On Contracting

Twelve years ago I drew attention in a paper to the importance of the discovery of performative utterances by the well known Oxford linguistic philosopher, John Austin, for a better understanding of the legal concept of contract.\u27 In The Legal Point of View, I developed this concept into what I called the performative function of discourse,2 and in a recent paper I applied it to rebut an attack on the objective theory of contract. 3 My main aim in the present paper is to compare Austin\u27s classification of infelicities, to which performative utterances are subject, with their legal analogues. Although it is unlikely that Lord Denning was familiar with Austin\u27s concept of performative utterances, the recognition of the performative function of discourse lends strong support to his doctrine of equitable mistake. 4 This example shows well how doctrinal development in the law may be strengthened by keeping abreast of developments in philosophy, and how it may be weakened by failing to do so. The philosophical repertoire of most lawyers is usually antiquated, if not quaint. The same is true of the legal repertoire of philosophers. Yet, philosophers on the whole are more willing to learn from lawyers than the other way round. Thus, Austin explicitly acknowledges that the nearest approach to performative is the word operative as used by lawyers, the operative part of a legal instrument being that part which actually performs the legal act which it is the purpose of the instrument to perform. 5 He also refers to contributions made by lawyers in his discussion of infelicities.

Crafting Queer Identity, Building Coalitions, and Envisioning Liberation at the Intersections: A Rhetorical Analysis of 1970s Lesbian-Feminist Discourse

This study examines how lesbian-feminists navigated the competing pressures of identity politics and coalition politics and confronted compounding frustrations, divisions, and exclusionary practices throughout the 1970s. Specifically, the study attends to the ways lesbian-feminists rhetorically recalibrated their identities in and through coalitional relationships with such social movement communities as women's liberation, gay liberation, and anti-war activism. In the process, they were able to build coalitional relationships with activists from other movements while retaining a space for articulating and bolstering their lesbian-feminist identities. This study accordingly examines lesbian-feminist published writings and speeches given during conferences, marches, demonstrations, and political rallies between 1970 and 1980 to reveal how they crafted a space for lesbian-feminist politics, identity, and liberation from within coalitional relationships that also marginalized them. The project intersects the theories of public address, social movement rhetoric, intersectionality, identity politics, and coalition politics to examine the strategic interaction between coalition politics and identity politics in lesbian-feminist activism. In particular, recalibration allowed lesbian-feminists to strategically capitalize on intersectionality in order to negotiate the tension between identity creation and coalition formation. Using the rhetorical strategy of pivoting to feature certain aspects of their identities with the various coalitions in mind, lesbian-feminists increased their visibility. They did so not only for the sake of promoting shared political goals and legitimizing lesbian-feminism, but also to confront social movement members on issues of exclusion, homophobia, and sexism. As a result, lesbian-feminism came to hold a variety of meanings for women working in the second-wave women's liberation, gay liberation, and anti-war movements. At times, lesbian feminists upheld a separatist, vanguard ethic, which was defined in opposition to other identities and movements. Though empowering and celebrated by some as more ideologically pure, separatist identity formations remained highly contested at the margins of lesbian-feminist identity politics. With those margins clearly defined, lesbian-feminists strategically pivoted to enact political ideologies and preserve identity from within coalitional relationships. In the process, their discourse revealed a great deal about the relationship between identity politics and coalition politics in the context of U.S. social protest in the post-1960s era

Language, Communication, Computers and the Law

There is an old story about a drunken man who is looking for an object under a street light. A policeman asks him what he is looking for. It is my keys , he says. Did you lose them here? No, over there.\u27 Why then are you looking for them over here? Because I can see here , is the man\u27s reply. The real significance of this story is very different from what it appears. It is not the man who is foolish but the policeman. We can only look for something from where we can see it. The alternative is to burrow like moles in the dark. But how can we find something that is not there? We can\u27t of course, but we can get a perspective of it by following a ray of light as far as it will go. There are many lights and many perspectives, but no one absolute objective truth, or any one way of finding it

Pornography as a Species of Second-Order Sexual Behaviour. A Submission for Law Reform

The immediate subject-matter of law reform is law, and the immediate reason for reforming the law is dissatisfaction with the law as it is; but the ultimate subject-matter of law reform is the human behaviour contained in a social practice, and the ultimate reason for reforming the law is dissatisfaction with such behaviour. The immediate task of the law reformer is to bring about a change in the legal rules; but his ultimate task is to bring about a change in human behaviour. Hence, law reform ultimately presupposes a set of evaluative standards according to which human behaviour can be evaluated. If the human behaviour leaves nothing to be desired, then the law can be left alone except perhaps to make it more elegant. If, on the other hand, dissatisfaction is felt with the human behaviour, the relevant legal rules must be looked at. Perhaps they can be changed so as to produce the desired human behaviour; perhaps nothing can be done, the case being simply one in which human behaviour will not respond to legal pressure, or the necessary pressure will be so great as to involve more unsatisfactory behaviour than it will be able to cure

Conic Multi-Task Classification

Traditionally, Multi-task Learning (MTL) models optimize the average of task-related objective functions, which is an intuitive approach and which we will be referring to as Average MTL. However, a more general framework, referred to as Conic MTL, can be formulated by considering conic combinations of the objective functions instead; in this framework, Average MTL arises as a special case, when all combination coefficients equal 1. Although the advantage of Conic MTL over Average MTL has been shown experimentally in previous works, no theoretical justification has been provided to date. In this paper, we derive a generalization bound for the Conic MTL method, and demonstrate that the tightest bound is not necessarily achieved, when all combination coefficients equal 1; hence, Average MTL may not always be the optimal choice, and it is important to consider Conic MTL. As a byproduct of the generalization bound, it also theoretically explains the good experimental results of previous relevant works. Finally, we propose a new Conic MTL model, whose conic combination coefficients minimize the generalization bound, instead of choosing them heuristically as has been done in previous methods. The rationale and advantage of our model is demonstrated and verified via a series of experiments by comparing with several other methods.Comment: Accepted by European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECMLPKDD)-201

Aerosol Pollution from Small Combustors in a Village

Urban air pollution is widely recognized. Recently, there have been a few projects that examined air quality in rural areas (e.g., AUPHEP project in Austria, WOODUSE project in Denmark). Here we present the results within the International Cooperation Project RER/2/005 targeted at studying the effect of local combustion processes to air quality in the village of Brzezina in the countryside north-west of Wroclaw (south western Poland). We identified the potential emission sources and quantified their contributions. The ambient aerosol monitoring (PM10 and elemental concentrations) was performed during 4 measurement cycles, in summer 2009, 2010 and in winter 2010, 2011. Some receptor modeling techniques, factor analysis-multiple linear regression analysis (FA-MLRA) and potential source localization function (PSLF), have been used. Different types of fuel burning along with domestic refuse resulted in an increased concentration of PM10 particle mass, but also by an increased in various other compounds (As, Pb, Zn). Local combustion sources contributed up to 80% to PM10 mass in winter. The effect of other sources was small, from 6 to 20%, dependently on the season. Both PM10 and elemental concentrations in the rural settlement were comparable to concentrations at urban sites in summer and were much higher in winter, which can pose asignificant health risk to its inhabitants

Field experiments on the development of time preferences

Time preferences have been correlated with a range of life outcomes, yet little is known about their early development. We conduct a field experiment to elicit time preferences of nearly 1,000 children ages 3-12, who make several inter temporal decisions. To shed light on how such primitives form, we explore various channels that might affect time preferences, from background characteristics to the causal impact of an early schooling program that we developed and operated. Our results suggest that time preferences evolve substantially during this period with younger children displaying more impatience than older children. We also find a strong association with race: black children, relative to white or Hispanic children, are more impatient. Interestingly, parents of black children are also much more impatient than parents of white and Hispanic children. Finally, assignment to different schooling opportunities is not significantly associated with child time preferences

Field experiments on the development of time preferences

Time preferences have been correlated with a range of life outcomes, yet little is known about their early development. We conduct a field experiment to elicit time preferences of nearly 1,000 children ages 3-12, who make several inter temporal decisions. To shed light on how such primitives form, we explore various channels that might affect time preferences, from background characteristics to the causal impact of an early schooling program that we developed and operated. Our results suggest that time preferences evolve substantially during this period with younger children displaying more impatience than older children. We also find a strong association with race: black children, relative to white or Hispanic children, are more impatient. Interestingly, parents of black children are also much more impatient than parents of white and Hispanic children. Finally, assignment to different schooling opportunities is not significantly associated with child time preferences

Toward an understanding of the development of time preferences: Evidence from field experiments

Time preferences have been correlated with a range of life outcomes, yet little is known about their early development. We conduct a field experiment to elicit time preferences of over 1200 children ages 3–12, who make several intertemporal decisions. To shed light on how such primitives form, we explore various channels that might affect time preferences, from background characteristics to the causal impact of an early schooling program that we developed and operated. Our results suggest that time preferences evolve substantially during this period, with younger children displaying more impatience than older children. We also find a strong association with race: black children, relative to white or Hispanic children, are more impatient. Finally, assignment to different schooling opportunities is not significantly associated with child time preferences