The Madonna and Margaret fuller

Alicia Suskin Ostriker. Feminist Revision and the Bible. Cambridge, Blackwell Publishers, 1993. 148 pp., ix; intro., Catherine Pastore Blair and Harold Schweizer.

Brenda Webster, Sins of the Mothers. Baskerville Publishers, Dallas, Texas, 1993. 364 pp.

Shoshana Felman, What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 178 pp.     

When complex facts threaten court reviews: Litigation over navigation projects

The capacity of the U.S. courts to provide effective review of cases involving complex scientific and economic analysis is declining. Rational action in such cases requires three things: a general rule by which to judge the appropriateness of actual or proposed actions; a set of facts sufficient for determining the consistency of the action with the general rule; and an independent review institution with power to enforce actions under the rule. Where the issues are complex, however, government agencies increasingly have tended to cloak their decisions in needlessly technical formulations and to buttress their presentations in masses of impenetrable data. Courts tend to avoid involvement in the complexities, resting instead on a presumption that government reports are accurate and government actions appropriate; this is a tendency we label “judicial math block.” Two cases taken from the complex area of public navigation investment illustrate the problem.     

Res Ipsa Loquitur: a step along the road to liability without fault

Traditionally, courts have required that the plaintiff prove the negligence of medical defendants through expert testimony. Res ipsa loquitur, on the other hand, allows juries to infer negligence from the circumstances surrounding the injury. The tension between those two propositions is obvious. It is incongruous to allow a lay jury to infer a proposition that generally demands expert proof.