More Binding Than Marriage

"Herein lies another lesson: make sure you know who you are getting into bed with when entering a partnership. ...any advice that I would give to a young attorney now would be to make this of paramount consideration over and above any financial benefits, for whereas you may seek to bring a traditional marriage to an end, a legal partnership, as I have found out to my cost, can be a virtual noose around your neck." Philip Nicholls joined Cottle Catford in January of 1987 after completion of his masters at Manchester University. That ended his academic education, but did not prepare him for what he was ultimately to face. After a relatively uneventful eight years, during which he became one of the youngest partners at a major law Firm in Barbados, his life began to spiral out of control through events he describes with clarity and emotion. As the most junior of three partners, his battle with colleagues who should have been mentors to him has left him far worse off twenty years later than he was at the time of the troubles. Through it all he has had to battle the unethical actions of some of his brothers at the bar, with the result that he alone has been called to account for the defalcations of his former legal partners, who today remain oblivious to the misery caused to him by their callous and cowardly refusal to stand up and acknowledge their responsibilities. His twenty-year journey takes the reader behind the scenes to some of the nasty practices in the legal profession, but as will be seen from his description of other events he has been involved in, these traits are really the failings of human beings and not just of lawyers. This memoir makes for compelling reading, not only for persons in the law profession, but also those interested in human behavior.

"Herein lies another lesson: make sure you know who you are getting into bed with when entering a partnership. ...any advice that I would give to a young attorney now would be to make this of paramount consideration over and above any financial benefits, for whereas you may seek to bring a traditional marriage to an end, a legal partnership, as I have found out to my cost, can be a virtual noose around your neck." Philip Nicholls joined Cottle Catford in January of 1987 after completion of his masters at Manchester University. That ended his academic education, but did not prepare him for what he was ultimately to face. After a relatively uneventful eight years, during which he became one of the youngest partners at a major law Firm in Barbados, his life began to spiral out of control through events he describes with clarity and emotion. As the most junior of three partners, his battle with colleagues who should have been mentors to him has left him far worse off twenty years later than he was at the time of the troubles. Through it all he has had to battle the unethical actions of some of his brothers at the bar, with the result that he alone has been called to account for the defalcations of his former legal partners, who today remain oblivious to the misery caused to him by their callous and cowardly refusal to stand up and acknowledge their responsibilities. His twenty-year journey takes the reader behind the scenes to some of the nasty practices in the legal profession, but as will be seen from his description of other events he has been involved in, these traits are really the failings of human beings and not just of lawyers. This memoir makes for compelling reading, not only for persons in the law profession, but also those interested in human behavior.

Whose Keeper? is a profound and creative treatise on modernity and its challenge to social science. Alan Wolfe argues that modern liberal democracies, such as the United States and Scandinavia, have broken with traditional sources of mortality and instead have relied upon economic and political frameworks to define their obligations to one another. Wolfe calls for reinvigorating a sense of community and thus a sense of obligation to the larger society. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1989.

Over four thousand gay and lesbian couples married in the city of San Francisco in 2004. The first large-scale occurrence of legal same-sex marriage, these unions galvanized a movement and reignited the debate about whether same-sex marriage, as some hope, challenges heterosexual privilege or, as others fear, preserves that privilege by assimilating queer couples. In Queering Marriage, Katrina Kimport uses in-depth interviews with participants in the San Francisco weddings to argue that same-sex marriage cannot be understood as simply entrenching or contesting heterosexual privilege. Instead, she contends, these new legally sanctioned relationships can both reinforce as well as disrupt the association of marriage and heterosexuality. During her deeply personal conversations with same-sex spouses, Kimport learned that the majority of respondents did characterize their marriages as an opportunity to contest heterosexual privilege. Yet, in a seeming contradiction, nearly as many also cited their desire for access to the normative benefits of matrimony, including social recognition and legal rights. Kimport’s research revealed that the pattern of ascribing meaning to marriage varied by parenthood status and, in turn, by gender. Lesbian parents were more likely to embrace normative meanings for their unions; those who are not parents were more likely to define their relationships as attempts to contest dominant understandings of marriage. By posing the question—can queers “queer” marriage?—Kimport provides a nuanced, accessible, and theoretically grounded framework for understanding the powerful effect of heterosexual expectations on both sexual and social categories.