare approach, is a necessary step to achieving substantive equality for women.

There is currently no mechanism – no journal, no learned society – somehow integrating Portuguese sociology of law, despite a considerable academic production. In an attempt to appreciate globally and substantially this production, this paper takes as a starting point the theory of semi-periphery formulated by Boaventura de Sousa Santos in the 1980s, and revisits the findings of socio-legal research carried out in Portugal over the recent decades in the light of that theory. The conclusion that can be drawn from this exercise is that the theory of semi-periphery – provided it is upgraded in order to better take into account features of recent processes of globalisation – still supplies a valuable framework for the reflection on the social, economic and political conditions that favour uses of the law as a tool for human groupings to govern themselves.

The attempt to secure maternity rights has been a major focus of decades of campaigning for women's equality. However, it is of concern that maternity rights might reinforce women's responsibility for childcare. This paper considers how we bring men back into the frame, through a critical assessment of the contrasting approaches in Europe and the US to claims by fathers for parenting rights. It is argued that the goal of equal participation of women in the workplace needs to be matched by equal participation of men in the home. This is only possible if the conception of equality is shaped by a conscious and explicit commitment to the social value of parenthood. Substantive equality can only be genuinely furthered if pregnancy and parenthood are appropriately distinguished. Whereas pregnancy is unique and should be treated as such, a true application of substantive equality requires a ‘levelling up’ option, extending women's parenting rights to fathers.

Pensions constitute an important link, in many welfare regimes, between processes of social categorisation and labour market segmentation over the life-course. Pensions also reveal how socio-economic rights are defined in relation to normative and ideological categories (such as gender, class and race), how (and for whom) the state prioritises their distribution, and what these processes reveal about notions of equality and their political and legal institutionalisation. In this paper, I argue that pensions, especially but not only occupational pensions, therefore fall within the ambit of a broad conception of labour law; they should be of interest to feminist legal scholars not solely because of their linkages to paid employment, however, but because of their relationship with the organisation of both production and social reproduction – and the evolution of norms of equality across these domains.

The international right to social security has been given limited attention as a vehicle for addressing women's poverty. This paper highlights some of the issues shaping women's poverty globally that require a more responsive right to social security. It discusses the nature and purpose of social security and examines the international law relating to this right, arguing that recent interpretations lack an adequate framework for ensuring women's interests are fully accommodated. The paper challenges the relationship between the right to social security and traditional conceptions of work that exclude women's labour. It also argues that the right must have application at the transnational level if it is to address the changing nature of women's work. Drawing on ideas of substantive equality, it proposes an approach to the development of the right from a gender perspective including a set of principles to be followed in applying the right.

The recognition of individual identity as multilayered and circumstance based leads to a shift from a theory of general rights to a theory of specific rights connected to structural social change. General rights, such as the right to health and the right to work, must be interpreted according to the circumstance of differently situated women, so that rights are specific enough to ensure that they are actually enforced for different groups, including groups that, due to discrimination, are made invisible to the law. In this sense, the different circumstances that help develop the identity of women, Black women or poor Black women in Brazil will be studied to give specific content to general rights recognised by Brazilian law and by International human rights law.

Precarious work is a crucial impediment to substantive equality. This paper examines the regulation of precariousness in the light of two recent trends: the casualisation of employment in the wake of the crisis, and global efforts to regulate domestic work (e.g. ILO Domestic Workers Convention (No 189)). It takes these developments as an opportunity to explore the effective regulation of contemporary labour markets, and in particular the role of the Standard Employment Relationship (SER). The paper returns to two prominent accounts of the SER: Vosko's critique of SER-centrism in non-standard work regulation and Bosch's notion of the flexible-SER. It argues that the domestic work debates confirm the value of a modernised SER in its temporal dimensions. Yet the literature on precarious work tends to focus on regulatory settings in which the standard model remains dominant. The key contemporary challenge is to identify strategies that will embed this model in settings in which it is in decline or was never deep-rooted. Drawing on the notion of ‘reconstructive labour law’, the paper argues for innovative legal mechanisms that prompt the construction of flexibilised SER-type relationships. It concludes, however, that for these strategies to be effective, casualisation must be identified not only in contractual arrangements but also in working-time practices.

The South African Constitution is widely regarded as one of the world’s most progressive, and this essays looks to a series of novels concerned with the nation’s transition beyond apartheid in order to examine the challenges of transformative constitutionalism. Through readings of Nadine Gordimer’s None to Accompany Me, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, and Ivan Vladislavic’s The Folly,1 it explores the prevalence of the language and imagery of architecture in describing national rebuilding and South African constitutional jurisprudence alike. The essay ultimately argues, however, that the architectural metaphor casts post-apartheid recovery as a success story that belies political and economic reality.

We regret that there were a number of minor errors in the second paragraph of the recent publication (Barr 2014)