After years of neglect, political theorists in the last few years have started to take an interest in issues of language policy, and to explore the normative issues they raise. In this chapter, we examine why this interest has arisen and provide an overview of the main approaches that have been developed. A series of recent events has made it clear that language policy is central to many of the traditional themes and concepts of political theory, such as democracy, citizenship, nationhood, and the state. The rise of ethnolinguistic conflict in Eastern Europe, the resurgence of language-based secessionist movements in Catalonia, Flanders, and Quebec, the backlash against immigrant multiculturalism, and the difficulties in building a pan-European sense of European Union citizenship—in all of these cases, linguistic diversity complicates attempts to build stable and cohesive forms of political community. In the past, political theorists have often implicitly assumed that this sort of linguistic diversity would disappear, as a natural concomitant of processes of modernization and nation-building. However, it is now widely accepted that linguistic diversity is an enduring fact about modern societies. As a result, political theorists have started to explore the justifications for minority language rights claims, and to consider how different models of language rights relate to broader political theories of justice, freedom, and democracy.

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Language Rights and Political Theory

Joan Williams' Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict And What To Do About It (Oxford, 1999) is a "theoretically sophisticated and thoroughly accessible treatise" that offers a new vision of work, family, and gender. (Publisher's Weekly, Nov. 1, 1999) It examines our system of providing for children's care by placing their caregivers at the margins of economic life. This system that stems from the way we define our work ideals, notably from our definition of the ideal worker as one who takes no time off for childbearing or childrearing and who works full-time and is available for overtime. The ideal-worker norm clashes with our sense that children should be cared for by parents. The result is a system that is bad for men, worse for women, and disastrous for children. Williams documents that mothers remain economically marginalized, and points out that when mothers first marginalize and then divorce, their children often accompany them into poverty. Williams argues that designing workplaces around the bodies of men (who need no time off for childbearing) and men's life patterns (for women still do 80% of the child care) often constitutes discrimination against women. She also engages the work/family literature to show that "flexible" workplaces are often better than existing practices for employers' bottom line. On the family side, she argues that the ideal worker's wage -- after as well as before divorce -- reflects the joint work of the ideal worker and the primary caregiver of his children, and should be jointly owned. In a comprehensive examination of the theoretical issues surrounding work/family issues, she uses the work of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu to explain why gender has proved so unchanging and unbending, reframing the special treatment/equal treatment debate, the debate over "women's voice," and offering new perspective on how to avoid the persistent race and class conflicts that emerge in debates over work and family issues.

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Unbending Gender: Why Family and Work Conflict and What To Do About It (Panel Two: Who's Minding the Baby?)

Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

There is a strong tendency in the social sciences to understand and conceptualize the new information technologies in terms of their technical properties and to construct the relation to the sociol...

http://www.saskiasassen.com/PDFs/publications/Towards-a-Sociology-of-Information-Technology.pdf

Towards a Sociology of Information Technology

Introduction Meir Dan-Cohen Dignity, Rank, and Rights Jeremy Waldron 1. Dignity and Rank 2. Law, Dignity and Self-Control Comments Response to Jeremy Waldron Wai Chee Dimock Aristocratic Dignity? Don Herzog Dignity, Rank and Rights Michael Rosen Reply to Commentators Jeremy Waldron Reply Index

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Dignity, Rank, and Rights

The Women's Court of Canada is an innovative project engaged in systematically rewriting Canadian equality law by issuing its own versions of leading Supreme Court of Canada equality-related decisions. The judgment of the WCC in Law v. Canada (Minister of Employment and Immigration) traces the emergence of dignity as the touchstone of section 15 equality rights, and reviews the factors relevant to finding a violation of dignity from the Supreme Court of Canada's 1999 decision in Law. These factors are reinterpreted as pointing to three forms of indignity that may be inflicted by law or policy: grounding law or policy in prejudice, the use of, or reliance on, stereotype, and exclusion from dignity-constituting benefits. In analyzing the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) limitation on eligibility for a spousal survivor's pension to those over age thirty-five, the Women's Court finds that the exclusive focus on the age-related differential treatment in the courts below provides an incomplete picture of the program and its rationale. The vast majority of survivor pension recipients are women, and this part of the CPP cannot be properly understood or evaluated absent this gendered context. Denying any assistance to those under a certain age differentially affects mainly women in that age group. Further, the assumption that losing a spouse causes no financial hardship to younger survivors, even in the short term, adopts a male norm by treating as typical of younger spouses those who are employed and fully. self-sufficient. Given the roadblocks women typically encounter in their efforts to be self-sufficient, the financial dislocation due to a spouse's death may easily be severe enough to impair women's ability to live lives of dignity and be full participants in society. Accordingly, the Women's Court reverses the Supreme Court decision, and holds that the CPP survivor pension scheme is discriminatory on the combined basis of age and sex. Based on the arguments put forward in the courts below, the legislation cannot be saved under section 1.

Law V. Canada (Minister of Employment and Immigration)

Official‐Language Rights: Intrinsic Value and the Protection of Difference

Recent Supreme Court jurisprudence under s 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has identified the violation of human dignity as a key element, perhaps the key element in the determination of whether a legislative distinction is discriminatory Although this move has been condemned as introducing a vague and indeterminate concept into equality jurisprudence and for being used to deny worthy claims, it is arguable that some substantive foundation like dignity is needed to make sense of s 15 However, the Supreme Court has not yet done a very good job of explaining what dignity is and how we can identify its violation This article aims to provide a fuller understanding of dignity as a legal value and explain the role is it capable of playing in defining the scope of equality rights It identifies three forms of indignity implicit in the case law to date and interprets features of the Supreme Court's test for the violation of s 15 through a dignity lens

Discrimination and Dignity

Are there any rights to public goods? Can they be claimed by individuals? Recent literature has elided these two questions and reached a skeptical conclusion. This oversimplifies the issue. The difficulty with individual rights claims in respect of public goods has to do less with the public nature of the good than with whether the good is participatory by nature; some but not all public goods are participatory. Thus individual rights claims to some public goods may be valid under certain circumstances. However, groups rather than individuals must hold any rights that may validly be claimed in respect of participatory public goods.

Denise G. Reaume

Papers

Law V. Canada (Minister of Employment and Immigration)

Official‐Language Rights: Intrinsic Value and the Protection of Difference

Discrimination and Dignity

Individuals, Groups, and Rights to Public Goods

Individuals, Groups and Rights to Public Goods