Mapping New Jerusalem: Space, National Identity and Power in British Espionage Fiction 1945-79.

This thesis argues that the espionage fiction of Graham Greene, Ian Fleming and John le Carré published between 1945 and 1979 illustrates a number of discontinuities, disjunctions and paradoxes related to space, sovereignty and national identity in post-war Britain. To this effect, the thesis has three broad aims. Firstly, to approach the representations of space and sovereign power in the work of these authors published during the period 1945-1979, examining the way in which sovereign power produces space, and then how that power is distributed and maintained. Secondly, to analyse the effect that sovereign power has on a variety of social and cultural environments represented within spy fiction and how the exercise of power affects the response of individuals within them. Thirdly, to establish how the intervention of sovereign power within environments relates to the creation, propagation and exclusion of national identities within each author’s work. By mapping the application of sovereign power throughout various environments, the thesis demonstrates that the control of environment is inextricably linked to the sovereign control of British subjects in espionage fiction. Moreover, the role of the spy in the application of sovereign power reveals a paradox integral to the espionage genre, namely that the maintenance of sovereign power exists only through the undermining of its core principles. Sovereignty, in these texts, is maintained only by weakening the sovereign control of other nations

Police Accountability and Early Warning Systems: Developing Policies and Programs

The identification of police officers who have potential problems has emerged as a popular approach for curbing police misconduct and achieving accountability. Early warning (EW) systems are data-driven programs whose purpose is to identify officers whose behavior is problematic and to subject those officers to some kind of intervention, often in the form of counseling or training. Because of their potential for providing timely data on officer performance and giving police managers a framework for correcting unacceptable performance, early warning systems are consistent with the new demands for performance evaluation raised by community policing and the effective strategic management of police departments. This article identifies essential components of EW systems and explains the characteristics, structure, and processes of a model program

Will Aggregate Litigation Come to Europe?

The current wave of deregulation and market liberalization in Europe has had major repercussions for the prospect of litigated forms of collective redress. Once decried as the perversity of rapacious Americans, class actions are now the focus of significant reform efforts in many European countries and even at the level of the European Union. There are, no doubt, many reasons for the relatively sudden attention to means of collective redress. Some have to do with the need to create effective ex post accountability mechanisms to contain the potential adverse effects of goods and services freely entering the market. Others seek to create mechanisms for efficient resolution of Reiss Professor of Constitutional Law, New York University School of Law. Stuyvesant Comfort Professor of Constitutional Law, New York University School of Law. This draft was first presented at a conference on class actions in Europe held in Florence, Italy on June 13-14, 2008, and sponsored by NYU School of Law, the American Law Institute, and the European University Institute. We benefitted from the comments of conference participants, as well as from the research assistance of Laura Miller and Colin Reardon. the numerous intertwined claims that invariably arise from the mass production and delivery of goods and services across a broad market. One should not gainsay the significance of these reform measures. All represent efforts to mobilize means of private enforcement to prevent harm through the prospect of civil litigation. For countries steeped in the civil law tradition, the move away from centralized public enforcement is a sea change in legal structures. The marriage of private enforcement mechanisms and relaxed barriers to entry into increasingly deregulated markets is a significant change as well. Add to that the diversity of litigation tools that are being developed and one would have to be almost churlish not to marvel at the liberalizing spirit sweeping the continent. And, yet, one need spend only a few minutes in conversations with European reformers before the proverbial but enters the discourse: But, of course, we shall not have American-style class actions. At this point, all participants nod sagely, confident that collective actions, representative actions, group actions, and a host of other aggregative arrangements can bring all the benefits of fair and efficient resolution to disputes without the dreaded world of American entrepreneurial lawyering. And no doubt the American entrepreneurial ways must and will be resisted fully, in much the same way that Europe has held off the unwelcome presence of McDonald\u27s or Starbucks in its elegant piazzas. To this dignified and self-assured conversation we bring a simple but unwelcome question: Really? We develop this Essay in two parts. First, we must acknowledge that the aversion to the American-style class action corresponds to sustained critiques of class actions in the United States as well. A number of American reforms, from revisions to the class action provisions of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to the Class Action Fairness Act, have taken aim at some of the misfirings of class actions. Some Supreme Court decisions, most notably Amchem Products, Inc. v. Windsor and Ortiz v. Fibreboard Corp., have burdened class actions with procedural strictures that have limited the class action as an effective vehicle for resolution of mass personal injuries. Thus, in the United States, broad scale settlements of asbestos exposures or of pharmaceutical injuries are likely to take the form of bankruptcy workouts, or mass private aggregative settlements, as with the claims over harms caused by the anti- inflammatory drug, Vioxx

Technology Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control

Several high-profile academic articles and reports claim to have identified important gaps in current merger enforcement rules, particularly with respect to tech and pharma acquisitions involving nascent and potential competitors—so-called “killer acquisitions” and “kill zones.” As a result of these perceived deficiencies, scholars and enforcers have called for tougher rules, including the introduction of lower merger filing thresholds and substantive changes, such as the inversion of the burden of proof when authorities review mergers and acquisitions in the digital platform industry. Meanwhile, and seemingly in response to the increased political and advocacy pressures around the issue, U.S. antitrust enforcers have recently undertaken several enforcement actions directly targeting such acquisitions. As this paper discusses, however, these proposals tend to overlook the important tradeoffs that would ensue from attempts to decrease the number of false positives under existing merger rules and thresholds. While merger enforcement ought to be mindful of these possible theories of harm, the theories and evidence are not nearly as robust as many proponents suggest. Most importantly, there is insufficient basis to conclude that the costs of permitting the behavior they identify is greater than the costs would be of increasing enforcement to prohibit it

An asymptotic framework for gravitational scattering

Asymptotically flat spacetimes have been studied in five separate regions: future/past timelike infinity $i^\pm$, future/past null infinity $\mathcal{I}^\pm$, and spatial infinity $i^0$. We formulate assumptions and definitions such that the five infinities share a single Bondi-Metzner-Sachs (BMS) group of asymptotic symmetries and associated charges. We show how individual ingoing/outgoing massive bodies may be ascribed initial/final BMS charges and derive global conservation laws stating that the change in total charge is balanced by the corresponding radiative flux. This framework provides a foundation for the study of asymptotically flat spacetimes containing ingoing and outgoing massive bodies, i.e., for generalized gravitational scattering. Among the new implications are rigorous definitions for quantities like initial/final spin, scattering angle, and impact parameter in multi-body spacetimes, without the use of any preferred background structure

Unbalanced flows in the subtle body: Tibetan understandings of psychiatric illness and how to deal with it

Much of what Western medicine classifies as psychiatric illness is understood by Tibetan thought as associated with imbalance of rlung (wind, breath). Rlung has a dual origin in Indian thought, combining elements from Ayurvedic medicine and Tantric Buddhism. Tibetan theories of rlung seem to correspond in significant ways with Western concepts of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), and Western medicine too has associated psychiatric issues with ANS problems. But what is involved in relating Tibetan ideas of rlung to Western ideas of the emotions and the ANS? The article presents elements of the two systems and then explores similarities and differences between them. It asks whether the similarities could be the basis for a productive encounter between Tibetan and Western modes of understanding and treating psychiatric illness. What could Western psychiatry learn from Tibetan approaches in this area