The Impact of Court Delays on the Prosecutor and the Defendant: An Economic Analysis

One important aspect of the economic theory of criminal court delay is to understand how the prosecutor and the defendant make their decisions, and how these respond to changes in trial delay. If both parties jointly maximise expected utility, trial delay may increase or decrease the number of trials, depending upon the decision makers' attitudes towards risk. The main policy implication is that providing the criminal courts with more resources in the form of additional judges and court capacity may lengthen the trial queue rather than shorten it. This is a counterintuitive result contrary to popular belief.     

The ECJ eases the way for comparative advertisers

The ECJ reiterates its support for the comparative advertiserby indicating that common sense is needed to comply with theMisleading Advertising and Comparative Advertising Directive(Directive 97/55).     

Participation,education, and pluralism: towards a new extension ethic

The concern driving current debate on agricultural extension is increasingly that of how to help farmers learn how to deal with the complex world around them responsibly and profitably, in such a way that the extension worker is ancillary. This article seeks to deconstruct and provide a more reasoned assessment of agricultural extension services through a reflection on development paradigms, adult education, individual empowerment, and institutional pluralism. By calling into question the underlying ethical dimensions of agricultural extension, it is possible to develop an alternative paradigm and thereby generate new insights into it. The article concludes that the raison d'être of agricultural extension today must be to create an ethical basis which ensures that extension practices are more inclusive and thus responsive to the needs of farmers and other rural populations, integrating individual expectations into the wider socio-economic, cultural, political, and geographical environment.     

Shaped on the Anvil of Mars: Vance and Nettie Palmer and the Great War

In Australia as elsewhere within the belligerent nations of the Great War, dissenting thinkers were marginalised with the mobilisation of militarism. Vance and Nettie Palmer, Australia's most important literary partnership in the interwar period, were initially critical of the war, their response typical of the English radical intelligentsia among whom they were living at the time of its outbreak. Forced back to Australia in 1915, the Palmers had to re-establish themselves in its increasingly turbulent intellectual battlefields. Nettie's earlier anti-war beliefs and cosmopolitanism were undermined while Vance became ever more deeply enmeshed in a discourse concerning the virtues of the “ordinary people”, which encompassed the men of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). Nevertheless, in their extensive writings about Australia, neither Palmer ever endorsed the legend of the heroic Anzacs. The Great War, however, profoundly shaped their political consciousness and their choice of genre and writing strategies, as it did others of their literary generation. This article will show that the war was a far more important influence on their work than usually acknowledged in Australian literary scholarship, and thereby reveal some of the cultural patterns that shaped their generation of Australian radical writers and intellectuals — particularly in Melbourne, arguably the heartland for the tradition of democratic literary nationalism which the Palmers have been seen to epitomise.