#law dissertation idea

[phdlawwriter]

How Do I Choose the Right Law Dissertation Idea?

Selecting the right Law Dissertation Idea can be very important for students' law journey. They can select a suitable topic that not only aligns with their interests but also fills a gap in existing legal research. By exploring more, students can ensure that their research offers fresh insights into the chosen legal field.

Students need to start exploring legal areas such as constitutional law, international human rights, and business law. After identifying the broad field, they can narrow down their focus to specific issues, case studies, or contemporary challenges, which can be very useful for them to review recent legal cases, articles, and academic papers to find under-researched topics.

Developing a law dissertation idea can consider the Law Dissertation Structure.  A well-chosen topic should be manageable within the structure of a dissertation and can be meaningfully addressed comprehensively, and provide sufficient research material. A well-structured dissertation requires a focused research question, a literature review, a methodical analysis, and clear conclusions.

Lastly, seek feedback from professors or advisors to ensure that your Law Dissertation Idea is both feasible and academically viable. With their assistance, students can refine their topic and ensure that it meets academic expectations.

[sparrows4bats]

@vi-reads Thanks for the Inspo!!

Damian is smart, a genius to rival his father, everyone knows that, but what even the batfamily didn't realise is just how qualified he is.

Damian spent at least the first 10 years of his life with access to a multitude of tutors who were forced to change their ciriculums to adapt to how fast he learnt. By the time he joins his family, he has the equivalent of PHDs in many fields, including but not limited to Geology, Business and Finance, Engineering, and Zoology. He learnt classical instruments such as the violin and is fluent in multiple languages.

Now imagine a preteen Damian going from that to a classroom education with his age group for the first time. No matter how elite Gotham Academy claims to be, there is only so much they can do to keep him stimulated, and as Bruce wants him to learn social skills, he is stuck in tedium.

So he looks for other outlets out of pure boredom. As the stagnantation gets worse, so does his attitude.

The first one to notice is Alfred, predictably. The old butler remembers how Bruce was at that age and the terror he was in his boredom, so he took Damian aside and offered him a deal. If he completes all of his schoolwork, how his teachers want him to. (It takes Damian only two hours a week) Alfred has no issue procuring him learning materials on any subject he would like. Damian so frustrated at this point, agrees without hesitation. The Manor quickly fills with university level textbooks on Physics, Chemical Engineering and Mathematics.

But soon that isn't enough, and Damian, despite knowing more than ever, has nothing to do with it.

He start seeking out the rogues after he finds their research. Ivy, Quinn, Freeze, and Scarecrow are very confused but so happy and flattered to talk about their work with Robin, who has fascinating ideas of his own.

Barbara is the next to notice because while she is taking inventory of Batcave supplies, she notices chemicals and other raw materials are going missing, so she checks the cameras and sees Damian making gadgets, different antidotes and poisons, even a second flying Batmobile!!

So Barbara confronts him about it and he (and Alfred) explain what's been going on and Barbara feels her heartbreak a little because God does she understand this problem she herself is always pursuing at least one qualification or writing a research paper under a puesdo name. When she was young, her boredom and the lack of accommodations in Gotham literally led to her becoming Batgirl.

A bored genius in Gotham is a recipe for disaster, so she very quickly sets Damian up with placement exams in every subject she can think of. He passes every single one of them at a high school level and many past university.

Damian looks elated when the results arrive, and Barbara easily convinces Harvard (where she did her law degree long distance) to accredit him and formalise his qualifications. They even work it so Damian can write his dissertations in Gotham Academy so that he can still gain social skills and go to Gotham University to use their labs and libraries when needed.

By the end of the year, Damian has earned his official PhD. in Geology and Mechanical Engineering and plans on doing his next one in Chemistry and Bioengineering. He even easily completes an MBA and starts branching out to the humanities.

The family doesn't know about any of this until Damian invites them all to his graduation, but do note the improvement in Damians' behaviour. (Damian keeps forging Bruces signature on the paperwork).

To say they are shocked but happy is an understatement. Bruce has a crisis because Damian has multiple PHDs in Gotham! What if he becomes a villain!

Yet all of Damians' research is for the betterment of people and animals. The batfamily becomes very overprotective of him, especially around chemicals. Just in case.

Jon finds out about it after Damian and he start dating. He knew his best friend was smart but hadn't taken him that seriously when they were kids. Damian went to Gotham Academy and hated every second of it.

After he slept over for the first time and couldn't find him in the morning, Jon located him in the Manor by his heartbeat to Damians study, where his degrees were framed and hung on the wall. He was in awe of how many there were.

Damian proudly explained each one to him, and Jon kissed his genius for every graduation he missed. He now calls Damian Doctor just to see him blush. (In the privacy of his own mind, Dr. And Mr Wayne Kent has a nice ring to it.)

Damian and Barbara bond and give feedback on eachothers work regularly. The bats who are still in school come to them for help, and Tim is inspired to get his GED and join a university program. (Alfred is Delighted) The Wayne Family Library expands rapidly to accommodate research materials, and Bruce builds Damian a proper lab. (It's so much easier to make antidotes now!)

When Damian goes to med school, he quits being Robin as he has to be there in person at odd hours. Bruce mopes, but goes to yet another graduation. Damian still does some lab work but finds his calling in Surgery and Medical Research.

The thing is, outside of the family, and even inside of it, very few know how many qualifications Damian has achieved.

Until one of the rare times Damian goes to Watchtower and someone tries to correct him as he explains the very complicated biochemical pathogen that is being spread by a new villain.

Damian looks bored and asks where they did their degree when other answers he goes, "Oh yes, I know your advisor. I disproved his shoddy results last month. I published my paper last week."

The hero turns bright red and tries to argue, but Damian shuts him down at every turn. "Well, the expert in this field - "

"Is me, so if you don't have a better idea, sit the hell down and shut up!"

The bats look so smug, and Jon has to restrain himself from dragging his wonderful partner into the nearest supply closet. (He finds Damian so irresistible when he is both competent and verbally evisirating someone.)

[girderednerve]

i have been listening to plastic capitalism (vanatta, 2024). i'm like a third of the way through but here are my thoughts so far

okay just for background plastic capitalism is a history of the credit card industry & related regulation which runs from roughly the 1930s to the 1980s. this is the book i said has dissertation voice, so it is pretty dense, but i like it. okay moving on

one thing i have seen people say on here & elsewhere as a sort of yardstick for the recency of women's liberation (such as it stands, yikes) is that "women couldn't get credit cards until 1978." this is an interesting sentence which has become fascinating to me with more context

credit cards developed out of two major antecedents: travel cards (e.g., diner's club, introduced in the 1950s for jet-setting executives, & accepted at nightclubs, bars, airlines, & so on) and revolving credit plans offered by major retailers, which operated more like store accounts. the idea of attaching one's credit to a card came from the latter context, and they were the far more common credit offering. these cards were intended very explicitly to be used primarily by women

the people who pull out that 1978 date aren't wrong, though! women were the target audience for department store accounts, retail charge plans, early bank charge cards, but those creditors specifically targeted middle-class housewives & issued credit in their husbands' names (very 'you do the shopping & he gets the bill,' pearls & a red lip in the department store)

the 'credit cards for women' thing is interesting because if you are into the history of credit cards the big breakthrough in 1978 wasn't access for women, it was marquette v. first of omaha. marquette is the case in which the supreme court decided that a credit card transaction would be governed by the laws of the state in which the issuing bank was chartered, rather than the state in which the transaction physically took place. it sparked a sort of regulatory race to the bottom for a lot of states, as they tried to attract larger banks; this is why citibank's head office is in south dakota, despite the titular citi being located in (where else) new york. south dakota had no consumer credit law, and new york had a relatively low interest cap. hmm.

there's a real friction around consumer credit, because the postwar american lifestyle relied (among other things!!!!) on access to cheap consumer credit, but being a debtor is, speaking very generally, a disadvantaged & stigmatized social position. so on the one hand there's a precariousness attached to being in debt, but there's also the atomic-age glow of convenience & affluence attached to credit [sidebar plastic was a novel & exciting material when bank of america began issuing its industry-defining bankamericard in 1958]. why should women want credit cards in the first place? well, because they're now a requirement for full participation in the modern economy. this is why you see a sort of warm & fuzzy posture around signing people up for bank accounts & credit products, even though many of them will undoubtedly incur fees or have other problems as a result: they are being included! they are being offered Opportunity™

the framing which treats credit as a pathway to future success is more or less predatory marketing, but in the 1960s when these regulatory fights were being hammered out, there were a lot of civil rights activists who accurately pointed out that black people were systematically denied access to good credit. there is a wrinkle here where many black people were denied good credit because they had first been violently denied remunerative jobs or capital ownership, which had the very secondary consequence of damaging their creditworthiness, but it is very true that 'creditworthiness' is a subjective trait which was assessed by racist white bankers. it is also very true that people who need cash quickly & cannot access traditional forms of credit from a bank are pushed into riskier & more expensive forms of credit (pawnshops, payday & car title loans, etc.)

related to this tangle is one of my favorite regulatory bugbears, i.e. the thing where the united states does not have a federal usury statute & instead has disclosure laws [pattern in consumer protection more generally]. vanatta has a whole bit on the legislative history of the truth in lending act of 1968, & the two main arguments for disclosure instead of a federal ceiling on revolving credit were: 1) efficiency, in the sense that some freshwater economists wanted the market to regulate itself & in the sense that traditional state-level usury laws tended to have all kinds of bullshitty carve-outs for different kinds of lenders, so it was a huge mess, and 2) placating jim crow segregationists who resisted any attempts at all to expand federal power on principle. states' rights! so that's the background.

the weirdo fragmented state-level financial regulation was a deliberate outcome of the new deal's financial interventions. the new dealers wanted to expand credit to stimulate demand (as per the ideas of my man john maynard), but they had concerns about credit & wanted to limit it by keeping it tied closely into the traditional community relationships around local banks. this is a weird idea to me because i hate bankers but i did not become an adult until the twenty-first century. vanatta doesn't talk about antisemitism or cultural ideas about bankers at all so far, which is fine because the book can't be about everything, but i am very curious about it now. anyway that's the background for why marquette happened at all: on purpose, most financial regulation in the united states occurred at the state level, which is incredibly stupid but then here we are #laboratoriesofdemocracy

i should really read mehrsa baradaran's how the other half banks next. writing that down so i remember. i want to know more things about informal credit, the gray economy, regulatory failures, things of that nature

mastercard [well, the bank card network that became mastercard] was founded in buffalo because visa [well, the bank card division of bank of america, which became visa] had a very specific franchising strategy in mind & they didn't care about upstate ny as a market. those clowns #upstatepride

[deaneverafter]

Nope, this false image that's gaining traction due to people's "joking" insults, the idea that Jensen is incompetent and nothing more than a pretty face, that he's not responsible for his own career and that Danneel is the mastermind behind his success... it's getting out of hand.

I expect this from the loser extras, including but not limited to, Misha, Briana, Kim, Rich, Rob. They're desperate for fandom (heller) approval & they resent Jensen (& Jared), hate that J2 were integral to the show, unlike them. So the s*x*al harassment and digs are a two in one, get clout AND revenge. I didn't expect such behaviour from TW cast (if someone gives you your big break/starts your whole career, the least they should be able to expect is basic decency), mocking, belittling Jensen, so I was disappointed. But all things considered, seeing the behaviour that was someone was modeling for them, encouraging them into, I guess it shouldn't be surprising. I've even come to expect it from fandom people, heller and non heller alike, who are highly involved in the con circuit, since the resentment many people in this fandom have against Jensen for being everything they can't be, everything they can't have, is so blatant. Their snide "jokes" about "you're not my fave, your brother-in-law/Misha/JoJo are", "you're nothing to me, I love your wife [but I did spend thousands of dollars to be in *your* presence to tell you that]" are their bitterness manifesting, plus, the con handlers encourage it too.

But now, to see crew members from Supernatural, people who worked w/ Jensen for a decade & a half, people who had a job for 15 years because Jensen (and Jared) stayed, people who've seen his work ethic, his talent... for them to turn around and make fun of him, it's too much. And for what? To get clout by spreading this weird "joke" (frigging insult) that Danneel is the successful producer who is sustaining his career, and Jensen is just her loser husband, her puppet? Like, I'm sorry, but I'm failing to see the "humour" in such digs. I don't get it.

And what's perhaps worst of all, is that these people only get away with it because so called fans don't call it out, even defend & make such claims themselves. I get why hellers love it, no one hates Jensen more than the Misha / destiel cult. But what's everyone else's reason? You guys cry about the big, bad coven day in, day out, when such toxic environment towards Jensen, surely started by hellers, but sustained by the rest of the fandom, could do much more damage than the haters could ever even dream of doing. What happens when people outside the fandom start hearing and believing such things? Casual fans don't do a deep dig. They hear something, and they think, ah, must be true (and I don't blame them. You can't conduct a dissertation on every artist you like).

How can you call yourself a Jensen fan and then hear such pathetic insults, disguised as funny jokes, and laugh? How can you sit back and watch this disease spread like wildfire, this image of him that he's not responsible for his own career? That he's just a pretty face, a puppet Danneel is pulling by the strings, who only has a career because Danneel has her hand on the wheel? I'm not sure what people feel Jensen has done to deserve this, to have all his hard work, commitment, effort, be dismissed this way, smh, and by people who claim to be his fans, at that. Snakes in the grass, more like.

What's also interesting is that Danneel's fans never put her down to hype Jensen up. Her friends take it one step further than jokes. They seriously claim that she's the one behind Jensen's career & success, that she's the one making things happen behind the scenes. Danneel herself literally pushes this agenda that Jensen "only moves left and right, and does what it does, because I have my hands on it", because I guess it gives her an ego trip and makes her feel relevant, assuages her insecurities a bit, while all Jensen does is support her and her whims and hypes her up.

And I just-? This makes it even crazier to me that some "Jensen Ackles fans" are not only condoning these false claims being made, they're actually the ones hammering them in, trying to brainwash the rest of the fandom, bullying people into going with these stories? Let's get this clear. Jensen has a successful career, including a steady stream of excellent jobs since he was 18, coworkers (the genuine ones anyway) who only praise him, directors/writers who want to work with him again, because of HIS hard work, HIS talent, HIS work ethic. He also has Chaos Machine because he worked hard enough, gained enough trust, that higher ups were ready to take a chance on Jensen and his projects. Danneel has Chaos Machine, the Supernatural role and any other roles she might get through CM (so essentially the entirety of her career in recent history) because she's married to Jensen. Her own career independent of Jensen peaked at a recurring role as a high school mean girl, trampling on others to make herself feel special. Since then, all her relevance or "career" has been because of Jensen and Jensen's name. That's literally it. I know this is a touchy topic for some people, but if someone's responsible for the other's career and relevance, it sure as hell is not Danneel ☕ And stealing credit from Jensen and his work and slapping it next to her name isn't going to change that. If the goal is truly to hype her up, and not go put Jensen down, and one wants to prove she's a girlboss, surely she has her own accomplishments one can brag about? Credit stolen from his work shouldn't be required.

If you call yourself a Jensen fan, act like it. Protect him, instead of cackling with a-holes mocking and degrading him. Stop dismissing his work and success to prop others up. And if you can't, then drop the "Ackles fan" in your bio and start calling yourself a hater 🤷🏻‍♀️

[gatheringbones]

[“Perhaps it’s because we’ve been trained since the earliest days of capitalism to see the poor as idle and unmotivated. The world’s first capitalists faced a problem that titans of industry still face today: how to get the masses to file into their mills and slaughterhouses to work for as little pay as the law and market allow.

Hunger was the capitalists’ solution to the labor question. “The poor know little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action—pride, honour, and ambition. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour.” So wrote the English doctor and clergyman Joseph Townsend in his 1786 treatise, A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, By a Well-Wisher of Mankind, asserting a position that would become common sense, then common law, throughout the early modern period. The “unremitted pressure” of hunger, Townsend continued, offered “the most natural motive to industry.”

Once you got the poor into factories, you needed laws to protect your property and law men to arrest trespassers and court systems to prosecute them and prisons to hold them. If you were going to fashion an economic system that required the movement of labor, capital, and products around the globe, you needed a system of tariffs and policies to govern the flow of trade, not to mention a standing army to uphold national sovereignty. Big money required big government. But big government could also hand out bread. Realizing this, early capitalists decried the corrosive effects of government aid long before it was extended to the so-called able-bodied poor. In 1704, the English writer Daniel Defoe published a pamphlet arguing that the poor would not work for wages if they were given alms. This argument was repeated over and again by leading thinkers, including Thomas Malthus in his famous 1798 treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population.

Early converts to capitalism saw poor aid not merely as a burden or as bad policy but as an existential threat, something that could sever the reliance of workers on owners. Fast-forward to the modern era, and you still hear the same neurotic arguments. The idea is to protect one kind of dependency, that of the worker on the company, by debasing another, that of citizens on the state.”]

matthew desmond, from poverty: by america, 2023

[thatsoheeron]

Yesterdays Paper: A look at a (bad) reaction to Brown Vs. the Board of Education TW: Racists from 1955 in Richmond, Virgina

So the powers that be have decided to put an "end" to Black History Month, which is obviously unambiguously awful. I deeply care about history and have for the entirety of my life, and I also happen to have a podcast. So I decided to take one integral moment in Black History and look up what was being published in the newspaper at that time.

This week I chose Brown Vs. the Board of Education (1954) and some articles from The Richmond News Leader in Richmond Virginia (Thursday, June 2nd, 1955) and the narrative described was something I found incredibly interesting.

In reaction to the Supreme Court's decision to integrate all segregated schools, bonds already donated to Richmond schools were revoked on the simple premise that they did not want to pay for integration. What was once $600,000 to be donated to new school constructions had dropped to a measly $150,000, and many individuals called the ruling "vague" in it's wording, a sentiment reflected on the ruling's archive.gov page.

They also criticized the "social psychologists" of which they claimed the ruling was based off of. Which I am assuming is because of the idea that *shocker* black people are not inherently inferior. They also commonly cite Plessy Vs. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruling that claimed that Black Americans were inferior to the white race, and also set the precedent for Jim Crow laws.

Something I found interesting was a small article claiming that a few teachers did not return to their positions and instead decided to leave the profession, which will come up later, of course.

Then the editor of the Richmond News Leader essentially puts it all out there, and writes up a dissertation about what segregationists have to do to keep segregation in schools. Either the government needs to comply with segregationists or there will be no school. At all.

But no school for whom? The entirety of Prince Edward County in Richmond, Virginia? No!

Otherwise he claims that they need to force the Public Schools to sell the buildings for pennies on the dollar and then white benefactors will rebuild private schools for their children to learn.

Huh. So... segregation.

There's also another editor who expands upon the school board meeting and his similarly racist thoughts as well as an article I couldn't even read entitled "The White Race Has Built Great Civilizations," (read at your own risk)

Oh also, the teachers are quitting because they do not want to teach black students, and this complete racist cowardice is being used by politicians to dig their claws into and tear apart integration.

But Sarah why the hell would you do this weird thing? You may be asking yourself, well I believe as a white person that we shouldn't just be fed a white-washed child-friendly version of America's horrible racist past and move on about our lives. That's how you get people who misquote MLK or think that "racism is over," which we all know it very clearly is not.

I also have a podcast and a platform (and a majority white audience) and if the government is going to abandon the public then the first thing we should is educate each other.

If you are one of those white people that think "Well that's old, racism is over," Keep in mind this was only 70 years ago, and the first black student to attend an integrated school, Ruby Nell Bridges Hall, is still alive today. So, no, it was not that long ago.

Keep in mind, this is one school board in one county in all of the American South. Thurgood Marshall, leader of the NAACP is quoted in the above articles saying that they would sue any school that did not comply with the Supreme Court's decision, and whose work was so incredible that segregation can seem like a thing of the distant past, even though capitalism wielded as a tool to enforce white supremacy has been here all along.

Next week we're going to look at the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and will continue to look at more big moments in Black History for the entirety of February. If you want to know more of mine and Josh's opinions, we talk about it on this week's APWSTR ep. 224 'Know Your Enemy (Greg)'

Take care, and happy Black History Month!

[askthechronoverse]

OK. So I'm going to ask everyone here to help me with something. We obviously aren't going to try to convince a judge that he didn't do it? Because he absolutely did and it was put in history books. Heck, his motives were part of my dissertation for my advanced psychology course when I was working on my law degree.

I think our best strategy might be to prove what he's done with his life in the past 25 years. We have some ideas on what we can present, but if any of you think of anything... let me know, okay?

I'm not going to lie to you: the prosecuting attorney is... he's an absolute shark. Former villain who now uses his desire to cause pain to send people to jail. I feel like Starhawk shows him specifically because the fact he's able to make several of his former enemies absolutely miserable in one move is more than enough motivation to get him to make this trial go in his favor.

As a representative of the Assembly Of Master Builders, I will be more than happy to answer your questions as well about the legal process.

[coochiequeens]

As someone from Connecticut, I knew as soon as I saw Yale my reaction would be an eyeroll.

By Jennifer Lahl May 13, 2025

About the Author

Jennifer Lahl (MA, BSN, RN) is the founder of The Center for Bioethics and Culture. She has produced several important documentaries that can be viewed for free on YouTube. Follow Jennifer on X: @JenniferLahl

At some of the most prestigious universities in the world, ideas once confined to fringe online communities and personal blogs are now published in academic journals and treated as legitimate scholarship. These aren’t just strange thought experiments—they’re full-blown efforts to “queer” biology, reimagine pregnancy without women, and reshape medical ethics in ways that downplay the health of unborn children. What used to sound like satire is now shaping how doctors are trained and how healthcare is delivered.

I work in reproductive technology, so I read a lot of research on fertility and pregnancy. Most of it is scientific and straightforward. But lately, I’ve been seeing more and more papers that ignore biology entirely in favor of ideology. I wrote previously about one such paper that argued we should question our desire for “normal fetal outcomes” during pregnancy—especially when the pregnant person is taking testosterone as part of a gender transition. The authors actually suggested that helping people have healthy babies might be too focused on “normative bodies,” and that staying on high doses of testosterone while pregnant is fine. It was unscientific and dangerous.

But then I came across a paper that took things even further.

It’s called “Transfeminist Pregnancy: Reproductive Speculation, Genre, and Desire,” written by Carlo Sariego, a Ph.D. candidate in Yale’s joint program in Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Sariego, who uses they/them pronouns, does research exploring gender, sexuality, medicine, and science from a sociological point of view. Sariego’s dissertation, titled “Repro Futures: Transgender Reproductive Politics, Justice, and Time in the United States,” is about dismantling the idea of pregnancy itself.

In this particular paper, Sariego argues that pregnancy isn’t just something that happens to female bodies, and that trans women—biological males—can also “experience” pregnancy through three ideas: transition, performance, and labor. Sariego claims that only by reimagining pregnancy through a “transfeminist” lens can we move beyond outdated ideas rooted in biology.

It may sound bizarre—and it is—but this kind of thinking is becoming more common in academic circles. And because these ideas are starting to affect real-world medicine and policy, they need to be taken seriously—and challenged.

Let’s take a closer look.

The paper argues that “only a transfeminist re-theorisation of pregnancy can reach meaningfully beyond bodily gestation,” and laments that current research on “trans pregnancies” has focused too heavily on trans men and nonbinary individuals “to the detriment of the fertile experiences of trans women.” Sariego asserts that “pregnancy need not imply a cis body,” and proposes that “pregnancy can potentially establish a shared ground between trans and cis women.” In short, the paper claims that men can participate in pregnancy conceptually through three categories: transition, performance, and labor.

This thesis directly challenges basic biology and raises obvious questions about how these ideas could be applied in any real medical setting. The entire paper is speculative and theoretical, making it hard to pin down what exactly Sariego is proposing—or how it might help a physician provide better care to a pregnant patient. Sariego’s challenge to the biological basis of pregnancy ignores the fact that those biological realities form the foundation for how we define women in both medicine and law—and for how we care for pregnant women and their unborn children.

Even more concerning is the way Sariego misrepresents existing legal language to support their argument. For example, in the paper’s introduction, Sariego cites Texas House Bill 2690 and claims it defines a woman as “an individual with a uterus, regardless of any gender identity.” But that’s not what the bill actually says.

Here’s the full definition from HB 2690, The Woman and Child Safety Act:

“Woman” means an individual whose biological sex is female, including an individual with XX chromosomes and an individual with a uterus, regardless of any gender identity that the individual attempts to assert or claim.

Sariego’s misrepresentation of the bill by inappropriately truncating the definition distorts the legislative context and weakens its perceived credibility. It’s also worth noting that HB 2690, which was never passed, aimed to criminalize abortion-inducing medication. That has nothing to do with reimagining who can get pregnant. Since abortion can only be performed on pregnant women, the bill’s relevance to Sariego’s argument is questionable at best.

No matter where you stand on abortion, this bill has nothing to do with so-called “trans pregnancies.” Misrepresenting it doesn’t help the argument—it just makes the reader less likely to trust the author’s conclusions.

From there, Sariego lays out the “problem” as they/them see it: that reproductive medicine is “stuck,” in part, because “reproductive science and medicine are shaped by rigid gender roles” and that transgender pregnancies are underexplored—especially when it comes to trans women. Sariego claims that “anti-trans and gender-critical feminists use reproduction to argue for a ‘sex-based’ theory of pregnancy.”

But might that be because pregnancy is sex-based? It requires a female to produce an egg and a male to produce sperm. There’s no way around that. Yet Sariego insists we should reject the idea that “the view that pregnancy is exclusive to female bodies.”

To support this view, the paper divides pregnancy into three “sub-genres”—transition, performance, and labor—meant to help us reimagine pregnancy “beyond the cis/trans divide.” But these categories are abstract, ideological, and disconnected from biology. They don’t help us understand how to better care for patients. They simply shift focus away from evidence-based medicine and toward ideological storytelling.

Still, Sariego structures the paper around these three categories. So let’s take a closer look at each of them—transition, performance, and labor—to understand what they’re really arguing, and why these claims fall apart under scrutiny.

Transition

Sariego frames gender transition as analogous to pregnancy, suggesting that both involve bodily change, transformation, and the emergence of new possibilities. In this view, pregnancy and gender transition create solidarity between cis women and trans women because both undergo what Sariego calls a “process of becoming.”

See the rest of the article

[greenouillee]

This is entirely my own impression, and likely extensively re-treading common ground within the area of mathematical pedagogy, but it seems to me that there is an almost universal drawback to all higher-level mathematical education which has lingering negative effects, and it's a problem that I'm not even sure can be avoided: If you try to assess people on their understanding of a given topic or idea, they will, by necessity, focus their effort on the content being assessed. This is, of course, productive to understanding that content, but by the nature of students having to prioritise their resources, it acts as a massive disincentive to thinking deeply about the subject or asking further questions; it is, by nature, mathematical activity that goes unassessed and unrewarded. Alone, this is likely a good thing; it's widely reported that positively reinforcing activities which are already being pursued only creates stress and externalises the reward of the activity, which would likely only harm the student and their mathematics. However, given the demands on the student, I believe that this lack of award via grading in an exam-centric course contributes to students prioritising a surface-level understanding and thinking, which, if true, is antithetical to producing strong mathematicians. This is not a problem I believe necessarily should be solved if it even can be. One theoretical solution would be more open-ended, research-focused tasks, more similar to that of theses and dissertations, but obviously this cannot be the only method of assessment as it would not provide sufficient structure for many students, and would be ill-suited to teaching essential skills, especially early on in a degree. All of this is to say, TL;DR: Goodhart's Law ("When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,") applies to all academia, but I think the effect on how it makes students think about mathematics in particular is interesting in that the target is both antithetical to good maths and yet simultaneously inextricable from it. Apologies if you came to this TED Talk.

[askclint]

I’m a clinical psychologist who specializes in affirming therapy with trans kids and teens. I see kids from as young as early elementary school to just starting college. At any given moment I have about half of my caseload as trans and gender expansive kids, most of whom I’ve seen over a year or more.

Want to know how many “de-transitioned”?

In my entire caseload, only one.

I have referred kids to endocrinologists for HRT, at least while it was legal in my state. But I’ve also encouraged just as many to wait, or to consider blockers first. The kids that are interested in HRT know more about hormones and the effects than the politicians making these bullishly dangerous laws.

There’s honestly not a whole lot I do differently between trans kids and cis kids. At the end of the day they’re still kids, after all. There are kids I see who I am happy to write a letter of support whenever they feel ready for that step.

The important piece is that it’s the kid’s decision along with support from their grownups. At any point, the kid can stop and discontinue HRT if they want to. The dosages that endocrinologists start kids out in are so low that it takes months for any effect to take place.

I’m not sure what my goal is in writing this, I guess I’m just tired of these politicians who have no idea how affirming treatments work. I’m the only trans psychologist in my state, I’m a literal expert in this subject and wrote my dissertation on it. I’d be more than happy to talk with politicians (our really anyone genuinely interested) about how all of this affects kids. I dunno, just kinda journaling tonight.

[mar3ggiata]

thoughts on trump and guantanamo

first of all, i am not american, feel free to educate me if i get something wrong.

i’m doing a masters degree at the moment and my thesis is on sound torture, acoustic violence used in detention/concentration camps. i am focusing on two main occasions in which music and sound have been used to torture detainees, you guessed it guantanamo and the holocaust.

so i’ve been doing my research it’s been a few months and today at 10am i had a meeting with my dissertation supervisor. we had a chat about history repeating itself, in italy, given our history with fascism, we study the holocaust and nazism very in depth and take it very at heart. so, throughout the whole meeting, i told her what i had found and learned on guantanamo specifically, the legal black hole and the violations of the Ginevra conventions.

i saw the news about trump and his decision to put illegal immigrants / immigrants that commit or are accused of a crime in guantanamo an hour ago and i’m still perplexed. we are witnessing genocide, am i wrong? nazi germany, it started with mass deportation. the greeks and armenian people in turkey? mass deportation and then genocide. no?? even better, they get to the detention camp to work, cause work can set you free? where have i heard this…? oh yeah. Auschwitz.

and now, history is repeating itself. like clockwork.

am i wrong when i say guantanamo is a place in which laws don’t apply? am i wrong when i say guantanamo is known as a place of torture, humiliation, human rights violations and abuse? i believe the past presidents have made efforts (minimal) to get people out and they succeeded in some cases. and now?

education is power. so let me tell you what i learned.

there’s this theory called the enemy’s penal law. it basically means there are two different types of laws, one for us normal people (‘us’ i say sarcastically) and one for the enemy. terrorists, immigrants, everyone that’s different from what we say it’s normal and correct and WORTHY of decency and FAIRNESS. it’s the idea that not everyone is worthy of protection, not everyone EVEN IN DETENTION is worthy of respect, a fair trial, basic human rights.

i believe president trump is using the enemy’s penal law and applying it, in this case, to illegal immigrants. to make people feel frightened. it all comes down to protecting his people from an invisible evil. i believe he’s using propaganda to convince his supporters of how dangerous these ‘aliens’ are and therefore, he’s justifying his choice of a special treatment for them. the treatment is detainment in cuba, away from constitutional protections. the treatment is torture.

i am shocked and disgusted and disappointed and i feel like crying, probably because my thesis topic, the one thing that i made MY special topic and decided to study for my degree is evolving as we speak right in front of me. i say evolving, i mean im witnessing genicide. i am writing about guantanamo’s past while the gates are being opened again. i am learning the atrocities while they’re deporting people there. i am in utter shock.

anyways.

if you’re american or you’re a minority or your parents are immigrants and you want to share your experience please feel free to do so. use this platform to share and educate people (kindly). and i’m sorry this is happening. if you know of any petitions or donations…

i will continue my research, add this incredible project of trump’s to my work. i will educate my friends and will proudly educate everyone who’s gonna be listening when i defend my thesis on how we. are. witnessing. history.

i am very sorry.

[bugbugboy]

I promise I'm not a bot!!!

I'm just writing my dissertation and need primary resources! My dissertation is on the relationship between graffiti/ street art and the law, and I would be very grateful if you could take my survey and share it for best sample size.

I promise it won't take much time and there are no wrong answers! I want to hear your opinions and perspectives. Thanks guys <3

(Feel free to copy the link and share it with your friends and family and co-workers and babysitters and dogs and cats)

[portraitoflestatonfire]

2, 10, 15, 18, 29, 35 🧛🏾‍♂️

suddenly every thought I’ve ever had has left me...ok

2. How did you discover it or get interested in it? I was familiar with the books + the '94 film and remember hearing about the Bryan Fuller-led hulu series ages ago (given Fuller's track record it's no surprise that never manifested). But by September 2022 I'd totally forgotten there was a series in the works so all it took was levitating gay sex gifs and Jacob Anderson's face (I've been a Raleigh Ritchie fan for a long time). And the idea of a gothic romance with a black lead was very enticing. I subscribed to amc+ and the rest is history (actually it isn't, should I file a claim in the class action lawsuit against amc?)

10. What was your favorite episode of season one?  1.06! I just found an old post in my drafts basically telling everyone to remember Coline Abert's name. She’s incredible and I'm so glad she's back for s2.

Recovery, reflection, and restitution. This episode contains everything about the series that makes me crazy in top form. We have the aftermath of horrific intimate partner violence and where do we go from here? The difference in how they relate to one another as a result. Codependence abound! The further enmeshment of Louis and Claudia. The "oh-so-delicate balance of our oh-so-delicate household."

We also get the 1973 memory 💕

(and I could write a dissertation on this single still thank you levan)

15. What were your favorite costumes?  Louis' undershirt <3

18. What’s a scene you feel is underrated? hm. It's hard for me to gauge what is/isn't underrated because I spend so much time in this relatively small echo chamber of people who have also combed the entire series top-to-toe a million times.

But I'd have to say the final moment between Louis and Grace in 1.05. The image of Louis crying over his own gravestone is so striking!

Or... Louis and Lestat greeting Florence at the beginning of 1.02. They mention going to see The Doll House afterward. I love the barbs between in-laws ("I see you have a banjo band in your front yard :(" makes me laugh every time). Florence calls Louis "fragile son" as she did Paul in the previous episode. And Louis hearing his mother's thoughts for the first time is super interesting!

35. Share a headcanon of yours. I believe that Louis was an avid reader of bodice rippers and other (un)savory romance novels from the 70s-90s. In fact, there was probably one sitting in his back pocket at Polynesian Mary's. There may not be any on those floating shelves, but it's something I know in my heart! I just feel like the thematic content would resonate with him <3

[the-writing-moon]

so i work in a well-known library, right, as a part-timer, and it's been great working with the books, they're real friendly and everything. but this is a very exclusive library, right, you have to send in an application and maybe get interviewed to get in because we're dealing with really old archival material here; i've had to dust crumbled paper off of desks and some of the spines of these hundreds-of-years-old books have been replaced with electric tape with their titles rewritten with wite-out from how much the spines have fallen out. i look up and see dead white men glaring down at me from murals and paintings and busts from the ceiling, probably aghast and wondering how a fucking little island girl is handing their precious books and poking at their dutch-painted glass windows with her grimy brown fingers. this is just set-dressing, so you really know where i'm coming from.

anyways, you know those memes that go around writing communities? doesn't matter if you write fics or manuscripts, we've all seen them, liked them, reblogged them.

"writing a slash fic instead of writing i've been googling what jewelry young german women wore in the 1700s"

"i'm pretty sure i'm on the fbi and interpol hitlists because of my search history"

"story prompt: overly helpful serial killer sweetheart x clueless crime fiction writer"

"when you don't know long division but you can talk about the taxation laws in victorian england because you needed to find out how taxes work to make your story believable"

they're memes that make you chuckle, guffaw, and nod because they're relatable! everyone hates the idea of being corrected by a random poindexter who can call you out on your bullshit on victorian tax laws, you uncultured fool, or who happens to know how blood sprays look if you shoot a person a certain way, you gormless coward, not because they were shooting the gun but they were part of the forensics team, pinky promise, i wasn't there on the 15th of november. and it's a bit absurd. like, who exactly knows - or cares - about victorian tax laws? does it really matter to write about reality in all its facets into fiction? majority of your readers probably aren't vampires or other extant immortals so does it really matter if you don't hold history up as accurately as possible in your 30k friends-to-enemies-to-lovers dark academia yuri slashfic? does historical accuracy matter when you're writing about samurais in the heian period in modern english with modern sensibilities? who would even know what stuff was really like back then? some things aren't googlable, and you can't always trust google anyways.

i don't know the answer to all these questions. but i know the answer to one.

so, back to the library.

one day, i'm shelving history books one after the other, listening to an audiobook from a public library using a library card of which i faked my address for me to use. reparations. and way more ethical than piracy in my eyes. support authors, patronize libraries, and all that. when i shelve books, i like to wonder about who reads them and why. what research they're doing. what they're doing here. whether they know how lucky they are. i envy this library where i work. i envy the people who live in this town. i envy the readers. they have all of this because someone recognized the value of hoarding, the value of taking and tabulating and preserving. one could argue it's the colonial way. but enough of that, i'm shelving books, books that i sometimes wonder at, because i never could have imagined so many books on so many topics, and sometimes they are topics that are so trivial and-

and i'm holding, in my hands, a book about the jewelry young german women wore in the 1700s.

being in a university town, you come to understand that academics have their pet projects; the drive to understand the minutiae of their field, of humanity, of nature. think of a topic and there's probably a dissertation for that. you also understand there is a lot of publishing politics, that researchers' papers are paywalled behind exorbitant fees for which they receive no royalties from. you also understand that academia can also be elitist, even when the people inside it call for open access.

to other people, i'm sure i sound incoherent and raving. but i'm sure that there are people out there who understood why i took several moments staring at this book, recalling all those fucking memes about historical accuracy, of people joking that they're looking for things even the internet has no answer for. because the answers do exist. someone's written about them. someone took the time to look at and tabulate and write about german jewelry. someone else, tax laws. some other person, blood sprays, either through study or applied experimentation. the knowledge is out there. they just aren't available to you.

[distinguishedfifty]

Thank you @its-always-silly-season for this academic au idea. This is so fun. I did leave some riders blank bc I’m just unsure. Feel free (anyone) to make additions or what you think past or present riders would be doing

Marc M: statistics professor. Some people think stats is too different to math, but he’s found his way and has convinced many of his undergrad students to consider stats

Alex M: has his MBA, working in the industry as a consultant, but Marc is trying to get him back to academia (Álex doesn’t like the idea of going back to school for 5 years and then fighting it out in academia)

Alex R: art history professor. He thought he found funding for a post doctorate at a uni, but it fell through (they’re cutting the arts). Is now here teaching

Joan: philosophy professor, but is in his 1st year of teaching this university. He came from another uni bc they defunded his department and is trying to find his footing

Taka: architecture professor. Usually around in the architecture building helping his students and trying to tell them to not pull all nighters getting their designs finished

Bezz: Got his bachelors in math and currently on a PhD track. However, is debating on testing out and leaving with his masters

Pecco: in his last year of his PhD, and getting ready to defend his dissertation where he focuses more on differential equations. He’s great at memorizing

Franky: got his phd in philosophy and Vale is trying to get him a professor position in his department. He actually has his undergrad in literature, but loves writing even more

Luca: got his bachelors in computer science and is getting his masters in computer science. Debating on getting his phd in computer science since he likes the idea of working in the industry

Jack: marine biologist and is known to take his students on wild boat rides. He will take over campus tours when they’re in the marine biology building

Brad: a professor in the medical school. He used to be an ER doctor and volunteers his summers with Doctors Without Borders. Makes sure every professor gets their flu shot or else he will be visiting them in their office hours

Pol: music professor that focuses on piano. Will take any student and go on a tangent on how special the piano is

Augusto:

Aleix: works in the law school, but has a heavy hand in telling prelaw students to get their law degree here too. Additionally, he is on the faculty senate. One day he will get everyone to unionize

Maverick: contrary to popular belief, Maverick is actually an air traffic controller professor and not an aviation professor. He used to be in the industry, but it’s a very stressful and underemployed industry. Figured he’d make more change in trying to get more air traffic controllers to fix this

Miguel: languages professor that was the first to bring the Portuguese track to this uni

Raúl:

Fabio: getting his phd in statistics. Actually getting ready to make the leap from phd student to PhD candidate

Diggia:

Jorge M: is getting his phd in gender and queer studies. He’s writing his dissertation on gender and queer identities in sports. He petitioned for a safe space to be created on campus and is working on getting a section of the undergrad dorms to be just for students that identify as queer

Johann: music professor and focuses on the guitar. He also is the choir professor

Dani: languages department chair. Since he is the dept chair, he doesn’t teach much, but students would do questionable things to get into his class. Ensures enough funding and resources are available to keep Catalan studies

Jorge L: business department chair. He has his undergrad in psychology, but went on to get his MBA and PhD in international business. Will use a weekend to travel to a different country and observe their business practices

Vale: math department chair. Theoretical math bc he’s insane. You should hear him talk about the 4th dimension

Dovi: psychology professor. Has his masters in counseling and his psyD. He makes sure his students know how taxing it can be to become a therapist. He may or may not still have a practice, but his fellow professors come to him anyways. One day he found a couch in his office and he never asked for it to be moved

[tieflingkisser]

Why are America’s elite universities so afraid of this scholar’s paper?

The Columbia Law Review website was temporarily shut down after it published a Palestinian human rights lawyer’s article proposing a new way to understand Palestinian life under Israeli rule

When the Palestinian human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah arrived at a Manhattan cafe on Thursday afternoon, he had just learned that his article had been reinstated in the Columbia Law Review. After a weeklong censorship controversy, the prestigious journal’s website was back online, too. The law school journal’s faculty and alumni board had shuttered the website for most of the week rather than publicize Eghbariah’s 105-page article, titled Toward the Nakba as a Legal Concept. In it, he proposed a new framework to explain the complex, fragmented legal regimes governing Palestinians. He wanted to bring the word Nakba – which translates from the Arabic as catastrophe, and is better known for describing the displacement and dispossession of Palestinians in 1948 – to the center of a new legal conversation.

[...]

He had worked on his contribution for almost half a year, finding a home for it at the Columbia Law Review after a shorter web piece he had written for the Harvard Law Review had been blocked at the last minute. He was proud of his scholarship but found it dangerous that the content of his article had become secondary to what he saw as the manufactured controversy of its censorship. “Now, we have to debate about my right to say what I want to say instead of debating about what I actually said,” he told the Guardian. “I felt convinced by my work if it’s generating this repression,” he said. Ultimately, the story led to headlines in major newspapers, and a PDF of the article was posted widely on social media, getting far more readers than is typical for legal scholarship. “People can see through these authoritarian tactics and reject them. The censorship in this case is actually counterproductive.”

[...]

Different legal systems apply to Palestinians living under Israeli rule or in neighboring Arab states or elsewhere. “It’s kind of a system of domination by fragmentation,” he explained. “We become trained in doing these legal gymnastics, and flipping from one framework to the other, without sometimes even reflecting about the nature of this.” To articulate that fragmentation in his legal research, he realized he needed a new terminology. Just as the genocide convention emerged after the Holocaust, and the word apartheid entered everyday speech amid South Africa’s systemized segregation, Eghbariah was finding that analogies to other seemingly comparable situations were insufficient. In the article, he argues that the term Nakba, in use by Palestinians for decades, encapsulates the layered and overlapping legal entanglements of Palestinian life in the absence of self-determination. The Nakba of 1948, he says, is not a historical artefact. His grandparents survived the Nakba and it informs Eghbariah’s research. Like many Palestinian scholars, he views Israel’s war on Gaza as part of a continuing Nakba to destroy Palestinian life on the land Israel seeks to control. “It’s an organic framework that has been developed in Palestine to reference the ramifications and ongoing nature of the Nakba of 1948,” Eghbariah said. “What the genocide moment and discourse did to that is that it actually made me think about it in legal terms.” The article lays out the concept, and as he develops the idea further in his dissertation, he hopes it could have practical ramifications for outstanding disputes over matters like Palestinian property rights and the status of refugees. This is how laws in the US have often developed: scholars put out a new approach in a law review, practitioners try it out, and it can lead to case law or legislative efforts. “Those ideas get refined in the process,” Diala Shamas, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, told the Guardian. “It’s provocative, and it’s exactly what scholarship should be doing. It’s exactly what Palestinian scholars need to be doing.”

TOWARD NAKBA AS A LEGAL CONCEPT

download the pdf