For a long time, women's crime has been quite a no-go area for feminist thinkers. With the lesser frequency of female crime seemingly encouraging quantitative-minded criminologists to dismiss a gendered approach as altogether irrelevant, theories of crime, in fact, have been mostly written by and tested on men. The emergence of a feminist perspective in criminology pluralized and decentered the disciplinary epistemology with important outcomes. On one side, it paved the way for the investigation of the distinctive ways in which individuals socialized as women commit crimes, deconstructing the die-hard stereotype of female criminals’ abnormality, that is, the idea that female offenders deviate from a female standard of nondelinquency. On the other, quoting Loraine Gelsthorpe, feminist criminology “has not only developed a critique of accumulated wisdom about female offenders and victims, but has illuminated institutionalized sexism within criminological theory, policy and practice.” Feminism has stimulated the production of criminological knowledge both empirically and theoretically. As far as empirical studies are concerned, historian Philippa Levine, in a seminal piece on prostitution, crime, and empire, remarked that prostitution, erroneously conceived as a quintessentially female crime, constituted an important exception to the unquestioned association of crime and masculinity, resulting in the neglect of serious gendered analysis of crime. Here the criminalization of commercial sex can be explained by the fact that prostitution is considered to defy the very norm at the core of the power gender system, that female sexuality has to be kept monogamous, reproductive, and conjugal to service the patriarchal social order. As Levine argues, prostitution “offers the prospect not only of women defined by their sexual nature but also of a more threatening vision of women actively putting that sexuality to work for their own benefit.” As a consequence, the agency of women exchanging sex for money promiscuously outside of wedlock has been conceptualized in two different apparently paradoxical ways: women prostitute themselves either because they are abnormal, so they act out of their deviancy, or because they are forced to do so, so they act under coercion. Completely lost to these split understandings, juxtaposing blame and compassion, was obviously the meaning of women's agency and rationality, especially when these were inscribed within a logic of survival and subsistence.

During the final months of Sri Lanka's 2006–2009 civil war, Sri Lankan armed forces engaged in a disproportionate and indiscriminate shelling campaign against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which culminated in the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians. Conventional wisdom suggests that Sri Lanka undermined international humanitarian law (IHL). Significantly, however, the Sri Lankan government did not directly challenge such law or attempt to justify its departure from it. Rather, it invented a new set of facts about its conduct to sidestep its legal obligations. Though indirect, this challenge was no less significant than had Sri Lanka explicitly rejected those obligations. Drawing on Clark et al.'s concept of denialism, this article details the nature of Sri Lanka's challenge to the standing of IHL. At the core of its denialist move, Sri Lanka maintained that while the LTTE was using civilians as human shields, government forces were adhering to a zero civilian casualty approach. With this claim, Sri Lanka absolved itself of any responsibility for the toll inflicted on civilians and sealed its conduct off from the ambit of IHL. This case illustrates how actors can considerably undermine the law using strategies of contestation far more subtle than direct confrontation.

Kathryn Campbell-Kibler observes that the role of speaker intention seems to differ in the meanings of primary interest in variationist sociolinguistics on one hand and semantics and pragmatics on the other. Taking this observation as its point of departure, the central goal of the present work is to clarify the nature of intention-attribution in general and, at the same time, the nature of these two types of meaning. I submit general principles by which observers determine whether to attribute a particular intention to an agent – principles grounded in observers’ estimation of the agent’s beliefs, preferences, and assessment of alternative actions. These principles and the attendant discussion clarify the role of alternatives, common ground, and perceptions of naturalness in intention-attribution, illuminate public discourses about agents’ intentions, point to challenges for game-theoretic models of interpretation that assume cooperativity, and elucidate the nature of the types of meaning of interest. Examining the role of intention vis-à-vis findings and insights from variationist research and the formally explicit game-theoretic models just mentioned foregrounds important differences and similarities between the two types of meaning of interest and lays bare the contingent nature of all meaning in practice.

In recent years, climate citizens’ assemblies – randomly selected representative citizens gathered to make policy recommendations on greenhouse gas emissions targets – have gained in popularity as a potential innovative solution to the failure of governments to design and adopt ambitious climate change laws and policies. This article appraises the process and outcomes of three climate citizens’ assemblies held at the national level – in Ireland, France and the United Kingdom – and evaluates their contributions to the making of climate law and policy. In doing so, it first looks at whether citizens’ assemblies have the ability to improve the substance of climate law and suggests that they face difficulties in providing an integrated, holistic response to the climate problem. It then explores how citizens’ assemblies have fed into subsequent legislative processes to show their positive influence and draws lessons for our understanding of the role of citizens’ assemblies in climate lawmaking.

Upon hearing Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1918 Jean Roger-Ducasse was disturbed by the incongruity between each movement's music and its dedication to a fallen soldier. Similarly, historians have noted the ‘strangeness’ of Frontispiece and La Valse, which Ravel wrote after his war service and his mother's death in 1917. When taken together, these instances of ‘strange’ music – written during an especially emotionally trying period of Ravel's life – lead to questions concerning relationships between Ravel's music and traumatic expression. Although Carolyn Abbate and Michael Puri have suggested that these pieces can be understood as expressions of loss, no one has yet attempted to address how they might illuminate Ravel's trauma within the context of conceptions of trauma in interwar France.

In this article I suggest that Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, Frontispice and La Valse are musical performances of his traumatic responses to the war and his mother's death. I place primary and archival sources such as letters and diaries of Ravel and his peers in dialogue with early twentieth-century French sources in psychology and medicine to determine how Ravel understood trauma. Utilizing Abraham and Torok's theorizations of traumatic grief, I read Ravel's compositions as bearing ‘magic words’ – indirect articulations of trauma that manifest when individuals cannot openly voice their trauma. By studying these pieces in the context of modernist musical mourning traditions in World War I-era France, I suggest that Ravel's post-war compositions demonstrate his resistance to nationalistic norms requiring the suppression of trauma for the war effort.