Reducing Variability in Civil Jury Awards

The purpose of the present study was to test several procedures that could be adopted for reducing unwanted variability in civil damage awards. Four methods for providing guidance to jurors (and judges) about the distribution of awards in comparable cases were compared to each other, to a no-guidance control, and to the capping of awards at a specified maximum, which has been the most commonly legislated solution. The findings of this study suggest several alternative solutions that are better able than caps to solve the problem of unwanted variability in awards.     

‘White Already to Harvest’: South Australian Women Missionaries in India

In 1882, the South Australian Baptist Missionary Society sent off its first missionaries to Faridpur in East Bengal. Miss Marie Gilbert and Miss Ellen Arnold were the first of a stream of missionary women who left the young South Australian colony to work in India. Scores of women from other Christian denominations and from other Australian colonies also went to India and indeed to other mission fields in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As with other western women missionaries, these women intended to save souls and to bring India's daughters to Christ, often by means of medical work. But unlike their British sisters, these women came from the edge of empire to intervene in another, but different, colonial site. These missionary ventures coincided with efforts of the Australian settlers to elaborate for themselves an identity separate from and against that of the metropolitan centre. Within these debates, contestations over the meaning of ‘the colonial girl’ and ‘the Australian girl’ played a key role. The article explores why the women were drawn to India rather than to working with Aboriginal people in Australia. It begins to investigate how in seeking to reconstruct Indian womanhood they elaborated for themselves a separate colonial, Australian identity and how much in their missionary endeavours they affirmed an identity as white, Christian and ultimately British.     

Martin Luther King's Civil Disobedience and the American Covenant Tradition

Daniel J. Elazar introduced the covenant idea to political sciencein his four-volume work, The Covenant Tradition in Politics.As he showed, American government and society are indebted tocovenant ways of New England Puritans and their doctrine, "federaltheology". Puritan covenants fostered polities whose framesof government and patterns of civil order established a federalmatrix antecedent to modern American federalism. The moral orientationof covenant has also influenced modern American political thought,as evidenced by the public philosophy articulated by the Rev.Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement(1954–1968). In such works as "The Letter from the BirminghamCity Jail," King challenged his contemporaries' ideas aboutlaw and justice, Americans with an opportunity to examine moderncovenant practice.     

Lords and Leg Cos: Two Second Chamber Sagas

New Zealand's approach to second chambers is best described as mercy killing which works well in a smaller polity where the first chamber can take up the burdens a second chamber would have helped to carry. Now, 50 years later, New Zealand has discovered the added benefit that proportional representation produces many of the bonuses claimed for second chambers and adds more. In Britain's bigger, tradition encrusted polity we are making a mess of reform of the House of Lords. The House of Commons is not capable of taking on the extra work the abolition of the Lords would require. So the peers stagger on. Labour made easy promises of modernisation, democratisation and the abolition of the hereditary peers without thinking any of it through and is now grappling with the consequences. Accidentally we have ended up with a very effective second chamber but a temporary one. Having released the democratic beast from its cage we seem set to upset this balance to create a hybrid House which will be mainly elected. Unless there is a belated decision to leave well alone.     

Determinants and consequences of university spinoff activity: a conceptual framework

The characteristics and behavior of university spinoff activity is an important subject in economic and management studies literature. Such studies merit research because it is suggested that university innovations stimulate economies by spurring product development, by creating new industries, and by contributing to employment and wealth creation. For this reason, universities have come to be highly valued in terms of the economic potential of their research efforts. The aim of this paper is to offer a framework for the study of academic entrepreneurship that explains different aspects of university spinoff behavior in a coherent way. We suggest that the existing literature on this topic can be categorized into six separate streams and synthesized in a framework that captures the determinants and consequences of spinoff activity.