Volume 17, Issue 1 - Special Issue title: Law and Boundaries Vol. 3, Guest Editor: Tomaso Ferrando

Judges sitting in US and EU courts have adjudicated a number of high-profile cases of mass and small-scale digitization and access to digitized material. These cases have important policy effects mounting to shaping the future of digital libraries insofar as the current copyright framework does not change from the legislative branch. This article focuses on the judges’ struggle to achieve progressive (pro-libraries and pro-technology) results interpreting the applicable rules. American judges, on the one hand, primarily utilized doctrinal tools such as the fair use doctrine. European judges, on the other hand, used interpretative methods that can push the limits of exceptions and limitations favoring libraries. The article seeks to bring the role of the judiciary to the spotlight, analyze the wording of the relevant decisions and offer a possible reading of the responsibility that the judges must have experienced adjudicating these cases. Ultimately it urges legislative reform to be a follow-up to the judges’ support of the benefits of digitization the future of libraries in the digital era.

The paper argues that the opposing ideas of order/disorder, peace/war and normality/abnormality exist within each other, making a discernible boundary between them a fallacy created by the language of law. Therefore, even when a resistance to the order is carried out, it is with the aspiration of assimilation into this phantom world community. I analyze how the concept of nation-state is reinforced through territorial identities, best portrayed through liberation struggles, thus demonstrating how these transgressions, though projected by the international order to exist separate from the order (normality) as an ‘abnormality’, is in fact facilitated through (the normality of) law.

This paper revisits the occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2004. The focus of my analysis is the agricultural reforms promoted by the occupying power, the Coalition Provisional Authority, which aimed at the marketisation of agricultural production, at the enhancement of the position of multi-national agribusiness and in the total integration of Iraq in global food markets. More specifically, this article maintains that the aggressively neoliberal reform of Iraq’s agriculture can be better understood as the extreme end of a wider spectrum of promotion of neoliberal state-building through international law and international institutions post-1990.

The public/private distinction came to be in the 16th and 17th centuries as a form of a limitation of political power and structuring of social interactions – it is a product of its own time and in Western thought it is seen as a given. Does it still hold? In the first part of the paper I intend to offer a reconstruction of the public/private distinction, which I will then criticize by means of constructivist epistemology, i. e. the statement that knowledge is created by a cognizing subject and transmitted along to others. In the last part I then offer an alternative reconstruction, which in light of phenomena like globalization and technological advancement, centers on the mobility of subjects and resources. With the use of cognitive science, I will demonstrate that the distinction between private and public that is put at the center of Western thinking is but a construction, the meaning of which is created (and negotiated) in a given society. The reader will be persuaded that even if this alternative framework is not a suitable substitute for the public/private distinction, a serious discussion of the latter’s shortcomings must take place.