Secularism before the Strasbourg Court: Abstract Constitutional Principles as a Basis for Limiting Rights

The justification for the restrictions on religion inherent in secularism is the subject of lively debate in constitutional and political theory. As a rights‐focused text, the ECHR struggles to accommodate constitutional principles such as secularism whose aims and justifications may go beyond the protection of the rights of others and include abstract goals such as upholding the religious neutrality of the state. Rights alone cannot provide an adequate account of the relationship between religion, state and law, and in Ebrahimian v France, the Strasbourg Court rightly reaffirmed that secularism and strict neutrality can be in harmony with the values of the Convention. However, the Court needs more clarity about the reasons for this stance and to be vigilant in its protection of private autonomy so that the use of abstract principles to restrict religious expression does not give excessive latitude to states to restrict individual autonomy and minority rights.     

Wiltshire Council v Cooper Estates Strategic Land Ltd: Development Plans and the Restriction of Town and Village Green Applications

The Court of Appeal has, for the first time, considered the scheme of ‘trigger events’ introduced in the Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013 which preclude the registration of land as a town or village green (or TVG). The event in question concerned identification for potential development in a development plan document. The court was required to determine what constitutes ‘identification for potential development’ for the purposes of the statute. This note suggests that the court's interpretation of ‘identification for potential development’ is unconvincing, and was motivated primarily by policy: to render it more difficult to register land as a TVG. It argues that the judgment constitutes a further and significant restriction on the future viability of TVG applications, rendering entire settlements liable to lose the application of TVG law.     

A lively and engaging series of essays

Intellectual Property Stories is the latest title in the ‘LawStories Series’ from Foundation Press (a Thomson/Westimprint), which sets out to explore the stories behind variousnoteworthy US Supreme Court decisions in different areas oflaw, including tax, torts, constitutional law, civil procedureand property. The series was launched in 2003 when ProfessorCaron P (the series editor) published Tax Stories, which workis complemented by an excellent companion website providinga complete record of each of the ten cases discussed in thebook, including lower court opinions, briefs of the partiesand amicus curiae, oral arguments (where available), and theSupreme Court's opinions (www.law.uc.edu/TaxStories). IntellectualProperty     

Violent Couples: Coping and Communication Skills

Twelve married couples court-ordered to attend a violence reduction treatment program completed self-report measures of anger, social problem-solving skills, and strategies employed for dealing with high-conflict situations. They were subsequently videotaped while discussing 3 different scenarios. Three raters independently coded the videotapes for the use of effective and ineffective communication strategies used by the participants. Aggregate reliability estimates were acceptable. No gender-based differences were found on the self-report measures or the communication skill ratings. When couples discussed low-conflict situations use of effective skills exceeded use of ineffective skills, and when couples discussed high-conflict problems use of ineffective skills exceeded use of effective skills. Implications for treatment of spousal assault are presented.     

Introduction

Journal of Indian Philosophy -     

The environmental determinants of diversity management: Competition,collaboration and clients

Diversity management has received considerable attention in public management research. Most existing research, however, analyses the effects rather than the determinants of diversity management. Using panel data on American hospitals from 2008 to 2011, we probe how market competition, inter‐organizational collaboration and clientele diversity affect diversity management adoption. We find that all three environmental factors increase diversity management adoption. Hospitals in competitive markets are more likely to adopt diversity management strategies when they engage in extensive service collaboration and serve a diverse population. Monopolies in less collaborative environments lag behind in adopting diversity management, especially when they serve ethnically homogenous populations. Our findings broaden understandings about what drives diversity management practices and add to the literature on the external contingency of managerial practice.     

Playing with the System: Fragmentation and Individualization in Late Pre-colonial Mīmāṃsā

Studies of Indian philosophy have generally overemphasized the con-sistency of philosophical systems over time, and consequently slighted later works as derivative. This paper seeks to reassess the “system” as a basic category for analyzing Sanskrit philosophy, in particular by examining the changes that took place in hermeneutics, or Mīmā?sā, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it became commonplace for Mīmā?sā authors to criticize long established Mīmā?sā positions. At first this criticism is selective and largely directed at more recent authors, but the margins of acceptable criticism are gradually broadened to the point when even the foundational works of the tradition are routinely attacked, and works are produced whose sole purpose appears to be to attack established Mīmā?sā tenets, sometimes without even attempting to replace them with a more workable set of views. It becomes increasingly difficult to see what if anything one must believe to be considered a Mīmā?saka.     

Poetry Beyond Good and Evil: Bilhaṇa and the Tradition of Patron-centered Court Epic

The eleventh century poet Bilhaṇa’s magnum opus, his Vikramāṅkadevacarita, quickly became one of the most admired and quoted examplars of a newly emergent genre in second millennium Sanskrit poetry, the patron-centered court epic—an extended verse composition dedicated to relating the deeds and celebrating the virtues of the pet’s own patron. But Bilhaṇa’s verse biography of his patron, the Cālukya monarch Vikramāditya VI, while ostensibly singing his praises, is colored throughout by darker suggestions that Vikramāditya may be less than the moral paragon it proclaims him to be, and that the power of poetry lies precisely in its ability to fabricate royal virtue where none exists, and to wash clean the reputation of any king, regardless of his actual deeds. He makes these insinuatons through a variety of formal and narrative techniques, most strikingly by his persistent suggestions that Vikramāditya has perhaps less in common with Rāma, the archetypal paragon of royal virtue, than with his demonic antagonist Rāvaṇa, and, even more corrosively, that Rāma’s own reputation may owe more to his panegyrist’s skill than to his own virtue.