Today I want to talk about Augustine's Confessions, a book that may seem a far cry indeed from the life of the modern lawyer—especially the lawyer for whom what we call “religion” seems a very distant matter. But I think Augustine has much to say to us about the nature of a good education, including a good legal education, and I hope this is so whether or not one shares his religious commitments.

The Science of Language, published in the sixth decade of Noam Chomsky's linguistic career, defends views that are visibly out of touch with recent research in formal linguistics, developmental child psychology, computational modeling of language acquisition, and language evolution. I argue that the poor quality of this volume is representative of the serious shortcomings of Chomsky's recent scholarship, especially of his criticism of and contribution to debates about language evolution. Chomsky creates the impression that he is quoting titbits of a massive body of scientific work he has conducted or is intimately familiar with. Yet his speculations reveal a lack of even basic understanding of biology, and an unwillingness to engage seriously with the relevant literature. At the same time, he ridicules the work of virtually all other theorists, without spelling out the views he disagrees with. A critical analysis of the ‘Galilean method’ demonstrates that Chomsky uses appeal to authority to insulate his own proposals against falsification by empirical counter-evidence. This form of discourse bears no serious relation to the way science proceeds.

Cet article étudie un emploi de l’adverbedéjà qu’on rencontreexclusivement dans les questions. Cet emploi peut êtreillustré par l’exemple prototypique: Quel est sonnom, déjà? Deux problèmes sontabordés: d’une part, le rapport complexe que cet emploimémoriel de déjà entretientavec les questions; d’autre part, les conséquencessocio-interactionnelles que produit l’indication d’oublià laquelle il est associé. On montre notamment que lesquestions marquées ainsi portent prioritairement surl’oubli de formes linguistiques (noms propres et expressions). Onformule par ailleurs une hypothèse rendant compte du fait quedéjà mémoriel marque uneforte prédilection pour les questions ouvertes (partielles), audétriment des questions fermées (totales).L’article aborde également les rendementssocio-interactionnels de cet adverbe et distingue trois circonstancesd’emploi. Cette distinction est fondée sur lesprésomptions habituellement associées aux questions, enparticulier celles commentées pardéjà mémoriel.

BBC Television's Horizon series, fifty years old on 2 May 2014, despite its significance to the history of the public culture of science, has been little studied. This microhistorical account follows the gestation and early years of the programme, demonstrating how it established a social and cultural account of science. This was a result of televisual factors, notably the determination to follow the format of the successful arts television programme Monitor. It illuminates how the processes of television production, with a handful of key participants – Aubrey Singer, Gerald Leach, Philip Daly, Gordon Rattray Taylor, Ramsay Short, Michael Peacock and Robert Reid – established the format of the programme. This occurred over seventeen months of prior preparation followed by three troubled years of seeking to establish a stable form. This was finally achieved in 1967 when the programme adopted a film documentary approach after extended attempts at making it as a studio-based magazine programme. The story has implications for understanding the social accounts of science that were circulating in the key decade of the 1960s.

Atlanta's human rights community was buzzing, because the United Nations (U.N.) was coming to town. On Sunday, January 19, 1964, the front page of the Atlanta Daily World, the city's oldest black newspaper and the South's only black daily, announced, “United Nations Rights Panel to Visit Atlanta.” The U.N. Sub-Commission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (Sub-Commission), the Daily World explained, was a fourteen nation “body that surveys the worldwide problems of discrimination.” The Sub-Commission had been invited to Atlanta by Morris Abram, a former Atlanta attorney and the lone United States member of the Sub-Commission, to study first-hand the city's well-publicized, efforts to improve in race relations. Sunday morning's Daily World also noted that the U.N. delegation “composed of experts, mostly lawyers and jurists” was in the midst of drafting a global treaty designed to end racial discrimination, and the local paper highlighted Abram's role as the primary drafter of the race accord. “Mr. Abram, as the U.S. expert on the subcommission has proposed a sweeping eight-point treaty,” the article reported. According to the Daily World, the pending race treaty—the treaty that would ultimately become the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD or Convention)—would address “segregation, hate groups and discrimination in public accommodations.”

Two key themes emerging from recent studies on disability are the shift in the conception of persons with disabilities, expressed in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), from objects to subjects of policies concerning them and the recognition of the close interconnections between disability and poverty. Both themes have clear implications for international development cooperation. It is essential that the high number of persons with disabilities in developing countries is recognised and that the programmes implemented by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), including those in emergencies and disasters, are made fully inclusive of them. Community-based rehabilitation (CBR) programmes are important in achieving inclusiveness and fulfilling the rights of persons with disabilities. Italian NGOs such as AIFO (Associazione Italiana Amici di Raoul Follereau) have played an important role in helping launch CBR, most notably in Mongolia. Two sets of research data published in 2008 have measured the impact of Italian action on disability in international development cooperation. The reports on the one hand reveal inadequate levels of funding in general, and funding by banks and private companies in particular, and insufficient involvement of disabled persons' organisations, but on the other suggest that Italy's domestic experience of advanced disability legislation can be productively applied in international contexts to include and empower persons with disabilities.