disowning dependence: single women's collective struggle for independence and land rights in northwestern India

In April 2008 over 2,600 single women marched for three days to Shimla, the state capital of the northwestern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, to demand rights to land, health care and ration cards for single women. The march was organized by a new social movement called Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan, comprising divorced, abandoned, never-married women, widows and wives fleeing domestic violence who are demanding rights from the state in their own names (rather than as wives, daughters or mothers); in so doing they are directly challenging the construct of the ‘dependent woman’ naturalized in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial discourses. The most radical of the demands of this new social movement is the struggle for land rights and the creation of new women-centred family formations. Through an analysis of their collective demands, I argue that the normative, dependent woman is mutually constituted not only at the intersections of gender, kinship and heterosexuality, but also spatially, through denial of rights to land. As single women disown their dependence upon husbands/fathers/brothers and demand land rights, they simultaneously re-imagine gendered selves by envisioning new marital families and re-working the division of labour.     

韩国的医师说明义务与患者知情同意权

医师的说明义务与患者的知情同意权是医疗关系的核心内容,并成为医疗责任认定的主要依据。韩国对于这一对权利义务关系的认识经历了从传统医疗模式向人道模式的转变,使得患者从医疗关系的客体转变为主体。这一转变不仅改变了患者的地位,更体现出法律的进步。然而,单纯强调患者的知情同意权将会导致医师实施保守治疗,因此,平衡医师的说明义务与患者知情同意权之间的关系显得尤为重要。     

The Progression from Tetra-Ethyl Lead to MTBE to Ethanol: Hidden Dangers and Unforeseen Risk

This article describes the progression of gasoline additives and the environmental and health effects of the preferred gasoline additives. It discusses the need for gasoline additives, the circumstances leading to tetra-ethyl lead becoming the first gasoline additive instead of ethanol, the regulation of automobile emissions leading to the phase-out of leaded gasoline, the introduction of oxygenates such as methyl tert-butyl ether to reduce ozone concentrations in urban areas, and the reasons for banning methyl tert-butyl ether, which resulted in ethanol becoming the preferred additive today.     

A new approach to measuring time-lags in technology licensing: study of U.S. academic research institutions

This paper contributes to measurement of licensing performance of U.S. research institutions by suggesting an approach for identifying time-lags in the licensing process. Licensing is a multi-state process starting with a disclosure, and resulting in intermediate outcomes such as patents, licensing agreements, and licensing income. The time duration among these variables is critical in understanding which investment is responsible for which outcome. This study develops a statistic procedure estimating time-lag coefficients among licensing variables using an unstructured regression model (OLS). The procedure is applied to 46 U.S. academic research institutions using the licensing survey data from 1991 to 2007 by Association of University Technology Manager. The results present individual time-lag relationships between each pair of licensing variables.     

Opposition or cooperation: the relationships between lawyers and non-lawyer professionals in the US, 1999–2008

Despite longstanding scholarly attention to professions in the US, the relationships between lawyers and non-lawyer professionals are not well explained. Socio-legal studies and studies of professions often take for granted conflicts as the nature of inter-professional relationships. However, this understanding ignores the possibility of cooperation in which a set of professional occupations jointly attains a limited supply of necessary resources. Based on the ecological concepts of interactions and environments, the author discusses the impact of non-lawyer professions on the population of lawyers in an attempt to understand the relationships between the occupational groups. Using the panel data model to test data from 50 US states and the District of Columbia over a 10-year period, the study reveals that the legal profession is in cooperation with professionals in financial and law-affiliated areas. The analysis of ecological interactions moves beyond conflict-oriented understanding of professional occupations, and further, exhorts for the exploration of various forms of inter-professional relationships.     

Lost in the Semiotic Maze: Empirical Approaches to Proof of Blurring in Trademark Dilution Law

One of the most interesting and possibly disturbing developments in U.S. trademark law in recent decades is the rise of a federal remedy for trademark dilution. Dilution law in theory provides a remedy for owners of famous trademarks when others use similar marks in ways that blur or tarnish the famous mark. This article focuses on attempts by courts and scholars to formulate a methodology for proving this elusive cause of action. The article offers a history of dilution regulation and analyzes and critiques representative empirical approaches to proving dilution, with a focus on dilution by blurring.