H. M. Seervai – Indian Advocate and Great Lawyer of the Commonwealth of Nations*

For much of the second half of the 20th century, H. M. Seervai was a leading advocate of the Bombay High Court. He argued some of the most important constitutional cases decided by the Supreme Court of India and in 1970 he resolved to write his Constitutional Law of India. It became the leading text on Indian constitutional law. It is still in widespread use. Many instances of recent citations are quoted. But Seervai’s book is not the usual commentary on the text of the Indian constitutional and case law. Instead, the book contains a running discussion on the shifts in direction, as well as sharp criticisms, where Seervai felt that the courts had strayed from correct constitutional doctrine. Seervai died in 1996 as the fourth edition was just completed. In this article, originally given as a lecture in Mumbai in 2007 on the centenary of Seervai’s birth, the author questions Seervai’s testamentary prohibition on posthumous editions of his text. He urges that a new edition should be produced to keep Seervai’s legacy alive not only in India but in other constitutional democracies where Indian judicial authority is increasingly cited.     

Prudential Assurance Co. Ltd. v. London Residuary Body — The end of pragmatism or the beginning of reason?

Conclusion Whilst Lord Templeman seemed satisfied with the result of the decision in thePrudential case, Lord Browne-Wilkinson did not share his view. He said that the outcome of the case was unsatisfactory and did not accord with the agreement of the parties. He said No one has produced any satisfactory rationale for the genesis of this rule. No one has been able to point to any useful purpose that it serves at the present day and he urged the Law Commission to examine whether the rule should continue to operate in English law.The genesis of the rule was, it seems, satisfactorily described by Lord Templeman and its usefulness lies in the fact that it imposes a degree of certainty and reliability on the parties. Each knows from the outset what they have contracted for. Its failing lies in the fact that its operation, as Russell L.J. rightly pointed out, leads to a freely negotiated bargain being defeated. If the Law Commission does examine the rule then clearly the central issue will be the balancing of these two principles and which is to be given effect to. If the law wishes to see certainty and reliability in this area, then Lord Templeman's decision is undoubtedly welcome since the law was clearly in a state of flux and confusion before the case.     

Computer based testing – Bolls v. W. Scott Street,Sec'y of Va. Bd. of Bar Exmnrs., August 11, 2009, case no. 090915

The most significant change to law licensing in the United States is the recent¹ reliance on computer-based testing for the bar exam in all of the fifty states. The following comment piece is meant to inform the computer and technology law community how the use of testing software must necessarily be accompanied by additional procedural protections and corrective processes that may not have existed previously. Chief among these is the availability of discovery of the item in question, namely in this case the essays in a computer-based bar exam, which constitutes evidence that is essential to vindicating one's rights when a software failure occurs.     

A Criticism of M. Siderits and J. L. Garfield’s ‘Semantic Interpretation’ of Nāgārjuna’s Theory of Two Truths

This paper proposes a critical analysis of that interpretation of the Nāgārjunian doctrine of the two truths as summarized—by both Mark Siderits and Jay L. Garfield—in the formula: “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth”. This ‘semantic reading’ of Nāgārjuna’s theory, despite its importance as a criticism of the ‘metaphysical interpretations’, would in itself be defective and improbable. Indeed, firstly, semantic interpretation presents a formal defect: it fails to clearly and explicitly express that which it contains logically; the previously mentioned formula must necessarily be completed by: “the conventional truth is that nothing is conventional truth”. Secondly, after having recognized what Siderits’ and Garfield’s analyses contain implicitly, other logical and philological defects in their position emerge: the existence of the ‘conventional’ would appear—despite the efforts of semantic interpreters to demonstrate quite the contrary—definitively inconceivable without the presupposition of something ‘real’; moreover, the number of verses in Nāgārjuna that are in opposition to the semantic interpretation (even if we grant semantic interpreters that these verses do not justify a metaphysical reconstruction of Nagarjuna’s doctrine) would seem too great and significant to be ignored.     

Mass Violence and the Continuum of Destruction: A study of C. P. Taylor’s Good

There are important studies that have directly focused on how, in times of conflict, it is possible for previously law abiding people to commit the most atrocious acts of cruelty and violence. The work of Erich Fromm (Escape from Freedom), Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem), Zygmunt Bauman (Modernity and the Holocaust) and Ernest Becker (Escape from Evil) have all contemplated the driving force of aggression and mass violence to further our understanding of how people are capable of engaging in extreme forms of cruelty and violence. This paper specifically addresses these issues by focusing on C. P. Taylor’s play Good. This provocative play examines how a seemingly ‘good’ and intelligent university professor can gradually become caught up in the workings of the Third Reich. Taylor highlights the importance of appreciating how people can be steadily incorporated into an ideologically destructive system. I argue that the theatre is a powerful medium to explore these complex issues. The audience of Good find themselves confronted with the following question—‘What would you have done?’

     

Lanzhou Univ. of Tech., Lanzhou 730050

C square-wave pulse inverter controlled by DSP was introduced. TMS320-serial DSP produced by Texas Instruments Corp., its developing environment and program flow, and the use of the software CCS were also introduced. According to the requirement of output waveform, the main program of control system, interruption service routine, and subroutines were designed by using modularized software design method. Offline and online experimental results indicated t     

Measuring Reed’s Reach: Content Discrimination in the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals After Reed v. Town of Gilbert

Commentators and justices on the Supreme Court of the United States speculated when the Court delivered its opinion in Reed v. Town of Gilbert in 2015 that the case would dramatically reshape First Amendment law. This article analyzes Reed’s impact to date in the United States Circuit Courts of Appeals. The article demonstrates that, although Reed has been consequential in some circuits, it has not been the basis of any First Amendment revolution. Indeed, the research supports the conclusion that many circuit courts seem to be actively working to narrow Reed’s reach. Moreover, the article concludes that Reed did little to clarify — and in some ways made worse — what has been a problematic doctrine for decades.     

Idea generation: the performance of U.S. States 1997–2007

Regional prosperity increasingly depends on a region’s capacity to have command over the production of ideas. Measuring the production of ideas with patents, the objective of this paper is to analyze how the number of utility patents granted to inventors in U.S. States in different technologies changed between 1997 and 2007 and how States took advantage of the new opportunities and adapted to the changing technology landscape. The paper uses shift-share analysis, traditionally used in employment studies, for analyzing change in patents by technology categories developed by the NBER. The shift-share results show that only a few states were able to take advantage of the information technology driven increases in patents. California dominates in patent production and may be providing spillover benefits to neighboring states. The shift-share decompositions are used as variables in a fixed-effect panel-regression model of state economic growth. The regression results show that the shift-share decompositions provide statistically significant information in explaining growth after accounting for a State’s stock of patents, suggesting that States should concentrate on effective ways to boost their stock of knowledge in rapidly growing technologies to improve state economic growth.     

A War on Cops? The Effects of Ferguson on the Number of U.S. Police Officers Murdered in the Line of Duty

Police agencies in the U.S. are currently facing a major legitimacy crisis resulting from a spate of high-profile use of force incidents, many involving minority citizens. Recent headlines emphasize that there is now a “war on cops” and that police officers are facing increasing levels of hostility and violence fueled by a growing anti-police sentiment. In the aftermath of events in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, some commentators claim that the number of police officers feloniously assaulted and killed in the line of duty has increased sharply. Using time series analysis of data from the Officer Down Memorial Page, we test whether events in Ferguson were associated with an increase in the number of police officers murdered in the line of duty. Our results provide no evidence for a “Ferguson Effect” on the number of U.S. police officers murdered in the line of duty as of March 2016.     

Juvenile Involvement in Fratricide and Sororicide: An Empirical Analysis of 32?Years of U.S. Arrest Data

Despite the interest in juvenile homicide offenders, few studies have systematically examined their involvement in incidents involving specific victims. This study focused on one victim type, the killings of siblings. To date, siblicide research has been based primarily on case studies. Bivariate and multivariate techniques were used to systematically investigate offender, victim, and incident characteristics associated with fratricides and sororicides committed by juvenile homicide offenders in single victim, single offender incidents over a 32-year period (1976–2007), as recorded in the Supplementary Homicide Report data base. Juvenile sororicide offenders, relative to juvenile fratricide offenders, were significantly more likely to be female and to kill younger victims. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings in terms of past research, their implications for intervention and prevention, and directions for future research.     

Has Legal Realism Damaged the Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court?

Does understanding how U.S. Supreme Court justices actually decide cases undermine the institutional legitimacy of the nation's highest court? To the extent that ordinary people recognize that the justices are deciding legal disputes on the basis of their own ideological biases and preferences (legal realism and the attitudinal model), the belief that the justices merely “apply” the law (mechanical jurisprudence and the myth of legality) is difficult to sustain. Although it is easy to see how the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, the most unaccountable of all American political institutions, is nurtured by the view that judicial decisionmaking is discretionless and mechanical, the sources of institutional legitimacy under legal realism are less obvious. Here, we demonstrate, using a nationally representative sample, that the American people understand judicial decisionmaking in realistic terms, that they extend legitimacy to the Supreme Court, and they do so under the belief that judges exercise their discretion in a principled and sincere fashion. Belief in mechanical jurisprudence is therefore not a necessary underpinning of judicial legitimacy; belief in legal realism is not incompatible with legitimacy.     

Constancy and change in the U.S. age distribution of crime: A test of the “invariance hypothesis”

The recent controversy over the age relationship with criminal behavior can be traced to Hirschi and Gottfredson's (Am. J. Sociol. 89, 552–584, 1983) failure to define invariance. In this paper, I distinguish two types of invariance—parametric andmathematical form— that explains both the pattern of stability claimed by Hirschi and Gottfredson and the pattern of variability observed in more recent research. I then directly test for each type of invariance using age-specific arrest data for index offenses in the United States from 1952 to 1987. The results are largely consistent with recent research showing variability in the characteristics (i.e., parameters) of the age distribution of crime, but at the same time, the results provide evidence for a persistent, underlying mathematical form to the age distribution of crime, regardless of year or offense type.