Some Reasons Courts Have Become Active Participants in the Search for Ultimate Moral and Political Truth

This short essay was prompted by the increasing delegation to courts of the responsibility for deciding what are basically moral questions, such as in litigation involving human rights conventions, as well as the responsibility for deciding basic issues of social policy with at best only the most general guidelines to guide their exercise of judicial discretion. The essay discusses some of the reasons for this delegation of authority and briefly describes how courts have struggled to meet this obligation without transcending accepted notions governing the limits of judicial discretion

A Comment on Restatement Third of Torts’ Proposed Treatment of the Liability of Possessors of Land

In §§ 51 and 52 of the forthcoming second volume of the Restatement (Third) of Torts: Liability for Physical and Emotional Harm, the reporters have sought to accommodate the trend to extend the liability of possessors of land to trespassers. The courts that have led the way in this legal transformation of the traditional common law have largely focused on the foreseeability of the trespasser and of the likelihood of injury from the disrepair of the premises. The Restatement (Third) takes a different approach by focusing on the flagrancy of the trespass, a concept with significant moral connotations. I argue that this approach has severe problems. The notion of flagrancy conjures up at least two overlapping visions. One is the purpose of the trespasser in committing the trespass, such as whether to commit a crime. The other is the frequency of the trespass; the more frequent the trespass the more foreseeable it is to the possessor of the premises. But since frequency, after a point, shows a total disregard of the rights of the possessor, it can lead to the conclusion that, what would have been an actionable injury, is now without a remedy because of the flagrant disregard of the rights of the possessor. Moreover, by focusing on the moral culpability of the injured trespasser, it requires juries and courts to make moral judgments with large subjective components. This possibility is recognized by the reporters in their explicit recognition and expectation that different jurisdictions might have different notions of what is \u27flagrant.\u27 Whether a restatement of the law that accepts that different states will look at things differently is actually a \u27restatement\u27 is a matter that deserves serious consideration

Oceans apart: women readers in the Nineteenth-century British and American novel

This dissertation provides a transatlantic, historical approach to women's reading, analyzing within that context representations of fictional women readers, bearing in mind the cultural anxiety surrounding "the reading habit." These fictional readers contributed to the phenomenon of "the woman reader," and representations of reading women shaped ideas about women's intellectual abilities, public voices, and domestic roles. The following chapters offer a comparative analysis of women readers in select British and American novels to consider their cultural and political implications. Ultimately, I claim that women readers in the American novel read to establish agency in the service of establishing a national identity, while women readers in the British novel read to establish agency within the domestic sphere with the aim of extending their influence into their immediate community. While anxiety surrounding the "woman reader" straddled the Atlantic, over the long nineteenth-century she developed differently on opposite shores. The following chapters investigate affinities between British and American texts as well divisions resulting from divergent historical and cultural circumstances. My investigation includes the American novels: The Coquette, Hope Leslie, The Wide, Wide World, and Work and British novels: Belinda, Mansfield Park, Villette and The Doctor's Wife, to extrapolate how historical circumstances shaped and were shaped by female literary culture of the period. These novels were chosen because they portray readers at pivotal moments in their respective national histories. To approach how authors construct women readers, I ask such questions as: Who is reading? What are they reading? Why was the novel dangerous? The answers support my argument that political events, women's status, and women's literature are intertwined and impacted by the changing role of the household. When sociopolitical ideologies differ, the elements that "construct" the woman reader change. This is where the value of a transatlantic consideration lies

The implications of legal reasoning for a system of argumentation

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Kansas, Speech and Drama, 1980

Revelations from Cheesecake Manor : Agatha Christie, detective fiction, and interwar England

For too long standard interwar histories have portrayed the interwar years as a period marked by failure, instability, depression, and volatility. Instead, rising living standards, the narrowing of socioeconomic disparities, expanded avenues of social welfare, increased leisure time, and mass consumerism resulted in an altogether peaceful, healthier, stable, and increasingly affluent England. Out of these rising economic improvements emerged forms of mass entertainment, including popular fiction. Cheaper paper and printing methods, rising literacy, faster distribution methods, new forms of advertising, and the expansion of public libraries led to the creation of a mass readership across England. For the first time, publishers truly had to give the people what they wanted. As such, the proliferation and popularization of genres, both new and old, occurred. Most notably, the detective genre matured and blossomed during this period, which marked its Golden Age. As its authors\u27 sales depended on popular approval and because of the genre\u27s realistic, conservative nature, detective fiction offers historians an inside look into the conventional morals, attitudes, beliefs, and values of the English interwar public. It was Dame Agatha Christie\u27s fiction that dominated sales both in the detective genre and in popular fiction in general. Throughout her astonishingly successful career, from 1920 until 1976, she always attempted to be as realistic, current, and up-to-date as possible. As such, she left behind a record of the times that she experienced firsthand. As a highly conventional middle-class woman, she mainly wrote for and about the class that guided England\u27s social and cultural life. Her works affirm the reality that interwar England was a nation that still followed and believed in late Victorian and Edwardian morals and values, accepted the existence of hierarchy and class distinctions based primarily on birth, and condoned Britain\u27s role as an imperial nation

Blame the Messenger: Summers on Fuller

A Review of Lon L. Fuller by Robert S. Summer