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Naomi Creutzfeldt (University of Kent) has posted Cultural Patterns of Disputing Behaviour? (Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie. 2023.) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This essay builds on my previous comparative work on Ombuds users and develops the notion of cultural patterns,...

Andy Aydın-Aitchison (University of Edinburgh - School of Law) has posted Victims, perpetrators, and bystanders: Atrocity and its aftermath in the films of Jasmila Žbanić on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Following cultural and visual criminologists, who explore cinematic representations...

Introduction: Are Human Rights Universal? The concept of human rights predates the current system, which was established in 1945 with the creation of the United Nations (Mende, 2019). "Universal human rights theory holds that human rights apply to everyone simply by virtue of their being human" (Nasr, 2016), but cultural relativism maintains that these rights … Continued

At least one of us was once accused of dressing like a 1970s DJ - which, upon consideration, we felt to be a step up from the usual description. So, it could well be said that fashion isn't really and quite our thing. Coach's Stuart Vevers on sustainability in fashion: 'The change has to come from designers'British designer credits a decade in New York with firing a 'genuine passion' for sustainabilityThis newfound insistence upon sustainability in fashion amuses us. For, of course, the entire point and purpose of fashion is to show who is in this season with the latest things and who is some regrettable oik still wearing something at least three weeks out of date. At the highest possible, most favourable, description the entire industry produces Veblen Goods. Which is, of course, a problem when actual clothing - and designs - are now cheap as chips and getting cheaper by the week. Temu, Shein, Boohoo and the rest means that said oiks can be dressed in whatever at the same time as the cognoscenti. Which would never do, of course. Violating the main point of the game.What is the point of catwalk shows, now that social media serves up fresh trends to everyone's phone every day of the year? "[It] has to be about sustainability", says Stuart Vevers, the British designer who has spent the last decade bringing fashion credibility and a new point of view to the once-staid American handbag brand Coach.Fashion weeks hand the microphone of the cultural conversation to designers, and Vevers wants to use his airtime "to look at where sustainability can be scaled. Where we can scale is where we can have an impact."Thus the rules of the game must be changed. For if the base idea is the production of Veblen Goods then Veblen Goods there must be. So, now sustainability is in - a method of creating expensive things which people will buy because they are expensive and therefore "Look at Me!" as opposed to nice cotton t-shirts which just anyone can now have in abundance.As someone once said about methods of eating asparagus (perhaps a Mitford?). Which one is used doesn't matter, even firing it from miniature cannons into fellow diners' mouths. But that there is a fashionable method which you don't know about is vital. For that's how the distinction between you and non-U is made.Given the paucity of wildly wealthy economists out there it's not true that a command of economic theory is a surefire way to make cash. But it is nice to see that The Theory of the Leisure Class is still relevant as a description of human behaviour 125 years later.

I was very pleased to receive a new 'think piece' by Tom C Veblen — yes, he is related to the great Theory of the Leisure Class author, and his daughter worked at ASI for a while too. His piece is called America's Exceptional Experiment in Self-Government and it imagines a cultural and political revival of that great nation, now struggling through its self-induced cultural and political mess.Among other things, Veblen cites a guide for surviving a seaplane crash on water. When that happens, they tend to come to rest upside down, so you need to have your wits about you. You must stay calm. Grab your life vest. Open the exit and work out your escape route before releasing your seat belt. If the obvious way out is blocked, work out another before you unbuckle yourself. Don't let go until you are out. If you are underwater, follow the bubbles to the surface. Then inflate your life vest.Veblen says it's an analogy for 'getting out alive' from the wrecked political systems we have, and the more you think about it, the more apt the analogy is. You need to stay calm. Too many politicians see problems emerging — inflation, for example, leading to widespread complaints and strikes over pay, rising borrowing costs, falling house prices and soaring prices for essentials like food and energy — then rush into some 'quick fix' solution that actually makes things worse. Like huge domestic heating subsidies to households, both rich and poor, which require vast new public borrowing to finance. Or windfall taxes on oil producers alongside calls to cap energy prices, which have the effect of driving energy investment out of the country. Or capping the price of bread and milk and other basic groceries, which (as the author of Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls can tell you), won't work and will just lead to shortages. No quick fixes will get you out of this crash. You need to grab your life vest, the thing that's going to keep you afloat. And that life vest is what Adam Smith (whose 300th birthday we celebrate this month) called the 'simple system of natural liberty'. Make sure your money is sound, protect the basic institutions of open markets, competition, individual liberty and the rule of law. Leave people free to go their own way, and they will collaborate and boost value and progress before any government bureaucrat has even got the spreadsheet functioning.Then you need to work out your escape route. That's not always easy, as we discovered during the early 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher's government tried to roll back a bloated state. Efficiency experts were brought in, and when they left again, things reverted back to their sad normal. We needed instead to work out a way to get the all-dominating nationalised industries (utilities, communications, transport, manufacturing and all the rest) out of state protection and into the chill wind of competition. The solution to each was different, and some worked better than others. It's not easy to find your way out of a crashed state.Follow the bubbles — look at what other people round the world are doing that actually works, and do that, rather than clinging to some ideological totem pole like the National Health Service. And, when you have done all that, distance yourself from the wreckage and inflate your life vest. Deploy the system of natural liberty, and you can float free.

Gene Healy


"The library looms as the next big confrontation in the culture war," the Atlantic reports, and President Biden, our Culture‐​Warrior‐​in‐​Chief, is itching for the fight. "The president signaled a new approach in his late‐​April announcement video, when he cited book bans as evidence for his accusation that Republicans in the Donald Trump era are targeting Americans' 'personal freedom.'"
Not today, Satan—not on Joe Biden's watch. "We're taking on these civil rights violations, because that's what they are," Biden told the crowd at the White House Pride Celebration in June: "book bans may violate the federal civil rights laws when they target LGBTQ students or students of color and create hostile classroom environments."
When that happens, local school districts will face the wrath of the new federal Czar of the Middle‐​School Library. "Students have a right to learn free from discrimination," the president's top domestic policy advisor, Neera Tanden, explains, but "across the country, our nation faces a dangerous spike in book bans [targeting] LGBTQI+ communities." Accordingly, the administration is appointing a new "coordinator" in the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights who'll bring the full force of the federal government to bear in this fight.
I wrote recently that Biden's new Title IX edicts make him "Commander‐​in‐​Chief of the Girls' Room"; with this latest move, he can add "Boss of the Bookmobile" to his collection of extraconstitutional titles. It's an absurd power‐​grab based on the flimsiest of pretexts—and it's certain to make America's cultural conflicts worse.







The White House, like much of the press, has been cagey and duplicitious when it comes to what the "book‐​banning" controversy is really about. In Biden's reelection video, for example, while the president rails against "MAGA extremists… banning books," the camera shows a stack of titles including Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.
Atticus Finch in the dock? Maybe in a few notorious MAGA strongholds like, er, Los Angeles and Seattle, where Lee's novel has been pulled from the curriculum for its insensitive "white‐​savior" storyline. But the real school‐​library fight centers on a quite different class of books.
In both the PEN America and American Library Association "most banned" lists, number one by a wide margin is Maia Kobabe's Gender Queer, a "graphic novel" that's decidedly Not Safe For Work and—arguably!—inappropriate for a grammar‐​school library.
Others in the ALA's top 10 include:
All Boys Aren't Blue (#2), (depictions of underage cousin‐​incest)
Lawn Boy (#7), "which describes 10‐​year‐​old boys performing oral sex on each other"; and
This Book Is Gay (#10), which includes advice on mutual masturbation—"something they don't teach you in school"(!)—and "instructions on how to use Grindr to find sex partners.")
The ACLU and former president Barack Obama have recently encouraged public‐​spirited Americans to start Banned Books clubs. I'd love to see the face of any earnest suburban liberal who signs up expecting a refresher course in Vonnegut and Steinbeck. In any event, if you'd like a clearer picture of what some parents are objecting to, in their new study, "The Book Ban Mirage," AEI's Max Eden and Heritage's Jay P. Greene and Madison Marino helpfully screenshot many of the offending passages.
As for the supposed "dangerous spike in book bans," Eden, Greene, and Marino show that activists are playing fast and loose with the term "banned." PEN America's definition is broad enough to include "any action taken against a book" that leads to "restricted" or "diminished" access for any period of time. Temporarily removed then reshelved after review? "Banned." Moved from the middle‐​school library to the high‐​school shelves? "Banned." Removed from a recommended reading list but still on the library shelves? "Banned."
In fact, when Eden et al. decided to check online school library catalogs against the PEN index of "banned" books, they found that:
"74 percent of the books that PEN America lists as banned are listed as available in the same districts from which PEN America says those books were banned."

Still, the authors managed to find a few localities where kids can no longer check out some of the spicier tomes on PEN's List. So what? There are over 13,000 school districts in the United States; are we supposed to think Our Democracy is imperiled because a couple dozen of them took Gender Queer off their library shelves?
Reports of a wave of book‐​banning Babbittry have been greatly exaggerated. But to be fair to PEN America, the organization does document some serious cases of legislative overreach by Red‐​state politicians claiming to speak for concerned parents. Last year, for example, Missouri made it a misdemeanor offense, carrying possible jail time, for librarians to provide "explicit sexual material" to students. That's nutty: decisions about what goes on school‐​library shelves should be made at the local level, not forcibly dictated from the state house.
Still less should those decisions be dictated from Washington, D.C.: if the taxpayers in a local school district don't want Gender Queer or This Book Is Gay in their kids' library, it's none of Joe Biden's business.
That's not how Biden sees things, unfortunately; in the president's view, it's his right and duty to make a federal case out of how school libraries stock their shelves.
In January, according to the Washington Post, the Biden administration embarked on its "first test of a new legal argument that failing to represent students in school books can constitute discrimination."
In early 2022, the Granbury Independent School District in North Texas removed multiple LGBTQ‐​focused books from its libraries for review, ultimately deciding to return most of them to the shelves. Only three books, including This Book Is Gay (the one "that teaches kids about anal sex, oral sex, and hookup apps"), were permanently removed. The ACLU hit back with a federal civil rights complaint charging that the district had "actively facilitated discrimination and hateful rhetoric" in violation of Title IX. As the Post noted:
"If the government finds in the ACLU's favor, the determination could have implications for schools nationwide, experts said, forcing libraries to stock more books about LGBTQ individuals and… ensur[e] student access to books that some Americans, especially right‐​leaning parents, deem unacceptable.

The Granbury investigation is still in progress, but in May, OCR reached a settlement in a similar case involving a suburban Atlanta school system. Here, the Biden administration advanced the novel theory that, even if the school district itself doesn't discriminate, it can be held accountable for a "hostile environment" created by parents' comments at a school board meeting.
The Forsyth County School District's trouble started in January 2022, when it temporarily removed eight books following parent complaints. After review, they returned seven of eight to the library shelves, excluding only one, the aforementioned All Boys Aren't Blue. FCS soon found itself subject to a federal civil rights investigation into whether the removal of those books created a "racially and sexually hostile environment for students."
In its May 19 letter announcing the resolution of that case, the Office for Civil Rights admits that Forsyth County wasn't engaged in an anti‐​gay book purge: it had "limited its book screening process to sexually explicit material." "Nonetheless," OCR chides, "communications at board meetings conveyed the impression that books were being screened to exclude diverse authors and characters, including people who are LGBTQI+ and authors who are not white, leading to increased fears and possibly harassment." OCR found it troubling that during a February 15 board meeting:
"some [parents'] comments focused on removing books for reasons related to gender identity or sexual orientation. Also some parents made negative comments about diversity and inclusion or critical race theory."

The OCR letter doesn't specify what those comments were, but according to press coverage of the Board meeting, they included statements like
"Do you think it's healthy for 8‑year‐​olds to be exposed to books which encourage transgenderism, sexualization and masturbation?"

and
"CRT, DEI, SEL, or any other name you give it is not harmless…. No more lies, such as 'DEI's purpose is to teach children that there are different cultures that eat different foods. Really?"

Scandalous wrongthink—and in the presence of children, no less! According to OCR, parents' statements at the board meeting contributed to a potential "racially and sexually hostile environment," which the district failed to adequately address with "supportive measures" for afflicted students.
To get the feds off their back, Forsyth County Schools had to agree to a number of humiliating terms. Per the Resolution Agreement, FCS must:
Publicly Pledge Fealty to DEI Thought: "in locations readily available to the District's middle and high school students," FCS shall post a statement affirming that "the District strives to provide a global perspective and promote diversity by including in school libraries materials about and by authors and illustrators of all cultures";
Help Aggrieved Students Sic the Feds on Their School: that statement will also provide "any student who feels impacted by the environment surrounding the removal of books" with "information about how to file a complaint about discrimination or harassment" under Title IX and Title VI;
Take a Long, Hard Look in the Mirror: "The District will administer a school climate survey" on the prevalence of book‐​related and other harassment in its middle and high schools; and "assess whether any additional student or other training is needed to further improve the climate." Look, this is a wealthy school district with plenty of tax dollars to go around: why shouldn't the DEI‐​consultant industry get a taste?
…all this because school officials took a book featuring underage cousin‐​incest off their middle‐​school library shelves.
As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression notes, OCR's strong‐​arm tactics succeeded here despite the fact that
"there is no legal authority that [says] failure to 'promote diversity' violates federal anti‐​discrimination law. If OCR thinks it can require schools to affirmatively 'promote diversity'— a term left undefined — what else does the agency think it can get away with?"

I suppose we'll find out as Biden's new school‐​library czar gets to work.