Suchergebnisse

The article is a continuation of previous works devoted to clarifying issues which are related to the methodology of property research, the development of theoretical and methodological basis for practical implementation of transformation of the system of property under the modern conditions of Ukrainian economy's change. The processes of creating social-oriented market economy and increasing informatization of management should be determined by internal logic of the system of property. The author considers the formation of algorithms of property system reform based on scientifically grounded socio-economic concept to be the key problem. Explaining the concept of "the system of property – common resource system," the author demonstrates its fundamental theoretical basis – methodological institutionalism. Also the author gives practical examples of its display in the works by famous scientists and in real functioning of alternative social systems. Under the conditions of transformation crisis in Ukraine and the urgent need for large-scale reforms in all spheres of public life, to ensure the stability of social system and progressive movement in the direction of development the concept of "SP - CRS", which is society consolidating idea, can be offered. Laying this concept as a basis for reformation of social system, one can obtain a tool for intensive formation of self-management, which implements deliberative model of the democracy and management and brings the society closer to noosphere stage. ; Стаття є продовженням попередніх робіт, присвячених з'ясуванню питань, пов'язаних з мето- дологією дослідження власності, виробленню теоретико-методологічного базису здійснення практич- ної діяльності з перетворення системи власності у сучасних умовах трансформації української еконо- міки. Процеси створення соціально орієнтованої ринкової економіки і нарощування інформатизації господарювання визначаються внутрішньою логікою розвитку системи власності. Ключовою автор вважає проблему формування алгоритмів реформування системи власності на основі науково обґрун- тованої соціально-економічної концепції. Розкриваючи концепцію «Система власності – спільна ресур- сна система», автор демонструє її фундаментальну теоретичну основу – методологічний інститу- ціоналізм і наводить практичні приклади його прояву з робіт відомих вчених, а також у реальному функціонуванні альтернативних суспільних систем. Закладаючи цю концепцію в основу реформування соціальної системи, можна отримати інструмент інтенсивного формування самоврядного устрою, що втілює в життя деліберативну модель демократії і менеджменту та наближає суспільство до ноосферної стадії розвитку.

Цель: изучение состояния правового обеспечения реализации кластерных стратегий; обозначение проблем и возможных направлений совершенствования правового обеспечения кластерного развития регионов. Методы: системный, структурно-функциональный, индукция и дедукция, анализ и синтез, формально-юридический. Результаты: в работе сформулировано определение понятия кластера как формы кооперативного взаимодействия организаций, связанных отношениями в определенной экономической сфере вследствие функциональной зависимости, дополняющих друг друга и усиливающих конкурентные преимущества отдельных компаний. Выдвигается гипотеза о необходимости унификации и нормативной фиксации организационно-управленческой структуры кластеров таким образом, чтобы однотипные органы (в том числе органы исполнительной власти) и структуры разных кластеров (совещательные, специализированная организация, организация-координатор и пр.) имели схожую компетенцию и место в иерархии управления. Научная новизна: следуя наиболее общим представлениям о кластере как взаимодействующих институтах в специфической области, можно заметить, что отсутствие четкости в правовом обеспечении функционирования кластеров не позволяет определить статус властных и невластных субъектов экономической деятельности, организационноправовые формы и процедуры их взаимодействия. Практическая значимость: выявленные проблемы правового обеспечения реализации кластерных стратегий могут помочь в совершенствовании государственного регулирования кластерных отношений в регионах и их реализации. ; Objective: to study the state of legal support of the cluster strategies implementation; to identify the problems and possible directions for improv-ing the legal support of cluster development in the regions.Methods: systemic, structural-functional, induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis, formal legal.Results: the paper formulates the definition of cluster as a form of cooperative interaction of organizations interacting in some economic sphere due to functional dependence, complementing each other and reinforcing the competitive advantages of individual companies. The hypothesis is proposed that the organizational and management structure of clusters should be unified and obtain normative fixation so that the same type of bodies (including executive bodies) and the structure of the different clusters (deliberative, specialized organizations, organization-coordinator, etc.) had similar competence and position in the management hierarchy.Scientific novelty: following the most general conception of a cluster as interacting institutions in a specific area, one can see that the lack of clarity in the legal support of the clusters functioning does not allow to determine the status of authoritative and non-authoritative subjects of economic activities, their organizational-legal forms and the procedure of their interaction.Practical significance: the identified problems of legal support of the cluster strategies implementation can help in the improvement of stateregulation of cluster relations in the regions and their implementation.

El artículo recoge una aproximación a las diversas tendencias de investigación evaluativa que son especialmente útiles en la evaluación de programas de educación multicultural. Aunque los modelos aquí presentados tienden a desarrollarse desde una perspectiva cualitativa, el acento se sitúa en su potencial para responder a las necesidades que aparecen en la evaluación de programas sociales y, en concreto, en la evaluación de programas educativos multiculturales. Se parte, por tanto, de un breve análisis de estas necesidades para, posteriormente, centrarse en el estudio de algunos posibles modelos que intentan responder más adecuadamente a esas necesidades. El artículo presenta cuatro de ellos: la evaluación participativa, la evaluación democrática y deliberativa, la evaluación colaborativa y la evaluación de programas basados en la comunidad. Los materiales han sido recogidos de la literatura sobre el tema y, especialmente, de la experiencia en evaluación de programas multiculturales de las autoras. Finalmente, desarrolla con más amplitud el estudio del «empowerment» como estrategia de evaluación en educación intercultural, presentando un ejemplo de aplicación de dicha estrategia en una evaluación de programa. ; The article brings together a number of the different approaches to evaluative research which have been found to be particulary useful in the evaluation of multicultural education programs. While the models presented here have the common feature that they are developed from a qualitative perspective, emphasis is placed in their potential in responding to those needs which appear in the evaluation of social programmes, and in particular in the evaluation of multicultural education programmes. The starting point is a brief analysis of these needs which is followed by a study of some possible models which try to offer a more adequate response to these needs.Four such models are presented: participative evaluation, democratic and deliberative evaluation, collaborative evaluation and the evaluation of community based programmes. The materials used are drawn from a wide variety of literature related to the theme, and especially from our own experience in multicultural programme evaluation.Finally, this article provides a fuller development of the study of «empowerment» as an evaluation strategy in intercultural education and at the same time offers an example of the application of this strategy in a programme evaluation.

In this paper we aim to contribute to the literature on social entrepreneurship by nuancing both existing micro-level characterizations as well as its presumed macro level societal impacts. Moreover, we explore connections between the micro and macro levels of analysis to see which types of social entrepreneurs are more likely to achieve what kinds of societal impacts. We present findings from an illustrative sample of 28 interviews with Dutch social entrepreneurs working in International Development. At the micro level, our qualitative findings do not support a perception of social entrepreneurs – often found in the Anglo Saxon literature - as heroic 'lone rangers' who 'go it alone' and with 'dogged determination' fight for a self-defined social cause. Instead, most social entrepreneurs in our study are acutely aware of the need to cooperate with other stakeholders and often use existing 'off the shelf' social causes and theories of change, even when they do develop innovative ways to try and achieve these goals. At the macro level, two starkly contrasting views exist on the possible societal impacts of social entrepreneurs. The first is an, often implicit, extension of the 'lone-ranger' perception of social entrepreneurs as people who 'change the world' or at least significantly contribute to social and economic transformation. At the other end of the spectrum in the literature we find those who argue that social entrepreneurs are potentially counterproductive to international development interventions as their social mission is not the result of a 'collective deliberative process', their activities are likely to displace NGO and/or government interventions and might even give governments an excuse to not intervene and ignore deeper levels of political contestation and societal inequalities. The paper is structured as follows. We first explain the rise in social entrepreneurship in international development, and we introduce the central assumptions in the literature on how social entrepreneurs define their social mission and on their likely societal impact. Next we present our data to show that our interviews do not support existing assumptions about the characteristics of social entrepreneurs nor about their possible societal impacts. Finally, we explore the usefulness of the typology proposed by Zahra et al, and we conclude that this typology indeed helps to further systematize a more nuanced understanding of the characteristics and likely roles of social entrepreneurs.

Рассматривается политическая ситуация во Французском королевстве в начале XV века. В 1417 году наметились черты династического кризиса. Оставался всего один несовершеннолетний наследник, король Карл VI страдал от болезни, за власть боролись группировки знати. Чтобы предотвратить династический кризис, требовалось установить некий порядок, соответствующий новым условиям. Во внимание были приняты ордонанс 1374 года, в котором определялся порядок регентства на период взросления будущего Карла VI, а также сформированные на его основе решения января 1393 года, когда впервые потребовалось урегулировать порядок управления на время начавшейся болезни Карла VI. После нескольких обострений болезни короля ордонанс был скорректирован в 1403 и 1405 гг. Определенную долю ответственности за кризис король возложил на свою супругу, Изабеллу Баварскую, поэтому королева, почувствовав угрозу, поспешила покинуть Париж. Постепенно часть придворной знати сгруппировалась вокруг фигуры Изабеллы Баварской. Во Франции, по сути, оказалось две столицы: Париж, где находился король и заседали органы центрального управления, и Венсенн, куда перебрались Изабелла Баварская и ее двор. В статье дается описание раскола в королевском семействе и его последствия для политической ситуации того времени. ; The political situation in the Kingdom of France at the beginning of the 15 th century is considered. In 1417 there have been features of the dynastic crisis. There was only one minor heir, King Charles VI suffered from a disease, noble groups fought for power. To prevent the dynastic crisis, a procedure corresponding to the new conditions was needed to establish. The Ordinance of 1374, which defined the order of the regency for the period of growing of the future king, and the decisions of January 1393 formed on its basis, when the order of government at the time of illness of Charles VI first was settled, were taken into account. After several disease exacerbations of the King the Ordinance was amended in 1403 and 1405. Some responsibility for the crisis the King put on his wife, Isabella of Bavaria, so the queen, feel threatened, hurried to leave Paris. Gradually the part of the court nobility was grouped around the figure of Isabella of Bavaria. In France, in fact, turned out to be two capital cities: Paris, where were the King and deliberative organs of the central administration, and Vincennes, where Isabella of Bavaria and her court were. The article describes the split in the royal family and its implications for the political situation of the time.

Proponents of deliberative democracy argue that it enhances procedural democracy by bringing policymakers and the public closer together and by generating new alternatives rather than just choices. But what role does deliberation play under autocracy, where basic democratic institutions are absent? In China, citizens cannot elect their governments but are regularly consulted on matters of governance and policymaking. For example, all national and many sub-national policy initiatives in China currently proceed through at least one round of public consultation prior to adoption. Why do non-democratic regimes consult their citizens? One explanation is that consultation is simply "window dressing" for an otherwise authoritarian decision-making process. Indeed, no new political actors are empowered, the outcomes are non- binding, and critical comments can be kept private. But why then is the Chinese regime investing resources into a politically inconsequential activity? Similarly, why are hundreds of thousands of citizens voicing comments and criticisms if they have no effect? I argue that consultative autocracy is more than window dressing. In particular, I argue that public consultation helps inform and legitimate the policymaking process, contributing to more durable and legitimate policy outcomes. Testing these arguments required overcoming several empirical challenges. For example, public consultation is not randomly distributed, and policy outcomes are issue- specific, making them difficult to generalize. To address non-random selection, I created an extensive sub-national policy database that allows me to identify the effects of consultation across unique policy initiatives implemented in different parts of the country. To proxy for policy outcomes, I measured amendment and repeal rates, which should be lower among more effective policies. I find that no policies adopted with consultation have yet been repealed and that their amendment rates are significantly lower as well. To measure the legitimizing effects of consultation, I took advantage of a budget deliberation experiment in Zeguo, China, where participants are randomly selected to participate in annual budget deliberations. In January 2012, after multiple interviews with political leaders and legislative delegates in Zeguo, I organized a survey of the participant cohort along with a representative sample of non-participants. Survey results demonstrate that approval for local government and its policies is significantly higher among participants than non-participants but that consultation has no positive effect on views towards the central leadership

This thesis is a collection of three essays about the economics of coordination. Coordination issues arise when, in presence of multiple equilibria, heterogeneously informed agents need to coordinate with each other towards a Pareto-superior outcome. Electoral outcomes, collective decision-making, currency attacks or polit- ical regime changes examples of coordination problems. The first chapter provides a game theoretic analysis of group decision making, investigating how an agent's communication behavior is affected by different voting systems. I show that in an ideal state where communication is noisy but agents can communicate without opportunity costs, agents will always reach unanimous consensus regardless of which voting system governs the deliberative process. I further show that under the more realistic case in which communication involves opportunity costs, voting systems shape an agent's communication behavior. Specifically, when the opportunity costs of communication are low, a voting system based on unanimity approximates the results of the ideal state. Conversely, when communication involves high opportunity costs, a voting system based on majority is more desirable. The second essay is an experimental test of the predictions developed in the first chapter. The experiment is designed to determine how different voting institutions in uence the process of communication of collective decision bodies when communication can be costly. In contrast with the existing literature, I have found that different voting institutions induce different decision outcomes. In particular, a voting system based on unanimity fosters subjects' communication and information sharing. Once subjects choose to communicate, I also have observed that communication unambiguously improves the quality of the decision outcome across each voting rule. The third and final essay provides a political regime-change interpretation of the organized crime phe- nomenon. Under the assumption that the a criminal organization in a society benefits of the support of individuals, I investigate the strategic interplay between a criminal organization and a large number of citizens who might be more inclined to support the criminal organization rather than reporting its illegal activities to the legal authority. Borrowing from the economic literature on coordination and regime change, I model a criminal organization as an autocratic regime and claim that illegal activities are used in order to raise citizens support.

El presente trabajo tiene como objetivos presentar un concepto de sociedad civil desde una perspectiva crítica, una perspectiva que pueda dar razón del potencial de cambio y transformación social que encierra este ámbito de la interacción social. Con este fin, se adentra en primer lugar en la difícil relación entre democracia y sociedad civil, analizándola desde el paso de las democracias participativas a las democracias deliberativas. El carácter global de la sociedad civil y los problemas de realización práctica nos conducen, en segundo lugar, a la discusión de la propuesta de autores como J. Habermas y M. Kaldor, destacando las insuficiencias de sus respectivos enfoques. A continuación, y en discusión con los trabajos de J. Keane, se presenta una propuesta de definición y fundamentación del concepto de sociedad civil apoyado en una hermenéutica crítica, capaz de justificar su núcleo moral como ética de la sociedad civil y, al mismo tiempo, de sus posibilidades reales de aplicación. Por último, se propone el concepto de recursos morales para reconstruir las características básicas que definen a los recursos propios de la sociedad civil.The objective of this paper is to present a concept of civil society from a critical perspective that can explain the potential for change and social transformation encompassed within this sphere of social interaction. To this end, we first explore the difficult relationship between democracy and civil society, through an analysis of the shift from participative to deliberative democracy. The global character of civil society and the problems of its practical achievement lead us, in a second stage, to discuss proposals from authors such as J. Habermas and M. Kaldor, and to uncover the inadequacies of their respective approaches. This is followed by a proposal, arising from debate on the works of J. Keane, in which the concept of civil society is defined and grounded –based on a critical hermeneutic– that is capable of justifying its moral core as the ethics of civil society and at the same time, justifying its real possibilities for application. Finally, the concept of moral resources is proposed to reconstruct the basic characteristics that define the resources characteristic of civil society.

This paper (accepted for publication in the Journal of International Economic Law 15 (2012)) uses the term 'legal methodology' as referring to the conceptions of the sources and 'rules of recognition' of law, the methods of interpretation, the functions and systemic nature of legal systems like international economic law (IEL), and their relationships to other areas of law and politics. It begins with discussing six competing theories of justice justifying international economic regulation. This overview of theories of justice is followed by a discussion of competing moral, economic, political and legal conceptions of the 'primary' and 'secondary rules' of IEL. Due to the 'dual nature' of modern legal systems resulting from the universal recognition of human rights and of other principles of justice, legal positivism, natural law theories, social and policy conceptions of national, transnational and international legal systems must be applied in mutually coherent ways. As law and jurisprudence are less about 'truth' than about 'institutionalizing public reason', positive and normative legal arguments must respect legitimate 'constitutional pluralism' and 'reasonable disagreement' about interpretation and legal protection of civil, political, economic, social and cultural human rights as relevant context for interpreting IEL. The paper explains why, due to 'globalization' and the transformation of ever more national into transnational public goods, national Constitutions have become 'partial constitutions' that can no longer protect many public goods without international law and institutions. Constitutional and 'public goods' theories confirm that the five competing conceptions of IEL must be embedded into a multilevel constitutional framework limiting abuses of public and private power in all human interactions at national, transnational and international levels. The paper includes case-studies illustrating the need for comparative institutional research on which multilevel legal, institutional and regulatory approaches protect human rights, other cosmopolitan rights of citizens and related public goods most effectively. The obvious 'governance failures' in protecting interdependent public goods call not only for 'democratic empowerment' of citizens by cosmopolitan rights compensating the inadequate parliamentary control of multilevel governance by new forms of 'participatory', deliberative and cosmopolitan democracy. The obvious abuses of 'Westphalian conceptions' of 'international law among states' must also be limited by stronger multilevel judicial protection of cosmopolitan rights in order to hold governments more accountable for their failures to protect interdependent public goods more effectively.

The research on The public administration of the right to the quality of education aimed to characterize the administrative practices of territorial educational development in Pereira. This systematization was displayed as a contrastive relationship between the installed practices and the administrative behavior attributable to the legal and constitutional mandate of an integral formation by competencies. The central result of the research was the characterization of the denaturalization of deliberative participation of actors and authors of the educational fact to legitimate the sector policy of education, contained in the plans of territorial development. Once the autonomic problems were highlighted, in terms of the weak institutionalization of the constitutional principle of citizen's participation for the formative concretion of the ideal of the constitutionalized citizen and society, the appropriateness of participative planning was put into consideration, for the objectification of the articulation of the territorial plan of educational development not only with the national and local decennial plans of education that structure the national educational policy of standards and curricular guidelines by competencies, but also with the PEI, for the realization of their purposes, objectives and goals. ; La investigación acerca de La administración pública del derecho a la calidad de la educación buscó caracterizar las prácticas administrativas del desarrollo educativo territorial de Pereira. Esta sistematización se desplegó como relación de contraste entre las prácticas instaladas y el comportamiento administrativo imputable al mandamiento constitucional y legal de una formación integral por competencias. El resultado central de la investigación fue la tipificación de la desnaturalización de la participación deliberativa de los actores y autores del hecho educativo para legitimar la política sectorial de educación contenida en los planes de desarrollo territorial. Puesta de relieve la problemática autonómica en términos de débil institucionalización del principio constitucional de la participación ciudadana para la concreción formativa del ideal de ciudadano y sociedad constitucionalizado, de suyo se puso en consideración la idoneidad de la planeación participativa, para la objetivación de la articulación del plan territorial de desarrollo educativo tanto con los planes decenales nacional y local de educación, que estructuran la política educativa nacional de estándares y lineamientos curriculares por competencias, como con los PEI, para que realicen sus propósitos, objetivos y metas.

La discusión entre neoconservadores y segunda escuela de Frankfurt acerca del problema de la democracia tiene uno de sus ejes centrales en la manera de entender la cuestión de la legitimidad. En el caso neoconservador, la legitimidad democrática es asumida como el resultado de un proceso político de participación reducida a lo electoral, en el que, por ende, el nivel de lo económico no entra en el debate público. En esa medida, la cohesión social reposa a la vez en el funcionamiento autónomo del mercado y en la coerción del orden político-administrativo jurídicamente regulado. Por el contrario, para la teoría critica la clave de la legitimidad democrática reposa en una progresiva ampliación de la participación que se exprese, en último término, como el sometimiento, deliberativamente alcanzado, de los poderes económico y político-administrativo, a la volitividad de los ciudadanos. En otros términos, en la politización de la sociedad civil. En tales circunstancias, la cultura se erige en vehículo de la cohesión social en igualdad de circunstancias con el mercado y con la coerción institucionalizada. ; The discussion between newconservatives and Frankfurt School concerning the democracy problem, has one of its central points in the way of understanding the legitimacy issue. As far as the neoconservative are concerned, the democratic legitimacy is seen like the product of a political process in which the political participation is limited to the electoral dimension. In this view, of course, the economic level is independent of the public debate. Finally and in logical relation with this, the social integration rests on the independent working of the market and on the coercive mechanism of the political-administrative order. On the contrary, since the critical theory point of view, the key of the democratic legitimacy is a wide participation that means a civic control of the economic and political-administrative powers. That control should be reached by deliberative ways. It means, in other words, spread the politics all around the civil society. In this picture, finally, the cultural relations became a central tool of the social integration process, at the same level that the market and the institutional coercion.

Is the ineffective protection of international public goods (like an efficient world trading and financial system), and thereby also of interrelated national public goods (like a common market undistorted by anti-dumping laws and other border discrimination), the inevitable fate of humanity? The negative answer to this question in Section I argues that the ineffective protection of international public goods is mainly due to lack of adequate theories, rules and institutions for overcoming the 'collective action problems' in the multilevel governance of interdependent public goods. Section II reviews the competing conceptions of 'international economic law' (IEL) such as public international law approaches, multilevel economic law approaches, 'global administrative law' approaches, 'conflicts law approaches' and 'multilevel constitutional approaches'. Section III argues that - similar to the experience of all democracies that 'national public goods' can be supplied only in a framework of constitutional, legislative, administrative and judicial rules and procedures supported by domestic citizens - the multilevel governance of 'international public goods' requires a multilevel constitutional framework for multilevel rule-making and judicial protection of rule of law and constitutional rights accepted and supported by domestic citizens as 'primary' legal subjects of IEL and of a citizen-driven, worldwide division of labour. Section IV concludes that multilevel governance for protecting the national self-interest in international public goods must no longer be designed only as 'foreign policy', but rather as an ever more important part of 'multilevel constitutionalism' for the protection of essential citizen interests. Rather than relying on hierarchical claims (e.g. regarding national primacy of state sovereignty, international primacy of international law over domestic law), the diverse national and international legal regimes must be coordinated with due respect for 'constitutional pluralism', 'deliberative democracy', 'balancing' of competing rights and values, and international duties of cooperation (e.g. among national and international courts of justice). 'Westphalian conceptions' of international law as an instrument for advancing national interests in an anarchic world remain important for protecting 'national public goods' (like national security). Yet, as illustrated by the diverse forms of European law (such as EC, EU, EEA law and the ECHR), more effective protection of interdependent (inter)national public goods requires new forms of multilevel governance and of multilevel constitutional restraints limiting the 'collective action problems' in transforming national into international public goods (e.g. protection of common markets and the environment).

This present research aims at studying sport discourses and their links with the notion of identity by the act of naming in the discursive construction of a sportman or sportwomen referent. Two major events are considered, the last two big events organized in France : the olympic Games of Albertville 1992 and the soccer world Cup 1998 (won by the French national team). It is par- ticularly focused on the national and ethnic dimensions. Nationality and ethnicity are strongly linked in the imaginery representations of our official grouping. This study is syntactic, seman- tic and argumentative by analyzing both at syntagmatic and dialogical levels. Sports writings are usually close to the Aristotelician genre of epideictic but they tend to be more and more deliberative with some interests from the politics. They borrow some of its elements (termino- logy, syntax, prosody, etc.). Categorization is the link between the studies, confronting most of the time the dialectic of the Same and the Other by constent ingrouping ou outgrouping. This research leads to the conclusion that naming in sports discourses has a lot to tell about the confusions of identities but also about the complexity of social representations. ; Ce travail a pour objet d'étudier les discours sportifs et leurs rapports avec la notion d'identité à partir d'un corpus médiatique réuni autour de deux événements : les derniers Jeux olympiques en France (Albertville 1992) et la dernière coupe du monde du XXe siècle (France 1998 et la victoire de l'équipe nationale). L'analyse est sémantique, syntaxique et argumentative puisque nous étudierons les phénomènes de constructions identitaires dans deux dimensions du dis- cours, le niveau syntagmatique et le niveau dialogique. L'étude des productions de noms de sportifs, associées à leurs potentielles appartenances multiples (clubs, ville, nation, etc.), révèle une forte application du schéma dialectique du Même et de l'Autre. Dans son "écriture", le sport est proche du genre aristotélicien de l'épidictique, mais ses glissements vers le délibératif sont fréquents dans les médias. La politique s'empare de plus en plus de ses spécificités (termino- logiques, syntaxiques, prosodiques, etc.). Nous mettrons en avant des problèmes de confusions entre des critères de catégorisations, en particulier : confusion entre ethnicité et nation. A l'is- sue de cette recherche, la nomination des sportifs nous fait apparaître combien les confusions identitaires existent, mais se jouent à seulement quelques détails du discours.

Several state legislatures now require that before a woman may consent to an abortion, she must first undergo an ultrasound and be offered the image of her fetus. The justification is that without an ultrasound, her consent will not be fully informed. Such legislation, the latest move in abortion regulation, supposes that a woman who sees the image will be less likely to abort. This Article explores how visual politics has combined with visual technology, and how law has seized upon both in a campaign to encourage women to choose against abortion. While rarely analyzed, the significance of seeing, or what one court has called "sensory and contemporaneous observance," in fact appears throughout the law. This Article develops a "visuality of law," focusing specially on the treatment of fetal imagery. Drawing upon medical and ethnographic literature on sonography, this Article situates the regulatory appeal of mandatory ultrasound within a preexisting visual familiarity with the fetus. I argue that while a welcome and rewarding experience in the context of wanted pregnancies, ultrasound becomes pernicious when required by law in connection with abortion. The argument I develop is that not only is an abortion decision itself protected, but so is the deliberative path a woman takes to reach that decision. Mandatory ultrasound intrudes upon that protected area of decisionmaking in several respects. First, simply by virtue of having an ultrasound, a pregnant woman is promoted into the category of mother and it is against this conscripted status that she must proceed. Second, unlike other compulsory forms of abortion disclosure, the statutes require the woman to use her body to produce the very information intended to dissuade her from pursuing an abortion. The resulting fetal image is intended as a self-evident statement about the meaning of human life. But characterizing the fetus as a child, as most ultrasound statutes do, is a political description, not a scientific one. It confuses medically informed consent with what I identify as morally informed consent, that realm of personal considerations that are a woman's alone to determine. Imbued with indelible social meaning, the mandatory ultrasound requirement replaces consent with coercion – not about the ultimate decision, but about how a woman chooses to get there.