Driven by the fear of collusion in the new divorce court, in 1860 Parliament authorized the Queen's Proctor to intervene in divorce suits by rooting out information that the parties left undisclosed. This paper explores the activities of the Queen's Proctor in its first quarter century, revealing both the curious genealogy of community participation in the Queen's Proctor's efforts and the struggle over the definition of collusion. Over time, economic and evidentiary concerns prompted the Queen's Proctor to turn from uncovering collusion to producing evidence of adultery. The Queen's Proctor represents a striking attempt by courts to assess the validity of party-controlled narratives, resulting in surprising practical consequences. Evaluation of narratives quickly devolved into a bright-line test focusing on adultery, with judges following the Queen's Proctor's lead and eschewing discretion.

Closely examining a range of New York Court of Appeals police-power cases during the period 1885 to 1905, this article demonstrates that the New York Court had a long history of accepting and continually expanding the police power. In these police-power cases, one finds the court grappling with an evolving sense of how to balance the concept of and need for a well-regulated society against the rights of an individual in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, as well as a tenacious refusal to abandon Victorian bourgeois norms regarding the dichotomy between the home and workplace. By contextualizing and historicizing New York Court of Appeals cases, the article challenges the dominant historiographical interpretations about late-nineteenth-century law. Moving away from a paradigm that labels the court conservative or liberal, formalist or realist, it argues that the court participated in creating a regulatory state while also employing a reasoning that adopted a sharp distinction between the market and the site of the domestic.

As a distinct class of criminals, sex offenders stand out as being particularly subject to the new “risk management” penal strategies that, according to a number of scholars, have come to dominate punishment rhetoric and practices in recent years. Nonetheless, the criminal justice policymaking that targets sex offenders appears to have a more emotionally based underside. In this paper, I examine the emotional drive that appears to undergird contemporary sex offender lawmaking, suggesting that a significant force propelling the current panoply of sex offender containment strategies is a constellation of emotional expressions of disgust, fear of contagion, and pollution avoidance, manifested in a legislative concern about boundary vulnerabilities between social spheres of the pure and the dangerous. To do so, I analyze the lawmaking discourse of U. S. legislators as they debated four proposed legislative bills directed at sex offenders during the late 1990s.

This paper provides a critical perspective on the use of U. S. alternative dispute resolution (ADR) approaches for managing conflict in African and other communities. It argues that imposition of American ADR as a condition for foreign aid or capital investment is deeply problematic, and urges a more sophisticated analysis of the power dimensions and ideological basis of ADR. When viewed as an ideologically laden paradigm for how conflict should be resolved (i. e., a conflict paradigm), ADR can be seen as carrying troubling baggage. For example, ADR approaches imported from the United States deal with dispute resolution simply in terms of mechanisms or techniques, ignoring substantive issues central to conflict management in African and other communities. The entire discourse surrounding ADR pays insuficient attention to problems with terms such as modern or traditional, and encourages an ingenuous denial of the effects of inequality in power and money on conflict resolution. This ideological baggage renders unreflective imposition of ADR incompatible with the best interests of African communities. The authors urge a more complete and objective analysis of the global ADR revolution—one that takes a broader perspective.