Manners of Imagining the real

What counts as evidence? What is accepted as true in court given the evidence admitted? How are subordinated peoples further oppressed in courts because they cannot demonstrate that their experience is fact? Drawing on the confirmation brings for Clarence Thomas as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and the testimony of Anita Hill in those hearings, the author explores the ways in which representations of sexual violence against women can be seen as not “real.”     

THE FIRST TWO OIL SHOCKS: POLICY RESPONSE AND EFFECTIVENESS

A simultaneous, comparative review of the attempts by different countries and country groupings to react to the economic problems caused by the two oil shocks. of the 1970s can help us evaluate the relative success of those efforts. In general, the world has yet to recover from those shocks, with various combinations of slow growth, high unemployment, high inflation rates, and substantial governmental andlor international debt still facing countries everywhere. It appears that different combinations of traditional fiscal and monetary policy largely shifted the temporal impact of the shocks or altered the trade-offs among problem categories. It also appears that energy policy may be a more powerful tool with which to approach the possibility of future shocks than any combination of economic policies.     

Diminished Lives and Malpractice: Courts Stalled in Transition

Medicine is still largely a pre-Darwin, pre-Newton enterprise…. We do not yet understand the underlying mechanisms of the major illnesses which plague humanity, and therefore much of what is done in the treatment of illness must still be empirical, trial and error therapy. We are compelled by our limitations to resort to shoring things up, applying halfway technology, trying to fix things after the fact.¹     

Principles of Autonomy*

Autonomy has two faces, individual autonomy and institutional autonomy. Political systems not only deal with demands for individual freedom, the traditional rights of citizens to freedom of opinion, association and contract. Institutional autonomy is a pervasive property of all kinds of political systems. To international political systems just as to local and regional political systems, autonomy is a basic property. Both types of systems face the difficult task of maintaining stable relations with the nation state, securing an amount of control for the nation state while retaining some autonomy for themselves. The demand of various regions for independence or semiindependence within nation states has been a dominant theme in the politics of the sixties and the seventies. The autonomy of the nation state is its sovereignty. International political systems present a threat to the autonomy of the nation state, while at the same time they may provide mechanisms by means of which other sources of infringements on autonomy may be counteracted. Autonomy is a fundamental political property. A theoretical understanding of autonomy is conducive to the explanation of those aspects of political systems that are related to stability. Such an interpretation may place autonomy in an equilibrium analysis of how demand and supply of autonomy interacts with other basic political properties like influence and control.     

Understanding judicial discretion

The main aim of this paper is to clarify the dispute over judicial discretion by distinguishing the different senses in which claims about judicial discretion can be understood and by examining the arguments for these various interpretations. Three different levels of dispute need to be recognized. The first concerns whether judges actually do exercise discretion, the second involves whether judges are entitled to exercise discretion, and the third is about the proper institutional role of judges. In this context, the views of Dworkin, Raz, Perry, Greenawalt, and Sartorius are examined. Finally, it is suggested that a resolution of the judicial discretion controversy requires a satisfactory theory of the justification of judicial decisions.