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JULIE WALLBANK, The Campaign for Change of the Child Support Act 1991: Reconstituting the 'Absent' Father

Document Cited authorities 1 Cited in Related
Vincent
DOI10.1177/096466399700600208
Date01 June 1997
Published date01 June 1997
Subject MatterArticles
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ABSTRACTS
AUSTIN SARAT, Vengeance, Victims and the Identities of Law
Postmodernism fragments identities, exposes contingencies, and establishes new
connections. In so doing it calls into question simple distinctions between guilt and
innocence, criminal and victim. The victims’ rights movement is, in part, a response
to postmodernism and an attempt to reassert the position of the victim as the foun-
dation for criminal justice. One aspect of that movement is the effort to make room
for the voice of the victim or the victim’s family in what are said to be abstract,
impersonal criminal processes. The high tide of the victims’ rights movement in the
United States came in Payne v. Tennessee. In that case the Supreme Court allowed
the use of so-called victim-impact statements in capital trials. It treated vengeance
as a legitimate part of the apparatus of modern legality. But this article claims that
what Payne did was to destabilize the revenge/retribution distinction and to expose
fissures in law’s ideological apparatus. The victims’ rights movement, with its
associated call for vengeance, highlights the way identity is constructed in law as
well as the way law’s identity is constructed in the effort to police the revenge/retri-
bution distinction.
JULIE WALLBANK, The Campaign for Change of the Child Support Act 1991: Recon-
stituting the ’Absent’ Father
The Child Support Act 1991 is a piece of legislation which was introduced by the
Conservative government in order to ensure that fathers remained financially
responsible for their...

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