Preaching politics: Islam and Christianity on the Kenya coast

Focusing on the Kenya coast, this article analyses the developing contrast between the place of Islam and Christianity in public politics. It argues that Islam’s association with criticism of the political order contrasts with Christianity, but that this is not the result of inherent difference between the religions. Both have previously provided a language, and space, for political commentary and activism in Kenya. The contrast is rather the contingent result of particular circumstances in Kenya. Christianity has become increasingly associated with affirming clientelism and the accumulation of wealth in a way which is avowedly non-political but in practice legitimates the current political order. Meanwhile, although individual Muslims are more likely to enjoy high political office than was previously the case, Muslims are also more likely to locate their experience as symptomatic of a wider pattern of exclusion in Kenya and link this sense of local injustice to global inequalities.     

The Effect of Wanted Posters on Prospective and Retrospective Memory

The experiment tested prospective and retrospective memory for a person pictured on a wanted poster. Participants monitored the videotaped activity of a computer lab; one of their duties involved reporting if they saw a computer hacker. Half viewed a wanted poster of the hacker before the monitoring task and half after. For half the participants, the hacker appeared during monitoring and for half not. A diagnosticity ratio comparing the correct prospective memory identifications with false positive identifications showed that a prospective identification was 3.35 times more likely to be accurate than inaccurate. For those viewing the wanted poster after monitoring, the diagnosticity ratio was 1.21. Based on diagnosticity, a prospective identification had more value than a retrospective identification.     

The Costs of Respecting Sovereignty

Respect for sovereignty can be an effective tool to manage relations between states, drawing boundaries of acceptable behavior. But there are also clear costs of respecting sovereignty. A foreign policy based on a principled defense of sovereignty can be, in fact, morally wrong, politically illegitimate, and strategically dangerous. This does not mean that sovereignty should be broken wantonly, but only that prudential judgment must be exercised to weigh the costs and benefits of respecting the sovereignty of a state. In the end, our security and our values, not the principle of sovereignty, should be the metric by which we should judge the necessity and legitimacy of U.S. actions.     

Skype Technologies SA v Joltid Limited and others [2009] EWHC 2783 (Ch). Anti-suit injunction: Clarification of effect of English exclusive jurisdiction clause in worldwide technology licensing contract

The Court's discretion in granting an anti-suit injunction has been clarified further by the recent decision of Mr Justice Lewison in Skype Technologies SA v Joltid Limited and Others [2009] EWHC 2783 (Ch). Ruling on the Court's willingness to grant an anti-suit injunction where an exclusive jurisdiction clause had been breached, Mr Justice Lewison held that “standard considerations that arise in arguments about forum non conveniens should be given little weight in the face of an exclusive jurisdiction clause where the parties have chosen the courts of a neutral territory in the context of an agreement with world-wide application. Otherwise the exclusive jurisdiction clause would be deprived of its intended effect”. It follows that contracting parties who deliberately select the English courts as a neutral forum in an exclusive jurisdiction clause will not be allowed to “wriggle out” of their agreement, unless the party seeking to commence proceedings in an alternative forum can establish exceptional reasons, outside of ordinary forum non conveniens arguments, to justify why the exclusive jurisdiction clause should be displaced.     

U.S Federal Trade Commission hosts public forum on facial recognition technology

On December 8, 2011, the United States Federal Trade Commission hosted “Face Facts, A Forum on Facial Recognition Technology,” a one-day public forum exploring emerging issues in the field of facial recognition in Washington, D.C. Consisting of thought leaders from academics, government and industry, four panels analyzed and discussed the technology behind facial recognition, current and potential uses of that technology, and the privacy and security concerns raised by this newly-emerging technology. The event was open to the public and was made available on the Internet via webcast.     

Radical Islam in Europe

Europe now faces three related but different challenges: how to respond, in a time when “native” European populations are shrinking, to the growing presence of Muslim minorities; how to avoid having its relationships with its Muslim communities controlled by Islamists who seek to replace Western civilization with Islamic government based on sharia law; and what to do generally about this Islamist threat. Thus far, the European responses to these challenges have been shaped by four factors: accumulated civilizational exhaustion; the inability to grasp the challenge posed to European national identities by the allure of the global Caliphate; weakness arising from degraded security capabilities, including the impact of the continued drive to “build Europe” by adopting the Treaty of Lisbon; and the preference for appeasement of Islamist demands.     

South African regulation of online casinos licensed in a foreign jurisdiction

Advances in technology brought about new popular gambling activities such as online gambling (sometimes called trans-border e-gaming) in South Africa and abroad, demand new regulatory structures since the current laws on gambling do not have provisions for online gambling. This article addresses the legality of engaging in online gambling within the South African borders by casino operators who are licensed in a foreign jurisdiction, giving rise to the issue of determining the place where the act of gambling takes place between a player who is in South Africa while engaging on the Internet with a server in another country. Although this article deals with the South African perspective, realizing that South Africa is a developing country and the law relating to the Internet might be behind, a reference to the online gambling law of United States (US) is made to showcase a need for attention to regulate online gambling in both developing and developed countries.     

Approval regulation and endogenous consumer confidence: Theory and analogies to licensing,safety, and financial regulation

Safety regulation – in the form of pre-market approval, licensure, screening, and product entry limitations – governs numerous market realms, including consumer finance. In this article, we ask whether the effects of safety regulation go beyond safety and affect consumers' beliefs about the distribution of products they can use. We model “approval regulation,” where a government regulator must approve the market entry of a product based upon observable, unbiased, and non-anticipable experiments. We show that even if regulator and firm disagree about only quality standards, the disagreement induces the firm to provide more information about its product than it would in the absence of regulation. Put differently, purely first-order disagreements in regulation generate second-order consequences (more certainty about product quality). These second-order consequences of regulation are sufficient to generate first-order effects among end-users (more consumption of superior products), even when users are risk-neutral. In other words, even if approval regulation produces little or no improvement in safety or quality, it still aggregates information useful to “downstream” product users; these users will exhibit higher consumption and will more readily switch to superior products. In contrast with libertarian analyses of entry regulation and licensure, the model predicts that entry restrictions may be associated with greater product or service utilization (consumption) as well as with greater price sensitivity among consumers. Because contemporary cost–benefit analyses ignore these second-order effects, they are unlikely to capture the possible confidence effects of approval regulation.