US Appeals Court reminder: threats of litigation made during TTAB settlement discussions may support jurisdiction for declaratory judgment

The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that jurisdictionwas proper in a declaratory judgment action brought to establishtrade mark non-infringement, when the plaintiff had a reasonableapprehension of litigation based on threatening statements madeduring the course of discussions to settle disputes pendingbefore the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) that wereotherwise subject to Federal Rule of Evidence 408, which typicallymakes statements made during settlement inadmissible for establishingliability but not for other purposes.     

On the measurement of friend behavior in research on friend influence and selection: Findings from longitudinal studies of adolescent smoking and drinking

The principles that behavior is strongly influenced by the behavior of friends, and that people select each other to be friends on the basis of common characteristics, are based in large part on the many studies of adolescents that found the behavior of friends to be similar. In most of these studies, subjects were asked to describe, the behavior of their friends, and this information was then related to subjects' reports of their own behavior. The research on adolescent smoking and drinking described in this paper departs from that tradition by including friend reports of friend behavior so that results based on the different sources for measuring friend behavior can be compared. Subject report of friend behavior is a stronger correlate, of adolescent behavior than friend report of friend behavior, but the two sources for measuring friend behavior produce the same correlations with subject behavior when using longitudinal designs and controlling for prior subject behavior. The findings are discussed in the context of theoretical and methodological considerations of peer influence and selection.This research was supported by grants from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (AA04099) and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA02480) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.Received his Ph.D. from Florida State University. His research interests include adolescent health and evaluation research.Received her M.A. from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include methodology and analyses in behavioral sciences and applied social and developmental psychology.     

The Women's Charter: American Communists and the Equal Rights Amendment debate

The American Communist Party (CPUSA) opposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), arguing that it failed to ameliorate class and racial inequality. In 1936 the CPUSA participated in the Women's Charter campaign, an alternative to the ERA crafted to protect labor legislation. This article argues that the Charter campaign and the CPUSA's opposition to the ERA demonstrate class-based visions of equality that amalgamated race and gender into the class struggle and highlights disagreements among women's rights activists about how to define women's equality. These disagreements prevented a unified single-issue women's movement after 1920.     

Implementing Democratic Equality in Political Parties: Organisational Consequences in the Swedish and the German Pirate Parties

This article theorises and empirically assesses some important intra‐organisational implications of maximising democratic equality in political parties both between followers and members and between members and elites. They include weak member commitment, passivity of the rank‐and‐file membership and – depending on party structure – high levels of internal conflict. To substantiate the arguments, two parties that implement principles of democratic equality in their organisations are examined: the Swedish and German Pirate parties. These cases show, first, that while organisational structures implementing norms of equality allowed them to rapidly mobilise a considerable following, the same structures systematically reduced their capacity to consolidate support in the longer term – a weakness that might eventually put these parties' survival at risk. Second, they show that differences in the extent to which subnational units provide a foundation for member mobilisation helps to explain variation in the level of internal conflict experienced by these parties.     

Residential Aged Care Policy in Australia – Are We Learning from Evidence?

The residential aged care industry in Australia will expand rapidly over the next 10 years leading to substantial increases in government expenditure. Recent and future reforms are likely leading to changes in the structure of the industry with a potential impact on quality of care. The purpose of this paper is to stimulate broader public debate, based on the available evidence, about the preferred structure of this important industry. It examines the literature on the impact structure has on the quality of services and compares this with a fresh analysis of current trends. The paper argues that future policy should be evidence based and explicit about the structure of the industry that will emerge from current policy reforms.     

Maladies of our souls: identity and voice in the writing of academic international relations

Drawing primarily, but not exclusively on the work of Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes on language, writing, and ‘the subject’, I examine the issue of identity and writing in international relations. I argue that what has come to be labeled ‘critical’ or ‘radical’ constructivism rather insistently points in the direction of opening up spaces for discussing our own writing and exploring our own voices in what we write, though this has not been actively pursued. Sociologist Avery Gordon uses the phrase ‘making common cause’ to argue that our encounters with the social world ‘must strive to go beyond the fundamental alienation of turning social relations into just things we know and toward our own reckoning with how we are in these stories, with how they change us’. It seems to me that this is not possible without giving attention to the issue of voice, specifically the voice we use when we write about international relations. To speak of voice is to raise many interesting and important questions, to ponder our use of language, our locations within our stories and the discourses we create, and perhaps most importantly to give recognition to the presence of desire in language and in the writing of international national relations.     

Ranking of United Kingdom Law Journals: An Analysis of the Research Assessment Exercise 2001 Submissions and Results

Notwithstanding the Chancellor of the Exchequer's announcement in the 2006 Budget that, after the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise ('RAE 2008'), it is the government's firm presumption that the system for assessing research quality and allocating quality-related funding to United Kingdom universities will be mainly metrics based, RAE 2008 is vitually certain to proceed and to have considerable significance for legal research in the United Kingdom. In this rapidly developing and controversial context, this paper uses statistical analysis of the data from RAE 2001 to construct a series of metrics-based rankings which, when taken together, provide a reliable and coherent ranking of leading United Kingdom law journals.