Desperately seeking Implicit arguments in text

In this paper, we address the issue of automatically identifying null instantiated arguments in text. We refer to Fillmore’s theory of pragmatically controlled zero anaphora (Fillmore, 1986), which accounts for the phenomenon of omissible arguments using a lexically-based approach, and we propose a strategy for identifying implicit arguments in a text and finding their antecedents, given the overtly expressed semantic roles in the form of frame elements. To this purpose, we primarily rely on linguistic knowledge enriched with role frequency information collected from a training corpus. We evaluate our approach using the test set developed for the SemEval task 10 and we highlight some issues of our approach. Besides, we also point out some open problems related to the task definition and to the general phenomenon of null instantiated arguments, which needs to be better investigated and described in order to be captured from a computational point of view

Still seeking the audience

The changing capacities to connect generated through contemporary media have implications for an understanding of the idea of ‘audience’. This paper begins a new search for an understanding of the contemporary audience and seeks this through an engagement with a few key ideas that sign-post a reconsideration of my own understanding of what an audience might become. Massumi’s idea of intensity, Bennett’s use of assemblage and the focus on event to emphasize the dynamic nature of an audience help to guide my trajectory. Finally I attempt to apply these ideas to a personal experience of becoming an audience to see how useful they might be as I continue to question my own habituated conceptualisations

The Bernstein Memorial Lecture: The First Six Years

CICLOPs, the Center for International & Comparative Law Occasional Papers, could not be launched with a better issue than one dedicated to Duke Law\u27s named lecture series in the field, the Annual Herbert L. Bernstein Memorial Lecture in Comparative Law. Herbert Bernstein was Duke\u27s much-beloved professor of comparative law. The lecture series, established in Prof. Bernstein’s honor after his sudden death in 2001, has drawn leading scholars from all around the world to speak at Duke Law School on comparative law. This first issue of CICLOPs contains the text of the first six lectures, some of them previously published in hard-to-access venues and some not at all. As such, it serves as a tribute not only to Herbert Bernstein, but also to Duke Law\u27s vibrant and active comparative law community, which encompasses both numerous faculty members and also students pursuing Duke\u27s JD/LLM degree in international and comparative law as well as other student groups. The issue contains all lectures in the order in which they were delivered

The Right’s Reasons: Constitutional Conflict and the Spread of Woman-Protective Anti-Abortion Argument

The Lecture offers a provisional first account of the rise and spread of WPAA. It traces the development of gender-based antiabortion advocacy, examining the rise of post-abortion syndrome (PAS) claims in the Reagan years and the first struggles in the antiabortion movement about whether the right to life is properly justified on the ground of women’s welfare. My story then follows changes in the abortion-harms-women claim, as it is transformed from PAS—a therapeutic and mobilizing discourse initially employed to dissuade women from having abortions and to recruit women to the antiabortion cause—into WPAA, a political discourse forged in the heat of movement conflict that seeks to persuade audiences outside the movement’s ranks in political campaigns and constitutional law. I tell a story in which social movement mobilization, coalition, and conflict each play a role in the evolution and spread of this constitutional argument, in the process forging new and distinctly modern ways to talk about the right to life and the role morality of motherhood in the therapeutic, public health, and political rights idiom of late twentieth-century America

Overinterpreting Law

Overinterpretation has attracted considerable attention in other fields, such as literary studies, science, and rhetoric, but it is undertheorized in law. This Article attempts to initiate a theory of legal overinterpretation by examining the rhetorical nature of excess, the sociological dimensions of roles in team performances, and citation to legal and non-legal sources that have discussed overinterpretation. The Article concludes by positing illustrative categories of potential legal overinterpretation, and providing an examination of ways to minimize legal overinterpretation through a judicious, pragmatic balance between abstract considerations and concrete considerations in law

A Hiatus in Soft-Power Administrative Law: The Case of Medicaid Eligibility Waivers

Administrative law is fundamentally a regime of soft power. Congress, the President, administrative agencies, civil servants, and the courts all operate within a broad consensus for rational, good-faith decisionmaking. Congress grants agencies discretion, and courts and civil servants defer to agencies’ political leadership based largely on the expectation that the latter are seeking to honor statutes’ purposes. That expectation of prudential restraint also allays concerns about delegations of legislative power. When the executive systematically disregards that expectation and seeks single-mindedly to maximize achievement of its policy objectives, deference’s justification breaks down. Across agencies, the Trump administration has disregarded the assumptions on which administrative law’s soft power consensus depends. Its waivers allowing states to deny Medicaid to otherwise eligible low-income people unable to find employment exemplifies this disregard. Exploiting a sweeping delegation of authority to test new ways to achieve Medicaid’s goal of providing health care coverage, this administration has instead sought to achieve very different goals, from legislation that Congress has rejected. The waiver applications themselves estimate substantial increases in the numbers of uninsured people. Ignoring the administration’s disregard of the longstanding administrative law consensus could deter future Congresses from valuable delegations of discretion. Permanently abandoning the deferential soft-power model would seriously undermine future governance. Instead, courts and civil servants should treat this period as a hiatus in consensus for good-faith decisionmaking. Courts should suspend deference and other aspects of soft-power jurisprudence. And civil servants should comply with political officials’ lawful directions but should remain steadfastly truthful in their words and actions