Kamalaśīla on Doubt as the Cause of the Activity of Reading

As Funayama has shown, Dharmakīrti’s successors had an animated discussion on the nature and function of the initial statement (ādivākya) of scientific treatises in terms of its effectiveness and requisites. Arca?a (8th c.) in his comments on the initial statement of the Hetubindu considers that the initial statement, which contains the purpose (prayojana) of the treatise, is useless in prompting people to undertake the activity (prav?tti) of reading the treatise because judicious people are supposed to undertake action only due to certainty (ni?caya) which never arises from something that is not a pramā?a. For Arca?a, the initial statement is set forth only to dispel the objection of an opponent who criticizes the treatise for not having a purpose. Kamala?īla (8th c.) criticizes Arca?a on this point; for him the initial statement is effective to prompt people to undertake the reading of the treatise because people act also on the basis of doubt (sa??aya), which arises from the initial statement that is not a pramā?a but an abhyupāya for action. This paper attempts to consider how such doubt can cause reading by examining the debate in the Tattvasa?grahapañjikā and related texts. As Kamala?īla presupposes, when people act due to doubt, they may attain the desired purpose by chance but cannot escape the risks of not attaining an desired purpose and also of attaining an undesired purpose. Taking these risks into consideration, it is reasonable for Granoff to take up Kamala?īla’s position as an example of the maxim of kākatālīya in the introduction of her paper in the present volume. However, the probability for the readers of the Tattvasa?graha to achieve easy comprehension of tattva as a result of reading a full treatise, which they undertake due to doubt out of the initial statement, is higher than that for a crow being suddenly killed by a falling palm-fruit. According to Kamala?īla, the risk of not attaining the desired purpose does not prevent people from reading because such fear equally occurs in activities based on certainty. Furthermore, there is no risk of attaining an undesired purpose from the treatise because authors are supposed to undertake action only for the sake of others. Therefore, doubt which arises from an abhyupāya can make people undertake action.     

Creating a Literature for the King's Courts in the Later Thirteenth Century: Hengham Magna,Fet Asaver,and Bracton

The early common law produced a rich literature. This article examines two of the most popular legal treatises of the second half of the thirteenth century, Hengham Magna and Fet Asaver. It has long been recognized that these two treatises bear some relationship to each other. This article will attempt to establish that relationship, arguing that Hengham Magna and Fet Asaver were written by different people; that Fet Asaver borrows from Hengham Magna; and that the authors of both texts had independent access to the Bracton treatise. The article concludes by suggesting a new way to think about the legal literature of the later thirteenth century. It suggests that Hengham Magna and Fet Asaver do not represent a dramatic break with the earlier literature of the common law, as some scholars have suggested. They may instead represent an evolution of that literature to serve the needs of the practising bar.     

The Date and Authorship of Bracton: a Response

This paper is a response to John Barton's posthumous paper on the date and authorship of the English thirteenth-century legal treatise Bracton. That paper was an extended critique of sections of a much shorter paper I had published in 1996 on these and related topics. It responds to the main criticisms Barton makes of my paper. It accepts a few of these but not others, and does not accept his main arguments against assigning a date prior to 1240 for significant parts of the treatise nor his renewed assertion of the claims of Henry de Bracton to be the sole author of the treatise.     

Two Investigations on the Madhyamakakārikās and the Vigrahavyāvartanī

Purpose of the article is to provide support for the contention that two fundamental treatises representing the teaching of Madhyamaka, viz. the Mūlamadhyamakakārikās and the Vigrahavyāvartanī, were designed to establish and justify a metaphysical tenet claiming that no particulars of any kind can exist on some level of final analysis and that this was the only primary concern of those works. Whereas the former text is in the first place dedicated to providing proofs of the central metaphysical thesis the major objective of the second treatise lies in a defense of the claim against possible objections. A correlate of this view regarding the content of those two works is on the one hand that the philosophy of the founder of the Madhyamaka-school essentially consists in a metaphysical teaching implying a radical rejection of a stance propagated in earlier Buddhist schools according to which objects of ordinary experience could be reduced to or explained by the existence of other sorts of particulars that can be theoretically postulated. On the other hand the exegesis advocated in the article implies that theorems pertaining to the nature of language or the relationship between language and non-linguistic reality are not at all a predominant issue in the pertinent texts and presumably were not a major matter of concern of early Madhyamaka in general. Accordingly matters pertaining to questions of semantics attain relevance at best in the form of objective consequences which the metaphysical doctrine might entail. The paper focuses on the second chapter of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikās as well as the segment of the Vigrahavyāvartanī which deals with the first major problem, represented by the verses 1–4 and 21–29. The reason is that a detailed and thoroughgoing investigation of these two textual passages is suited to disprove a contention voiced by Western scholars who suppose that the teaching of the founder of Madhyamaka embodies a particular claim pertaining to the relationship between language and non-linguistic reality.     

Mos Geometricus and the Common Law Mind: Interrogating Contract Theory

Euclidian theories have it that there exist one or a small number of apex principles from which the entire fasciculus of rules of contract law can be logically deduced. Two arguments are marshalled against the Euclidian project. First, that it has been unsuccessfully attempted before – in the form of the nineteenth century contract law treatise which emulated the civil lawyer's rationalistic model, mos geometricus – cautioning us against setting much store by its present reincarnation. Second, that the common law's methodology makes it resistant to this form of theorising. Euclidian theory presupposes a picture of rules on which: a) cases involve an application of logically prior rules; b) rules are reliably identifiable by different actors in the legal system; and c) rules normatively range over an indefinite spectrum of future cases. It will be argued that the common law defies this picture of rules thus rendering Euclidian theory analytically impossible.     

Public preferences regarding police facebook posts: a macro-level analysis

ABSTRACT

Police agencies have adopted social media quite widely, but researchers have paid relatively little attention to the phenomenon. To date few studies have explored public reaction to police use of social media. The current study uses a purposive sample with 7,116 police Facebook posts collected from 14 different police agencies during a one-year period to answer two principal research questions: (1) with respect to the number of likes, number of shares, or number of comments regarding different themes present in police Facebook posts, are there differences among police agencies corresponding to differences in the thematic content in their postings? and (2) What factors are related to the public reaction (i.e., likes, shares, comments) to a police Facebook post? The findings from ANOVA and negative binomial regression models clearly indicate that citizens do have definite preferences on police Facebook posts – they are more likely to like and make comments on posts of police personnel and police-public relations, but less likely to share posts of Social Networking Sites. Also, they are more prone to like posts with narratives and pictures, but less likely to favor posts containing hyperlinks. Policy implications and practice guidelines, study limitations, and future research are also discussed.     

The art of mooting: mooting and the cognitive domain

Mooting is modelled principally on appellate advocacy. However, the skill set developed by participating in a moot programme – being that necessary to persuade someone to your preferred position – is indispensible to anyone practising law. Developing effective mooting skills in students necessitates the engagement of coaches with an appropriate understanding of the theories underlying mooting and advocacy practice and their interconnection with each other. This article explains the relevance of the cognitive domain to mooting performance and places it in context with the psychomotor and affective domains.     

Tacticians,Stewards, and Professionals: The Politics of Publishing Select Committee Legal Advice

At Westminster, there are increasing pressures on select committees to publish in‐house legal advice. We suggest that examining the process of deciding to publish provides useful insights into the provision, reception, and use of legal advice, and the dynamics of select committees generally. We argue that the autonomy of select committees to decide what use they make of evidence and advice they receive is, in practice, constrained by the intra‐institutional dynamics and practices of select committees. Committee actors – parliamentarians, clerks, and parliamentary lawyers – each have overlapping, sometimes competing, roles. Most of the time, these roles and the responsibilities they encompass coincide, but the prospect of publication reveals clear tensions between the different actors. This is the politics of publication: the tactical approach of politicians is in tension with the stewardship of clerks and the professional norms of parliamentary lawyers. We suggest this tension will only increase in the near future.     

A Normative Approach to the Quistclose Trust

This is the first article to undertake a sustained analysis of normative justifications for the Quistclose trust. Whilst much of the existing writing on this topic has focused on the better classification of such trusts – for instance, whether they are express, resulting, constructive or sui generis – this article asks why the law should recognise a trust in addition to any underlying legal relationship. Four key justifications are addressed, based on respecting party intention, unconscionability, fairness, and the incentivisation of desirable transactions. It will be argued that: (i) there are difficulties with each of these justifications, although an intention‐focused explanation is probably the most convincing; and (ii) the existing law and commentary lacks coherence and consistency, as seen in the mismatch between normative and doctrinal analysis, and the failure to properly address the ramifications of the Quistclose trust during insolvency.     

Padmaśrī’s Nāgarasarvasva and the World of Medieval Kāmaśāstra

This essay introduces a special issue on the history of kāmaśāstra in medieval India. It briefly reviews the secondary scholarship on the subject from the publication of the first translations of the genre at the end of the nineteenth century. It highlights the relatively unexplored history of later kāmaśāstra, and stresses the need for contexualized and detailed studies of the many kāmaśāstra treatises produced in the second millennium CE. The introduction, and the essays that follow, also argue for an expanded interpretive framework for the genre, moving beyond ‘sex’ and ‘sexuality,’ to a more widely defined notion of a ‘kāma world’, in which sensual pleasure is understood as being deeply enmeshed with aesthetic, ethical and cosmopolitan cultures.     

U. Vē. Cāminātaiyar and the Construction of Tamil Literary “Tradition”

U. Vē. Cāminātaiyar (1885–1942) is arguably one of the most influential figures of the so-called “Tamil Renaissance” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; his work has profoundly shaped the study of Tamil literature, both in India and the Euro-American academy, for more than a century. Among his many literary works is a long and incomplete autobiographical treatise known as Eṉ Carittiram, literally “My Life Story,” initially published in 122 installments between 1940 and 1942. What little scholarly attention this fascinating autobiographical narrative has received thus far has largely read the text as an artless, transparent documenting of South Indian literary culture in the late nineteenth century. Yet the text reveals substantial rhetorical art on close reading. Greater attention to Cāminātaiyar’s specific context and probable concerns when composing (and publicly publishing) Eṉ Carittiram suggests alternative ways of reading Tamil literary history and those texts that he first made widely available.     

“Hand-to-mouth” citizenship: decision time for the UK Supreme Court on the substance of Zambrano rights,EU citizenship and equal treatment

UK benefit rules strip Zambrano residence rights, for UK national children and their third country national primary carers, of equal treatment entitlement. These rules are challenged in a case pending before the UK Supreme Court. This piece argues that Zambrano creates an EU-citizenship-based right to reside which necessarily entails equal treatment. UK national children in Zambrano families fall within the scope of EU law so are not prevented by the wholly internal rule from claiming equal treatment with EU national children in Teixeira families. And they are protected by equal treatment as a general principle of EU law, which requires equal treatment with other UK national children. The justifications for automatic unequal treatment put forward before, and accepted with alacrity by, the Court of Appeal, are poorly reasoned and ill-matched with the rules in question – most notably because Zambrano families may have strong connections with the UK. A CJEU reference is likely; a Zambrano right is the right to reside in the Union – it is the right to have EU rights. The substance of EU citizenship is at stake.     

The Politics of Rule of Law Reform: From Delegation to Autonomy

How can we understand the delegation of power and authority – for example, from a polity to an administrator - in a world of fragmented governance? In this paper, I introduce the practices of contemporary ‘rule of law’ and ‘governance’ reform, which reframe this question in politically powerful ways. These practices are increasingly important in development contexts, and beyond. Practitioners begin with the assumption that some sort of administration occurs in the development contexts in which they work. They then focus on how to convene a political community in which to embed – and potentially legitimate - that administration. They thereby reconfigure the question of delegation into one of autonomy – or managing the extent to and ways in which the administrative legal system self-produces. In doing so, I argue that contemporary rule of law practitioners wield constitutional power under the rubric of workaday administrative reform. At the same time, they efface their political accountability.     

Will get fooled again: Emotionally intelligent people are easily duped by high‐stakes deceivers

Purpose. There is major disagreement about the existence of individual differences in deception detection or naturally gifted detection ‘wizards’ (see O'Sullivan & Ekman, 2004 vs. Bond & Uysal, 2007 ). This study aimed to elucidate the role of a specific, and seemingly relevant individual difference – emotional intelligence (EI) and its subcomponents – in detecting high‐stakes, emotional deception. Methods. Participants (N= 116) viewed a sample of 20 international videos of individuals emotionally pleading for the safe return of their missing family member, half of whom were responsible for the missing person's disappearance/murder. Participants judged whether the pleas were honest or deceptive, provided confidence ratings, reported the cues they utilized, and rated their emotional response to each plea. Results. EI was associated with overconfidence in assessing the sincerity of the pleas and greater self‐reported sympathetic feelings to deceptive targets (enhanced gullibility). Although total EI was not associated with discrimination of truths and lies, the ability to perceive and express emotion (a component of EI), specifically, was negatively related to detecting deceptive targets (lower sensitivity [d′]). Combined, these patterns contributed negatively to the ability to spot emotional lies. Conclusions. These findings collectively suggest that features of EI, and subsequent decision‐making processes, paradoxically may impair one's ability to detect deceit.     

The unexpected effect of social status on reproduction: a case study in Joseon Korea from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries

We examine how parents have made decisions about the number of children they have, given their social status in accordance with residential location (either urban or rural areas) and time (either the pre-modern or modern periods). We use two sets of microdata – Jokbo and Jejeokbu – spanning the early nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries in Korea. Combining the two data-sets, we use multiple imputation to fill the missing entries of some observations and apply a Poisson regression model on the augmented data. Our empirical results reveal statistically significant evidence that higher socioeconomic status is related to having more children. Additionally, our findings indicate that: (1) all else being constant, among high-status people, rural residents had more children than urban families; (2) for people born between 1800 and 1945, those born closer to the 1940s tended to have fewer children; and (3) during modernization, there was still a significant trend for high-status families to have more children.     

Amphetamine derivative related deaths

Amphetamine its methylendioxy (methylendioxyamphetamine methylenedioxymethylamphetamine, methylenedioxyethylamphetamine) and methoxy derivatives (p-methoxyamphetamine and p-methoxymethylamphetamine) are widely abused in Spanish society. We present here the results of a systematic study of all cases of deaths brought to the attention of the Madrid department of the Instituto Nacional de Toxicologia from 1993 to 1995 in which some of these drugs have been found in the cadaveric blood. The cases were divided into three categories: amphetamine and derivatives, amphetamines and alcohol, amphetamines and other drugs. Data on age, sex, clinical symptoms, morphological findings, circumstances of death, when known, and concentration of amphetamine derivatives, alcohol and other drugs in blood are given for each group. The information provided here may prove to be useful for the forensic interpretation of deaths which are directly or indirectly related to abuse of amphetamine derivatives.     

Topoi in Summa: Virtual Justice as Determinant for Aquinas’ Placement of Law

This study shows the spatial juxtaposition and separation of topics regarding law in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae. These topics are his treatise on legal structures among morals in its part I-II, and his treatise on legal justice among virtues in its part II-II. This difference in the topics’ placements requires mediation by the virtuality of law, in order to grasp the distances and bridges between the two treatments of law.     

A Charmed Spectacle: England and its Constitutional Imagination

This article argues that the fate of England – a subject of increasing contemporary interest – is inexorably linked to that of its constitution. Englishness is an impression, one that is rooted in its constitutional imagination, a bundle of impression and images, which can be found, not merely in statutes and cases, but in a myriad texts and treatises. The first part of the article concentrates on the constitutional imagination fashioned by the likes of Hooker and Spenser in the wake of the Henrician and Elizabethan settlements. The second part then looks at the frantic efforts of men such as Burke and Wordsworth to reinvest this imagination in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The final part of the article suggests that the`charmed spectacle' of the constitution, as Bagehot terms it, still represents a formidable residual strength against which any mooted constitutional reforms must be measured. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Seeing is believing: observer perceptions of trait trustworthiness predict perceptions of honesty in high-stakes emotional appeals

Instantaneous first impressions of facial trustworthiness influence the manner in which observers evaluate ensuing information about stranger targets [e.g. Porter, S., &; ten Brinke, L. (2009). Dangerous decisions: A theoretical framework for understanding how judges assess credibility in the courtroom. Legal and Criminological Psychology, 14, 119–134. doi:10.1348/135532508X281520]. In two studies, we examined the association between perceptions of general trustworthiness and honesty assessments in an extremely high-stakes sample – individuals publicly pleading for the return of a missing relative, half of whom had killed the missing individual. In Study 1, observers (N?=?131) provided trustworthiness ratings – either before or after viewing and evaluating the honesty of videotaped or audio-only pleas – for a still image that depicted a neutral expression on the face of each pleader. In Study 2, observers (N?=?220) evaluated the sincerity of audio pleas paired either with an untrustworthy-looking target, a trustworthy-looking target, or no target face. Collectively, our findings indicated that first impressions of trait trustworthiness form the basis of state judgments of honesty, potentially contributing to misguided credibility assessments and miscarriages of justice in the legal system.