Card Check Recognition: New House Rules for Union Organizing?

MISSIN

Reconsidering Virginia Judicial Selection

The 2008 Virginia General Assembly adjourned this summer without electing judges to vacancies on the State Corporation Commission (the Commission or SCC ), the Supreme Court of Virginia, and numerous circuit courts. Thus, Democratic Governor Tim Kaine recently appointed individuals to fill these openings. Although the jurists whom the Governor appointed seem very well-qualified, the judges may only serve for five months, unless the 2009 General Assembly elects them. The 2008 Assembly\u27s failure to elect judges for these vacancies demonstrates that the selection process is ineffective, and perhaps broken, as this development has eroded the delivery of justice and may have undermined public respect for judicial selection. The process for choosing judges, therefore, deserves reassessment to ascertain whether the system merits reform. This piece undertakes that effort. This article first evaluates the origins and development of Virginia\u27s procedure for appointing judges. This analysis determines that Virginia and South Carolina are the only jurisdictions that currently select judges through a process of legislative election. The examination also discerns that the Old Dominion has employed this system throughout most of its history since the American Revolution. The regime concomitantly operated rather efficaciously for much of the time when one major political party controlled the governorship and both houses of the General Assembly. Moreover, the review finds that legislators and additional observers have articulated, evaluated, and discussed various suggestions for change over the years and that the Assembly has recently instituted or experimented with some, but it has permanently adopted very few. The second section assesses recent developments which implicate judicial selection in the Old Dominion. The section finds that increasing partisanship and divisiveness have attended the process for choosing judges, especially with the rise and growth of a real two-party system as well as divided government in Virginia. The portion shows how the experience in the 2008 General Assembly- which failed in one regular and two special sessions to elect judges for numerous vacancies, despite a plethora of opportunities to name the jurists-suggests that the system is ineffective, if not beyond remediation. The final section, accordingly, explores numerous recommendations for future treatment of judicial selection in Virginia. This part descriptively evaluates the benefits afforded and disadvantages imposed by the processes that many other states employ when choosing members of the bench. The section concludes by proffering a number of solutions which appear to hold the greatest promise for improving Virginia judicial selection

Fictitious Capital and Crises

This paper is concerned with chapters 25-35 of Part V, The Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise, of Volume 3 of Capital. These chapters may be properly grouped in an ideal Part to be possibly titled "Credit and Crises, or Money Capital and Fictitious Capital" and is referred to in this paper as 'the unidentified Part'. This Part should be strictly considered as a follow-up of Part IV, The Transformation of Commodity Capital and Money Capital into Commodity-Dealing Capital and Money-Dealing Capital (Merchant's Capital) in the sense that while the former deals with the role played by merchant's capital, and particularly by money-dealing capital, the latter deals with the obstruction or perversion inflicted on this role by money capital being turned into fictitious capital by an improper use of credit. The paper is structured in three ideal sections. The aim of the first section is to clear the debris of 'the unidentified Part' and to reconstruct Marx's own thinking about the nature and role of credit and of fictitious capital in relation to the concept of merchant's capital and to the phenomenon of crises. On the contrary, the second section, which is mostly focused on different forms versus different sets of crises, highlights some contradictions in Marx's unsystematic treatment of the relations between financial and real crises. The third section is derived from the arguments set out in the previous two sections. Its aim is to assess Marx's similarity with Keynes on the matter of 'money as money' and of financial crises. Its conclusion (which is also the conclusion of the paper) is that this similarity, however strong with regard to the role of money as a store of value, is bound to collapse if Marx's law of the falling rate of profit is believed to be true. For in this case the fictitious-capital theory of crises developed in 'the unidentified Part' acquires a secondary importance while financial crises come to be viewed as a typical effect, rather than as the cause, of real crises.Marx, fictitious capital, money capital, financial crises

The Gardener and the Sick Garden: How Not to Address the Planet\u27s Environmental Issues

A truly workable environmental strategy would start by being grounded in better, more realistic and empirically accurate models of how nature works, how humans behave, and humankind\u27s relationship to nature. Such an environmental policy would realize that the gardener and the garden are not separate, but one. And this environmental policy would embrace two correlative legal norms: (1) we should recognize a positive right, held by both humans and their natural surroundings, to environmental conditions that may sustain human survivability\u27; and (2) we should impose an affirmative duty on humans to promote and support natural systems

Intentional Infliction of Mental Distress in Nevada

The independent cause of action for the intentional infliction of mental distress (IIMD) is the only modern intentional tort for physical injury to persons. State court judges in the United States initially recognized the freestanding cause of action during the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, considerable confusion has attended the judicial recognition, articulation, and application of this tort in a substantial number of American jurisdictions. The jurisprudence of IIMD that members of the Nevada Supreme Court as well as attorneys and litigants in Nevada have developed has remained rather clear, although the justices have decided comparatively few cases in which they have assumed the opportunities to explicate and refine enforcement of the cause of action or to elaborate comprehensively on the elements of the mental distress tort. Moreover, several recent determinations that the Nevada Supreme Court has issued have helped to clarify the IIMD cause of action by, for instance, specifically confirming its applicability in the important context of employment termination. Nonetheless, one of those opinions and two other decisions which the justices have resolved since 1995 could create confusion because the cases seemingly require parties who pursue IIMD claims to demonstrate that extremely outrageous behavior caused the litigants to suffer physical impacts or to experience physical injuries or physical .illnesses. Furthermore, Nevada lawyers and their clients have increasingly pied and attempted to prove that individuals who participated in extremely outrageous conduct that they intended would inflict severe mental distress on the parties behaved in ways which should expose the perpetrators to intentional tort liability, while invocation of the IIMD cause of action in Nevada promises to expand exponentially in the foreseeable future. All of the ideas above mean that those determinations in which the Nevada Supreme Court has recognized, enunciated, and applied the IIMD tort deserve assessment. This article undertakes that effort. The first section of the article considers the origins and development of the IIMD cause of action in the United States. Finding that the overwhelming majority of jurisdictions in the country have recognized the independent tort, that California was the initial state in America to acknowledge the mental distress claim during 1952, and that the California articulation and enforcement appear to have affected rather significantly the Nevada Supreme Court\u27s recognition, enunciation, and application of the cause of action, the second part explores the jurisprudence of the IIMD tort in Nevada. The examination afforded in section two relies substantially on the recent Nevada Supreme Court opinions which I mentioned in the first paragraph, a number of additional, significant decisions rendered by the justices over the last five years, and several of the most important earlier cases. The evaluation ascertains that the Nevada Supreme Court initially recognized the freestanding cause of action for IIMD during 1981. Moreover, the analysis determines that the jurisdiction\u27s jurisprudence of IIMD is relatively clear, albeit somewhat limited in scope, because there is a dearth of relevant precedent in which the Nevada Supreme Court has thoroughly explained the tort or embellished the elements of this cause of action during the subsequent two-decade period. The third portion of the article, therefore, provides recommendations for future treatment of the IIMD tort in Nevada, primarily by proffering ideas that should clarify significant areas of the law that remain rather unclear