Judges 19

When we encounter a text, whether ancient or modern, we typically start at the beginning and work our way toward the end. In Tracking the Master Scribe, Sara J. Milstein demonstrates that for biblical and Mesopotamian literature, this habit can yield misleading results.

In the ancient Near East, "master scribes"—those who had the authority to produce and revise literature—regularly modified their texts in the course of transmission. One of the most effective techniques for change was to add something to the front—what Milstein calls "revision through introduction." This method allowed scribes to preserve their received material while simultaneously recasting it. As a result, numerous biblical and Mesopotamian texts manifest multiple and even competing viewpoints. Due to the primary position of these additions, such reworked texts are often read solely through the lens of their final contributions. This is true not only for biblical and cuneiform texts in their final forms, but also for Mesopotamian texts that are known from multiple versions: first impressions carry weight.

Rather than "nail down every piece of the puzzle," Tracking the Master Scribe demonstrates what is to be gained when engaging questions of textual transmission with attention to how scribes actually worked. Working from the two earliest corpora that allow us to track large-scale change, the book provides broad overviews of evidence available for revision through introduction, as well as a set of detailed case studies that offer fresh insight into well-known biblical and Mesopotamian literary texts. The result is the first comprehensive and comparative profile of this key scribal method: one that was not only ubiquitous in the ancient Near East but also epitomizes the attitudes of the master scribes toward the literature that they produced.

There are many texts which, are to use M. Bakhtin's term, "in dialogue" with the "text of terror" that comprises Judges 19. There are many allusions to other texts in this story and it seems clear that the author was influenced by them. The most obvious and best known inter-text is that of Gen. 19, the story of Lot's offer to hand over his daughters to the angry men of Sodom to protect his guests, the angels from being molested by the mob.  But there are many more verbal echoes, such as "speak to her heart" (daber al lev) which link this text to others such as Gen. 34 and Hosea 2, or the knife (ma-achelet) used by Abraham in Gen. 22 or the outrage (nevala) referred to in the rapes of Dinah and Tamar in Gen. 34, and II Sam. 13. There are also thematic issues, such as hospitality, encouraging war, misogyny, which can be compared and contrasted and linked to this text. I plan to look at show that Judges 19 is not only a self-contained text but that when it dialogues with other texts, it gains new meaning as well as offering commentary on the inter-texts. I hope to show that the story of the Concubine of Gibeah which is often ignored (much as was Shakespeare's bloody, violent, play Titus Andronicus) is more than just an autonomous text because it is in an intertextual relationship to so many others. In deciding which texts borrow elements (story line, character, phrases, words, polemical ideas) from the other, we will also be learning about how this particular woman was "raped by the pen".

El libro presenta la construcción del Sistema de Medición del Desempeño Jurisdiccional en el Poder Judicial Peruano. Se presenta el contexto en el cual se desarrollo este sistema, se explican las métricas así como los principios operativos del sistema y se plantea una Hoja de Ruta para su aplicación definitiva.

This paper offers a hermeneutics of meaning developed for victim/survivors of sexual violence in the parish context, focused primarily on Judges 19 and its ramifications in Judges 20-21. I construct this hermeneutic through an exegesis of Judges 19, based in feminist commentaries that tease out entry points for discussion with victim survivors. Using an imagined community Bible study I construct a hermeneutic of meaning based in reconciliation and action using the work of pastoral theologians Carrie Doehring, Al Miles and Monica A. Coleman.

For centuries, the story of Lot’s daughters in Genesis is one which has both abhorred and intrigued countless readers. Utilizing the hermeneutical lenses of Narrative and Feminist Criticism, this paper draws attention to overlooked details in the narrative. The story is also contrasted with that of the Levite’s Concubine in Judges 19. The result of this study concludes that the narrative has been misread by past interpreters, arguing that the eldest daughter intentionally sought to deceive her younger sister for the intention of shaming their father as retribution for endangering their lives in Sodom. It proposes that the narrative of Gen. 19.30-38 is a dramatic representation by its author of divine irony and a strikingly pro-feminine text for the patriarchal society in which and to which it was written.

President Barack Obama’s nomination and the United States Senate’s confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court in the summer of 2009 had important implications for Latina and Latino identity and the meaning of “law” in the United States.  Objectively one of the most highly qualified individuals ever nominated to the high bench,  Judge Sotomayor’s nomination exploded into a national discussion of her remarks to the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law in 2002.
Subjected to a slew of characterizations, ranging from “racist” to “intellectual lightweight,” her nomination seized the attention and imagination of Latina@s and non-Latin@s. She portends new directions in American law.
This paper: (1) reviews the nomination/confirmation process and the public debate that surrounded it; (2) discusses the Berkeley speech in the context of  Judge Sotomayor’s  “Latinidad” and the legal perspective it articulates; (3) considers the idea of “subjectivity” in the development of American law and her proposed interjection of life experience into what is popularly perceived to be “objective” application of legal rules, which is deeply rooted in Anglo-American legal tradition; (4) explores the implications of culture and language in the construction of social reality and the law; and (5) suggests that her nomination, beyond its likely effects on the development of the law, has a profound effect on the development of Latina and Latino identity.

In order to maintain the newfound independence and power the judiciary enjoys in Pakistan, it must take self-correcting measure to ensure that the Court breaks its historical subservience to the military, makes the judicial appointment process more transparent and democratic, and ensures that misconduct by any member of the judiciary is properly punished.  Accordingly, this study will seek to evaluate institutional reforms and recommend solutions in the following areas: 1) Civil-Military relations, 2) Appointments to the Judiciary, 3) The Role of Bar Councils, and 4) Security.

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PRAXIS - The Official Peer-Reviewed Journal of the Alumni for International Human Rights Law.  This is the official version of the inaugural issue of PRAXIS.  This official version supersedes and/or modifies accordingly any and all versions, descriptor, announcement, communication and/or related matter appearing here and/or elsewhere.

Churches need to engage with men in order to transform dangerous ideas about manhood in Africa. The HIV epidemic calls for the immediate action on attitudes to sex and sexual violence (Chitando 2007: 46). In the age of HIV and AIDS, masculinity and manhood roles, tendencies and attitudes have become matters of life and death (Maluleke 2007). Defining the Problem: Violent Youth Masculinities in one HIV&AIDS Context In the past twenty-eight years of living with HIV&AIDS and the effort to contain its spread, Botswana has undertaken an intense promotion of the sexual ethics of abstinence from premarital sex for adolescents and young adults; consistent and correct condom use for the sexually active and faithfulness among those in committed relationships. This promotion has been marked by a parallel male discourse of resistance that took three different forms over time. 1 The first stage of resistance was characterized by counter-myth and sayings. One saying, counteracting the promotion of condom use, held that " ga o kake wa ja nekere e phuthetswe, " that is, one cannot eat a wrapped candy (Shaibu & Dube 2002:7). It is not an exaggeration that in an HIV&AIDS context a penis could be as good as a deadly shot of HIV infected sperms, hence the promotion of condoms. Be that as it may, the masculinities of resistance insisted on unprotected sex by constructing the penis as a candy-a sweet candy-one that must be fully enjoyed, unwrapped. This is but one saying among a whole host of sayings of the counter discourse that sought to resist the promotion of condom use, including " mythologies such as condoms have worms " (7). In a research that we carried, focusing on high school-going adolescents on Gender, Sexuality, HIV/AIDS and Life Skills in Education, the boys said they, " never admit to a fear of HIV/AIDS: " We brag when with friends, claiming to be kings of AIDS " " (Chilisa, Dube, Tsheko & Mazile 2002:112). One that I found memorable was when we asked them what they have heard about HIV&AIDS. One of their answers was that some people say, " let us have sex now, for in the future HIV will be airborne! " (105). Obviously, this saying is a powerful counter statement against the promotion of abstinence that constructs HIV as less dangerous in its current transmission form. 1 Although I discuss three forms of male resistance, I believe they can be five: the strategy of HIV positive male partners who insisted, against the will of their female partners and during the times when HIV Prevention of Mother to Child Programs were not available, to have children; and the rise of multiple concurrent partners. The latter are quite different from the traditional practice of the so-called small house, which allowed a married man to be involved with another woman who was not his wife but who was officially reported to his wife, family and children and was known to the wider society. The so-called small houses were some form of polygamy; although the man could choose not to marry the second woman it was a known and lifetime relationship. In the HIV and AIDS context, small houses have evolved into the multiple concurrent partners, counteracting the HIV messages. Consequently, the National Campaign Plan: Multiple Concurrent Partnership of Botswana was launched March 2009.

È opinione comune, presso gli studiosi moderni, che i giudici privati del processo civile romano (giudici monocratici o recuperatores) appartenessero alle classi sociali più elevate e più colte e che mantenessero, nel ricoprire il loro incarico, un atteggiamento di grande dignità. Questo dato appare in effetti confermato se si considerano tutti i giudici privati, dei quali le testimonianze antiche hanno tramandato l’identità. Ci sono tuttavia significative fonti letterarie, che presentano indizi dai quali è lecito sospettare, di fatto, l’esistenza di una seconda ‘categoria’ di giudici privati, costituita da persone di bassa estrazione sociale, che mantenevano spesso, nell'esercizio della funzione, comportamenti tutt’altro che incensurabili. I giudici di questo secondo gruppo erano, nella maggior parte dei casi, probabilmente quelli scelti al di fuori dell’album iudicum. Dall’indagine è risultato anche che, sebbene le due categorie di giudici fossero per molti aspetti differenziate tra loro, esse erano tuttavia assimilate per un importante carattere comune: l’imperitia iuris dei giudicanti, che si trova a più riprese lamentata dalle fonti antiche.

The Masoretic Text of Hag 2:15-19 is one of the most philologically challenging passages in the Hebrew Bible. As such, it has been subjected to frequent emendation (see the Biblia Hebraica Quinta). The present article focuses on two particular problems in this pericope: first, the meaning of Hag 2:16 ‫ם‬ ‫תָ‬ ֺ ‫ו‬ ‫י‬ ‫הְ‬ ‫מִ‬ along with the inter-clausal relations in Hag 2:15-17, and second, the function of ‫ד‬ ‫ﬠַ‬ in Hag

The gruesome biblical narrative of the gang rape of the Levite's concubine in Judges 19-21 is interpreted through the death bed confession/ diary of the Jewish ghetto police man Calel Perechodnik who guarded the assembly and transport of his wife and daughter to Treblinka. Using Levinas, the paper challenges traditional notions of theodicy that attempt to give meaning to episodes of suffering.

Author: Chuck Pitts
Publisher: CBE International

Judges 19 contains a seldom read, let alone studied or discussed, story of misogyny, subjugation, rape, murder, and dismemberment. Determining how to handle such atrocities in the Bible makes texts such as these difficult to address. More than thirty years ago, Phyllis Trible labeled Judg 19 as one of the “texts of terror” in the Hebrew Bible (along with the stories of Hagar, Tamar, and the daughter of Jephthah). Texts of terror tend to be avoided unless the reader can clearly separate the perpetrators of evil in the text from themselves. David Garber and Daniel Stallings have argued that the church must stop ignoring sexually explicit texts “because the story of the Levite’s concubine and the brutality contained therein speak vividly to issues of sexual violence that persist to this day. The silencing of sexually explicit biblical texts in American churches mirrors the silencing of issues of sexual violence in contemporary society.” This article will begin with a look at various approaches to exegesis of this text and then seek to show that we cannot exempt ourselves from this text of terror in light of its application to the twenty-first century problem of human trafficking, especially sex trafficking.

This essay is a compilation of research concerning Hebrew lament as a part of Jewish history. Written for a Christian audience, it seeks to define lament within a Hebrew context, explore lament via study of the Hebrew Bible, and attempt to understand a Jewish theology which incorporates suffering. This study pursues the value of understanding and possibly utilizing lament on the part of Christians who wish to understand their own religion in light of their Jewish heritage.

This paper examines the ways in which judges write opinions, the ways experienced and inexperienced legal readers conceptualize judges as authors, and the effect these conceptions have on the way they read those opinions. The paper describes judicial writing as a quintessential example of collaborative writing, a view corroborated by the ways experienced lawyers use and interpret judicial opinions in practice. The judicial opinion is not, as lay opinion grounded in the Romantic view that forms contemporary common wisdom would have it, the original work of the wise and creative judge pronouncing from on high. Rather, the opinion itself is a piece cobbled together from a number of other sources that include established law, the lawyers' written and spoken legal arguments, secondary legal sources, and earlier opinions that were themselves built up from the bits and pieces floating through the legal discourse community. Nevertheless, conventional legal thinking has since at least the 19th Century through today propounded the notion of the judge as quintessentially Romantic author-creator. This clash between legal practice and the conventions of legal (and especially academic) discourse poses real and neglected problems in legal education, especially in the ways the Romantic view of judicial authorship instills in students habits of reading.

The artistic production of several contemporary authors in the context of
Hebrew literature manifests a privileged interest in the body and its expressive capacities. These literary works can be approached by two complementary perspectives: on the one hand as relationship with the body inhabited and perceived as a necessary condition for the creative act, on the other hand, as words becoming flesh. These two poles, body represented and body of the word, allow to outline a research path of a poetic discourse that tries to return to the body as a way to tell a story.
Among the many forms that this discourse takes in the contemporary Hebrew literature and Israeli art, the body as an inevitable subject around and through which to define one’s role as an artist is at the center of Hila Lahav’s poetic production. Her writing of the body as expressed particularly in the poetic collection ‘Ad ha-boqer (Until Morning), 2014, will be the occasion for a reflection on the relationship between ars poetica and practices of resistance to violence.


La produzione artistica di diverse autrici contemporanee di lingua ebraica manifesta un interesse privilegiato per il corpo e le sue capacità espressive. Il rapporto tra corpo e creazione artistica si sviluppa secondo due prospettive complementari: da un lato come relazione con il corpo abitato e percepito quale condizione necessaria per l’atto creativo, dall’altro come parola che si fa carne. Questi due poli, corpo rappresentato e corpo della parola, permettono di delineare un percorso di ricerca di un discorso poetico che tenta di fare ritorno al corpo come unico mezzo per raccontare una storia.
Tra le molteplici forme che questo discorso assume nella creazione artistica contemporanea, il corpo quale soggetto inevitabile attorno e attraverso il quale definire il proprio ruolo di autrice è al centro della produzione poetica di Hila Lahav. La sua scrittura del corpo come espressa in particolare nella raccolta poetica ‘Ad ha-boqer (Fino al mattino), 2014, sarà l’occasione per una riflessione sul rapporto tra ars poetica e pratiche di resistenza alla violenza.

Of all the horrors told in Judges, it is chapter 19 and the rape and murder of an innocent woman while her husband sleeps soundly inside that raises perhaps the most unsettling questions for interpreters.
Genre-wise, there are many ways that we could take this story: as straight historical narration of an unhappy period; as prophetic commentary on pre-monarchical Israel; or perhaps even as a kind of ancient horror film, designed to shock the audience with the monsters within. The theme of this Festschrift, however, suggests a different—and, I think, productive— lens.
My point of departure is modern genre theory’s observation that texts do not “belong” to a single genre but have relationships with many genres. Readers use genres heuristically, forming a genre hypothesis and testing “alternative readings of the text as different genres.” In part one, I test a reading of Judges 19 as if it were a wisdom text. What features stand out when we understand the chapter as something akin to Proverbs, Job, or Ecclesiastes? In part two, I explore how the wisdom genre helps us reconceive the discontinuities of the story—particularly in the disturbing bargain with the sons of Belial—as features, not flaws. Every genre requires something different from us as readers, and reading Judges 19 as a wisdom text demands that we sit with its discontinuities for longer than we might otherwise be comfort- able. By refusing flat characterisation and trite moralizing, the text forces us live with ambivalence—which is where wisdom is often to be found.

A paper presented at the 2020 national meeting of the American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature in Boston, Massachusetts (USA).

In the scope of this paper is Josephine Butler's multiple interpretive renditions of the assault on the Levite's woman in Judges 19. The argument is that her challenge to the nineteenth century's obstinate insistence on masculine entitlement to sexual access in these acts of interpretation echo the terms and the schemes of the era's figurations of transgressive females: of women's savage sexuality, their objectifying amorous gaze, their diseased and degenerative minds, the stuff of the androcentric prattle in the service of the institutionalization of masculine supremacy. In seconding the zeitgeist in many ways, Butler substitutes the intemperate man for the iconoclastic woman as polite society's nemesis. Lust and an insatiable spirit of acquisition are marks of the masculine disposition, the fruit of a distorted construction of gendered essences. This mangled vision, she thought, would set the nation on the precipice, rushing Britain on a path to moral degeneration in a manner in comportment with Darwin's schemes. Butler subverts mainstream views in their own terms. Yet, notwithstanding her counter-cultural remonstrance, she is attuned with the dominant persuasion on one point: Victoria's imperial majesty is the world's hope. Europe's preeminence is a light to the nations. In this single aspect of the evolutionary imaginary Butler stands within England's pervasive vision.

The paper focuses on a series of confrontations between the colonial judiciary and the colonial state in India in 1942 and 1944. By the summer of 1942, the Japanese were advancing towards British possessions in India, the Indian nationalist parties had launched a civil disobedience movement which was spiraling out of control and discontent was rising due to famine and severe rationing. The government was quick to retaliate, with demonstrators being fired upon and over a 100,000 people arrested. It was to suppress these nationalist activities in face of war, that the government fashioned special legal instruments, such as the Defence of India Act and its various rules which allowed the government to hold people without trial. In a well publicized series of judgments the Federal Court struck down these laws and ordinances. What was remarkable was that the court in question had been perceived as a weak court, set up by the colonial government and had been staffed by consciously selected pro-establishment judges. Ironically, almost identical repressive ordinances in Britain were upheld by British courts. I hope to use judicial response to the Quit India movement as a prism to open up a discussion of law, state and legal culture in colonial India.

The role played by the Federal Court pushes us to revisit the consensus on the "rule of law" in colonial India, particularly the belief that "law was far from autonomous in practice, its autonomy nothing more than legal fiction and its practice pure farce". Placing the Indian and British judicial experience in a same discursive framework helps focus our attention on the "rule of colonial difference" and question our understandings of judicial behavior. I hope to show that the emergence of the legal public sphere and self perceptions of the legal profession played a constitutive role in shaping both the colonial and the postcolonial states. Finally, since the Federal Court was the immediate predecessor to the Supreme Court of India and consisted of the same judges, this study hopes to excavate the foundations of judicial independence in South Asia.

The thesis article presented is a class paper I worked on Fall 2018. In it I discuss the story of the Levite's Concubine, how she is presented, and what implications might there be towards the oppression of the earth. The supremacy over women is often viewed in humanity's supremacy over the earth and other earthlings. It's my first article.

Samson as God’s Adulterous Wife reveals striking parallels between the depiction of Samson in the Book of Judges and the prophetic literature’s metaphorical representations of Israel as an adulterous woman. This book endeavors to understand why Judges dwells on Samson’s sexual and romantic relationships while the personal lives of the other six judges are not afforded the same narrative attention. M. Alroy Mascrenghe compares adulterous Samson with idolatrous Israel and argues that Samson’s life is marked by the same cycles of adultery, bondage, crying out, and deliverance that structure the Book of Judges as a whole. Mascrenghe continues to pursue the theme of God’s adulterous wife through a comparison of the Levite-concubine story of Judges 19 to that of Hosea and Gomer.

Samson as God’s Adulterous Wife demonstrates the author’s own method for recognizing intertextual narrative allusions. Drawing from a wide variety of disciplines―including narratology, sociology, and theological hermeneutics―Samson as God’s Adulterous Wife offers a fresh perspective on the role of the Samson story within the broader intertextual thematic space of the Hebrew Bible.

It presents an ethnographic analysis of criminal justice social workers writing presentence reports for the Scottish courts. Social workers' report writing for judges brought into relief issues of relative professional status. Social workers were uncertain of their place within the legal domain and concerned about their credibility as criminal justice professionals. Reports were written, in part at least, as a way of seeking esteem and credibility in the eyes of judges-a motivation that undermined the policy objectives of social enquiry in sentencing. Applying the conceptual tools of Bourdieu to our findings, we argue that streetlevel bureaucrats who have to work across bureaucratic "fields" may find, or fear, that the cultural and symbolic "capital" they retained within their own field is undervalued in the symbolic economy of new fields, putting them in a position of relative inferiority. This issue of relative professional status, and how officials respond to it, is significant for our understanding of street-level bureaucracy.

This is the second volume, in two parts, of a six-volume set of the complete Vulgate Bible.

Compiled and translated in large part by Saint Jerome at the turn of the fifth century CE, the Vulgate Bible was used from the early medieval period through the twentieth century in the Western Christian (and later specifically Catholic) tradition. It influenced literature, visual arts, music, and education during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and its contents lay at the heart of Western theological, intellectual, artistic, and even political history during that period. At the end of the sixteenth century, as Protestant vernacular Bibles became available, professors at a Catholic college first at Douay, then at Rheims, translated the Vulgate Bible into English, primarily to combat the influence of rival theologies.

Volume II presents the Historical Books of the Bible, which tell of Joshua’s leading the Israelites into the Promised Land, the judges and kings, Israel’s steady departure from God’s precepts, the Babylonian Captivity, and the return from exile. The focus then shifts to shorter, intimate narratives: the pious Tobit, whose son’s quest leads him to a cure for his father’s blindness; Judith, whose courage and righteousness deliver the Israelites from the Assyrians; and Esther and Mordecai, who saved all the Jews living under Ahasuerus from execution. These three tales come from books that were canonical in the Middle Ages but now are often called “apocryphal,” with the partial exception of the Book of Esther.

The second half of the third/ninth and the fourth/tenth centuries are of particular importance for the development of the judiciary in the central lands of the Abbasid caliphate. At the end of the mihna period and the victory of Sunnism under al-Mutawakkil (r. 232-247/847-861), the caliphate agreed not to interfere further within the legal sphere, thus allowing the principal schools of law to complete their development toward their classical structure. In Iraq, thanks to the growing independence of the legal sphere and to the political weakness of the caliphate, the qadis increased their judicial freedom. Meanwhile, the political situation in Egypt was very different. The provincial rulers and two successive dynasties, the Tulunids (254-292/868-905) and the Ikhshidids (323-358/935-969), profited from the weakness of the caliphate, and imposed their autonomy de facto. The role played by the judiciary in this process is still unclear, as is the impact of Egyptian autonomy on the development of the local judiciary. In this paper, I discuss the evolution of the relationship between the Egyptian governors and the judiciary, from the accession of Ahmad b. Tulun in 254/868 until the arrival of the Fatimids in 358/969. Several elements are taken into consideration: (1) The institutional links between political power and the judiciary: Who appointed the qadis? How were they selected? Did the government choose to rely on local scholars or did the qadis come from outside the province? (2) The financial connection between the governors and the qadis, which was not only symbolic of the delegation of power, but could also denote the submission of the judiciary to the government. (3) The daily interactions between the qadis and the governors. (4) The judicial practice of the qadis. (5) Their reputation. I study to what extent the judiciary and its control was a political issue for the Tulunids and the Ikhshidids, and how the efforts of these two dynasties to build an Egyptian autonomy had important consequences on the structure of the legal milieu.

The list of “women in refrigerators” is all too familiar to comic book fans: a woman’s body becomes the site of gruesome violence, merely for the sake of furthering a man’s character arc.  Judges 19 exemplifies this pattern, positioning the death of a nameless concubine as the motivation for male violence.  A closer look at the origins and conventions of “women in refrigerators” reveals even deeper parallels with the concubine’s grim tale.  Like the superhero whose story named the trope, the Levite begins his story by seeking the return of his woman, cementing her status as a prized possession.  Like the hero's girlfriend, the Levite’s concubine finds herself sexualized by the narrative from the beginning; both texts encourage readers to become complicit in the objectification of the women, metaphorically reducing them to pieces of flesh before their bodies become literally dismembered.  Most importantly, both tales viscerally illustrate the known connection between the consumption of meat and the consumption of women.  In Judges 19, the narrative prominence of two disrupted feasts and the language of animal slaughter point to an unspoken equation of woman as food — and as food, the girlfriend and the concubine ultimately feed the rage of male protagonists with their butchered death.  Unpacking the contents of these refrigerators opens a new window into the disturbing tale of Judges 19 and points to a metaphor so powerful that it persisted from the tales of the Bible to the comic books of today.

Steeped in the Darwinian imagination, the exponents of fin-de-siècle literary artistry painted the New Woman of the era a lascivious man-eating beast. She was a purveyor of gender confusion whose emasculating initiatives would check Western European ascent to civilization's apogee. Unfettered by tradition, her flighty intemperate spirit, her vaunted sexuality blind to the fine(r) things of a "higher" cultural order, would return humankind to the primordial muck of hoary antiquity. Literature and science, it seems, conspire along these lines to curb Late Victorian sexual-social anxiety. In this essay I situate Josephine Butler's reading (through four publications) of the story of the Levite and his woman (Judges 19) in the stream of a broader challenge to the literary sensibilities of the time. Butler's voluminous writings from the latter half of the nineteenth century, in essays and speeches, brought a Christian acumen to bear upon a sustained critique of the androcentric and misogynistic suasion at the heart of a cultural consensus on women's character and women's sexuality, especially (though not exclusively) as it pertained to the regulation of prostitution. Her contention through an astute consideration of the Judges story is that a pervasive masculine animus of lust and rapine is the root of a crippling decline that is moral and religious, not strictly devolutionary in the senses espoused by Darwin and his acolytes. Yet, Butler's favor for the tropes of the time-a sex-specific salaciousness and victimhood, mangled bodies, diseased members, and national degeneration-is resonant of verbiage in the service of a broader consternation respecting the revisionary social-sexual movements afoot. Butler's co-option of the cultural cadences in currency, I contend, is not only a calculated rhetorical twist on the norm, but also a symptom of a shared ethos-that European dominance and splendor (specifically, Anglo-imperialism) is the high-water mark of human

Entre 1999 y 2003, la primera integración del Tribunal Electoral del Poder Judicial de la Federación (TEPJF) emitió diversos criterios relevantes, mediante los cuales incrementó —paulatinamente— su capacidad para conocer de litigios originados en el seno de los partidos políticos. Con el paso del tiempo, en la literatura especializada se ha venido consolidando la idea de que estos criterios estuvieron inspirados en el garantismo, la doctrina judicial desarrollada por Luigi Ferrajoli. Sin embargo, en dichos trabajos no es frecuente encontrar argumentaciones encaminadas a demostrar que los criterios del TEPJF efectivamente fueron acordes con el garantismo. El objetivo del presente artículo es, precisamente, analizar las determinacio-nes del Tribunal a la luz de los postulados torales de la teoría de Ferrajoli. Se mostrará que las sentencias de la primera integración comparten algu- nos de los rasgos fundamentales del garantismo, pero que en ellas también hay elementos que discrepan con la teoría ferrajoliana. Por tanto, se concluye que los criterios del TEPJF pueden ser calificados, en todo caso, como un garantismo en tensión.

Between 1997 and 2003, in a series of relevant cases, the first Electoral Court of the Federal Judicial Branch (TEPJF) gradually increased its capacity to adjudicate intraparty disputes. Over time, several authors have argued that these cases were inspired by the judicial doctrine developed by Luigi Ferrajoli, the “guarantism” (garantismo). However, this literature rarely provides evidence to show that the opinions of the TEPJF were consistent with this judicial doctrine. Precisely, this paper seeks to evaluate the decisions of the Electoral Court based upon the theory of Ferrajoli. Specifically, I will argue that the opinions of the first TEPJF share some of the key features of the guarantism, but that they also have others that disagree with the ferrajolian theory. Thus, I conclude that the opinions of the TEPJF could be characterized as a guarantism in tension.