Le Quartier: Étude Géographique Et Psycho-Sociologique

Les problèmes de la vie sociale en milieu urbain doivent être étudiés non dans un espace géographique au sens étroit, ni dans un espace social indépendent de l'espace géographique mais dans un espace socio-géographique qu'il importe de définir pour chaque agglomération. (P.-H. Chombart de Lauwe, Des hommes et des villes , p. 41)     

An ineluctable minimum of natural law: François Gény, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the limits of legal skepticism

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, legal theory on both sides of the Atlantic was characterized by a tremendous amount of skepticism toward the private law concepts of property and contract. In the United States and France, Oliver Wendell Holmes and François Gény led the charge with withering critiques of the abuse of deduction, exposing their forebears’ supposedly gapless system of private law rules for what it was, a house of cards built on the ideological foundations of laissez faire capitalism. The goal was to make the United States Constitution and the French civil code more responsive to the realities of industrialization. Unlike the other participants in this transatlantic critique, François Gény simultaneously insisted on the immutability of justice and social utility. His “ineluctable minimum of natural law” would guide judges and jurists toward the proper social ends, replacing deduction with teleology. The problem was that nearly all of Gény's contemporaries were perplexed by his conception of natural law, which lacked the substance of the natural rights tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the historicist impulse of the early twentieth. No one was more perplexed than Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose more thoroughgoing skepticism led him to see judicial restraint as the only solution to the abuse of deduction. The ultimate framework for this debate was World War I, in which both Holmes and Gény thought they had found vindication for their views. Events on the battlefield reaffirmed Gény's commitment to justice just as they reignited Holmes’ existential embrace of the unknown. In a sense, the limits of their skepticism would be forged in the trenches of the Great War.     

Medieval Britain in 1967

Abstract

Almost 180 years of scholarship on the Lewis chessmen have given us a solid foundation of understanding, primarily based upon their art-historical analysis. Taking a more interdisciplinary approach (combining elements of art history with archaeology and history), this paper focuses on some over-looked themes — primarily the archaeological, gaming and political contexts of the 12th- and 13th-century North Sea world — and some more familiar themes but in a new light. We suggest a more fluid composition and function of the gaming hoard, with at least four sets of chessmen from the same workshop conceivably made for use in Lewis, possibly in the early 13th century.     

From the particularistic to the universalistic: national narratives in Israel’s mainstream press, 1967–97

The aim of this article is to study the development of the Jewish‐Zionist national idea as expressed in the national narrative as it appeared in Israel’s mainstream press during the years 1967–97, against the background of five critical events in the Israeli collective experience as well as in the wake of the Holocaust Memorial Days. This development is studied as a case of the immanent tension between nationalism’s universalistic message and its particularistic application. The Jewish‐Zionist narrative in Israel is found to be ‘shifting’ from its particularistic towards its more universalistic pole. This development is discussed as a transition from a ‘purely national’ to a ‘post‐national’ narrative, and is positioned in its local and global contexts.     

Newcomers in the Canadian housing market: a longitudinal study, 2001–2005

The Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (LSIC) is used to investigate the participation of immigrants in Canada's housing market during the first four years of the settlement process, beginning in 2000–2001. The analysis focuses on the changing rate of homeownership, crowding and affordability. Special attention is given to differences between landing classes and population groups (especially visible minority groups). In general, the housing situation of LSIC survey respondents improved remarkably over the years covered by the survey. This is registered in a much higher rate of homeownership in the third wave of the survey (at four years after landing) compared with the first (six months after landing). Similarly, the ratio of survey respondents spending more than 30 percent of their total family income on housing dropped dramatically, as did the percentage living in crowded conditions. In other words, at least according to the measures explored here, LSIC suggests that the proportion of immigrants in precarious housing situations drops significantly in the early settlement period. This positive outcome is not universally shared, however, and certain groups—notably refugees, and immigrants of black and MiddleEastern background—see much less improvement in their circumstances than the average survey respondent.     

American and Canadian Environmental Federalism; A Game-Theoretic Analysis

To understand why environmental federalism is different in Canada and the United States, one might begin with the initial strategic realities that faced the Fathers of Canadian Confederation and the Framers of the Constitution of the United States. This essay examines federalism from a game-theoretic point of view, to integrate and expose the rational properties of the decision to federate and the logical entailments of that choice for environmental policy within two specific strategic contexts. Specifically, I suggest that American environmental federalism has arisen in response to the strategic reality of a Prisoner's Dilemma, while Canadian environmental federalism can be analyzed as an effort to regulate confrontations within a game of Chicken. In addition to the analysis of each federated structure, evidence from five case studies demonstrates the usefulness of games to the study of comparative federalism