Miscarriage of Justice? Postcolonial Reflections on the ‘Trial’ of the Maharajah of Baroda, 1875

This article revisits the Baroda Incident 1875, providing a detailed examination of the Enquiry or ‹trial’ for the first time, and locating that examination in the wider socio-cultural context of the nineteenth century British Empire (especially the Raj) and the exporting of the ‹British’/English legal culture to the Empire. The implications of the establishing of British principles of justice, including the value placed upon Indian-generated evidence and testimony by the courts, are explored, in order to establish the Baroda Incident as a significant miscarriage of justice. Using historical methodologies as well as postcolonial insights, it demonstrates that the concepts of justice on which the British prided themselves were intrinsincally racialised as well as gendered, with profound modern resonances. Dr. Judith Rowbotham is a Reader, School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University.     

Competitive Liberalization,Competitive Imperialism,and Intellectual Property

Aggressive pursuit of free trade agreements (FTAs) and customs unions (CUs) by major and minor trading powers alike challenges the conventional wisdom in favor of such pursuit – competitive liberalization. An equally plausible explanation for an active bilateral and regional trade agreement policy, one which effectively de-emphasizes multilateralism, may be competitive imperialism. The protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights is one area in which new provisions, going beyond multilateral rules, are being negotiated and written into FTAs and CUs. Such provisions may yield insights into which characterization of bilateralism and regionalism – competitive liberalization or competitive imperialism – is more apt. Rice Distinguished Professor, The University of Kansas, School of Law, Green Hall, 1535 West 15th Street, Lawrence, KS 66045-7577, USA. Tel. +1-785-8649224. Fax. +1-785-8645054. www.law.ku.edu. J.D., Harvard (1989); M.Sc., Oxford (1986); M.Sc., London School of Economics (1985); A.B., Duke (1984). Marshall Scholar (1984-86). Member, Council on Foreign Relations, Royal Society for Asian Affairs, and Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. Author, Modern GATT Law (Sweet & Maxwell 2005), International Trade Law: Theory and Practice (2nd ed. 2000, 3rd ed. forthcoming 2007-08), and Trade, Development, and Social Justice (Carolina Academic Press 2003). I am thankful to my Research Assistant, Mr. David R. Jackson (B.A., George Mason University, 1992; J.D. Class of 2007, University of Kansas), for his indispensable help on this work. I also am grateful to Dr. Mohammed El Said, University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN), for his consistent support and friendship, and for what he has taught and continues to teach me about international trade and intellectual property.     

Penal Excess and Surplus Meaning: Public Torture Lynchings in Twentieth-Century America

The most notorious lynchings that occurred in the United States between 1890 and 1940 involved publicity, crowds, ritual, and abnormal cruelty. Several hundred of these "public torture lynchings" took place, most of them in the Deep South. The author develops an interpretation that takes seriously the specific forms and discourses that lynchers and their supporters used to describe and justify these events—characterizing them as criminal punishments, albeit summary, informal ones that were shaped by a white supremacist culture and a politics of racial domination. An interpretation of the penal context and meanings of these public torture lynchings helps us understand their specific forms and their claims to legitimacy. The penal character of these lynchings increased the probability that they would be tolerated by local (and even national) audiences and thus made them a strategic form of violence in struggles to maintain racial supremacy. The author argues that a consideration of these events should lead us to revise our standard narratives about the evolution of modern punishments.     

Isolation of the DNA minisatellite probe MZ 1.3 and its application to DNA 'fingerprinting' analysis

A minisatellite probe, MZ 1.3, detecting hypervariable fragment patterns was isolated from a human genomic library. A repetitive sequence of 27 bp length was identified which is contained in the probe approx. 40 times. The MZ 1.3 repeat shows variable homology of 53-73% to the repetitive sequence of the protein III gene of the bacteriophage M13 genome. Polymorphic restriction fragment patterns were found with MZ 1.3 using the enzymes Hinf I, BstN I, Hae III, Mbo I, PstI/Pvu II, and Rsa I. An average of 18 polymorphic fragments was observed using Hinf I as enzyme. The band sharing frequency after Hinf I digestion among unrelated individuals was determined to be 23.8 +/- 7.2%. An example for the application of MZ 1.3 to paternity testing in an incest case is given. The probe can be used with radioactive or non-radioactive detection systems. An approach is presented to compare polymorphic fragment patterns from individuals obtained by independent gel runs on the basis of relative band positions (RBP) and calculated in a computerized analysis.