Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
Ever wonder why Lady Justice looks the way she does? She is modeled after the Roman goddess Iustitia and is an allegorical personification of the justice system. She is usually depicted with a scale in one hand, a sword in the other, and wearing a blindfold. Why? Well, she is to use the scale to weigh the evidence.
Though history favours the warriors, monarchs, and rebels, female pacifists and mediators behind the scenes were just as vital in the fight for equality.
While tensions continued to boil in the United States with the outbreak of the civil war in 1861 on the horizon, those aiming to assist slaves in securing their freedom often used letter correspondences to plan escape routes and share elated stories of their successes.
In the decades preceding the Civil War, the free black community in the North struggled both for freedom from racial oppression and for the freedom of their enslaved southern brethren. Black newspapers reflected these twin struggles in their own fight for survival—a fight that most black newspapers in the antebellum era lost in a relatively short time.
Over the past 20 years, scientists and governments around the world have wrestled with the challenge of climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement, and other international climate negotiations seek to limit warming to an average of two degrees Celsius (2°C). This objective is justified by scientists that have identified two degrees of warming as the point at which climate change becomes dangerous.
We might expect that people will have trouble understanding one another when they are using a foreign language, but several studies have found that overt misunderstandings are relatively uncommon in such situations. The reason for this is that when people can anticipate that some problems of understanding may occur, they adapt the way they speak.
This January the OUP Philosophy team honours William James (1842-1910) as their Philosopher of the Month. James was the founder of pragmatism, an influential Harvard philosopher and scholar on religion and was arguably considered one of the dominant figures in psychology of his day, before Sigmund Freud.
This year was, once again, one of great political turmoil. The international legal order is not immune from the impact of the rise of populism and increasingly strained relations between many of the world’s most powerful states. A positive view is that we are witnessing a period of global re-adjustment. A more negative take is that there is a real risk of the fabric of the international legal order, created so carefully in the aftermath of the First and Second World Wars, unravelling.
In the wake of the November 11, 1918 armistice between Germany and the Allies, high-minded idealism confronted a mélange of very unpleasant realities. All the belligerents had claimed to be fighting for a noble set of aims, and the United States President, Woodrow Wilson, went further. He proposed the creation of a supranational agency, the League of Nations, to govern international relations in a pacific age of transparent, altruistic diplomacy.
The Russian government’s use of disinformation, i.e. intentionally misleading content, has raised serious concern not only among Russia’s neighbors, but also in Western nations more broadly. Responses to the perceived threat range from attempts to monitor the disinformation, to U.S. court’s legal indictment of Russian individuals and companies.
Dr Henry Summerson was a research editor for the medieval area (pre-1500) from 1993, and in charge of the medieval era Dictionary between 2004 and his retirement at the end of September. Here he answers questions about the past achievements and future prospects of the Dictionary’s coverage of Britain’s early history.
Increasingly, teachers are being asked to adopt their classrooms to include students with a wide backgrounds and capabilities. The placement of students with diverse abilities in a regular school does not guarantee high-quality education, though. In order to help teachers build an inclusive classroom we have created this guide using the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education.
Erving Goffman died 36 years ago, in 1982, but his work is still frequently cited (Google Scholar documents 260,399 citations as of this writing) and he is certainly remembered by many. This is a meditation on when we remember to think of (and credit) the originator of an idea, and when we don’t, and what difference it makes.
In late 19th and early 20th-century America, a new image of womanhood emerged that began to shape public views and understandings of women’s role in society. With the suffrage and labor movements, the “new woman” emerged. These modern women were attending colleges, rejecting domesticity, asserting themselves politically in public, and becoming a part of the cultural landscape through literature. As the 12th century progresses, the voices of women pushed for more self-discovery and freedom from society’s traditional limitations.
“Rivers are the gutters down which flow the ruins of continents.” – Luna B. Leopold Luna Leopold understood that rivers are far more than gutters. In a 1964 textbook, he wrote figuratively of the role of river channels in transporting sediment to lower elevations. In other writings, however, Leopold’s understanding of rivers was closer to […]
The International Bar Association Annual Conference will be held in Rome from 7th October through 12th October. It is one of the largest annual events for international lawyers, renowned for its exceptional line-up of speakers from around the world, excellent networking opportunities, and global mission to promote and develop key issues in law.