Suchergebnisse

Introduction: shaping legal emotions in Blackstone's England -- What's love got to do with it?: desire, disgust, and the ends of marriage law -- Blackstone's last tear?: productive melancholia and the sense of no ending -- The orator's dilemma: public embarrassment and the promise of the book -- Terror, torture, and the tender heart of the law -- Blackstone's long tail: the (un)happiness of harmonic justice -- Coda: excessive subjectivity is the new subjectivity (speculations) -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About the author

Legal anecdotes serve to bind populations to law through creating an affective, even affectionate, relationship between law and its communities. An analysis of a legal anecdote involving Justice John Holt (1642–1710) and witchcraft demonstrates how anecdotes can soothe public anxieties over rapid modernization. This particular anecdote asserts the primacy of the literate over the oral, high culture over popular culture, science over superstition, the urban over the rural, and yet creates in the end an affective community united around affection for Holt and the English common law system he represented.

For those who yearn for some measure of control over death Final Acts, offers insight and hope. Writing in a style free of technical jargon, the contributors discuss documents that should be prepared (health proxy, do-not-resuscitate order, living will, power of attorney); decision-making (over medical interventions, life support, hospice and palliative care, aid-in-dying, treatment location, speaking for those who can no longer express their will); and the roles played by religion, custom, family, friends, caretakers, money, the medical establishment, and the government

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- Part One. Personal Stories -- Notes on My Dying / Robson, Ruthann -- Live Longer or Live Better? / Bingham, June -- "Life which is ours to know just once" / Barnes, Nancy -- Caregiving Beulah: A Relentless Challenge / Perlstein, Susan -- E-mails to Family and Friends: Claude and Maxilla-Declining Gently / Evans, Sara M. -- Whose Death Is It, Anyway? / Oyster, Carol K. -- The Family Tree / Levitan, Jean -- Elegy for an Optimist / Schwartz, Mimi -- Buddhist Reflections on Life and Death: A Personal Memoir / Pope, Alan -- Death as My Colleague / Jumbelic, Mary -- Part Two. Perspectives -- The Transformation of Death in America / Kiernan, Stephen P. -- Unintended Consequences: Hospice, Hospitals, and the Not-So-Good Death / Temple, Kathryn -- The Hospital Ethics Committee: Solving Medical Dilemmas / Hannon, Natalie R. -- Ethical Principles for End-of-Life Decision Making / Gauthier Cummins, Candace -- Life or Death: Who Gets to Choose? / MacGregor, Cherylynn -- Empowering Patients at the End of Life: Law, Advocacy, Policy / Tucker, Kathryn L. -- Dying Down Under: From Law Reform to the Peaceful Pill / Nitschke, Philip / Stewart, Fiona -- Ageism and Late-Life Choices / Cruikshank, Margaret -- Physician-Assisted Suicide: Why Both Sides Are Wrong / Byock, Ira -- End of days / Piercy, Marge -- About the Editors and Contributors -- Index

Becoming a widow is one of the most traumatic life events that a woman can experience. Yet, as this remarkable new collection reveals, each woman responds to that trauma differently. Here, forty-three widows tell their stories, in their own words. Some were widowed young, while others were married for decades. Some cared for their late partners through long terminal illnesses, while others lost their partners suddenly. Some had male partners, while others had female partners. Yet each of these women faced the same basic dilemma: how to go on living when a part of you is gone. Widows' Words is arranged chronologically, starting with stories of women preparing for their partners' deaths, followed by the experiences of recent widows still reeling from their fresh loss, and culminating in the accounts of women who lost their partners many years ago but still experience waves of grief. Their accounts deal honestly with feelings of pain, sorrow, and despair, and yet there are also powerful expressions of strength, hope, and even joy. Whether you are a widow yourself or have simply experienced loss, you will be sure to find something moving and profound in these diverse tales of mourning, remembrance, and resilience