Susan Smith and Her Children: A Reasoning Dialectic

Human judgment and decision making has been demonstrated by several contemporary researchers to be comprised of both rational and emotive/intuitive cognitive systems; a single decision can involve both rational thinking and intuition. In the present article, a narrative approach is utilized to analyze the Susan Smith case, and this is interlaced with contemporary decision theory in an attempt to more fully understand the seemingly nonrational act (murder/attempted suicide) committed by Susan Smith in October, 1994. The ethical, legal and social implications of using an approach of this nature are discussed.     

The German community in 19<Superscript>th</Superscript> century Hong Kong

This article examines the development of the German community in Hong Kong between the 1840s and the outbreak of the First World War. It pays particular attention to the question of how the Germans, as a minority group in the crown colony, attempted to strike a good balance between integration and segregation, cultural assimilation and dissimilation, national identity and marginalization. Through investigating their social life, missionary activities and economic activities in Hong Kong, it shows that they, on the one hand, cooperated closely with the British who were in charge of key political and economic affairs, and on the other hand worked with the local Chinese on different social stratums. Although the unification of Germany in 1870 strengthened the sense of nationhood among German people in Hong Kong, they strove to strengthen the German cultural and economic network that already existed in and around the colony, without sacrificing their business and social interests which were interwoven with those of the British and the local Chinese. It is this strategy that enabled them to survive in Hong Kong until 1914.     

The coalition of the willing: Effect of country diversity in an environmental treaty game

It is analyzed how size differences among countries affect the benefits from climate coalitions. It is shown that size differences lead to smaller coalitions and greater benefits than coalitions among identical countries. The importance of trigger strategies for supporting cooperative solutions is considered. A real world example, based on the world’s six largest emitters, is used to illustrate the implications of size differences in terms of emissions versus valuations of benefits. Climate coalitions become smaller when ranking in terms of benefits is different from ranking in terms of emissions. Three cases of benefit valuations are considered: benefits equal (i) share in world emissions, (ii) share in world GDP, and (iii) share of world population.     

Analysis on the impact of the “Dilution Theory” on ruling of trademark cases

Chinese trademark law has established the cross-category protection system of well-known trademarks based on the confusion theory. The system, however, has many problems in practice and does not fulfill completely the needs for protecting well-known trademarks. Consequently, when hearing trademark cases, some judges have abandoned the confusion theory instead of using the dilution theory in judging well-known trademarks. Through analysis on 100 judgments concerning well-known trademark cases, it can be seen that the influence of the dilution theory on the ruling of trademark cases is increasing. Certain conditions should first be satisfied when introducing the dilution theory to rule trademark cases: Firstly, the contents of the dilution theory shall be grasped as correctly as possible to avoid plausible understanding; secondly, the application of the dilution theory shall adopt the existing institutional criteria as much as possible by full use of the leeway of interpretation provided by the existing system.     

Interest-Based Negotiations in a Transformed Labor–Management Setting

The authors introduce a group of essays that evolved from a March 2003 symposium on the path-breaking new partnership and use of interest-based negotiation (IBN) at Kaiser Permanente (KP), one of the largest integrated health care programs in the United States. They briefly trace the history of the IBN approach (both success stories and failures); the growth of this phenomenon; and its use in collective bargaining settings. The KP case, the focus of the symposium (which was jointly sponsored by MIT's Institute for Work and Employment Relations and Harvard's Program on Negotiation), is by far the largest instance of the use of IBN in U.S. labor relations history.