Australia and a Post-Brexit Britain

This article, based on the Robert Menzies Lecture delivered by the author in London on 31 October 2017, provides a survey of Britain and Australia’s bilateral relationship from the 1930s to the present. In the earlier period particular attention is given to the role of Sir Robert Menzies. The relationship is examined in the light of Britain’s accession to the EEC/EU with reference to bilateral trade, security and global politics, and migration, with emphasis on strong people-to-people links. The author expresses hopes for renewed co-operation over free trade, a rules-based world outlook and links between universities in a post-Brexit world. He argues that although the bilateral relationship went through some troubled times in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it is now getting back to the natural strength that it deserves.     

The politics of quantitative easing and housing stimulus by the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank, 2008‒2018

Abstract

Central banks have been important yet underexplored actors in the fight against the Great Recession. In addition to ultra-low interest rates, they adopted large-scale bond-buying programmes known as quantitative easing (QE). Yet there is significant variation in QE programmes with important distributive consequences. Why has the Fed adopted multi-trillion-dollar bond-buying programmes in housing, while the ECB has not? This article argues that the Fed targeted the integrated housing finance market as a monetary transmission strategy to stimulate core elements of the US growth model: credit, demand, and consumption. In contrast, the ECB hardly stimulated housing given the eurozone’s fragmented housing finance markets and the macroeconomic frictions with some eurozone growth models, particularly export-oriented Germany. Analysing archival and interview data, this article traces the decisions of these central banks since the Great Recession, contributing to scholarship on the politics of central banking, economic policy in hard times, and the welfare state.     

Litigation Migrants

Civil law is enforced primarily via private litigation. One characteristic of private enforcement is that litigation levels tend to cycle between periods of boom and bust. This article builds a theory for explaining this fluctuation, proposing that plaintiffs’ attorneys can be understood as economic migrants. Just as workers cross borders to find jobs, lawyers “move” across case types and jurisdictions to find profitable claims, and case filing numbers increase as a result. Using the recent wage and hour litigation boom as a case study, this article paints an empirical picture of attorney migration and its influence on case filing numbers.     

Centred discourse,decentred practice: the relational production of Russian and Chinese ‘rising’ power in Central Asia

Abstract

This paper challenges dominant understandings of ‘rising powers’ by developing a decentred, relational account of Russia and China in Central Asia. We ask whether Moscow and Beijing’s regional integrative strategies do not guide, but rather are led by, everyday interactions among Russian and Chinese actors, and local actors in Central Asia. Rising powers, as a derivative of ‘Great Powers’, are frequently portrayed as structurally comparable units that concentrate power in their executives, fetishise territorial sovereignty, recruit client states, contest regional hegemony and explicitly oppose the post-1945 international order. In contrast, we demonstrate that the centred discourse of Eurasian integration promoted by Russian and Chinese leaders is decentred by networks of business and political elites, especially with regard to capital accumulation. Adopting Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of mimicry (subversion, hybridity) and J. C. Scott’s conception of mētis (local knowledge, agency), and using examples of Russian and Chinese investments and infrastructure projects in Central Asia, we argue that in order to understand centring discourse we must look to decentring practices at the periphery; that is, rising power is produced through ongoing interactions between actors at the margins of the state’s hegemonic reach.     

Sorting Out Mixtures of Property at Common Law

This article asks a simple question: when indistinguishable items of personal property owned by A and by B are mixed together, what rights do A and B have in relation to the resultant mass? It is argued that there is insufficient evidence in the positive law to provide any convincing answer to this question, and so it is asked which interpretation that can be drawn out from the law ought to be adopted. It will be shown that – both in relation to mixtures of goods and mixtures of cash – a rule of co‐ownership is to be preferred. The article's framework of analysis will be of interest to all those concerned by the relatively sparse case law that deals with foundational principles of personal property, and can help to guide a way forward in other contexts where the cases are silent, muddled, or fail to speak with one voice.     

What to do with all these Bayes factors: How to make Bayesian reports in deception research more informative

Bayes factors quantify the evidence in support of the null (absence of an effect) or the alternative hypothesis (presence of an effect). Based on commonly used cut‐offs, Bayes factors between 1/3 and 3 are interpreted as evidentially weak, and one typically concludes there is an absence of evidence. In this commentary on Warmelink, Subramanian, Tkacheva, and McLatchie (Legal Criminol Psychol 24, 2019, 258), we discuss how a Bayesian report can be made more informative. Firstly, this implies a departure from the labels provided by commonly used cut‐offs when reporting Bayes factors. Instead, we encourage researchers to report the value of the Bayes factors, or to convert these values into nominal support for the hypotheses. Secondly, researchers can provide recommendations to design follow‐up studies by examining the posterior distribution of the magnitude of the effect size. Lastly, we show how individual Bayes factors can be evaluated in the context of large‐scale meta‐analyses.