Where is the line drawn?

This chapter pursues the ‘civilian plus’, ‘mere civilian’, and ‘civilian minus’ across the three realms, exploring where the line is being drawn within the civilian category. Adopting parallel structures, the discussions in the Kinetic and Pedagogical realm first consider the humanitarian actor as a ‘civilian plus’ figure, and then as a ‘civilian minus’ figure. It is shown that in everyday practice, humanitarian actors strive to escape the vulnerability of the ‘mere civilian’ and to disperse any qualities of combatantness that might swirl around them. They root their claims to the ‘civilian plus’ in their important professional role and in the risk of harm it exposes them to; they also emphasize the expertise required to carry out humanitarian work. Other international actors detect a humanitarian superiority complex at play, sensing that humanitarian actors look down on them from a virtuous perch. Intriguingly, it is the very same professional role that could legitimate a claim to a special status that also impugns the civilianness of humanitarian actors—as when they are accused of ‘feeding the enemy’. The discussion in the Intellectual realm conveys that these intra-civilian distinctions are not disturbing an otherwise stable binary framework. Attention is drawn to IHL targeting rules that trouble a bright-line distinction. It is further shown that before the civilian was defined in AP I, the category was disaggregated for purposes of protection and access to services. Revisiting the Red Cross fantasy, it is proposed that IHL sets some humanitarian actors apart from other civilians.

Conclusion

My main concern in the book has been to show that Plato’s epistemology is fundamentally different from ours, and to investigate—once freed of the constraints imposed when we try to read him through our own views—just how his epistemology works. Recognizing the differences will however raise an important question: why would Plato do epistemology his way? This chapter provides an answer, in broad strokes. Plato’s philosophy is largely driven by an ethical question: How should one live? His epistemology makes sense as part of his answer. For Plato, especially in the Two Worlds dialogues, the bright line in ethics is between blessed contact with Being and pitiable immersion in seeming. Therefore the bright line in epistemology—the salient division between higher and lower—is the line between accepting what seems as final, and going beyond this to find what Is.

Notes: Children, autonomy and statements: The need for a bright-line rule

Currently, a child cannot provide a statement without parental or guardian consent. This limits the child’s right to participate fully in matters which affect the child. Indeed, it also impacts the fact-finding process of an investigation. In terms of international conventions and the Children’s Act 38 of 2005, child participation is a cornerstone of children’s rights. This note proposes that South African law recognise adolescent autonomy — specifically, an adolescent’s competence to provide a statement in matters affecting the child. An adolescent’s stage of growth (physical and mental) makes the child capable of understanding the consequences of such conduct, and the child’s developing agency and cognitive abilities mean that the child may wish to do so. The note proposes that the law recognise the autonomy of a child who is twelve years or older to provide an unassisted statement in legal fora.

Transformers for Classifying Fourth Amendment Elements and Factors Tests

Determining if a court has applied a bright-line or totality-of-the-circumstances rule for Fourth Amendment cases demonstrates a difficult problem even for human lawyers and justices. Determining the type of test that governs an issue is essential to answering a legal question. Modern natural language processing (NLP) tools, such as transformers, demonstrate the capacity to extract relevant features from unlabelled text. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT transformer models to classify Fourth Amendment cases by bright-line or totality-of-the-circumstances rule. Two approaches are considered in which models are trained with either positive language extracted by a domain-expert or with full texts of cases. Transformers attain up to 92.31% accuracy on full texts, further demonstrating the capability of NLP techniques on domain-specific tasks even without handcrafted features.

The role of lawyers, judges, country experts and officials in British asylum and immigration law

This paper examines the work of lawyers, judges and country experts involved in asylum and migration litigation. I begin by analysing their work in the wider semi-autonomous asylum field within which a number of powerful institutions operate to shape policy, define the roles of key actors and determine access to legal redress/justice by asylum applicants and migrants. To understand the work of these three legal actors, I analyse four very different types of legal cases involving asylum, foreign adoption and migration law. An analysis of these cases helps to identify the constraints on effective litigation on behalf of refugees and migrants against the British Home Office and it illustrates the fact that it is Home Office policy, and the decisions taken by Home Office officials, that created the injustice for the individuals concerned by blurring the ‘bright line’ differentiating between the rights of nationals and those of ‘foreigners’.

Traversing the Muddy Waters—Legality, Tenability, and Reliability of Co-defendant’s Confession under the Indian Evidence Act

This article critiques the Indian jurisprudence on section 30 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872. Under the present legal framework, a confession of a co-defendant in a joint criminal trial may be utilized by the Courts to corroborate other pieces of evidence, in order to determine the guilt of non-confessing defendants, also. However, this article argues that the ‘original meaning’ of section 30 makes the confession of a testifying defendant, admissible as against its maker—alone. And not against the other co-defendants. This position is supported by the drafting history behind section 30, and further, is the tradition and practice across common law jurisdictions. In this connection, the author argues that in the absence of any cross-examination or oath, admitting such a confession under section 30 prejudices the fair trial right of non-confessing co-defendants. Hence, it must be excluded altogether by the Courts—as a bright-line rule—while the guilt of those non-confessing co-defendants is determined. Conversely, the author argues that the interpretation of section 30 in light of its original meaning, which makes confession admissible against its maker alone, would automatically safeguard constitutional due process guarantees and the fair trial right of the non-confessing defendants.