Against the Grain: Therapeutic Judging in a Traditional Family Court

Against the Grain: Therapeutic Judging in a Traditional Family Court

The last several decades have seen a proliferation of specialized courts, including within the family court system, that deviate from the adversarial model, and that rely on therapeutic jurisprudence and other problem-solving techniques. Whether and how traditional family courts can incorporate the best practices of these specialized courts is a largely understudied area. Drawing from ethnograp...

Spiritual Values and the Family in Court

The topic assigned for discussion in this paper is happily ambiguous. "Spiritual Values" may be interpreted as referring to religious teachings; but the term may equally refer to broad considerations of a purely social character. First of all, it is here recorded that many millions of American citizens hold firmly to a purely religious judgment concerning the evils of divorce. They read the nin...

ICT in the New Zealand Family Court

The New Zealand Family Court (NZFC) is an ideal public sector application for social informatics. In a study investigating ICT-assisted communications which was conducted with multiple court stakeholders, paradoxical results emerged. This research is positioned within a five-fold layered theoretical framework encompassing: private/public space; sense of self; emotional energies; digital citizen...

Moving Against the Grain: Exploring Genre-Based Pedagogy in a New Context

Considerable literature explores the contribution of genre teaching in English academic writing. The role of this approach in developing academic writing of Iranian EFL students, however, has been underresearched. This study investigated the implications of using this approach with a class of undergraduate students in Iran. The current study reports on the findings of a project which employed a...

Against the Grain