Shrinks vs. shysters

In 1976, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a new mental health law which was designed to give civil and due process rights to the mentally ill, as well as to speed up the deinstitutionalization process. The psychiatric profession voiced loud disapproval of the new law. The public interest bar entered the issue, opposing the psychiatrists. In 1978, the law was amended, and most of the hard-won patients' rights were lost. This paper analyzes the reasons behind the psychiatric demand and victory, as well as the reasons for the lawyer's unsuccessful opposition, using two similar battles, one fought in the British Parliament in the eighteenth century, and one in the California legislature in the early twentieth century. Conclusions are drawn concerning the reason for the legislative “turnabout,” and predictions concerning the course of future battles are made.     

Profit Neutrality in Licensing: The Boundary Between Antitrust Law and Patent Law

We address the patent/antitrust conflict in licensing and developthree guiding principles for deciding acceptable terms of license.Profit neutrality holds that patent rewards should not dependon the rightholder’s ability to work the patent himself.Derived reward holds that the patentholder’s profits shouldbe earned, if at all, from the social value created by the invention.Minimalism holds that licenses should not be more restrictivethan necessary to achieve neutrality. We argue that these principlesare economically sound and rationalize some key decisions ofthe twentieth century such as General Electric and Line Material.     

Body Idiom in Platform Events: Media Representation and the Hegemony of the Vicarious Conversation

Taking a comparative approach to critical semiotics, I describe reciprocal relations between media representation of body idiom in platform events and the interaction order of social relations among people in Hong Kong. I argue that two conflicting representations of body idiom vie for supremacy in the former colony, in broadcast television as well as in print media, business, government and education. These can be related to monofocal and polyfocal platform formats. The predominant semiotic representation of the postural presentation of self in international media, the monofocal platform format, grows out of what we call the Utilitarian Discourse System, and is in a problematic dialectical relationship with Hong Kong and other societies. This model of the monologue is articulated by Dale Carnegie in his 1937 book How to Win Friends and Influence People, which advocates establishing and maintaining eye contact and a friendly manner. On the part of the audience, it requires accepting the fiction of a dialogue that is in fact vicarious. I argue that this acceptance evolved in Europe during the Enlightenment in what Foucault described as the disciplines of panopticism, but did not evolve in Hong Kong or China. I sketch the historical development of Hong Kong media and society in an attempt to explain the disjunction between media representation and interaction order, and conclude that critical social semiotics can make a contribution in disentangling these disparate interaction orders and media representations of body idiom.     

Foreign aid,debt relief and Africa's development: problems and prospects

In recent years, the Paris club granted a number of African countries, including Nigeria, debt relief. This elicited widespread celebration in the capital cities of affected countries, where it was portrayed as a veritable launch-pad to Africa's development. This paper takes a critical look at the debt relief, with emphasis on its problems and prospects for Africa's development. It is argued that while debt relief does offer some prospects for development, there is little or no evidence to suggest that such an outcome is automatic. The conditions that precipitated the debt crisis in the first instance, including an inequitable international economic order and political conditions tied to aid, are still very present in the debt relief regime. Corruption of the foreign aid regime by both internal and external actors has been compounded by the recent global economic crisis, posing further constraints on the effectiveness of foreign aid in Africa. If debt relief must yield the desired result, it has to be accompanied by a sustainable campaign to fundamentally reform the world order to make it more equitable, together with a drive for good governance that is not only democratic, but also efficient and development-oriented in Africa.     

The role of architecture in the Republic of Georgia’s European aspirations

Alignment with Europe has been a popular foreign policy objective among post-socialist nations. In the Republic of Georgia, discourse surrounding the country’s Euro-Atlantic orientation surged in the decade after the 2003 Rose Revolution. While such discourse has been examined in the context of political reforms and national security goals, this article foregrounds how it was incorporated into alterations of the built environment. Focusing on the urban transformations of the city of Batumi after the rise to power of the United National Movement government, it demonstrates how architecture served as a tool for selectively rewriting Georgia’s contemporary European identity. This article concentrates on two parallel initiatives to transform Batumi into a contemporary European city: the reconstruction of portions of the Old City and the new development along the seaside boulevard. Using evidence collected through qualitative methods, it further highlights the contradictions that emerged during this process of redevelopment and rebranding, as the state balanced initiatives for new development with other post-revolutionary state-building objectives, such as political reform and tourism-market production. Accordingly, it unpacks the various national and international politico-economic forces at play in the process of developing Batumi into the image of a contemporary European city.