Privatization, Vulnerability, and Social Responsibility

Martha Albertson Fineman is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University. A leading authority on family law and feminist jurisprudence, Fineman is the founding director of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, an interdisciplinary scholarly project she began at the University of Wisconsin in 1984. Since 2007, she also directs Emory’s Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative, an interdisciplinary project housed in the Laney Graduate School. Her scholarly work focuses on various aspects of the legal regulation of intimacy and on the social, cultural, and legal implications of human dependency and vulnerability and includes The Neutered Mother, The Sexual Family and Other Twentieth Century Tragedies (1995) and The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency (2004). Titti Mattsson is Professor in Public Law, working as a researcher and teacher in public law, social welfare law, and family law at the Faculty of Law at Lund University, Sweden. Her research interests are Social Welfare law, Medical Law, Child law, Elder Law and Data Protection Law. Ulrika Andersson is Associate Professor in Criminal Law at the Faculty of Law, Lund University, working as a teacher and researcher in criminal law and criminal procedural law. Her main research focuses broadly on questions concerning law and power. She is particularly interested in issues of sexuality and gender, in addition to power relations in regard to class and ethnicity.

1. Introduction

I. Analyzing Privatization

2. Three Faces of Privatization

3. Big Government Against Social Responsibility: A Vulnerability Critique of Privatization’s Public Priorities

4. Rethinking Responsibility in Private Law

5. In the Land of Choice: Privatized Reality and Contractual Vulnerability

II. Privatization and Corporatization

6. Entrepreneurial Subjectivity, the Privatization of Risk, and the Ethics of Vulnerability

7. Privatizing Hoodia: Patent Ownership, Benefit Sharing, and Indigenous Knowledge in Southern Africa

8. Credit Counselling in Canada: An Empirical Examination

9. Privatizing and Corporatizing the University: A U.S. and UK Comparison

III. Privatization of Public Services

10. Freedom of Choice over Equality as Objective for the Swedish Welfare State? The Latest Debate on Choice in Education

11. Privatization in the Human Services: Impact on the Front Lines and the Ground Floor

12. Still a responsive state?

13. E-government for the distribution of public services in Sweden: Privatization, Vulnerability and Social Responsibility reshaped

14. What does privatization mean for women in Uganda?

IV. Privatization of the Coercive Power of the State

15. The Human Right to Dignity and Commodification of Prisoners: Considering Worldwide Challenges to Prison Privatization

16. Gendered Aspects of Privatizing Force in Counterinsurgent Warfare

17. Harmed selves harming others – A vulnerability approach to the criminal justice system