The New Landscape of Jordanian Politics: Social Opposition,Fiscal Crisis,and the Arab Spring

The absence of regime change in Jordan during the Arab Spring obscured two critical trends transforming political order in this authoritarian kingdom. First, new opposition forces demanding democratic reform mobilized, within not only the youth population but also East Bank tribal communities long assumed to be citadels of loyalty. Second, worsening fiscal dysfunction and budgetary pressure have amplified the state's institutional weakness, and precluded the possibility that increased foreign aid could buy off dissent. Such possibilities require a serious reassessment about the foundations of stability in this kingdom. This double bind presents a nascent opportunity with profound ramifications: in the near future, the Hashemite monarchy may be forced to initiate credible political reform, because even a diminished autocracy is superior to a collapsing regime mired in mass insurrection.     

Why Weren’t We Taught? Exploring Frontier Conflict Through the Lens of Anzac

This article examines public understandings of two key strands of Australian history that sit at opposite ends of a spectrum of remembrance: frontier conflict and Anzac. The former, W. E. H. Stanner argued in 1968, was subsumed in a vacuum of silence, lost to popular consciousness in a wilful act of forgetting. Despite a wealth of subsequent scholarship documenting the violence and dispossession that characterised European colonisation, considerable gaps in public awareness about these foundational events remain. Anzac, in contrast, has become a defining narrative of Australian history for large segments of the general population and the political class. Recent scholarship suggests that this prominence has served to mask other, important histories of the continent, including frontier conflict. In this article, we argue that this is neither a necessary nor essential binary, and further, that one can inform the other. The written reflections of 320 tertiary students enrolled in a course about Australian military history provide insights into the ways that frontier conflict is popularly understood and how the fascination with Anzac can be leveraged to raise awareness of the violent historical dimensions of colonisation.     

The Counterrevolutionary Campus: Herbert Marcuse and the Suppression of Student Protest Movements

Abstract

With the recent surge of college protests against various forms of economic, political, social, and racial injustice, there have been persistent and pernicious reactions from other students, administrators and public figures that function to undermine the emancipatory impulses animating these demonstrations. The reactions are often justified under the banners of tolerance, chastising students to listen instead of protest. This article, focusing on Marcuse’s concepts of repressive toleration and counterrevolution, evaluates the reactionary responses to these events, as well as the critical potential of this fledgling student sensibility, a burgeoning refusal represented by protest events at American universities. We maintain that many of the calls for tolerance are actually demands for silence and belong to a wider counterrevolutionary phase of late capitalism observed by Marcuse. Bedrock liberties are dialectically inverted whereby speech and toleration are repressively deployed against demands for justice. This article concludes by arguing that it is crucial to the success of this resurgent sensibility for justice—and progress toward a radical socialist movement that coincides with the emancipatory vision of Herbert Marcuse—that the counterrevolutionary character of the responses are demystified.     

The Origins of Trade Secrecy Law in England, 1600–1851

This paper examines the origins of trade secrecy law from the beginning of the seventeenth century until Morison v Moat (1851), described by the Oxford History of the Laws of England as ‘foundational’. The paper reveals something of a conundrum. The first part shows that although the prevalence of guild ordinances would have familiarized many with the concept of ‘lawful secrets’, these provisions could no longer be enforced in the guild courts by the late seventeenth century, or within the wider jurisdiction of the courts of the City of London. Instead, as the second half of the paper shows, it was the law courts proper that came to provide succour to those working trade secrets, allowing them to both restrain employees from using secrets for their own benefit and/or to sell secrets to other parties. This was a halting process, but one that had certainly begun prior to Morison.     

China and India’s participation in global climate negotiations

In this paper, we discuss a range of issues concerning developing country participation in current global climate change mitigation negotiations, especially India and China. We argue that the problem of redefining ‘common yet differentiated responsibilities’ in a way which allows developing countries room to pursue their individual development goals while still achieving the necessary level of carbon mitigation is central to the debate. The choice of negotiating instruments, effective technology transfer and financial support, and other related issues have been raised principally by China and India, and may also be raised by several other countries. Kyoto non-compliance by Annex 1 countries will also greatly impact the negotiating power of China and India and other developing countries. We conclude that, once basic principles are clearly defined, the greatest incentive for China and India to participate in climate change negotiations is the prospect of future negotiating rounds that can be linked to a large number of climate change related issues, such as intellectual property, the potential for financial transfers and trade/market access.     

Manipulation and Single‐Peakedness: A General Result

This article considers environments in which individual preferences are single‐peaked with respect to an unspecified, but unidimensional, ordering of the alternative space. We show that in these environments, any institution that is coalitionally strategy‐proof must be dictatorial. Thus, any nondictatorial institutional environment that does not explicitly utilize an a priori ordering over alternatives in order to render a collective decision is necessarily prone to the strategic misrepresentation of preferences by an individual or a group. Moreover, we prove in this environment that for any nondictatorial institution, the truthful revelation of preferences can never be a dominant strategy equilibrium. Accordingly, an incentive to behave insincerely is inherent to the vast majority of real‐world lawmaking systems, even when the policy space is unidimensional and the core is nonempty.     

Application of the Optimized Summed Scored Attributes Method to Sex Estimation in Asian Crania

The optimized summed scored attributes (OSSA) method was recently introduced and validated for nonmetric ancestry estimation between American Black and White individuals. The method proceeds by scoring, dichotomizing, and subsequently summing ordinal morphoscopic trait scores to maximize between‐group differences. This study tests the applicability of the OSSA method for sex estimation using five cranial traits given the methodological similarities between classifying sex and ancestry. A large sample of documented crania from Japan and Thailand (n = 744 males, 320 females) are used to develop a heuristically selected OSSA sectioning point of ≤1 separating males and females. This sectioning point is validated using a holdout sample of Japanese, Thai, and Filipino (n = 178 males, 82 females) individuals. The results indicate a general correct classification rate of 82% using all five traits, and 81% when excluding the mental eminence. Designating an OSSA score of 2 as indeterminate is recommended.     

Forensic Epidemiologic and Biomechanical Analysis of a Pelvic Cavity Blowout Injury Associated with Ejection from a Personal Watercraft (Jet‐Ski)

Jet‐propelled personal watercraft (PWC) or jet‐skis have become increasingly popular. The means of propulsion of PWC, which is a jet of water forced out of small nozzle at the rear of the craft, combined with a high risk of falling off of the seat and into close proximity with the water jet stream, raise the potential for a unique type of injury mechanism. The most serious injuries associated with PWC falls are those that occur when the perineum passes in close proximity to the jet nozzle and the high‐pressure water stream enters the vaginal or rectal orifice. We describe the forensic investigation into a case of an anovaginal “blowout” injury in a passenger who was ejected from the rear seat position of a PWC and subsequently suffered life‐threatening injuries to the pelvic organs. The investigation included a biomechanical analysis of the injury mechanism, a summary of prior published reports of internal pelvic injuries resulting from PWC falls as well as other water sports and activities, and a comparison of the severity of the injuries resulting from differing mechanisms using the New Injury Severity Score (NISS). The mean (±standard deviation [SD]) NISS values for reported PWC injuries [not including the NISS of 38 in this case study] were 11.2 (±9.5), while the mean value for reported water‐skiing falls was half that of the PWC group at 5.6 (±5.2). It was concluded that the analyzed injuries were unique to a PWC ejection versus other previously described non‐PWC‐associated water sport injuries. It is recommended that PWC manufacturers help consumers understand the potential risks to passengers with highly visible warnings and reduce injury risk with revised seat design, and/or passenger seat “deadman” switches.     

The Origins of the Factors Acts 1823 and 1825

The Factors Act 1823 was the first major statutory exception to the rule nemo dat quod non habet in English law. The limited existing analysis of this Act suggests that it came about through the lobbying actions of merchants. This article demonstrates that the Factors Act 1823 was actually a compromise, and was considered a mere stepping-stone for further reform. The additional role of government policy in the development of the Factors Act 1825 is also demonstrated.