Law - OU Community Online

Professor Taylor (pictured), who was Associate Dean at Nottingham Business School, has a PhD in Economics and has directed research projects related to online teaching of Economics and the wider Social Sciences.

She is an Associate Director of the Economics Network at the University of Bristol, and has worked with the Economic and Social Research Council and the Higher Education Academy on addressing the identified skills deficit in quantitative methods across the Social Sciences.

Professor Taylor said she felt 'very privileged' to have joined the OU. For full OU news release click here.

The good news is that more than ten years of open2.net content has been moved to a new website at open.edu/openlearn, creating one home for all the Open University's free online learning for the public. 

The new site continues to support OU-BBC broadcasts, but also gives access to iTunes U podcasts, YouTube videos, free study units taken from OU modules and topical content, arranged under subject areas relating to the OU curriculum. 

There's lots to do - you can watch Evan Davis exploring the state of British manufacturing; explore the frozen planet; get to know the science and history of the Olympics or have a look at our study units in LearningSpace.

Any existing links that direct people to open2.net content will automatically send people to the relevant pages on the new site.

You’ll find more information at open.edu/openlearn. 

A civil appeals court in Aix-en-Provence has awarded €10,000 damages to a wife for having to endure her ex-husband’s sustained lack of sexual interest in her for several years.

The award of compensation for “injurious abstinence” in Monique v Jean-Louis B was made under article 1382 of the French civil code. French law says that married couples undertake to lead a “shared communal life” and the appeals court ruled that this includes reasonable sexual consortium.

Monique, 47, had brought the action following 21 years of marriage which she claimed were sexually unfulfilling. Her husband, 51, defended the allegation by arguing that there was significant sexual liaison albeit intermittent because of his health problems which included chronic fatigue arising from a heavy work schedule.

The court rejected the husband’s case. It stated that a sexual relationship between a husband and wife manifests the affection they have for one another and ruled “in this case it was absent”.

It found that the husband had failed to prove to the court that health problems were the reasons for his continuing abstinence from sex.

Historically, the English church courts would sometimes order a medical examination of a husband to determine whether he had the physical capacity to consummate a marriage. In 1778, for example, in a Canterbury case, penis inspectors were appointed by the court to evaluate the man’s virility.

The medical examination showed that the husband’s manhood (known legally as his “virile member”) was judged to be “soft and short”.

The court, however, noted that such flaccidity “does not always continue” (a man, after all, might not be fully aroused when being inspected by officers of the law) and ordered the marriage to run for three months before judgment could be conclusive.

In England, the matrimonial obligation is to maintain a “mutually tolerable sexual relationship” although even that doesn’t apply across the life of a marriage. The old legalistic maxim that normal frequency of marital sex is “twice a week”, expressed in the delicate maxim bis ruere in hebdomade (to disturb twice in seven) isn’t concrete law.

As the seasoned family law judge Lord Merriman said in a case in 1947 “No one can sit here as long as I have sat without realising that there is the greatest diversity of standards between one set of spouses and another as to what is or is not a normal standard of sexual intercourse”.

In the 1947 case he ruled that a husband who’d been prodigious in his sexual demands “sometimes even as much as five times in one night” and who had also made “certain revolting suggestions” to his wife about alternative sexual practices, was acting unreasonably. The major text on sex law says it would be unreasonable if “a husband insists on sex after every meal”.

In 1960, the Court of Appeal ruled that a wife from Croydon was in breach of her marital obligations when, with great intolerance towards her husband who wasn’t as sexually charged as she was, she repeatedly badgered him for sex.

To rouse him into copulation she would, in the early hours of the morning, “pull his hair, catch hold of him by the ears, and shake his head violently to and fro”.

By always eventually conceding to her demands, however, the husband was judged to have accepted her behaviour. So, no divorce for him – a crash helmet in bed was his only legal option.

Gary Slapper is Global Professor at New York University, Director of New York University in London, and Visiting Professor of Law at The Open University. His latest book More Weird Cases is published by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill

You can follow him on Twitter @garyslapper

Today (14 November 2011) is Student Finance Day. With student fees and loans high on the agenda for those considering university, Platform caught up with some prospective students via Twitter to find out how fees have influenced their decision making so far...

Name: Mrs Claire Siciliano
Age: 27
Location: Welwyn Garden City

Name: Alexandre L Costa
Age: 34
Location: Luton

Useful links

• Student Finance Day 
• Open University Fees 2012

The Open University’s Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) has developed an innovative new search facility called CORE - COnnecting REpositories - to help academics, researchers and students navigate related papers from across UK Open Access repositories.

Current search systems, such as Google Scholar, used to find academic papers can deny users access to the full article, particularly when subscription fees are required and this often proves a frustration for scholars. CORE specialises in searches of the full-text items held on all approved Open Access repositories, ensuring a vastly improved level of accessibility for users. Anyone searching CORE will therefore receive better access to relevant results. In addition, the CORE system stores these downloads, so that papers are still available even if their original repository is offline, thus ensuring a reliable service.

The creation of CORE – symbolised with an eye-catching apple core logo - was funded by JISC and is accessible via an online portal, mobile devices or through repositories and libraries which have integrated CORE with their own search features. Researchers can be confident they are receiving the most relevant recommendations as the system is the first to offer similar articles based on the full text of papers and currently searches 142 British research repositories and libraries.

Senior Research Fellow at the OU, Zdenek Zdrahal, who led the project, said: “The Open University is at the forefront of producing new and innovative advancements in educational resources. CORE is an exciting addition to this history and we believe it will be beneficial to the academic research community and to the OU. There are plans to develop systems further, to aid research.”

CORE is already integrated into The Open University’s research repository, Open Research Online (ORO) which includes more than 18,900 research publications. It is hoped that CORE will be adopted for use in many other universities and academic institutions.

CORE received £40,000 funding from JISC and the project took place over six months finishing in July 2011. Andrew McGregor, JISC programme manager, said: “UK repositories contain a wealth of high quality research papers. This service should help make it easier for researchers to discover and explore this content. CORE is an exciting demonstration of how JISC’s investment in emerging semantic technologies is being harnessed to benefit researchers.”

Visit the CORE website. A 'how to' video will follow shortly - watch this space!

The figure is nearly double that of a year ago – with 70 per cent of visitors now downloading straight to mobile devices.

The BBC reported that the OU is now neck and neck with rival Stanford University, and ahead of universities such as Yale and Oxford.

Martin Bean, Vice-Chancellor of The Open University, said: “Right from the start, the OU has always kept pace with the new technologies of the time and it is fascinating to see the development of the post personal computing stage of the OU on iTunes U.

“It is crucial for part-time students to be able to study when, where and how it suits them and we excel at finding new and better ways to enable students to study on the move.”

The OU is one of the biggest and most popular contributors to iTunes U, averaging 275,000 downloads a week. It regularly appears on the iTunes U Top Charts and has one of the widest ranging libraries, including both audio visual collections, and over 400 eBooks derived from our award winning OpenLearn site.

In July 2011, the OU’s The History of English in Ten Minutes collection which went straight to the iTunes U (UK) chart at number four after just four days. Shakespeare was the top OU download on iTunes U that month.

OU material on iTunes U gets a worldwide audience with 90 per cent of visitors to the site coming from outside the UK. An OU on iTunes U audience survey revealed that 96 per cent use the materials for learning.

The Open University first posted material on iTunes U in June 2008 and recorded 20 million iTunes U downloads in June 2010. In October 2010, the OU was one of the first three universities worldwide to put eBooks onto iTunes U.