Doctor in Trouble: Anderson v Gorrie and the Extension of Judicial Immunity from Suit in the 1890s

This article explores the case of Anderson v Gorrie (1894) in which the Court of Appeal completed the immunity of judges from suit for actions whilst ostensibly sitting judicially and within their jurisdiction. They subsequently rejected an argument for an extension of the ambit of the decision in Dimes v Grand Junction Canal Company to judges sitting in a case in which they had an interest. The strength of the fortifications the judiciary had built around itself, erected on the bones of Anderson and others, must have been influenced by the concerns the judges felt – concerns with the influx of litigants in person, who sometimes pursued their cases all the way to the Lords, benefiting from the in forma pauperis procedure.     

The Catalytic Effect of IMF Lending: Evidence from Sectoral FDI Data

Our study contributes to the search for the elusive catalytic effect of International Monetary Fund (IMF) lending on inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). Recent scholarship has found that the catalytic effect is conditional on political regime and program stringency. We contribute to this literature by developing and testing a theory which describes how the catalytic effect also varies by economic sector. This is a departure from existing studies, which have tended to focus on aggregate FDI flows after crises. Our findings corroborate previous research, which finds that in general IMF lending has a substantial and negative effect on FDI. However, we find that the negative effect is concentrated in sectors that are highly dependent on external capital and have low sunk costs in the host country. Our findings are robust to several alternative explanations common in IMF literature, namely the importance of IMF program design and the ability of governments to make credible commitments to reform. Substantively, our findings suggest that investors are more likely to use IMF lending as an escape hatch in countries where FDI is dependent on external capital and has low sunk costs.     

Conflicts of customary land tenure in rural Africa: is large-scale land acquisition a driver of ‘institutional innovation’?

This study combines legal and anthropological approaches to investigate how the establishment of a large-scale biofuel agro-industry is reinterpreting and potentially transforming customary institutional arrangements in rural Sierra Leone. The contractual relationships established between land acquirers and local authorities can be seen as an ‘institutional innovation’ that aims at interpreting and overcoming the limits of the national land regime. However, by formalizing customary land tenure structures through land registration, such innovations are exacerbating pre-existing social inequalities. We identified four categories of resulting conflicts: interlineage, intervillage, interfamily and intergenerational conflicts. Taken together, these conflicts question the current land-based sociopolitical structures of rural Sierra Leone and could be drivers of societal change.     

The Levant: A Profoundly Disturbed Environment

An account of two separate expeditions to climb mountains in Tibet, which, while not among the highest in the world, offer a technical challenge equal to the Matterhorn – indeed they are roughly the same height (about 6,500 metres). The first expedition was to Kajaqiao, which the author, Mick Fowler successfully climbed with Chris Watts, the second, a couple of years later, was to Manamcho, which was climbed with Paul Ramsden. The article contains a wealth of detail about the technicalities of this sort of climbing.