Good Faith,Flawed Assets and the Emasculation of the UK Anti‐Deprivation Rule

The Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Belmont Park Investments Pty Ltd v BNY Corporate Trustee Services Ltd and Lehman Brothers Special Financing Inc is of major significance to lenders, especially those in the global structured finance market. This case confirms the validity of commonly used insolvency‐triggered secured‐priority flip clauses, and, more generally, suggests a dramatically reduced role for the common law anti‐deprivation principle. The decision may not fully resolve market uncertainty, however, given the particular analysis adopted in the case itself (analysed here) and its divergence from the US statutory approach to the same principle.     

Reducing the Hindsight Bias Utilizing Attorney Closing Arguments

In the legal system, jurors are asked to render a decision after the event in question has already occurred and the final outcome, typically negative, is known. This after-the-fact structure of the legal system makes jurors susceptible to a human judgment phenomenon known as hindsight bias. This study focused on reducing hindsight bias in a courtroom context by incorporating a debiasing strategy within the defense's closing argument. Subjects viewed one of three videotaped versions of plaintiff and defense closing arguments in a commercial litigation case (i.e., foresight condition, hindsight condition, and hindsight debiasing condition). Results indicate that the hindsight debiasing strategy was effective in reducing subject-juror hindsight bias.     

Federal Expenditure and Fiscal Illusion: A Test of the Flypaper Hypothesis in Australia

Despite the fact that there are strong a priori grounds forpresuming that the intergovernmental grants characteristic offiscal federalism in Australia may generate fiscal illusion,no empirical effort has been directed at this line of inquiry.The present article seeks to go some way toward remedying thisdeficiency by evaluating the flypaper variant of the fiscalillusion hypothesis using a time-series analysis of AustralianCommonwealth expenditures for 1981 to 1992. The results of theseestimations provide some tentative empirical support for theexistence of a flypaper effect on public expenditure in Australiafor the period under review.     

The Debate on Australian Federalism: Local Government Financial Interrelationships with State and Commonwealth Governments

The nascent debate on Australian federalism has hitherto focused almost entirely on Commonwealth-state interrelationships to the virtual exclusion of local government. Since Australian local government employs around 156,000 people and spends in excess of $10 billion this neglect is unfortunate. In an effort to at least partly remedy this oversight, the present paper seeks to assess various unsettled questions in local government financial relationships with both Commonwealth and state governments, especially the issue of financial assistance grants and their efficiency consequences.     

The man who killed Warrington Dawson

On March 12, 1889, at about 4:00 p.m., the editor of the Charleston, South Carolina, News and Courier--Francis Warrington Dawson--was shot to death by Thomas Ballard McDow, M.D., a successful Charleston physician, in Dr. McDow's office. The investigation of the crime and the trial and acquittal of McDow have not been subjected to critical scrutiny in this century. This article offers an analysis of character and motivation of the principals, an examination of some of the evidence, a view of the prosecution and defense, and some conclusions based on these elements.     

Between Hermes and Themis: An Empirical Study of the Contemporary Judiciary in Singapore

Drawing upon interviews in 1995 and 1998 and analyses of judicial appointments from 1975–1998, the article offers a new explanation of judicial-executive relations in Singapore. It attempts to explain how the judiciary in Singapore actually functions, partly by using the concept of the core executive to locate the judiciary more accurately within its political context. The study demonstrates that the judicial system has been hegenomized by a number of political and bureaucratic strategies, and interprets its role in terms of the overall goals of the political executive. The lower judiciary is an amateur judiciary and forms part of the executive government. Despite this, the contemporary superior judiciary is not wholly a creature of the political executive, as is often postulated, but rather the result of a compromise which balances the need for a reputable judiciary with the requirement by the political executive for the judicial system to assist with the control of political opposition. This negotiated balance is qualitatively different from the relationship that characterized that between the Lee Kuan Yew governments and their Supreme Courts until 1991 and reflects the maturing of hegemonic control strategies under Goh Chok Tong. The analysis was completed in 1999.     

Oakeshott's Claims of Politics

Michael Oakeshott is most commonly thought of as a political philosopher. Thinking of his work in these terms can distract attention from his main arguments in which he outlines his conception of civil association. Civil association is a much broader idea than Oakeshott's idea of politics. But in refocusing attention away from politics and towards civil association it is important that we do not forget Oakeshott's positive account of politics.
Politics, as Oakeshott understands it, is an activity which is indispensable to the practice of civil association. Politics considers civil rules, neither as authoritative conditions nor in the deliberative or injunctive idioms of adjudication or ruling, but in the persuasive idiom of their desirability. This paper explores the character of Oakeshott's conception of politics and the relation of this activity, both positive and negative, to the practice of civil association.