West African Voices

A new literary programme has been started in the West AfricanService of the B.B.C., and this article is a reprint of oneof the talks. The Ibo speaker was formerly in the Customs, andqualified as a barrister last November: he is also the authorof numerous poems in English, and of a novel, The Prince ofUtete. The other two are schoolmasters working as Assistantsat the School of Oriental and African Studies. For technicalreasons, the orthography is not quite complete.     

Identity Confusion

When I was in high school, I went on a family vacation to Ocho Rios, Jamaica. I was getting lunch at a grilled chicken stand, when the cook asked me, "Miss Chin, where are you from?" (Jamaicans use Miss Chin as an affectionate nickname for all Chinese women.) I answered, "I’m from New Jersey, but I’m Korean." He practically dropped his spatula. "Whaaaat? I never met Korean Japanese Miss Chin fromNewJersey!"heshouted.Thatwas the only time I’ve had someone     

The reorientation of place legislation in England in the 1690s

Summary

Mediating Conflict in the Swiss Diets of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries

The Helvetic Confederation developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as a web of alliances between the most important urban and peasant republics (Orte) in the area of present‐day Switzerland. The only form of mediating conflicts laid down in the alliances was by tribunals of arbitration; but these were never recognised by all the Orte in the web of alliances and proved inadequate in the face of growing antagonisms and coalitions throughout the Confederacy. It became necessary to have recourse to political arrangements involving the interested parties. The forum for these arrangements was the Diets, meetings of deputies of all members of the Confederacy. These more or less represented the most important political forces. Difficulties arose only when there was no consensus in individual Orten and when the official deputies to the Diet represented only the magistrates (Obrigkeiten). In such cases it could happen, especially in matters of foreign policy, that individual groups went their own way and thwarted the decisions of the Diet. It usually took a long time to arrive at a consensus in the Diets because the deputies were bound by an ‘imperative mandate’ and the minority would mostly not accept the will of the majority. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries participation and the achievement of consensus were the conditions of joint action of the Helvetic Confederation.     

Commission Newsletter: 1995

SUMMARY

In this article, M. Manolova examines the provisions in the Bulgarian Constitution of 1879 which concern the responsibility of government ministers. It is shown how these provisions were unusually explicit in establishing that ministers were both individually and collectively responsible for their actions in government and in insisting that the power to institute proceedings lay exclusively with the parliament. The article compares the Bulgarian provisions with those in similar liberal constitutions of the period and notes the several instances down to 1919 when the provisions were implemented, in order to suggest that the principal of ministerial responsibility had a special importance in Bulgarian constitutional theory and practice.