Causation and the Law: Preemption, Lawful Sufficiency, and Causal Sufficiency

This article briefly describes the normative/nonnormative distinction, and how one might invoke this distinction to locate a nonnormative dimension of actual causation. After briefly introducing Richard Wright\u27s concept of a necessary element in a set of conditions for an effect, the article notes ambiguities in the critical concepts of necessity and sufficiency that he deploys. The article suggests the most plausible interpretation of Wright\u27s use of different modal concepts

Moore, Causation, Counterfactuals, and Responsibility

Professor Michael Moore\u27s contribution to this symposium represents a deep and thorough examination of the relationship between counterfactual and causal tests, the meeting of which are often taken to be necessary conditions for various sorts of moral and legal responsibility

Tort Liability of Charitable Corporations

The protective and friendly attitude with which the courts and legislatures have viewed charities is reflected in the rule of nonliability for torts committed by such eleemosynary institutions. The rationales for this exemption may be briefly classified into five main groups. The first and most all inclusive, is the trust fund doctrine based on an early English case and exemplified by the Massachusetts decisions. Under this theory a charitable institution can not be held liable for the negligence of servants and employees or administrative officials.Nor is the court concerned with the status of the plaintiff as beneficiary, employee or stranger. The trust fund can not be diverted from the charitable purposes for which it was intended to compensate for one injured in the execution of these duties

Noting the tunes of seventeenth-century broadside ballads : The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA)

The English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu, hosted at the University of California-Santa Barbara, was founded in 2003 to render pre-1700 English broadside ballads fully accessible as texts, art, songs, and cultural records. EBBA focuses especially on the broadside ballads of the seventeenth century because that period was the "heyday" of the genre.1 In their heyday, ballads were printed on one side of large sheets of paper (hence "broad"-side) mostly in swirling, decorative, black-letter (or what we today call "Gothic") typeface, embellished with many woodcuts and other ornamentation, and labeled with a tune title printed just below the song title. These alluring multimedia artifacts addressed multifarious topics--often from more than one perspective--to catch the interest of a wide audience.2Not

From victims to heroes : peasant counter-rebellion and Civil War in Ayacucho, Peru, 1980-2000

Toen in 1980 de communistische partij van Peru – Lichtend Pad – in naam van de boerenbevolking en het proletariaat, een gewapende revolutie lanceerde tegen de Peruaanse staat, werd deze door verscheidene wetenschappers al snel betiteld als een boerenopstand, en daarom een geschikte case om zich toe te leggen op de vraag waarom boeren in opstand komen. Maar zelfs terwijl de opeenvolgende onderzoeken over de zich steeds verder ontwikkelende Peruaanse burgeroorlog een overvloed aan literatuur voortbracht, waarvan men de relevantie verkondigde als zijnde een voorbeeld van een boerenrevolutie, vonden geweldadige confrontaties tussen de guerrillastrijders en de boeren, die zij beweerden te vertegenwoordigen, steeds vaker plaats. De wijdverspreide verbazing en verbijstering die deze gewelddadige botsingen veroorzaakten was misschien tekenend voor de mate waarin wetenschappers al lange tijd de vraag hadden genegeerd wat boeren ertoe bracht actief en geweldadig contra-revolutionair te worden. Het voornaamste belang van het fenomeen boerenverzet is zijn cruciale relevantie voor het begrijpen van de wetenschappelijke theorie over revolutie en voor het begrijpen van de dynamiek in de relatie tussen boeren en revolutionaire groepen. Dit boek probeert het wetenschappelijke begrip van oorzaken, structurele vormen en dynamiek van de geweldadige boerenverzet te vergroten, door een case-studie te presenteren over boerenzelfverdedigingsgroepen in het Peruaanse departement Ayacucho gelegen in het Andes gebergte, geboorteplaats van zowel de revolutie van het Lichtend Pad als het boerenverzet. Daarnaast onderzoekt dit boek ook de geschiedenis van de Peruaanse burgeroorlog vanuit het relatief verwaarloosde perspectief van het boerenverzet in een poging de dagelijkse ervaringen van de boerenbevolking met politiek geweld en hun reactie daarop te begrijpen

Beyond Counterinsurgency: Peasant Militias and Wartime Social Order in Peru’s Civil War

In much of the academic literature on contemporary militias, the focus is typically on their destructive anti-rebel character.  By contrast, the perspective of militias as agents of local governance, social reconstruction, and positive transformations is one that to date has been under-researched.  Taking a “relational” perspective, this article examines how peasant militias in Ayacucho Department, although initially formed for the purpose of violently opposing Shining Path rebels, became engaged in governing their own “wartime social order” in which they organised, coordinated, regulated, and signified activities and behaviour for the collective good of their local communities.  From it we might gain insight into how these peasant militias were able to avoid permanently becoming the predatory sort of militia that much of the academic literature warns about. Resumen: Más allá de la contrainsurgencia: milicias campesinas  y el orden social de guerra en la guerra civil de Perú   Gran parte de la literatura académica sobre las milicias contemporáneas ha centrado su atención en su carácter destructivo anti-rebelde. Sin embargo, la perspectiva de las milicias como agentes de la gobernanza local, la reconstrucción social y las transformaciones positivas, hasta la fecha ha sido poco investigada. Tomando una perspectiva "relacional", este artículo examina cómo las milicias campesinas en el departamento de Ayacucho, que inicialmente se formaron con el objetivo de oponerse violentamente a los rebeldes de Sendero Luminoso, se comprometieron a gobernar su propio "orden social de guerra" en el que organizaban, coordinaban, regulaban, y manifestaban actividades y comportamiento para el bien colectivo de sus comunidades locales. A partir de esto, podríamos obtener una idea de cómo estas milicias campesinas pudieron evitar convertirse permanentemente en el tipo de milicia predatoria que advierte gran parte de la literatura académica

Mill on logic

Working within the broad lines of general consensus that mark out the core features of John Stuart Mill’s (1806–1873) logic, as set forth in his A System of Logic (1843–1872), this chapter provides an introduction to Mill’s logical theory by reviewing his position on the relationship between induction and deduction, and the role of general premises and principles in reasoning. Locating induction, understood as a kind of analogical reasoning from particulars to particulars, as the basic form of inference that is both free-standing and the sole load-bearing structure in Mill’s logic, the foundations of Mill’s logical system are briefly inspected. Several naturalistic features are identified, including its subject matter, human reasoning, its empiricism, which requires that only particular, experiential claims can function as basic reasons, and its ultimate foundations in ‘spontaneous’ inference. The chapter concludes by comparing Mill’s naturalized logic to Russell’s (1907) regressive method for identifying the premises of mathematics