Dead Letter Research Articles

Innocent Infants or Abusive Patriarchs? Spousal Homicides, the Punishment of Indians and the Law in Colonial Mexico, 1740s–1820s

This article examines numerous spousal homicides occurring all over New Spain (colonial Mexico) during the last seven decades of the colonial period. After killing their spouses, sometimes in an extremely brutal manner, a considerable number of the defendants managed to get away with little more than a slap on the wrist. I argue here that this was not due to the fact that written laws were dead letters. After examining general patterns of spousal homicides, I focus on the legal treatment and punishment afforded to indigenous criminals, several of who were drunk at the time of their crimes. Being an ‘Indian’ or committing a crime while drunk – both characteristics of many defendants in the records – were treated as a mitigating circumstance under law and led to the acquittal of several of the accused. Royal graces, an important legal mechanism, also played a significant role in easing the severity of the treatment of these and other domestic criminals. The judicial treatment of spousal murders thus did not reflect a considerable gap between law and practice at the time. Punishment derived from a complex combination of socio-cultural factors and longstanding legal prescriptions, doctrines and traditions.

Storyteller : Leslie Marmon Silko's Reappropriation of Native American History and Identity

Storyteller:Leslie Marmon Silko’s Reappropriation of Native American History and Identity Cynthia Carsten (bio) "We live forever in stories, not manners," he teased a newspaper reporter last year. "So, tease the chance of conception, tease your mother, tease the privy councils of the great spirit, and always tease your own history." –Almost Gegaa Browne Gerald Vizenor's character Almost Browne, in Hotline Healers,1 reveals something of the quandary faced by the American Indian oral historian. Although his version of the truth is marginalized by the dominance of another language and the literary conventions of the bearer of that foreign language, he "has never been . . . a coach of victimry. The traces of his native ancestors are always tricky, but never tragic" (1). He challenges the purveyors of the discourses of Euro-American domination—the journalist, the anthropologist, the university professor, the judge—to "tease" their own history. Almost recognizes that, for the American Indian, the conventions of Euro-American genres dictate that the story can only be told one way, and that way is as oppressive to the Indian mind and spirit as social and political dominance. Almost recognizes that "tricky stories are the sovereignty of motion [End Page 105] and creation, never the dead letters of cultural inventions, or the classy causes, tragic closures, and motivations of discoverers" (5). The solution to the dilemma for Almost Gegaa Browne is to subvert the conventions of Euro-American letters with the blank page. He sells his Wiigwaas Trade Books, the brand name of his empty books, at the local university, and he never has enough of them for curious students, who are told by Almost that "the best stories were heard in the absence of printed words" (25). When he is arrested by the university police and charged with "consumer fraud, false advertising, and conducting a commercial business on state property without a license," Professor Monte Franzgomery, who had danced around Almost's bookmobile "to the sound of shaman drums," pays the fine. According to the professor, Almost's blank books "were a source of inspiration . . . a ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings'"(27). Professor Franzgomery, for all of his goodwill, is perhaps an all-too-familiar representative of the academic sphere, ever willing to romanticize and exoticize the Native presence, to "dance to the sound of shaman drums," and yet to celebrate the blank page of the Native voice in print. Vizenor, like other American Indian writers who draw upon the oral traditions of their communities to inscribe their histories and identities, is of course "teasing history," pointing to the ironies of Native Americans' limited access to the production of culture. Control over the discourses and images of the Native American has, from the historical moment of contact, been in the hands of European and Euro-American elites. Non-Indian anthropologists, folklorists, and historians have for many years been those who determine what is and isn't authentically American Indian and/or worthy of serious academic regard; the courts of the United States have determined how much (or rather, how little) of indigenous Americans' oral traditions can legitimately be recognized and protected as "religion"; American journalists have perpetually sensationalized the image of the Native American; and today, practitioners of New Age pseudo-Indian religions have appropriated and misconstrued Native traditions, romanticizing and trivializing the songs, prayers, and practices that American Indians have for centuries relied on for their very survival. What is perhaps even more troubling for American Indian writers and scholars, proficient in writing the English language, are the constraints imposed by Euro-American epistemological assumptions and the conventions of the literary genres that reflect and sustain them. Fredric Jameson points to the role of genre in "master narratives," which perpetuate ideologies through the chronologies and the predetermined endings of their plots. According to Jameson, "a genre is essentially a socio-symbolic message, or, in other terms that form is immanently and intrinsically an ideology in its own right."2 As Native American writers and academics have entered the spheres of cultural production in [End Page 106] American society, they have discovered that telling the story according to their own cultural aesthetic conventions has led them into contested territory...

La organización territorial de la Comunidad Autónoma en el Estatuto de Autonomía

Que los actuales Estatutos de Autonomía adolecen de una notable falta de profundización en la regulación de esta materia, es cosa bien conocida que no precisa mayor aclaración. Que, además, aun siendo parca, esa regulación, lisa y llanamente, no se ha aplicado jamás en algún extremo, convirtiéndose el Estatuto en letra muerta en tal aspecto, es asimismo una realidad bien conocida en nuestra Comunidad Autónoma, por cuanto el art. 4.4 del Estatuto contempló, en vano, la posibilidad de que las Diputaciones provinciales se encargasen de la gestión de los servicios periféricos de la Comunidad Autónoma. Consiguientemente, más allá del incremento de los ámbitos competenciales propios de la Comunidad Autónoma y de la renovación de los preceptos basilares en punto a la financiación, resultaba más que probable que los procesos de reforma estatutaria tendrían en la regulación de la organización territorial un amplio terreno donde desplegarse.

Dead letter or living document? Ten years of the Code of Conduct for disaster relief

This paper examines the present value of the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Disaster Relief, in view of discussions on neutrality and the Western bias of the humanitarian aid system, and assesses how it can retain its relevance in future. The Code of Conduct was launched just after the Rwanda genocide of April 1994. A decade later, the crises in Afghanistan and Iraq have sparked renewed interest in humanitarian principles and in whether the code can serve as an instrument to define humanitarianism and guide humanitarian decision-making and coordination. More than 300 organisations have now subscribed to it. This paper is based on the findings of a survey of code signatories and the outcomes of a conference on the value and future of the code, held in The Hague, Netherlands, in September 2004 to mark its tenth anniversary.

Ten Minutes for Seven Letters: Reading Beloved 's Epitaph

JEFFREY ANDREW WEINSTOCK Ten Minutes for Seven Letters: Reading Beloved's Epitaph You haven't really read something until you've read it as an epitaph, said a friend of a friend of mine to whom I told this title. Tell them that. Cynthia Chase (EiHT1ELL them that." The last reported words from an anonyJL mous "friend of a friend." Taken by itself, the command raises ambiguity to its highest level—the imperative for someone to tell something to others. Read contextually, the implied "you" of the imperative "Tell" is Cynthia Chase. The "them" is the audience at the 1993 New York University conference "Deconstruction is/in America" listening to Chase's "Reading Epitaphs" presentation. The "that" is "You haven't really read something until you've read it as an epitaph." Yet the "that" of Chase's related comment raises even more questions: what is an epitaph ? How does one read it? How and why does this reading differ from normal reading—or rather, how does reading something as an epitaph constitute reading in its essence such that texts read otherwise aren't "really read"? And how can something that is not an epitaph be read as an epitaph? One can begin to approach the dilemmas posed by the idea ofreading epitaphs by observing that to read something as an epitaph, as written on a gravestone, is, first of all, to make the relationship between language and death explicit—epitaphs are always curious types of dead letters that mediate the relationship between the living and the dead. Reading something as an epitaph forces one to consider the strange materiality of language, the way in which the sign can persist in the absence of both its producer and addressee. The epitaph marks a site of Arizona Quarterly Volume 61 , Number 3, Autumn 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1 61 o I30 Jeffery Andrew Weinstock memory, a powerful zone of contact between the living and the dead. It performs the complicated function of calling to mind the departed as departed, that is, of foregrounding the present absence of the beloved. To read the epitaph is to remember its referent, to conjure the dead, while at the same time to be struck by the ephemerality of living. The materiality, the weightiness, the persistence of words literally etched in stone contrast with the fleetingness and fragility of life. However, can one ever really "read" an epitaph? Ifthe epitaph functions to refer beyond itself, to call to mind the departed, then to read the text of the epitaph as text, divorced from its referential function, is not to read it as epitaph. To read an epitaph as a poem, for instance, to celebrate the beauty of its composition rather than to reflect on the absence of the deceased, is not to read it as an epitaph. Contrarily, to read the epitaph as epitaph, as that which commemorates the deceased and insistently gestures towards the present absence of its referent, is not to read the epitaph as text. The question of reading the epitaph therefore introduces an ethical dimension to reading. Is it ethical to consider an epitaph as "literature" and to perform the same critical analyses and manipulations one might apply to, say, a "normal" poem? Can an epitaph be aestheticized and still be an epitaph? The reverse of this question also applies, especially in light of my epigraph: can one consider the "normal" poem as epitaphl At bottom here is the vexed question of the relationship of language to that which exists outside language. If, as Hegel suggests, the word is the death of the thing, then is not every word, in some sense, an epitaph? The imperative to read as epitaph suggests that somehow reading is connected to absence, that to read is always to recognize or undergo an experience of loss. In order to approach the subject of spectrality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and its relation to language and to the possibility of justice for the living and the dead, one must start with the complex mediation performed by the epitaph, because, from start to finish, Beloved is a story about an epitaph, the name...

Public Use: Returning to the Sources

Once considered dead letter, the public use clause of the Fifth Amendment has once again become the subject of serious legal contention. With the Supreme Court's consideration of Kelo v. New London, the public has learned that there is a serious crisis in eminent domain law: governments are regularly seizing private property for the benefit of private groups for their own private profit. Part I of this paper explains that, although the public use limitation was intended to prohibit such redistribution, courts have drifted from that original understanding since the Populist Era. Part II addresses the most important problem the legal community faces in returning to a proper understanding of the limits of eminent domain - namely, the attempt to avoid the difficult question of legitimate state interests. Part III proposes an important opportunity to limit eminent domain through state constitutions.

Die oudheid van die letter en die nuutheid van die Gees. Enkele opmerkings oor die Skrif as lewende Woord

The antithesis between letter (gramma) and Spirit (pneuma) should be understood within the eschatological contrast between the old passing age and the new eschatological kingdom. The eschatological tension between the old creation and the new re-creation is reflected in the dialectical tension between letter and Spirit. Since the letter is a creation of the Spirit and is at the same time judged by the Spirit, this tension is within the letter itself. Therefore a warning is sounded against identifying the law or the Old Testament as such, with the gramma. The contrast between gramma and pneuma, old and new, permeates the entire Bible (i.e. Old and New Testament). This tension is the work of the Spirit as the auctor primarius of Scripture, through which the "dead letter" is transformed into the living Word. "The new which God works makes itself similar to the old, and thereby makes the old into a parable of the new" (Jüngel). Therefore a pneumatological reading of Scripture implies that the literal sense is taken seriously, since it is from the latter that the meaning (respectively: significance) of the text arises. When, however, the pneuma is rejected the letter becomes not merely dead, but deadly. Die woord van God is lewend en kragtig. Dit is skerper as enige swaard met twee snykante en dring deur selfs tot die skeiding van siel en gees en van gewrigte en murg. Dit beoordeel die bedoelings en gedagtes van die hart (Hebreërs 4:12). (Acta Theologica, Supplementum 3, 2002: 150-168)

Strategic alliances in education: the knowledge engineering web

The field of higher education shows a jumble of alliances between fellow institutes. The alliances are strategic in kind and serve an economy‐of‐scales concept. A large scale is a prerequisite for allocating the budgets for new educational methods and technologies in order to keep the educational services up‐to‐date. All too often, however, strategic alliances remain no more than dead letters, fêted by boards of management, but lacking innovative power. The current paper reviews the K‐Web case, one of few successful strategic alliances in education in the Netherlands. The K‐Web alliance started in 1997 and aimed at a joint development of digitized learning materials in the domain of knowledge engineering. At its start five universities in the Netherlands were involved; in 2002 more universities joined the alliance. Based on the K‐Web case, this paper identifies and explains the critical factors for successful co‐operation and proposes a number of guidelines for making strategic alliances work. The guidelines involve issues on governance, project management, the partners' autonomies, conflicting pedagogies and conflicting technologies. The K‐Web strategy seems to indicate a passable route, which may be helpful for other alliances.

Strengthening Article 20

This paper argues that article 20 of the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction can and should be invigorated. While the Hague Convention typically requires a court to return an abducted child to his or her habitual residence, article 20 provides a defense if return would violate “the fundamental principles of the requested State relating to the protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Strengthening Article 20 explains that this defense has become almost a dead letter, suggests why this is so, analyzes the appropriateness of the defense’s demise, and provides a solid basis for the defense’s revitalization. Strengthening Article 20 is set in the context of a broad problem: Women who flee transnationally with their children to escape domestic violence are often respondents in Hague Convention proceedings and have their children returned to the place from which they have just fled. Strengthening Article 20 briefly sets forth this problem and very generally suggests that article 20 might be able to help these women. By focusing attention on article 20, with its emphasis on human rights, this article might prompt delegates to address the problem seriously when they attend the 2006 Special Session to Review Operation of the Hague Convention.

The dead letter; and, The figure eight

The dead letter; and, The figure eight

To stand and fight: the struggle for civil rights in postwar New York City

Prologue: The Rise of the Struggle for Negro Rights 1 Jobs for All 2 Black Mobilization and Civil Rights Politics 3 Lynching, Northern style 4 Desegregating the metropolis 5 Dead Letter Legislation 6 An Unnatural Division of People 7 Anticommunism and Civil Rights 8 The Paradoxical Effects of the Cold War 9 Racial Violence in the Free World 10 Lift Every Voice and Vote 11 Resisting Resegregation 12 To Stand and Fight Epilogue: Another Kind of America Notes Acknowledgments Illustration Credits Index

MSJAMA. Politics of quarantine in the 19th century.

MSJAMA. Politics of quarantine in the 19th century.

Dead letters: undeliverable Malay messages from the early 1870s1

(2003). Dead letters: undeliverable Malay messages from the early 1870s1. Indonesia and the Malay World: Vol. 31, No. 91, pp. 381-398.

Exceptionalism and Transnationalism: UK Judicial Control of the Detention of Foreign “International Terrorists”

his recent commentary on sovereignty and the exception, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben claims that the statement 'the rule lives off the exception alone' must be taken to the letter. Law is made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive exception of the exceptio: it nourishes itself on this exception and is a dead letter without it. (1) According to Agamben, this is central to understanding the nature of sovereignty: violence exercised in the state of exception clearly neither preserves nor simply posits law, but rather conserves it in suspending it and posits it in excepting itself from it.... As long as the state of exception is distinguished from the normal case, the dialectic between the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it is not truly broken, and the sovereign decision even appears simply as the medium in which the passage from one to the other takes (2) While Agamben's vision of sovereign power holds within a Westphalian conception of the state, it no longer fully explains the relationship of the exception to sovereignty under transnational conditions. When the norms through which state sovereignty are exercised, the laws and their enforcement through the courts become subject to transnational rules, so that, for example, the equation is redefined through human rights obligations. State sovereignty no longer provides the explanation for exceptionalism and the state institutions themselves are transformed from the obedient servants of state exceptionalism into actors obliged to respect norms that transcend the national and are only tangentially subject to the sovereign Agamben's world, state institutions must protect the sovereign space of the exception against any challenges from within as well as from outside. If its institutions are in conflict among themselves about the meaning of the sovereign exception and its extent, then further refinement of theory about the nature of sovereignty is unavoidable. The autonomy of one of the state institutions, the judiciary, is especially at issue with respect to the consideration of the sovereign exception in that the space of the judiciary in relation to obedience and autonomy is structured around the laws created by other state institutions. However, into this closed system based on constitutional settlements at the national level between the people (in the form of citizens) and the rulers (in the form of democratic government) come external norms, not least in the form of human rights conventions. the case of the analysis to be developed in this article, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its incorporation into the domestic law of the United Kingdom are the central external elements impinging on state sovereignty, judicial obedience to state interests, and the meaning of the exception in law. I argue that transnationalism in law challenges the structuring of the exception inherent in Agamben's account of sovereignty. My testing ground will be that most sensitive field of state exceptionalism--the treatment of nonnationals. Agamben ties sovereignty and constitutional settlement within the territory to the exception: In the system of the nation-state, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man show themselves to lack every protection and reality at the moment in which they can no longer take the form of rights belonging to citizens of a state. (3) According to Agamben, the state reveals the full power of the exception to the individual outside the reference of the state and allegiance--that is, to the foreigner. Agamben does not recognize the possibility that when an external transnational norm beyond the control of the state comes into play at the state level it can provide a mechanism of autonomy for the judiciary with respect to the protection of the noncitizen. the decision of the United Kingdom's immigration and security court (the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, or SIAC), it is at the point of the intersection of human rights, individuals, and citizens that the autonomy of the judiciary finds its place. …

Emerging crisis of continuing professional education: becoming a dead letter between external pressure and personal incentive?

Continuing professional education (CPE) has been recognized as an effective tool for equipping health professionals with updated knowledge and skills for improving health services quality. However, there is globally increasing skepticism concerning the effectiveness of CPE. In developed countries, the major reasons for participation in CPE include compliance with employers' requirements and renewal of specialist qualifications and licences. In developing countries, CPE, frequently supported by development agencies, often provides subsistence support to participants and is possibly perceived as an extra income opportunity or tool for promotion among health professionals. The knowledge and skills learned are insufficiently applied in daily practice. This carrot-and-stick approach should be reduced and efforts should be made to increase the level of application of what has been learned. To deliver more effective and efficient CPE, it is critical to study this issue in more depth.

The End of Temporality

After the end of history, what? No further beginnings being foreseen, it can only be the end of something else. But modernism already ended some time ago and with it, presumably, time itself, as it was widely rumored that space was supposed to replace time in the general ontological scheme of things. At the very least, time had become a nonperson and people stopped writing about it. The novelists and poets gave it up under the entirely plausible assumption that it had been largely covered by Proust,Mann,Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot and offered few further chances of literary advancement. The philosophers also dropped it on the grounds that althoughBergson remained a dead letter, Heidegger was still publishing a posthumous volume a year on the topic. And as for themountain of secondary literature in both disciplines, to scale it once again seemed a rather old-fashioned thing to do with your life.Was aber war die Zeit?

How Books Stop Time: The Problem Of Originality And Artists' Books

By representing bookishness in non-traditional forms, Book Artists have opened up new ways of thinking about and theorizing about The Book. Books represented as coffee tin wrappers, glass coronets in a pool of Parrish blue, painted undergarments, as hats and boots and Dr. Seuss-like musical instruments in a wordless performance that itself pantomimes the temporality and interpretive choreography of reading, liberate the imagination from the dead letter of convention. This rigorous, forty year project of interrogating the premises of the codex book has, with increasing energy and, some might say, shamelessness, exposed The Book as a notional reality, a powerful symbolism subject to seemingly inexhaustible figuration. "It is this experience of the sacred," writes Mircea Eliade, "that generates the idea of something which really exists and, in consequence the notion that there are absolute intangible values which confer a meaning upon human existence"("Structure and Changes in the History of Religion" 366). The task of this paper is to suggest how the Artists' Book constitutes the experience of Eliade's "sacred," within a discussion of the implications of originality and the concomitant problems of Aristotelian and non-Aristotelian Time.

Dead Letter Office: Conspiracy, Trauma, and Song of Solomon's Posthumous Communication

3 Song of Solomon picks up where Mumbo Jumbo leaves off. That is, in repeating with a difference certain details and motifs of Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel, Toni Morrison signifies upon what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has called one of grand works of critical Signification (238). (1) While the writing of Mumbo Jumbo concludes, we read, at P.M. on Jan. 31st, 1971, Morrison's famous North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent sets off from the roof of Mercy Hospital for other side of Lake Superior ... [a]t 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th of February 1931 (Reed 218; Morrison, Song 3). If Morrison sets her watch by Reed's earlier novel, she also rewinds the time back to the early years of the Depression. Yet even in that return to the past, Song of Solomon continues Mumbo Jumbo, a novel that, except for its epilogue, is set in a fantastic pastiche of the 1920s. With this opening example, I would like to suggest how an exploration of Song of Solomon and its many intertexts evoke questions of narrative logic, historical time, and cultural memory. Because it is so densely allusive on so many different levels and in so many different modes, Morrison's novel deserves to be read not only through its numerous intertexts, but also as a commentary on the significance of intertextuality as a literary, historical, and social process. As her careful but parodic dating suggests, Morrison, like Reed, uses intertextuality to provide an alternative to dominant accounts of history, and, like Reed again, she does so by engaging both with texts of the black Atlantic and with Euro-American currents in Western literary culture. In particular, for my interests, both Song of Solomon and Mumbo Jumbo rewrite Thomas Pynchon's paranoid postmodern quest classic The Crying of Lot 49. (2) On the surface, Morrison's novel seems far from Pynchon's and Reed's work, but in fact they constitute a complex constellation that can lead to a rethinking both of intertextual relations and of intersections among literature, history, and memory. Each novel involves a protagonist's quest for a hidden truth that destabilizes his or her everyday world and turns out to involve coming to terms with some significant, but previously obscure, aspect of the past and its still operative influence on the present. Pynchon's Oedipa sets out to execute a will and finds herself searching for proof of an elaborate postal conspiracy that recedes hundreds of years into the past. Reed's PaPa LaBas attempts to understand the wax and wane of the Jew Grew infection and ends up seeking the sacred Text of black culture and uncovering an epic battle that stretches back to ancient Egypt. Finally, Morrison's Milkman initially sets out after his Aunt Pilate's inheritance, only to discover that it is not gold that is at stake, but an oral cultural document of familial and communal history. Despite broad narrative and thematic similarities--and a host of smaller-scale convergences--Morrison's work diverges significantly from the two other texts I have identified. While Reed in Mumbo Jumbo pushes Pynchon's paranoid and conspiratorial logic to the extreme, at once universalizing and shattering it, Morrison takes a different tack. She backgrounds conspiracy in order to explore a related, but significantly different, narrative logic, that of traumatic memory. While critics have in particular read Morrison's Beloved as a literary enactment of trauma, Song of Solomon also offers an opportunity to engage with contemporary legacies of traumatic memory. (3) Exploring the intersections among these texts takes on particular significance because narratives of conspiracy and trauma have emerged in recent decades as two of the most powerful logics through which the subjects of postmodern U.S. culture register and reflect on history. The two narrative logics are often linked, both in real life and in popular culture. In two well-known examples, the trauma of Kennedy's assassination has given birth to rampant paranoid speculation, and Mulder's conspiratorial thinking on The X Files has supposedly been spurred by the traumatic abduction of his sister. …

LA IDÓNEA IMPLEMENTACIÓN ESTRATÉGICA ES CONDICIÓN NECESARIA PARA ASPIRAR AL ÉXITO DE LA EMPRESA

El pensamiento estrategico tiene que traducirse a implementacion estrategica para alcanzar las metas por las que lucha la organizacion. De no ser asi, todo el proceso de planeacion, tanclaro, ordenado y controlado, falla en alcanzar los resultados y termina como letra muerta. El proposito del articulo es darlesguias, caminos y herramientas a aquellos que quieren aceptar el desafio de la implementacion estrategica en sus empresas con minima ayuda externa.

An Empty Shell? Rethinking the Usury Laws in Medieval Europe

Many historians have argued that the usury laws were a dead letter and that usurious practices were widespread during the Middle Ages. This review of canonical rule formation in Europe shows that many contracts were outside the prohibition and that the laws were highly effective. The popularity of financial instruments depended on obtaining the Church's approval, and ecclesiastical tribunals pursued usurers relentlessly. Although it is not possible to measure with any precision the incidence of usury or the effectiveness of the prohibition, arguments of a high incidence of usury do not stand up in the light of evidence from the contemporary legal context.