The paper is a study of the gender-based stigmatisation process of elite professionals in an international legal field. It uses commercial arbitration as an example of an international profession and adds to the prevalent understanding of gender inequality by developing a framework called ‘invisible stigmatisation’. The main theoretical framework is supported by twenty-two semi-structured interviews conducted across five international arbitration jurisdictions and two original datasets. These data have helped to contextualise the nuances of gender-based stigmatisation in prestigious arbitral appointments and at the echelons of international arbitration law firms. The paper establishes that the stigmatising experiences drive elite female professionals and their gender-equality consciousness. These experiences also lead to them devise innovative strategies to minimise the effects of gender inequality on their professional lives.

The digester, invented by Denis Papin in the 1680s, was a rudimentary pressure cooker used to soften hard bodies by boiling them at high pressure. In this paper, I propose a reassessment of Papin's work on the digester, arguing that his research was located at the intersection of the chemical laboratory and cooking practice. I then examine cases from the eighteenth-century European circulation of the instrument in Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands in order to showcase the different practices in which the digester was embedded, including chemical research, philanthropic projects to feed the destitute, and proposals for the improvement of home cooking. The digester's history represents a key episode for demonstrating the intertwined nature of natural-philosophical research and the practice of economy or ‘thrift’. All users of the digester engaged in a rationalization of its functions through quantification, not only to fulfil a concern for precision but also to display the device's potential to reform practical daily life. The digester could save time and fuel, reduce material waste, make cooking easier and foster collective meal preparation for the needy.

In this paper we present an original approach to analyze the compositionality of indefinite expressions in Romance by investigating the relevance of their syntactic distribution in relation to their meaning. This approach has the advantage of allowing us to explore the question of how syntactic structure can determine the meaning of different forms of indefiniteness. To that end, we postulate a common derivation for bare plurals, bare mass and de phrases, whereby an abstract operator de is adjoined to definite determiners and shifts entities into property-type expressions. Quantificational specificity is proposed to be derived from a syntactic structure in which weak quantifiers select for indefinite de-phrases, no matter whether de is overt at Spell-Out or not; these quantifiers turn properties into generalized quantifiers. The anti-specificity meaning of some indefinites is derived by adjoining in the syntactic structure an abstract operator alg that encodes the speaker’s epistemic state of ignorance to a quantifier encoded for specificity, and it turns a generalized quantifier into a modified generalized quantifier. The paper also brings some general predictions on how indefiniteness is expressed in Romance, as it provides extensive support from five Romance languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, French, Italian and Spanish.

This paper examines the presence of lonely, isolated and impoverished older citizens in Japan's prison population, many of whom have turned to petty crime only recently and arguably lack a genuine need for corrective services. The paper offers empirical evidence drawn from a mixed-methods study that appears to confirm their compliant, ‘law-abiding’ attributes. It argues that their influx into prisons can be seen, at least in part, as citizens who are already socially excluded and stigmatised leveraging law to assert an additional risk-laden and stigmatised identity, which provides protection. The outcome is the subversion of prisons as de facto aged-care communities. This analysis resonates with an emerging body of literature that Chua and Engel (2018; 2019) have described as the ‘Identity’ school of legal-consciousness scholarship. This literature centres on empirical studies of marginalised cohorts who leverage legal structures to embrace an identity that complicates their stigma while providing desired protections.

Using a legal-consciousness approach, this paper discusses the issue of stigma and law from the perspectives of a group of older homeless people in Singapore. Focusing specifically on the Destitute Persons Act 2013 Rev. Ed. (DPA), the paper shows the different ways in which homeless people make sense of, negotiate, resist or succumb to the stigma of a homeless identity ascribed by the DPA. From these experiences, two fundamental problems with the DPA are highlighted. First, the DPA imposes a homeless identity that is entangled in archaic legal definitions that often do not relate to contemporary experiences of homelessness in Singapore. Second, the enforcement of the DPA legitimises a differential treatment of homeless people, without addressing the broader complexities of homelessness.

This paper highlights the intersection of gender, sexuality and class in shaping the ways in which ‘leftover’ women navigate legal and social discrimination. ‘Leftover women’ is a stigmatising term in China that refers to women who do not get married by the time they reach their late twenties. Based on my fieldwork in China with queer and heterosexual ‘leftover’ women, I introduce two strategies of stigma management: ‘buying a licence to be deviant’ and ‘identity-hopping’. The former is a strategy adopted by heterosexual women with financial resources and a desire frequently expressed by queer women. ‘Buying a licence to be deviant’ refers to the strategy of accumulating sufficient financial resources to justify one's choice to be deviant and deal with the legal consequences of the evasion of the population policies. ‘Identity-hopping’ is popular among those with a lower social and financial status, who use the law's labelling function to hop from one stigmatised identity to another as a way to deal with stigma. From an intersectional lens, this paper advances law and society's study of stigma and discrimination by emphasising the hierarchy of stigmatised identities and the strategy of using the law's power of labelling identities to hop from one identity to another. It also demonstrates how the intersection of gender, sexuality and class complicates the ways in which leftover women understand and engage with the law.

This article pursues the reiteration of reading as a practice that circumscribes the work of the literary text. In doing so, it responds to particular assertions made in Kate Highman’s “Close(d) Reading and the ‘Potential Space’ of the Literature Classroom.” More pertinently, though, it seeks to reposition the value of reading as a vital attribute in engaging with the humanities and emphasizes that analyzing and the interpreting of the text is the practice indisputably central to the humanistic endeavor. The discussion reiterates that any ways in and through the text are available only by reading, making it necessary to encourage and inculcate it as a central objective so that the work of the text, in accordance with Attridge’s qualification of it, remains productive. Finally, it argues that situating this critical practice as a deliberate objective within the teaching of literature must be reprioritized as a matter of urgency.

This paper explores the complex iteration of ethnic identity and legal culture amongst the Chakma peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh and the hill territories of Tripura, India. Its hypothesis is that the stigma of tribal identity is more likely to be sustained in situations of ‘weak’ pluralism – that is, where the customary system is formally annexed to the state. However, such stigma is more likely to be dispelled where numerous, competing legal jurisdictions collide in a ‘strong’ pluralism expressed as a relatively autonomous legal domain, overlapping legal jurisdictions and in the presence of a productive and potentially creative ‘interlegality’. Conversely, strong state recognition of identities, such as can be found in India, appears to be linked to weak local pluralism, creating an insular and inward-looking community that embraces stigma and the preservation and use of customary practices. In conclusion, this paper asserts that formal state recognition in a situation of legal pluralism tends to freeze identities in a facsimile of the colonial trope of tribe, whilst conflict between the communities and the state generates new and resistant identities and new iterations of customary law.

When the Ottoman Empire defaulted on its public debt in 1875, British bondholders launched a campaign to win government intervention on their behalf. This article interprets the unprecedented success of this campaign as a matter of knowledge production. Mobilizing the newly established Corporation of Foreign Bondholders as a kind of ‘centre of calculation’, bondholders argued that they deserved assistance because of the unique size of the Ottoman default and the proportion of it that was held by British subjects. Yet neither of these numbers was easily calculated. In fact, influential bondholders worked closely with accountants and members of the Statistical Society to devise an accurate method for quantifying the Ottoman debt – and concluded that such a method did not exist. Historians of quantification and accounting have argued that the scientific status of nineteenth-century accounting depended on its disinterestedness. In the case of the Ottoman default, however, calculation was understood to be inseparable from material interest and political debate.

In this paper, we adopt an experimentalist approach to determining the content of international human rights for assessing national mandatory work programmes for recipients of social assistance (MWPs). This approach implies going back and forth between law and experience in order to determine the better way to secure human rights in an ever-changing environment. After having identified six criteria for evaluating MWPs in the soft case-law of international bodies, we confront this emerging international human rights framework with an empirical study on MWP practices in the Netherlands. This confrontation reveals that specific aspects of the capability for voice of working welfare recipients are absent in the human rights framework and that the framework is not gender-neutral. Including these aspects, we construct an experimentalist human-rights-based instrument that is suitable for evaluating national MWPs.