93,077 research outputs found
Panel Presentation: Securities Regulation and Corporate Responsibility
What I want to do is talk about the big picture, as John suggested, and consider the likely spillover effects of Sarbanes-Oxley. I want to do this in a discretely administrative law-oriented way, taking two themes that were very visible and driving forces behind the legislation. The first, as Mary suggested in her opening remarks, is a question about federalism. It has been common for the last twenty years, at least, to trot out - as John just did - a distinction between federal and state spheres of competency. The SEC is on the disclosure side, while the substance of corporate law (e.g., the mechanics of how decisions are made) is left to the states. I don\u27t think you can read either the text or the music of Sarbanes-Oxley and think that this is much of a viable distinction anymore. If Congress really believed in the importance of that distinction as a matter of policy, Sarbanes-Oxley would be a very, very different statute
Avoiding the perfect storm of juror contempt
Concern over juror contempt and improper conduct is one of the factors that
prompted the Law Commissionâs early review of Contempt of Court. This article
argues that any reform of the law of contempt in relation to juries and jury trials
should be based on rigorous and reliable empirical evidence, not anecdotal
evidence, exceptional cases or untested assumptions about juries. It reports the
first findings of recent research conducted with juries at Crown Courts examining
juror understanding of contempt, awareness of recent prosecutions of jurors,
willingness to report improper conduct, as well desire for deliberation guidance
and written judicial directions. Based on empirical evidence, this article argues
for a three-pronged approach to minimising juror contempt in the new media age.
It also argues that calls for the removal or relaxation of s.8 of the Contempt of
Court Act are misguided and based on a myth that the current law prevents detailed
jury research
Fear appeal construction in the Daily Mail Online:a critical discourse analysis of âPrime Minister Corbyn and the 1000 days that destroyed Britainâ
The rhetorical fear appeal is a technique of political communication that seeks to elicit an emotional response in receivers with the intention of provoking them to political action desired by the rhetor. This paper examines a single example of fear appeal construction in the British press, the Mail Onlineâs âPrime Minister Corbyn and the 1000 days that Destroyed Britainâ (2015), through analysis of its use of two defining political myths, a conservative myth of declinism, and the utopia/anti-utopia binary myth. I firstly examine the origins and contemporary uses of fear appeals as techniques of political persuasion, before going on to examine how these are constructed. I then go on to analyse the Mail Online articleâs use of these two powerful political myths, one, declinism, which I argue is utilised descriptively for the purposes of discourse construction, and the other, utopia/anti-utopia, which is utilised instructively. Finally, I propose a method of analysis combining recent approaches to the critical discourse analysis of myth with the cognitive-motivational-relational theory of emotion drawn from social psychology, in order to show how the Mail Online article is constructed as a discursive fear appeal
Vacuum Energy: Myths and Reality
We discuss the main myths related to the vacuum energy and cosmological
constant, such as: ``unbearable lightness of space-time''; the dominating
contribution of zero point energy of quantum fields to the vacuum energy;
non-zero vacuum energy of the false vacuum; dependence of the vacuum energy on
the overall shift of energy; the absolute value of energy only has significance
for gravity; the vacuum energy depends on the vacuum content; cosmological
constant changes after the phase transition; zero-point energy of the vacuum
between the plates in Casimir effect must gravitate, that is why the zero-point
energy in the vacuum outside the plates must also gravitate; etc. All these and
some other conjectures appear to be wrong when one considers the thermodynamics
of the ground state of the quantum many-body system, which mimics macroscopic
thermodynamics of quantum vacuum. In particular, in spite of the ultraviolet
divergence of the zero-point energy, the natural value of the vacuum energy is
comparable with the observed dark energy. That is why the vacuum energy is the
plausible candidate for the dark energy.Comment: 24 pages, 2 figures, submitted to the special issue of Int. J. Mod.
Phys. devoted to dark energy and dark matter, IJMP styl
Form and content in utopia
A critique of Habermas is theory of the three worlds as a foundation for criticism and social philosophy
Psychagogia in Plato's Phaedrus
published or submitted for publicatio
2012: The End of the World as We Know It?
Many so-called â2012 doomsayers theorists,â such as John Major Jenkins and Jose Arguelles successfully convinced a portion of the modern Western world that the ancient Maya had predicted the end of the world. They swayed many into believing that the world was supposed come to a violent end on December 21, 2012. This important date is referred to as the end of the âGreat Cycleâ of 13 Bakâtuns, according to translations of the ancient Maya hieroglyphic texts. But what evidence, if any, in the archaeological recorded suggested a cataclysmic collapse in support of these doomsday predictions? Here, I explore the root of these concepts of violent collapse. Although we now know their predictions were false, they seem to have gotten a good deal of the Western world worried about what was to come this past winter. What exactly did these doomsayers like Jenkins and Arguelles predict and how do their predictions compare with what the ancient and contemporary Maya say? The archaeological evidence that survives suggests the ancient Maya would not have feared this time but would have celebrated it as a time of renewal. Although the ancient Maya mythology suggests destruction of the world at the end of the 13th Bakâtun, a new world would no doubt have been anticipated by the ancient Maya who would have celebrated this period as a time of rebirth and renewal, much like other important period endings in their calendar. Below I review the doomsayersâ theories and present evidence from several archaeological contexts that suggest the predictions of December 21st, 2012 do not accurately reflect the thinking of the ancient Maya
Reflections on the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level.
In a world in which consumers correctly expect that both Ricardian and non-Ricardian policy regimes are possible in the future, the fiscal theory of the price level is valid, yet the price is indeterminate. This result does not rely on imposing that the initial stock of nominal bonds be strictly positive, and it does not require a surprise ex post revaluation of nominal assets.
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