Alegal

Okinawan life, at the crossroads of American militarism and Japanese capitalism, embodies a fundamental contradiction to the myth of the monoethnic state. Suspended in a state of exception, Okinawans have never been officially classified as colonial subjects of the Japanese empire or the United States, nor have they ever been treated as equal citizens of Japan. As a result, they live amid one of the densest concentrations of U.S. military bases in the world. By bringing Foucauldian biopolitics into conversation with Japanese Marxian theorizations of capitalism, Alegal uncovers Japan’s determination to protect its middle class from the racialized sexual contact around its mainland bases by displacing them onto Okinawa, while simultaneously upholding Okinawa as a symbol of the infringement of Japanese sovereignty figured in terms of a patriarchal monoethnic state. This symbolism, however, has provoked ambivalence within Okinawa. In base towns that facilitated encounters between G.I.s and Okinawan women, the racial politics of the United States collided with the postcolonial politics of the Asia Pacific. Through close readings of poetry, reportage, film, and memoir on base-town life since 1945, Shimabuku traces a continuing failure to “become Japanese.” What she discerns instead is a complex politics surrounding sex work, tipping with volatility along the razor’s edge between insurgency and collaboration. At stake in sovereign power’s attempt to secure Okinawa as a military fortress was the need to contain alegality itself—that is, a life force irreducible to the legal order. If biopolitics is the state’s attempt to monopolize life, then Alegal is a story about how borderland actors reclaimed the power of life for themselves. In addition to scholars of Japan and Okinawa, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in postcolonialism, militarism, mixed-race studies, gender and sexuality, or the production of sovereignty in the modern world.

In the wake of the recognition of the Whanganui River in New Zealand, the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers in India, the Yarra River in Australia and the Atrato River in Colombia as «subjects of rights», the International Observatory on Nature’s Rights has initiated a reflection on the possibility of recognizing the St. Lawrence River, the «path that walks» as it is called by the First Nations, as a «legal person». The texts in this collective work deal with the implications of attributing a legal personhood and rights to the St. Lawrence River, delve into the epistemological foundations of the paradigm of the recognition of the rights of Nature and present concrete cases of recognition of rivers as subjects of law. Written by experts from several countries where the recognition of the legal personhood of rivers has occurred to date, they take an in-depth look at the challenges and contributions of this paradigm shift in river protection. This book answers questions about the implications of such recognition and contributes to the process of building a new law that has just begun in Quebec and Canada with the adoption in February 2021 of resolutions conferring the status of «legal person» on the MagPie/ Muteshekau Shipu River located on the North Shore of Quebec and on the Nitassinan (ancestral territory) of two Innu communities, Ekuanitshit and Uashat mak Mani-utemam. Contributions : Inès Bennada, David Cordero Heredia, Teresa Vicente Giménez, Stratégies Saint-Laurent, Isabelle Delainey, Uapukun Mestokosho, Sylvain Gaudreault, Andrew Galliano, Nathalia Parra, Bianca De Marchi Moyano, Hugo Muñoz, Danaé Espinoza, Erin O’Donnell, Brettel Dawson, Shrishtee Bajpai, Rébecca Pétrin, Sokhna Sene, Victor David, Daniel Turp and Yenny Vega Cárdenas.

This book addresses three major questions about law and legal systems: (1) What are the defining and organising forms of legal institutions, legal rules, interpretative methodologies, and other legal phenomena? (2) How does frontal and systematic focus on these forms advance understanding of such phenomena? (3) What credit should the functions of forms have when such phenomena serve policy and related purposes, rule of law values, and fundamental political values such as democracy, liberty, and justice? This book seeks to offer general answers to these questions and thus gives form in the law its due. The answers not only provide articulate conversancy with the subject but also reveal insights into the nature of law itself, the oldest and foremost problem in legal theory and allied subjects.

This book explores the legal dimension of the Islamic State, an aspect which has hitherto been neglected in the literature. ISIS’ dystopian experience, intended as a short-lived territorial and political governance, has been analyzed from multiple points of view, including the geopolitical, social and religious ones. However, its legal dimension has never been properly dealt with in a comprehensive way, assuming as a point of reference both the Islamic and the Western legal tradition. This book analyzes ISIS as the expression of a potential though never fully realized legal order. The book does not describe ISIS’ possible classifications according to the standards and the criteria of international law, such as its possible statehood or proto-statehood, issues that are however touched upon. Rather, it analyzes ISIS’ own legal awareness, based on the group’s literary materials, which show a considerable amount of juridical work. Such material, mainly propagandistic in its nature, is essential in understanding which kind of legal order ISIS aimed at establishing. The book will be of interest to students and academics in the fields of Law, International Relations, Political Sciences, Terrorism Studies, Religion and Middle Eastern Studies.

"This book explains how to organize and write legal memoranda that will communicate information to the reader clearly and effectively. It is written primarily for first-year law students, but upper-class law students and practicing attorneys can also use it, to produce more effective legal memoranda or written legal analyses generally"--

The books in this series describe what successful principals must know and be able to do. Written by teams of nationally recognized experts and accomplished practitioners, they include practical materials such as checklists, sample letters, model forms, case studies, and action plans.