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harperhug · 3 years

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What Good Is 'Raising Awareness?'

Just being educated about diseases isn't enough to make people healthier.

In 2010, a strange meme spread across Facebook. People’s feeds were suddenly filled with one-word statuses saying the name of a color, nothing more. And most of these posts were from women.

The women had received messages from their Facebook friends that were some variation on this, according to The Washington Post: "Some fun is going on ... just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of breast cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before people wonder why all the girls have a color in their status. Haha."

Oh, okay. It was for breast cancer awareness. Except, no, wait—how? The Susan G. Komen Foundation had nothing to do with it, though it did get them some Facebook fans, according to the Post story. It wasn’t clear at all who started it. There was no fundraising component to the campaign. And the posts weren’t informative at all. In fact, their whole point was to be mysterious. Maybe people asked their friends what they meant by just posting “beige” or “green lace” and then they had a meaningful conversation about breast-cancer screenings and risk factors, but I’d guess that happened rarely, if at all.

This incident is just one example of the nebulous phenomenon of “raising awareness” for diseases. Days, weeks, months are dedicated to the awareness of different health conditions, often without a clear definition of what “awareness” means, or what, exactly, is supposed to come of it.

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According to a commentary published this month in the American Journal of Public Health, the United States has almost 200 official “health awareness days.” (The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lists all national health observances on its website.) And that’s not counting all the unofficial ones, sponsored by organizations.

The paper was an attempt to begin to investigate whether awareness days actually improve people’s health. Jonathan Purtle, an assistant professor at Drexel University’s School of Public Health, teamed up with Leah Roman, a public-health consultant, to see whether awareness could even be quantified.

“We both kind of anecdotally observed that there seem to be more [awareness days] than ever,” Purtle says. “In public health, and in medicine, we’re putting more and more emphasis on evidence-based practices. Everything should be informed by science in some way. We asked ourselves, has anybody ever evaluated these things, do we know if they’re effective at all?”

The answer: Not many people have, and we really don’t.

Awareness days do seem to be on the rise, by at least a couple measures—the researchers found that more than 145 bills including the words “awareness day” have been introduced in U.S. Congress since 2005, a huge leap compared with previous years. Articles that reference "awareness day" in the PubMed database have followed a similar, but less extreme, upward trajectory.

Trends in Attention to Awareness Days in U.S. Congress and Health Science Literature

But most of the articles Purtle and Roman found in their search (which was just preliminary, not a systematic metareview) were editorials or commentaries announcing or discussing awareness days. Only five studies empirically evaluated the effects of an awareness day, “but the designs weren’t that rigorous,” Purtle says. The best one, according to Purtle, found that on “No Smoking Day” in the U.K., five times more people called a quit smoking hotline than the daily average. “But that was about it,” Purtle says.

So evidence really is lacking on what good these awareness days do.

Liz Feld, president of the nonprofit advocacy organization Autism Speaks, says she has seen results from World Autism Awareness Day, which was April 2, and Autism Awareness Month, which goes on for all of April. The organization has raised more than $10 million so far in April, more than 50,000 people registered on Autism Speaks’ website, and more than 18,000 buildings around the world illuminated with blue lights on April 2 as part of the “Light it Up Blue” campaign. A spokesperson also told me that “Light it Up Blue” was a trending topic on Facebook and Twitter on April 2.

The money is something concrete that came out of the awareness month, but what about the rest?

“One-third of people who live with autism are nonverbal,” Feld says. “The power of a global blue-light movement is very strong. On that day, that is the collective voice of the autism community. That’s a show of power. The blue lights are really a voice.”

Here, "awareness" seems to mean sending a message, getting attention, and getting people to talk about the issue, at the very least on social media. During the week of the most recent World AIDS Day, December 1, 2014, AIDS.gov got the most engagement and new followers of the entire year, Miguel Gomez, the director of AIDS.gov, told me in an email. Perhaps not coincidentally, the organization’s HIV Testing and Care Service Locator got nearly triple its average traffic on December 1.

Social-media activism gets a lot of criticism, some of it deserved, some of it less so. (There's even a somewhat pejorative term for it: slacktivism.) On one hand, it’s an easy way to reach a lot of people, and it often amplifies the voices of the marginalized. On the other hand, changing your profile picture for an awareness day (something Autism Speaks asked people to do for Light It Up Blue) might just be the smallest possible unit of support for a cause. If not backed up by money or deed, it’s little more than lip service. But lip service is not nothing—if enough people do it, it could help shift cultural norms, as Melanie Tannenbaum wrote in Scientific American, about people supporting marriage equality by making equals signs their profile pictures.

“Based on everything that we know about our brains and their bafflingly strong desires to fit in with the crowd, the best way to convince people that they should care about an issue and get involved in its advocacy isn’t to tell people what they should do—it’s to tell them what other people actually do,” Tannenbaum writes. “And you know what will accomplish that? That’s right. Everyone on Facebook making their opinions on the issue immediately, graphically, demonstrably obvious.”

With a controversial issue like marriage equality, enough equals signs on Facebook pages could send the message that this is a common cause to support, and just maybe, gather more support, in a snowball-rolling-down-a-hill sort of way. The thing is, though, that with diseases, everybody’s pretty much already on the same side. There aren’t pro-cancer people who need convincing to come around.

“The question I would ask Autism Speaks or someone who's doing some sort of initiative like ‘Make your picture blue,’ is how they think that will trickle down into some sort of positive outcome for people with autism,” Purtle says.

So I asked.

“First of all, anyone who takes the time to change their picture, they feel invested, like they’re part of something,” Feld says. “That’s the culture we live in now. It’s a way for them to participate. It creates a sense of a community, it really goes back to that. People like to be part of something, look at the ALS ice-bucket challenge. They wanted to be part of something that was bigger than themselves. It’s free, it makes you happy, it makes you feel like you're doing something.”

But Feld recognizes that this isn’t enough.

“You’ve got to follow it up with something else,” she says. “What comes with raising awareness is a responsibility to do something about what you’re aware of. I always say to people, ‘April 2nd is great but what happens April 3rd?’”

When so much is vying for people’s attention, especially online, including the couple hundred other awareness days, even if you get people to listen, how do you get them to do more than just post a status?

There is a sociological theory called narcotizing dysfunction, which proposes that the more people learn about an issue from the media, the less likely they are to do something about it. Purtle and Roman posit that this might be an unintended effect of awareness days, that people might “conflate being knowledgeable about a health issue with taking action to address it.” It’s not enough to just say “this is a problem, and we need to do something about it.” There are a lot of problems in the world that need doing something about.

So in addition to awareness-raising, to try to get people to do something, Autism Speaks fundraises and asks people to sign petitions. “[When we try] to get corporate sponsors, I always tell people here, you can’t just go pitch this as a moral imperative,” Feld says. “There are a lot of moral imperatives. An effective awareness day has got to give people a window into what a real person who's living with autism is going through. My goal is for people to see the face of someone with autism on Autism Awareness Day, so that they carry that with them on April 3rd, April 4th, April 5th.”

Awareness days wouldn’t be so popular if there weren’t an appetite to address health problems. “People want to do something, which is good,” Purtle says. What he worries is that awareness campaigns’ focus on the individual—what you need to know, what you can do—could reinforce existing troublesome ideas about the origins of health, especially with conditions like obesity and heart disease, where lifestyle is a big risk factor.

A lot of people believe, he says, that “it’s really people’s choices that determine their health outcomes and if they’re unhealthy it's either: 1. They made bad choices, or 2. They’re just unlucky and have some genetic thing. These awareness [days] seem to be reinforcing that if you’re aware of the health issue, it’s a good step, and it might be even sufficient to address the health issue. That really flies in the face of the complexity of the various forces that influence a person’s health and a population’s health.”

Those forces include environmental, societal, and economic factors—things that can’t be fixed with knowledge alone. “I think if more people understood that, perhaps we’d see awareness days looking a little bit different,” Purtle says. A better awareness day, he thinks, would spread information about the prevalence of a condition and its risk factors, as well as policy changes that could lessen disparities or help people living with the condition.

“Neither Leah nor I think awareness days are necessarily a bad thing, nor is awareness a bad thing,” Purtle says. “Awareness can be a first step toward changing behavior, but in my opinion, more importantly it would be a first step to positively address the policies that impact a population's health.”

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instantdeerlover · 4 years

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James Beard Foundation Announces Lifetime Achievement and Humanitarian of the Year Awards added to Google Docs

James Beard Foundation Announces Lifetime Achievement and Humanitarian of the Year Awards

The James Beard Foundation announced today that Jessica B. Harris, James Beard Award Who’s Who honoree, 2019 James Beard Award Cookbook Hall of Fame Award winner, author, journalist, culinary expert, and historian, has been named the recipient of the 2020 James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award. The award is bestowed upon a person in the industry whose body of work has had a positive and long-lasting impact on the way we eat, cook, and think about food in America. Additionally, Zero Foodprint, the nonprofit organization dedicated to building a carbon-neutral, renewable food system, has been named the recipient of the 2020 James Beard Humanitarian of the Year Award. The award is given to an individual or organization whose work in the realm of food has improved the lives of others and benefited society at large.

For the first year, Michael Phillips, president of Jamestown Properties and a James Beard Foundation trustee, has established the Michael Phillips Humanitarian Fund at the James Beard Foundation, which will award an annual cash prize of $20,000 to the Humanitarian of the Year. Jessica B. Harris and Zero Foodprint will be honored at this year’s 30th Anniversary of the James Beard Awards, presented by Capital One, on Monday, May 4, 2020, at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Jessica B. Harris is an author, editor, and translator of eighteen books. Her twelve works on food document the foodways of the African Diaspora–a topic on which she is considered a ranking expert–and include Hot Stuff: A Cookbook in Praise of the Piquant; Iron Pots and Wooden Spoons: Africa’s Gifts to New World Cooking; Beyond Gumbo: Creole Fusion Food from the Atlantic Rim; and High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America. Her other works include My Soul Looks Back: A Memoir and the forthcoming Vintage Postcards from the African World, a work presenting images of the foodways and celebrations of the African Atlantic World. A culinary historian, Harris lectures internationally, is a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and served on numerous boards for many professional culinary, publishing, and editorial organizations.

In almost five decades as a journalist, Harris has written extensively about the cultures of Africa and its diaspora for publications including Essence (where she was travel editor from 1977-1980), Cooking Light, Garden & Gun, Eating Well, Food & Wine, Saveur, The New York Times, and German Vogue, and has made television appearances on The Today Show, Good Morning America, Sara Moulton’s Cooking Live, and B. Smith with Style, among others. Within the hospitality industry she has served as a consultant for national and international organizations ranging from Kraft Foods to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History, where her research and writings were essential to the development of the museum’s Sweet Home Café project, and is currently the lead curator for the Museum of Food and Drink’s exhibition, African/American: Making the Nation’s Table.

A native of New York City, Harris is Professor Emerita at Queens College/CUNY in New York City, where she was a professor for fifty years. Harris is the first African American woman to have addressed a graduating class at the Culinary Institute of America and is now — following in the footsteps of icon Leah Chase – the second African American woman to receive the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award.

“I am humbled, honored, and more than a little astonished to receive this singular award. I am mindful that while my name is on it, it is also meant for those African Americans in the hospitality world in the past who labored unheralded, un-thanked, and for too many centuries unpaid or underpaid. I hope that this extraordinary honor heralds the beginning of a new era when all Americans can sit down and fully participate at the nation’s table and none of us are strangers at the feast,” said Jessica B. Harris.

Zero Foodprint (ZFP) is a nonprofit organization building a renewable food system rooted in healthy soil. The organization is dedicated to mobilizing the cultural and economic power of the food and restaurant world to solve the climate crisis. To do so, ZFP invests in climate-beneficial agriculture via its grant-making program, Restore California. The organization partners with restaurants to crowd-fund grants for farmers making the switch from extractive to renewable farming. Practices such as compost application, cover cropping, and rotational grazing all help draw carbon out of the atmosphere and incorporate it into the soil, where it is beneficial. Implementing these regenerative farming practices not only helps farmers, but also improves ingredients available to participating restaurants.

Anthony Myint and Karen Leibowitz, award-winning restaurateurs, developed ZFP to support a growing movement of farmers and ranchers who want to use their land to solve climate change, but need vital funding to implement these new practices. Tiffany Nurrenbern, program director of ZFP, coordinates collaborations that foster collective action towards the organization’s overall mission to end climate change. Together, ZFP restaurants, diners, and farmers are shifting the nation’s farmland from climate problem to climate solution. In a recent announcement, ZFP shared that it will organize pilot projects across the United States in celebration of Earth Day. Restaurants can participate by adding a 1% surcharge from April 20 to 26, 2020, with proceeds going to the carbon farming project of their choice.

“We’re so excited to see the James Beard Foundation shining a spotlight on food and climate, because farmers are amazing, and the restaurant world can do so much to heal the world. We share this honor with all of the Zero Foodprint member restaurants and the farmers we work with, and we hope that the award brings in even more people, as we build on our Restore California program to support carbon farming projects around the country. This is an amazing moment to connect diners, restaurants, and farmers around better food and climate solutions through our Earth Day campaign,” said Karen Leibowitz, executive director of Zero Foodprint.

Tickets for the 30th anniversary James Beard Awards Gala in Chicago go on sale Wednesday, March 25, 2020, at 12:00 PM EST, and the Awards will be broadcast live via the James Beard Foundation’s Twitter feed.

About the 2020 James Beard Awards

The 2020 James Beard Awards will mark the 30th anniversary of America’s most coveted and comprehensive honors for chefs, restaurants, journalists, authors, and other leaders in the food and beverage industry. Throughout their three-decade history, the Beard Awards have both sparked and reflected trends in America’s food culture. To commemorate the past, honor the present, and look to the future, the Foundation is celebrating the semifinalists, nominees, winners, events, and milestones that have created the dynamic and ever enlightening food and restaurant community we have today.

Embodying the Foundation’s Good Food for Good mantra, the James Beard Awards support sustainability, gender equality, inclusion, equity, and access for all. As the preeminent benchmark for culinary excellence, the Awards will continue to support the James Beard Foundation’s mission to make America’s food culture more delicious, diverse, and sustainable for everyone: celebrating the past while championing the future.

Nominees for all award categories will be revealed on Wednesday, March 25, 2020 in Philadelphia at The Barnes Foundation in partnership with VISIT PHILADELPHIA®. The celebrations will begin in New York City on Friday, April 24, 2020 at the James Beard Foundation Media Awards presented in association with HOUSTON FIRST©, an exclusive event honoring the nation’s top cookbook authors, culinary broadcast producers and hosts, and food journalists that will take place at Pier Sixty at Chelsea Piers.

The events then move to Chicago with the Leadership Awards Dinner, presented in association with Deloitte, taking place on Sunday, May 3, 2020, where honorees will be recognized for their work in creating a more healthful, sustainable, and just food world. The James Beard Awards Gala will take place on Monday, May 4, 2020, at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. During the event, which is open to the public, awards for the Restaurant and Chef and Restaurant Design categories will be handed out, along with special achievement awards Lifetime Achievement, Design Icon, and America’s Classics. A gala reception will immediately follow, featuring top chefs and beverage professionals from across the country.

For the first year ever, the James Beard Awards House Presented by Capital One, official credit card and banking partner of the Foundation, will bring a dynamic, central gathering place during the Awards weekend, open Sunday, May 3, and Monday, May 4, 2020, at the Old Post Office (433 W. Van Buren Street, Chicago, IL). The Awards House will offer guests attending the Awards, members of the industry, and general public a chance to engage in programming that will include talks focusing on issues that affect the community such as racial equity, sustainability, wine tariffs, and more. Local partners Choose Chicago, The Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA), Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and multiple Chicago-based restaurant groups and chefs will take up residency in fun and delicious ways. A co-working space, a media lounge, hospitality and bar areas, and one-off events with sponsors and friends of the Foundation will be plentiful. A special 30th anniversary photo exhibit created by photographer

Melanie Dunea featuring past James Beard Award Winners and milestones will be open to guests. The full list of events and programming will be continually updated on the Foundation’s website, and ticket information is forthcoming.

The 2020 James Beard Awards are presented by Capital One, the official credit card and banking partner of the James Beard Foundation. Through this first-of-its-kind partnership, Capital One cardholders enjoy exclusive access across signature James Beard Foundation programs including the Taste America tour, JBF Greens: Foodies Under Forty, and the iconic James Beard House.

The James Beard Awards are proudly hosted by Choose Chicago and the Illinois Restaurant Association and presented in association with Chicago O’Hare and Midway International Airports and Magellan Corporation, as well as the following partners: Premier Sponsors: All-Clad Metalcrafters, American Airlines, the official airline of the James Beard Foundation, HMSHost, Lavazza, S.Pellegrino® Sparkling Natural Mineral Water; Supporting Sponsors: Marriott Bonvoy, National Restaurant Association®, Skuna Bay Salmon, Tabasco® Sauce, Valrhona, White Claw® Hard Seltzer, Windstar Cruises, the official cruise line of the James Beard Foundation; Gala Reception Sponsors: Ecolab, Front of the House®, Kendall College, with additional support from VerTerra Dinnerware. Intersport is the Official Broadcast

Partner of the 2020 James Beard Awards.

Established in 1990, the James Beard Awards recognize culinary professionals for excellence and achievement in their fields and further the Foundation’s mission to celebrate, nurture, and honor chefs and other leaders making America’s food culture more delicious, diverse, and sustainable for everyone. The first James Beard Awards were given in 1991. The James Beard Awards are governed by the volunteer Awards Committee. Each Awards program (Restaurants and Chefs, Books, Journalism, Design, Broadcast Media, and Leadership) has its own subcommittee made up of industry professionals who volunteer their time to oversee the policies, procedures, and selection of judges for their respective Awards programs. All James Beard Award winners receive a certificate and a medallion engraved with the James Beard Foundation Awards insignia.

About the James Beard Foundation

The James Beard Foundation’s mission is to promote Good Food for Good. For more than 30 years, the 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization has highlighted the centrality of food culture in our daily lives. Through the James Beard Awards, unique dining experiences at the James Beard House and around the country, scholarships, hands-on learning, and a variety of industry programs that educate and empower leaders in our community, the Foundation has built a platform for chefs and asserted the power of gastronomy to drive behavior, culture, and policy change around food. To that end, the Foundation has also created signature impact-oriented initiatives that include our Women’s Leadership Programs, aimed at addressing the gender imbalance in the culinary industry; advocacy training through our Chefs Boot Camp for Policy and Change; and the James Beard Foundation Leadership Awards, which shine a spotlight on successful change makers. The organization is committed to giving chefs and their colleagues a voice and the tools they need to make the world more sustainable, equitable, and delicious for everyone. For more information, please visit jamesbeard.org and follow @beardfoundation on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

About Capital One

At Capital One we’re on a mission for our customers — bringing them great products, rewards, service, and access to unique and unforgettable experiences they are passionate about. Capital One is a diversified bank that offers products and services to individuals, small businesses and commercial clients. We use technology, innovation and interaction to provide consumers with products and services to meet their needs. Learn more at capitalone.com/access.

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legalseat · 5 years

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A Compelling Collection of Criminal Law Scholarship: Book Review of Manitoba Law Journal, (2018) 41:3

At times, it seems as though law is a heavily polarized field. On one side, there are the practising lawyers; the practical, front-line people who deal with the realities of our legal system on a day-to-day basis. On the other, there are the academics; the people who chart and explain the progression of our legal system, and who explore the implications of decisions and debate the good and the bad of what our system has been, what it is, and of the direction that it may take in the future. Too often, I think, we put the practising side of law on a pedestal. We students are especially guilty of this. What practising lawyers do is important. They enable the functioning of the legal system, help people to realize their rights. The arguments that they put forward shape the common law and create the framework within which judges render their decisions. In light of this, it is easy to view the academic side of law as unimportant: a side show which, while interesting, is often too far removed from the reality of law to be relevant.

However, such a view misses the great value that academic pursuits add to the legal field. Academia provides perspective. Since academics are not limited by a particular position and the pursuit of a particular outcome, they are free to undertake more expansive and holistic analyses which can consider issues from all angles. Academia builds understanding and legal discourse, which is itself a cornerstone of a healthy legal system. The comments of academics can often be just as persuasive as any case law, if used skillfully, and many a judge has referred with approval to such secondary sources.

Of course, the lifeblood of academic expression is the journal. This blawg reviews the Criminal Law Edition of the Manitoba Law Journal, (2018) 41:3. The present issue collects papers covering a wide range of topics, from developing jurisprudence and issues of evidence, to challenges faced by Indigenous persons in the justice system, to issues of the law and sex work, and more. Some present the outcomes of studies conducted by the authors, while others construct legal arguments. Below, I discuss some of the salient qualities of the Journal, as well as highlighting a few of the papers therein which particularly captured my own interest.

Before doing so, however, there is a preliminary matter to deal with. As stated above, publications like the Manitoba Law Journal are extremely important to the legal field, as they provide a forum for academic expression. They are also quite a chore to put together. Thus, before going any further, I think that it is crucially important to acknowledge the great amounts of time and effort that went into the making of the present volume. I have had the privilege of getting to know virtually everyone on the editing team, whether as instructors of courses that I have taken, through work on campus, or simply through sharing a class. All are very busy and involved individuals and, knowing how much they already had on their plates, I frankly have no clue how they found time to put this together. Behind every hour of time that the reader spends on the material contained in the Journal are many hours of work. So, to the editorial team, to the folks at Emond Publishing, and to the authors of the pieces themselves, thank you for your superb efforts.

On now, to the fruits of those efforts. I admit, it can be difficult to get excited about reading a law journal. Doing research over the summer, I read portions of a lot of law journals, mostly dealing with international law topics. While the contents are often interesting, they are not, generally, page-turners. However, in this regard the present issue of the Manitoba Law Journal surprised me. As I made my way through it, I found myself engrossed by the papers that I was reading; I quite enjoyed it. I think that this is a reflection of two aspects of the Journal that are very well done: the topic variation and the accessibility of the language.

The variety of topics and types of papers included in the Journal aids its readability. The Journal is divided into four substantive sections. The first looks at issues of evidence and emerging legal tests. The second examines issues faced by Indigenous persons, particularly in corrections. The third looks at issues of youth and the law. The final section includes two papers on sex work. Within these sections, the nature of the papers varies as well. Some detail studies done by the authors. Here, the focus is on explaining the hypothesis and methodology of the study, and then presenting and interpreting the results. Other papers present very focused arguments toward a specific end, such as the one by Scott Mair, which asserts the unconstitutionality of Canada’s infanticide provisions under s 233 of the Criminal Code.2 Others still, take more of a descriptive approach, highlighting the present state of affairs and the related issues. An example of this is the piece by Leah Combs on the underutilization of provisions in the Corrections and Conditional Release Act which are supposed to promote more effective corrections programming for aboriginal persons. The collective effect of this diversity is that the Journal avoids presenting the reader with similar concepts in a similar format repeatedly. This makes it easier to read because it does not feel repetitive. Many of the papers go in very different directions, making each section feel new and fresh, and avoiding monotony.

Building on the readability established by the diverse contents of the Journal, is the accessibility of the language. Choice of words is important in conveying a point, be it simple or complex. Using simple, direct, plain language can often make even difficult and abstract concepts much easier to understand. Conversely, use of rambling, technical language and an excess of unnecessary words can render the most basic idea arcane and impenetrable. Unfortunately, it has been my own experience that too many academics subscribe to the latter style. Luckily for all of us, none of these individuals have been included in the present volume of the Journal.

I found that the papers in the Journal were quite easy to follow. Even some of the more technical ones, such John Burchill’s piece on alibi evidence and disclosure issues, is eminently readable.2 This paper is a great example, as I have had no prior experience with alibi defences and the relating disclosure rules, yet the information was presented in such a way that I had little trouble following Burchill’s argument. The Journal reads clearly like this throughout. Once again, this makes the entire publication both easier and more enjoyable to read. Readers should not have to feel like Columbus, sailing off in a general direction and hoping to find an author’s point somewhere along the way. The present volume of the Journal imparts no such feeling: at all times while reading it, you know exactly where it is going.

Before concluding, I wanted to highlight some of the pieces that I found to be particularly compelling in this volume of the Journal. First up is, conveniently, the first paper of the journal: Examining How Lineup Practices of Canadian and US Police Officers Adhere to their National Best Practice Recommendations.3 The paper summarizes the authors’ findings in a study that compared the degree to which Canadian and American police follow the Best Practice recommendations handed down to them by their respective governments. I found it interesting because it sheds light on the implementation side of developing the legal system. Where police are not implementing the best practices they have been given, it raises important questions about why: are the officers themselves resisting the change, or are there unforeseen practical issues raised by the recommended practices? These are important questions that need to be followed up in order build a better legal system.

The second piece that I would like to highlight isR v Jarvis: An Argument for a Single Reasonable Expectation of Privacy Framework.4 I was a bit biased on this one, as I read and briefed Jarvis over the summer. The case, involving a teacher who was secretly filming females’ chests with a hidden camera while talking to them in the halls, just did not sit right with me. At both the trial and appeal levels, Jarvis was acquitted, for reasons that were just absurd on my own view. I enjoyed reading Ryan Mullins’ arguments for an assessment of reasonable expectation of privacy which considers the totality of the circumstances. The case is on its way through the Supreme Court now. It shall be interesting to see how they decide to approach the reasonable expectation of privacy issue. Given modern technology, especially the ease with which we can be recorded, this case could set an important precedent for the future.

The final paper in the Journal that stood out to me is Healing Ourselves: Interrogating the Underutilisation of Sections 81 & 84 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act.5 The provisions in question were designed and implemented to help reduce Indigenous over-representation in the Canadian justice system. This paper indicates that these provisions have not been used nearly as much as they could be, and explores why. Given that Indigenous over-representation is one of Canada’s biggest criminal law issues, I think it would have been inappropriate to publish a criminal law journal without including material addressing this issue. It is difficult, it is politically loaded, but it cannot be ignored. The findings made by Leah Combs in this paper are also important because they indicate that Corrections is not just resistant to implementing ss 81 and 84, but that they are actively siphoning funds earmarked for initiatives under these provisions into other parts of their budget.6 That is a serious problem and, whether you support the content of the provisions or not, should not be allowed to continue.

Thus, we come to the end of this book review for the present volume of the Manitoba Law Journal. What this journal, and all journals, do is important to the legal field. This volume in particular is well-written, interesting and diverse; it is clearly the product of much care and effort on the part of all involved in its production. I found my interest thoroughly engaged by its contents, which address issues of significance and relevance to the criminal law realm today. To readers and researchers wondering whether to dive into this volume, I would say you cannot go wrong by doing so.

The journal is available online in various legal databases, on the web for everyone, and at Academia.edu.

Endnotes

1 Scott Mair, “Challenging Infanticide: Why Section 233 of Canada’s Criminal Code is Unconstitutional”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 241.

2 John Burchill, “Alibi Evidence: Responsibility for Disclosure and Investigation”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 99.

3Michelle I Bertrand et al, “Examining How Lineup Practices of Canadian and US Police Officers Adhere to their National Best Practice Recommendations”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 1.

4 Ryan Mullins, “R v Jarvis: An Argument for a Single Reasonable Expectation of Privacy Framework”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 77.

5 Leah Combs, “Healing Ourselves: Interrogating the Underutilisation of Sections 81 & 84 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 163.

6 Ibid at 163.

A Compelling Collection of Criminal Law Scholarship: Book Review of Manitoba Law Journal, (2018) 41:3 published first on https://divorcelawyermumbai.tumblr.com/

0 notes

legalroll · 5 years

Text

A Compelling Collection of Criminal Law Scholarship: Book Review of Manitoba Law Journal, (2018) 41:3

The journal is available online in various legal databases, on the web for everyone, and at Academia.edu.

Endnotes

1 Scott Mair, “Challenging Infanticide: Why Section 233 of Canada’s Criminal Code is Unconstitutional”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 241.

2 John Burchill, “Alibi Evidence: Responsibility for Disclosure and Investigation”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 99.

3Michelle I Bertrand et al, “Examining How Lineup Practices of Canadian and US Police Officers Adhere to their National Best Practice Recommendations”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 1.

4 Ryan Mullins, “R v Jarvis: An Argument for a Single Reasonable Expectation of Privacy Framework”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 77.

5 Leah Combs, “Healing Ourselves: Interrogating the Underutilisation of Sections 81 & 84 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 163.

6 Ibid at 163.

A Compelling Collection of Criminal Law Scholarship: Book Review of Manitoba Law Journal, (2018) 41:3 published first on https://medium.com/@SanAntonioAttorney

0 notes

legalseat · 5 years

Text

A Compelling Collection of Criminal Law Scholarship: Book Review of Manitoba Law Journal, (2018) 41:3

The journal is available online in various legal databases, on the web for everyone, and at Academia.edu.

Endnotes

1 Scott Mair, “Challenging Infanticide: Why Section 233 of Canada’s Criminal Code is Unconstitutional”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 241.

2 John Burchill, “Alibi Evidence: Responsibility for Disclosure and Investigation”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 99.

3Michelle I Bertrand et al, “Examining How Lineup Practices of Canadian and US Police Officers Adhere to their National Best Practice Recommendations”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 1.

4 Ryan Mullins, “R v Jarvis: An Argument for a Single Reasonable Expectation of Privacy Framework”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 77.

5 Leah Combs, “Healing Ourselves: Interrogating the Underutilisation of Sections 81 & 84 of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act”, (2018) 41:3 Man LJ 163.

6 Ibid at 163.

A Compelling Collection of Criminal Law Scholarship: Book Review of Manitoba Law Journal, (2018) 41:3 published first on https://divorcelawyermumbai.tumblr.com/

0 notes