Academic literature on the topic 'Legal domain epistemology'

In the past half century most legal philosophy has been limited to a fairly narrow range of traditional topics such as adjudication, legal reasoning, interpretation, legal persons, obligation and authority, the possibility of legal knowledge, the relationship of law to power, morality, economics and class struggle, and positivism vs. natural law. For those of us comfortable in the tradition, the range of questions appeared to outline an intellectually and politically adequate domain. The basic problems fell neatly into the major philosophical departments of epistemology, logic, value theory and, in some cases, metaphysics, and allowed participation by everyone along the political spectrum from the radical Marxist left through the liberal center to the fascist right.

AbstractIn most Muslim-majority countries, the legislators who drafted family law codes sought to produce a codified version of one of the many Islamic fiqh schools. Such is the case, from West to East, for Morocco, Egypt, and Indonesia. There are situations, however, in which the law remains silent. In such cases, judges must turn to fiqh in order to find appropriate provisions. It is up to judges to interpret the law and to locate the relevant rule. In this process, judges use new interpretive techniques and modes of reasoning. After addressing institutional and legal transformations in Morocco, Egypt, and Indonesia, this article focuses on the domain of family law. We examine cases that illustrate how judges seek a solution in the body of fiqh when asked to authenticate a marriage. In conclusion, we put forward an argument about how judges who are required to refer to fiqh deal with this matter within the context of positive, codified, and standardized law. We argue that the methodology and epistemology adopted by contemporary judges, the legal material on which they draw, and the means by which they refer to this material have fundamentally altered the nature of legal cognition and of law itself.

The rapid expansion of economic analysis is visible in many areas of law. In some of them – in antitrust in particular – economic reasoning is already perceived as the dominant discourse. This article is an attempt to contemplate a reverse analysis. Instead of addressing the legal domain from the perspective of economics, it tries to explore the economic discipline through the lens of a lawyer. The analysis is directed at one of the main principles of neoclassical economics – the concept of perfect competition: partly to explore its constitutive role in economic reasoning, but also in order to articulate the misconception with which some economists approach legal regulation of economic relations. It attempts to explain why economic analysis is bound to address broader societal problems in a purely pragmatic way, quantifying the whole spectrum of societal values, reducing them to the common economic denominator of efficiency. This feature of economics is embedded in its epistemology and should not be perceived as its normative claim. In other words, the fact that welfare economics reduces the social interests to cost–benefit calculus does not automatically characterise it as being irresponsive to the social embeddedness problem.

AbstractBig Data is now permeating environmental law and affecting its evolution. Data-driven innovation is highlighted as a means for major organizations to address social and global challenges. We present various contributions of Big Data technologies and show how they transform our knowledge and understanding of domains regulated by environmental law – environmental changes, socio-ecological systems, sustainable development issues – and of environmental law itself as a complex system. In particular, the mining of massive data sets makes it possible to undertake concrete actions dedicated to the elaboration, production, implementation, follow-up, and adaptation of the environmental targets defined at various levels of decision making (from the international to the subnational level).This development calls into question the traditional approach to legal epistemology and ethics, as implementation and enforcement of rules take on new forms, such as regulation through smart environmental targets and securing legal compliance through the design of technological artefacts. The entry of Big Data therefore requires the development of a new and specific epistemology of environmental law.

Thirteen years ago, Kenichi Ohmae proclaimed that the world had become “borderless,” and the nation-state nothing more than a “bit actor” in a globalised economy. Around the same time, “interdisciplinarity” appeared as the prime strategy for breaking down the rigid stratifications of traditional disciplines, promising an equivalently borderless academe. However, despite the rhetoric of globalisation and interdisciplinarity, territorial boundaries—both physical and conceptual—remain in evidence and under contention. We chose Christy Collis’s article, “Australia’s Antartic Turf,” as our feature article because it foregrounds what we were most interested in: the collaboration between the physical and representational aspects of territory in the creation of “turf.” Ironically, as Collis notes, the territory she maps out—the Australian Antarctic Territory—is, in a physical sense, a “turfless space,” though it is one that is legally claimed as Australian turf. In this space, once again, we can see the collapsing of the literal and conceptual aspects of turf. Collis’s “anatomy” of Australia’s Antarctican space is exciting reading for questions of territorial claims and territorial representations and their implications. She informs us about the often forgotten complex geopolitical and legal aspects involved in such territory-making, and shows how these aspects, together with certain cultural spatialising technologies, have transformed vast areas of Antarctica into Australian sovereign space. As Collis’s article shows, the territories these practices mark out are not neutral spaces, but highly politicised turfs, themselves fragmented by conflicting interests and agendas. Eric D. Mason’s article, “Border-Building: Cultural Turf and the Maintenance of Hybridity,” examines the way in which, in the context of international capitalism, the border-eliding practice of hybridity is, paradoxically, fostered through the “strategic reinforcement of national and cultural borders.” The problems of this paradox are exemplified in “the idealistic American view of culture as a ‘melting pot’” in which disparate cultural identities are subsumed into a “greater national identity.” However, as Mason argues, the 9/11 attacks have shattered this homogeneous hybridity and “prompted a host of culturally-focused turf disputes ranging from the bombing of mosques to the deliberate dumping of French champagne.” In “Allegiance and Renunciation at the Border,” Brian J. Norman also addresses changes to U.S. immigration and citizenship policies post-9/11, but from a rhetorical standpoint. He examines the way in which the Bush administration responded to the attacks “with vigorous efforts to shore up national borders within a language of terrorism, evildoers, and the dire need for domestic security.” The Oath of Allegiance, he argues, is one such example of how rhetoric creates new political realities. Norman’s article, in this way, rethinks the figure of the immigrant and questions of citizenship within the context of state procedures, and considers these shifts as a result of newly inflamed discourses of terrorism and national security. This theme of the production and circulation of nationalism through language continues to run through Terrence Maybury’s article, “The Literacy Control Complex.” This article examines the literate domain and some of the changes it has experienced throughout the new media communications revolution. Maybury ultimately relates questions of literacy and its control to the concepts of sovereignty, territoriality, and nationalism. New media technologies are among the most effective and pervasive means for circulating and maintaining such politicised turfs, and, in “Transformations: A Nation State Responds,” Tim Dwyer looks specifically at these technologies in an Australian context. Dwyer addresses issues of “turf” as part of national debates about the institutional reshaping of media regulation at times of rapid changes within communications media. Using debates in Australia about how to merge the functions of the Australian Communications Authority and the Australian Broadcasting Authority as an example, he discusses social, technological, and politico-economic dimensions of regulatory policies. From these more geo-political and mediatised aspects of turf, our articles take a turn towards academic questions of disciplinary turf. Fred Mason’s story of his personal experiences of the academic “turf protection” maintained by traditional disciplines offers thoughts about interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity—those much-touted new prime strategies in cultural research. For Zach Whalen, games studies is a new field of cultural research at the edges of academe that must deal with the issues surrounding interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity raised by Fred Mason. He poses the question as to whether “ludology is sufficiently robust as a hypothetical academic discipline” to firmly establish games studies within the confines of the traditional university. He argues that the study of video games has been the subject of “a quiet disciplinary turf war between scholars who attempt to bring games into existing academic discourse communities and scholars who see games as an entirely unique medium warranting independent academic infrastructures.” Whalen’s conclusion is that, at present, ludology may not be able to resolve this turf war and, instead, games studies may be better considered as a “melting pot” of competing methodologies. Laurie Taylor’s article on the spaces of video games can be considered a telling counterpoint to Whalen’s for two reasons. First, Taylor shifts the focus from the disciplinary turf war of games studies to the internal turf spaces and violent turf wars within video games themselves. Second, her article exemplifies the way in which new fields of study carve out ideological territories that delimit critical language, critical practice, and the object of study. Taylor maintains that what has been lacking in the debate over violence in video games is an awareness of the relationship between the virtual game space and the physical space of play. She argues that “the internal game space of a video game cannot be examined outside of the space of play because the space of play dictates how the game is played and how the game space is to be read.” In some way, each of these articles portrays a “turf war,” which, by definition, relies upon competing claims for cultural, spatial, or intellectual exclusivity. However, the word “turf” itself is intrinsically transcultural, sharing an Indo-European root with the Sanskrit darbha or “tuft of grass.” Moreover, in this sense of the word, turf can be carved up and exploited, burned for fuel; however, as a living network of roots and soil, it is also resilient and transplantable. It is this aspect of “turf” that Michelle Dicinoski’s poem “Golf” draws out. Dicinoski’s poem gives us a living image of one such cultural grafting as she opens the geopolitics of “turf” up to the everyday, the tangible, the local, and the familial. In her humorous and personal way, Dicinoski distils the genealogy of “culture” that Raymond Williams maps out in Keywords. In the same way, we need to cultivate an attentiveness to the spatial metaphors we (and these articles) use to talk about knowledge. Traditional epistemology has been consistently defined in geographical terms—knowledge is surveyed and divided into fields, topics (from topos, or place), provinces, domains, realms, and spheres. Implied in this subdivision of epistemological territory is a mastery or dominance over knowledge, as the terms “subject” and “discipline” make evident. An awareness of these metaphors alerts us to the fact that the language we use is not neutral, apolitical, or simply academic. Critical encounters with “turf” are not mere rhetoric: they at once establish, erase, or contest borders both of knowledge and physical territory. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mitchell, Peta & Buettner, Angi. "Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Mitchell, P. & Buettner, A. (2004, Mar17). Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0403/01-editorial.php>

History is not over and that includes media history. Jay Rosen (Zelizer & Allan 33) The media in their reporting on terrorism tend to be judgmental, inflammatory, and sensationalistic. — Susan D. Moeller (169) In short, we are directed in time, and our relation to the future is different than our relation to the past. All our questions are conditioned by this asymmetry, and all our answers to these questions are equally conditioned by it. Norbert Wiener (44) The Clash of Geopolitical Pundits America’s geo-strategic engagement with the world underwent a dramatic shift in the decade after the Cold War ended. United States military forces undertook a series of humanitarian interventions from northern Iraq (1991) and Somalia (1992) to NATO’s bombing campaign on Kosovo (1999). Wall Street financial speculators embraced market-oriented globalization and technology-based industries (Friedman 1999). Meanwhile the geo-strategic pundits debated several different scenarios at deeper layers of epistemology and macrohistory including the breakdown of nation-states (Kaplan), the ‘clash of civilizations’ along religiopolitical fault-lines (Huntington) and the fashionable ‘end of history’ thesis (Fukuyama). Media theorists expressed this geo-strategic shift in reference to the ‘CNN Effect’: the power of real-time media ‘to provoke major responses from domestic audiences and political elites to both global and national events’ (Robinson 2). This media ecology is often contrasted with ‘Gateholder’ and ‘Manufacturing Consent’ models. The ‘CNN Effect’ privileges humanitarian and non-government organisations whereas the latter models focus upon the conformist mind-sets and shared worldviews of government and policy decision-makers. The September 11 attacks generated an uncertain interdependency between the terrorists, government officials, and favourable media coverage. It provided a test case, as had the humanitarian interventions (Robinson 37) before it, to test the claim by proponents that the ‘CNN Effect’ had policy leverage during critical stress points. The attacks also revived a long-running debate in media circles about the risk factors of global media. McLuhan (1964) and Ballard (1990) had prophesied that the global media would pose a real-time challenge to decision-making processes and that its visual imagery would have unforeseen psychological effects on viewers. Wark (1994) noted that journalists who covered real-time events including the Wall Street crash (1987) and collapse of the Berlin Wall (1989) were traumatised by their ‘virtual’ geographies. The ‘War on Terror’ as 21st Century Myth Three recent books explore how the 1990s humanitarian interventions and the September 11 attacks have remapped this ‘virtual’ territory with all too real consequences. Piers Robinson’s The CNN Effect (2002) critiques the theory and proposes the policy-media interaction model. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan’s anthology Journalism After September 11 (2002) examines how September 11 affected the journalists who covered it and the implications for news values. Sandra Silberstein’s War of Words (2002) uncovers how strategic language framed the U.S. response to September 11. Robinson provides the contextual background; Silberstein contributes the specifics; and Zelizer and Allan surface broader perspectives. These books offer insights into the social construction of the nebulous War on Terror and why certain images and trajectories were chosen at the expense of other possibilities. Silberstein locates this world-historical moment in the three-week transition between September 11’s aftermath and the U.S. bombings of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. Descriptions like the ‘War on Terror’ and ‘Axis of Evil’ framed the U.S. military response, provided a conceptual justification for the bombings, and also brought into being the geo-strategic context for other nations. The crucial element in this process was when U.S. President George W. Bush adopted a pedagogical style for his public speeches, underpinned by the illusions of communal symbols and shared meanings (Silberstein 6-8). Bush’s initial address to the nation on September 11 invoked the ambiguous pronoun ‘we’ to recreate ‘a unified nation, under God’ (Silberstein 4). The 1990s humanitarian interventions had frequently been debated in Daniel Hallin’s sphere of ‘legitimate controversy’; however the grammar used by Bush and his political advisers located the debate in the sphere of ‘consensus’. This brief period of enforced consensus was reinforced by the structural limitations of North American media outlets. September 11 combined ‘tragedy, public danger and a grave threat to national security’, Michael Schudson observed, and in the aftermath North American journalism shifted ‘toward a prose of solidarity rather than a prose of information’ (Zelizer & Allan 41). Debate about why America was hated did not go much beyond Bush’s explanation that ‘they hated our freedoms’ (Silberstein 14). Robert W. McChesney noted that alternatives to the ‘war’ paradigm were rarely mentioned in the mainstream media (Zelizer & Allan 93). A new myth for the 21st century had been unleashed. The Cycle of Integration Propaganda Journalistic prose masked the propaganda of social integration that atomised the individual within a larger collective (Ellul). The War on Terror was constructed by geopolitical pundits as a Manichean battle between ‘an “evil” them and a national us’ (Silberstein 47). But the national crisis made ‘us’ suddenly problematic. Resurgent patriotism focused on the American flag instead of Constitutional rights. Debates about military tribunals and the USA Patriot Act resurrected the dystopian fears of a surveillance society. New York City mayor Rudy Guiliani suddenly became a leadership icon and Time magazine awarded him Person of the Year (Silberstein 92). Guiliani suggested at the Concert for New York on 20 October 2001 that ‘New Yorkers and Americans have been united as never before’ (Silberstein 104). Even the series of Public Service Announcements created by the Ad Council and U.S. advertising agencies succeeded in blurring the lines between cultural tolerance, social inclusion, and social integration (Silberstein 108-16). In this climate the in-depth discussion of alternate options and informed dissent became thought-crimes. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni’s report Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing America (2002), which singled out “blame America first” academics, ignited a firestorm of debate about educational curriculums, interpreting history, and the limits of academic freedom. Silberstein’s perceptive analysis surfaces how ACTA assumed moral authority and collective misunderstandings as justification for its interrogation of internal enemies. The errors she notes included presumed conclusions, hasty generalisations, bifurcated worldviews, and false analogies (Silberstein 133, 135, 139, 141). Op-ed columnists soon exposed ACTA’s gambit as a pre-packaged witch-hunt. But newscasters then channel-skipped into military metaphors as the Afghanistan campaign began. The weeks after the attacks New York City sidewalk traders moved incense and tourist photos to make way for World Trade Center memorabilia and anti-Osama shirts. Chevy and Ford morphed September 11 catchphrases (notably Todd Beamer’s last words “Let’s Roll” on Flight 93) and imagery into car advertising campaigns (Silberstein 124-5). American self-identity was finally reasserted in the face of a domestic recession through this wave of vulgar commercialism. The ‘Simulated’ Fall of Elite Journalism For Columbia University professor James Carey the ‘failure of journalism on September 11’ signaled the ‘collapse of the elites of American journalism’ (Zelizer & Allan 77). Carey traces the rise-and-fall of adversarial and investigative journalism from the Pentagon Papers and Watergate through the intermediation of the press to the myopic self-interest of the 1988 and 1992 Presidential campaigns. Carey’s framing echoes the earlier criticisms of Carl Bernstein and Hunter S. Thompson. However this critique overlooks several complexities. Piers Robinson cites Alison Preston’s insight that diplomacy, geopolitics and elite reportage defines itself through the sense of distance from its subjects. Robinson distinguished between two reportage types: distance framing ‘creates emotional distance’ between the viewers and victims whilst support framing accepts the ‘official policy’ (28). The upsurge in patriotism, the vulgar commercialism, and the mini-cycle of memorabilia and publishing all combined to enhance the support framing of the U.S. federal government. Empathy generated for September 11’s victims was tied to support of military intervention. However this closeness rapidly became the distance framing of the Afghanistan campaign. News coverage recycled the familiar visuals of in-progress bombings and Taliban barbarians. The alternative press, peace movements, and social activists then retaliated against this coverage by reinstating the support framing that revealed structural violence and gave voice to silenced minorities and victims. What really unfolded after September 11 was not the demise of journalism’s elite but rather the renegotiation of reportage boundaries and shared meanings. Journalists scoured the Internet for eyewitness accounts and to interview survivors (Zelizer & Allan 129). The same medium was used by others to spread conspiracy theories and viral rumors that numerology predicted the date September 11 or that the “face of Satan” could be seen in photographs of the World Trade Center (Zelizer & Allan 133). Karim H. Karim notes that the Jihad frame of an “Islamic Peril” was socially constructed by media outlets but then challenged by individual journalists who had learnt ‘to question the essentialist bases of her own socialization and placing herself in the Other’s shoes’ (Zelizer & Allan 112). Other journalists forgot that Jihad and McWorld were not separate but two intertwined worldviews that fed upon each other. The September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center also had deep symbolic resonances for American sociopolitical ideals that some journalists explored through analysis of myths and metaphors. The Rise of Strategic Geography However these renegotiated boundariesof new media, multiperspectival frames, and ‘layered’ depth approaches to issues analysiswere essentially minority reports. The rationalist mode of journalism was soon reasserted through normative appeals to strategic geography. The U.S. networks framed their documentaries on Islam and the Middle East in bluntly realpolitik terms. The documentary “Minefield: The United States and the Muslim World” (ABC, 11 October 2001) made explicit strategic assumptions of ‘the U.S. as “managing” the region’ and ‘a definite tinge of superiority’ (Silberstein 153). ABC and CNN stressed the similarities between the world’s major monotheistic religions and their scriptural doctrines. Both networks limited their coverage of critiques and dissent to internecine schisms within these traditions (Silberstein 158). CNN also created different coverage for its North American and international audiences. The BBC was more cautious in its September 11 coverage and more global in outlook. Three United Kingdom specials – Panorama (Clash of Cultures, BBC1, 21 October 2001), Question Time (Question Time Special, BBC1, 13 September 2001), and “War Without End” (War on Trial, Channel 4, 27 October 2001) – drew upon the British traditions of parliamentary assembly, expert panels, and legal trials as ways to explore the multiple dimensions of the ‘War on Terror’ (Zelizer & Allan 180). These latter debates weren’t value free: the programs sanctioned ‘a tightly controlled and hierarchical agora’ through different containment strategies (Zelizer & Allan 183). Program formats, selected experts and presenters, and editorial/on-screen graphics were factors that pre-empted the viewer’s experience and conclusions. The traditional emphasis of news values on the expert was renewed. These subtle forms of thought-control enabled policy-makers to inform the public whilst inoculating them against terrorist propaganda. However the ‘CNN Effect’ also had counter-offensive capabilities. Osama bin Laden’s videotaped sermons and the al-Jazeera network’s broadcasts undermined the psychological operations maxim that enemies must not gain access to the mindshare of domestic audiences. Ingrid Volkmer recounts how the Los Angeles based National Iranian Television Network used satellite broadcasts to criticize the Iranian leadership and spark public riots (Zelizer & Allan 242). These incidents hint at why the ‘War on Terror’ myth, now unleashed upon the world, may become far more destabilizing to the world system than previous conflicts. Risk Reportage and Mediated Trauma When media analysts were considering the ‘CNN Effect’ a group of social contract theorists including Anthony Giddens, Zygmunt Bauman, and Ulrich Beck were debating, simultaneously, the status of modernity and the ‘unbounded contours’ of globalization. Beck termed this new environment of escalating uncertainties and uninsurable dangers the ‘world risk society’ (Beck). Although they drew upon constructivist and realist traditions Beck and Giddens ‘did not place risk perception at the center of their analysis’ (Zelizer & Allan 203). Instead this was the role of journalist as ‘witness’ to Ballard-style ‘institutionalized disaster areas’. The terrorist attacks on September 11 materialized this risk and obliterated the journalistic norms of detachment and objectivity. The trauma ‘destabilizes a sense of self’ within individuals (Zelizer & Allan 205) and disrupts the image-generating capacity of collective societies. Barbie Zelizer found that the press selection of September 11 photos and witnesses re-enacted the ‘Holocaust aesthetic’ created when Allied Forces freed the Nazi internment camps in 1945 (Zelizer & Allan 55-7). The visceral nature of September 11 imagery inverted the trend, from the Gulf War to NATO’s Kosovo bombings, for news outlets to depict war in detached video-game imagery (Zelizer & Allan 253). Coverage of the September 11 attacks and the subsequent Bali bombings (on 12 October 2002) followed a four-part pattern news cycle of assassinations and terrorism (Moeller 164-7). Moeller found that coverage moved from the initial event to a hunt for the perpetrators, public mourning, and finally, a sense of closure ‘when the media reassert the supremacy of the established political and social order’ (167). In both events the shock of the initial devastation was rapidly followed by the arrest of al Qaeda and Jamaah Islamiyah members, the creation and copying of the New York Times ‘Portraits of Grief’ template, and the mediation of trauma by a re-established moral order. News pundits had clearly studied the literature on bereavement and grief cycles (Kubler-Ross). However the neo-noir work culture of some outlets also fueled bitter disputes about how post-traumatic stress affected journalists themselves (Zelizer & Allan 253). Reconfiguring the Future After September 11 the geopolitical pundits, a reactive cycle of integration propaganda, pecking order shifts within journalism elites, strategic language, and mediated trauma all combined to bring a specific future into being. This outcome reflected the ‘media-state relationship’ in which coverage ‘still reflected policy preferences of parts of the U.S. elite foreign-policy-making community’ (Robinson 129). Although Internet media and non-elite analysts embraced Hallin’s ‘sphere of deviance’ there is no clear evidence yet that they have altered the opinions of policy-makers. The geopolitical segue from September 11 into the U.S.-led campaign against Iraq also has disturbing implications for the ‘CNN Effect’. Robinson found that its mythic reputation was overstated and tied to issues of policy certainty that the theory’s proponents often failed to examine. Media coverage molded a ‘domestic constituency ... for policy-makers to take action in Somalia’ (Robinson 62). He found greater support in ‘anecdotal evidence’ that the United Nations Security Council’s ‘safe area’ for Iraqi Kurds was driven by Turkey’s geo-strategic fears of ‘unwanted Kurdish refugees’ (Robinson 71). Media coverage did impact upon policy-makers to create Bosnian ‘safe areas’, however, ‘the Kosovo, Rwanda, and Iraq case studies’ showed that the ‘CNN Effect’ was unlikely as a key factor ‘when policy certainty exists’ (Robinson 118). The clear implication from Robinson’s studies is that empathy framing, humanitarian values, and searing visual imagery won’t be enough to challenge policy-makers. What remains to be done? Fortunately there are some possibilities that straddle the pragmatic, realpolitik and emancipatory approaches. Today’s activists and analysts are also aware of the dangers of ‘unfreedom’ and un-reflective dissent (Fromm). Peter Gabriel’s organisation Witness, which documents human rights abuses, is one benchmark of how to use real-time media and the video camera in an effective way. The domains of anthropology, negotiation studies, neuro-linguistics, and social psychology offer valuable lessons on techniques of non-coercive influence. The emancipatory tradition of futures studies offers a rich tradition of self-awareness exercises, institution rebuilding, and social imaging, offsets the pragmatic lure of normative scenarios. The final lesson from these books is that activists and analysts must co-adapt as the ‘War on Terror’ mutates into new and terrifying forms. Works Cited Amis, Martin. “Fear and Loathing.” The Guardian (18 Sep. 2001). 1 March 2001 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4259170,00.php>. Ballard, J.G. The Atrocity Exhibition (rev. ed.). Los Angeles: V/Search Publications, 1990. Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 1999. Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books, 1973. Friedman, Thomas. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. Fromm, Erich. Escape from Freedom. New York: Farrar & Rhinehart, 1941. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Kaplan, Robert. The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War. New York: Random House, 2000. Kubler-Ross, Elizabeth. On Death and Dying. London: Tavistock, 1969. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964. Moeller, Susan D. Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War, and Death. New York: Routledge, 1999. Robinson, Piers. The CNN Effect: The Myth of News, Foreign Policy and Intervention. New York: Routledge, 2002. Silberstein, Sandra. War of Words: Language, Politics and 9/11. New York: Routledge, 2002. Wark, McKenzie. Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events. Bloomington IN: Indiana UP, 1994. Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1948. Zelizer, Barbie, and Stuart Allan (eds.). Journalism after September 11. New York: Routledge, 2002. Links http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Burns, Alex. "The Worldflash of a Coming Future" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/08-worldflash.php>. APA Style Burns, A. (2003, Apr 23). The Worldflash of a Coming Future. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/08-worldflash.php>

Legal knowledge engineering methodology for epistemologically sound, large scale legal expert systems is developed in this dissertation. A specific meta-epistemological method is posed for the transformation of legal domain epistemology to large scale legal expert systems; the method has five stages: 1. domain epistemology; 2. computational domain epistemology; 3. shell epistemology; 4. programming epistemology; and 5. application epistemology and ontology. The nature of legal epistemology is defined in terms of a deep model that divides the information of the ontology of legal possibilities into the three sorts of logic premises, namely, (1) rules of law for extended deduction, (2) material facts of cases for induction that establishes rule antecedents, and (3) reasons for rules, including justifications, explanations or criticisms of rules, for abduction. Extended deduction is distinguished for automation, and provides a map for locating, relatively, associated induction and abduction. Added to this is a communication system that involves issues of cognition and justice in the legal system. The Appendix sets out a sample of draft rule maps of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, known as the Vienna Convention, to illustrate that the substantive epistemology of the international law can be mapped to the generic epistemology of the shell. This thesis deflects the ontological solution back to the earlier rule-based, case-based and logic advances, with a definition of artificial legal intelligence that rests on legal epistemology; added to the definition is a transparent communication system of a user interface, including an interactive visualisation of rule maps, and the heuristics that process input and produce output to give effect to the legal intelligence of an application. The additions include an epistemological use of the ontology of legal possibilities to complete legal logic, for the purposes of processing specific legal applications. While the specific meta-epistemological methodology distinguishes domain epistemology from the epistemologies of artificial legal intelligence, namely computational domain epistemology, program design epistemology, programming epistemology and application epistemology, the prototypes illustrate the use of those distinctions, and the synthesis effected by that use. The thesis develops the Jurisprudence of Legal Knowledge Engineering by an artificial metaphysics.
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D)

Legal knowledge engineering methodology for epistemologically sound, large scale legal expert systems is developed in this dissertation. A specific meta-epistemological method is posed for the transformation of legal domain epistemology to large scale legal expert systems; the method has five stages: 1. domain epistemology; 2. computational domain epistemology; 3. shell epistemology; 4. programming epistemology; and 5. application epistemology and ontology. The nature of legal epistemology is defined in terms of a deep model that divides the information of the ontology of legal possibilities into the three sorts of logic premises, namely, (1) rules of law for extended deduction, (2) material facts of cases for induction that establishes rule antecedents, and (3) reasons for rules, including justifications, explanations or criticisms of rules, for abduction. Extended deduction is distinguished for automation, and provides a map for locating, relatively, associated induction and abduction. Added to this is a communication system that involves issues of cognition and justice in the legal system. The Appendix sets out a sample of draft rule maps of the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods, known as the Vienna Convention, to illustrate that the substantive epistemology of the international law can be mapped to the generic epistemology of the shell. This thesis deflects the ontological solution back to the earlier rule-based, case-based and logic advances, with a definition of artificial legal intelligence that rests on legal epistemology; added to the definition is a transparent communication system of a user interface, including an interactive visualisation of rule maps, and the heuristics that process input and produce output to give effect to the legal intelligence of an application. The additions include an epistemological use of the ontology of legal possibilities to complete legal logic, for the purposes of processing specific legal applications. While the specific meta-epistemological methodology distinguishes domain epistemology from the epistemologies of artificial legal intelligence, namely computational domain epistemology, program design epistemology, programming epistemology and application epistemology, the prototypes illustrate the use of those distinctions, and the synthesis effected by that use. The thesis develops the Jurisprudence of Legal Knowledge Engineering by an artificial metaphysics.

This chapter shows that in the moral domain, as in epistemology, Hume’s task is to provide a naturalistic explanation of our moral conventions and explain why we so often misunderstand the structure of our own moral thought. He aims to explain how custom grounds, and is not grounded by, the moral universe we inhabit. Although many of the components of Hume’s account of morality derive from Hutcheson, Shaftesbury, and Mandeville, the structure into which he places these components—constituted by his naturalism and Pyrrhonism—together with the understanding of custom based in legal theory, gives rise to something entirely new. Hume offers an account of ethics grounded in the union of natural sentiment and a natural propensity to artifice, reflecting the seamless integration of distinct instances of custom as it is manifest both as habit and as convention, as a foundation for the normativity we seek in morality.