How the Corporation Conquered John Bull

This is a study of the evolution of the forms of business organization during the industrial revolution. Historians never fully agree about anything at all, and often with good reason, but there is really no doubt that the period covered by this book is one that saw major changes in agricultural and industrial production, and in commercial practice and organization. It is convenient to refer broadly to the changes which took place in terms of a revolution, industrial, agricultural, or less commonly, commercial in nature. Long before the starting date for this study, which is the date of the Bubble Act of 1720, there had existed firms of one kind or another, which had engaged in production, commerce, and consumption. The oldest form taken by the firm is the family. There existed in medieval and early modern England numerous other important legally recognized associations or collectivities, such as households, guilds, colleges, universities, Inns of Court and Inns of Chancery, convents, cities, boroughs and charitable foundations, such as hospitals. The typical form of association employed for business purposes was the partnership. But in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the institution of the corporation, which was conceived to possess a personality distinct from that of its members, and which had evolved outside the commercial world, came to be employed for business purposes. In the same period the Court of Chancery invented the conception of the trust, an institution to some degree modeled on the earlier medieval institution of the use. In origin quite unconnected with the commercial world, the trust could, potentially, be adapted for use in the commercial field, though this development was not to take place until the eighteenth century. The main emphasis of Ron Harris\u27s Industrializing English Law: Entrepreneurship and Business Organization 1720-1844 is on the forms of commercial group organization, some incorporated, some not, which were available to the business community after 1720, in particular during the industrial revolution. Harris provides a full chapter devoted to the pre-1720 business corporation, which was mainly associated with overseas trade and monopoly. Two distinct forms of business corporation evolved - the regulated corporation and the joint stock corporation

Surprise Encounter Sheds Light on Human Rights Debate

A.W. Brian Simpson, the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law, loves few things more than rummaging through national archives, British or American. Poring through both leads him to a surprise encounter that\u27s worth writing about - and he does

Human Rights Visionary Hersch Lauterpacht

How did it come about that Hersch Lauterpacht, the Whewell Professor of International Law in Cambridge, achieved the distinction of being considered by the Foreign Office as not quite sound on human rights? The story begins at a 1942 meeting of the Grotius Society, the only British intellectual institution then existing that brought together academics and practitioners. The following essay is based on the Lauterpacht Memorial Lecture that the author delivered last fall at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law. A version of this essay also is forthcoming as Hersch Lauterpacht and the Invention of the Age of Human Rights in 119 Vol.1 Law Quarterly Review (January 2004). Hersch Lauterpacht, who died in 1960, was a Cambridge professor and reowned international law scholar whose ideas influenced worldwide development of notins of human rights

Detention without Trial in the Second World War: Comparing the British and American Experiences

National security has long been advanced as a justification for the abrogation of civil liberties. In this lecture, Professor Simpson examines through the analysis of particular cases how two nations dealt with these competing values in the interment without trial of their respective citizens during World War II. Condemning the secrecy and lack of accountability of the authorities responsible for protecting the nation, Simpson issues a call for vigilance and a warning that patterns and habits of respect for liberty will serve better than mere forms of procedure to effectively insure that liberties are not again abandoned to ill-founded claims of defense necessity

Their Litigious Society

A Review of The Whilton Dispute, 1264-1380: A Social-Legal Study of Dispute Settlement in Medieval England by Robert C. Palme

Empirical Insight and some Thoughts on Future(s) Investigation: Comments on Mark West\u27s \u27Private Ordering at the World\u27s First Futures Exchange\u27

Some considerable number of years ago, when I was in Chicago, I had a plan to undertake a general study of the origins of futures markets. They fascinated me for a variety of reasons, one being their bizarre nature: traders meeting together, usually in some form of ring, in order to sell, on a huge scale, quantities of commodities which they neither possess, nor intend to possess, to other traders, who have not the least wish to receive such commodities, and nowhere to put them if they did. At first sight it appears a weird perversion of the institution of the contract of sale. So I wondered: How did such markets ever come into existence? In any event, I did some work on the records of the Chicago Exchange and on the Liverpool cotton market. Though I published a piece on the latter, the general study was never completed. This explains why I was especially interested in two of the articles in this symposium, one by Lisa Bernstein and the other by my colleague, Mark West. I shall confine my comments to Mark West\u27s article

The influence of hypoxia and energy depletion on the response of endothelial cells to the vascular disrupting agent combretastatin A-4-phosphate

Combretastatin A-4 phosphate (CA4P) is a microtubule-disrupting tumour-selective vascular disrupting agent (VDA). CA4P activates the actin-regulating RhoA-GTPase/ ROCK pathway, which is required for full vascular disruption. While hypoxia renders tumours resistant to many conventional therapies, little is known about its influence on VDA activity. Here, we found that active RhoA and ROCK effector phospho-myosin light chain (pMLC) were downregulated in endothelial cells by severe hypoxia. CA4P failed to activate RhoA/ROCK/pMLC but its activity was restored upon reoxygenation. Hypoxia also inhibited CA4P-mediated actinomyosin contractility, VE-cadherin junction disruption and permeability rise. Glucose withdrawal downregulated pMLC, and coupled with hypoxia, reduced pMLC faster and more profoundly than hypoxia alone. Concurrent inhibition of glycolysis (2-deoxy-D-glucose, 2DG) and mitochondrial respiration (rotenone) caused profound actin filament loss, blocked RhoA/ROCK signalling and rendered microtubules CA4P-resistant. Withdrawal of the metabolism inhibitors restored the cytoskeleton and CA4P activity. The AMP-activated kinase AMPK was investigated as a potential mediator of pMLC downregulation. Pharmacological AMPK activators that generate AMP, unlike allosteric activators, downregulated pMLC but only when combined with 2DG and/or rotenone. Altogether, our results suggest that Rho/ROCK and actinomyosin contractility are regulated by AMP/ATP levels independently of AMPK, and point to hypoxia/energy depletion as potential modifiers of CA4P response

Reactions of exotic nuclei with the quark-meson coupling model

The nucleon-nucleon interaction is an important requirement for investigations of nuclear structure and reactions, as well as for astrophysical models such as r-process nucleosynthesis and neutron stars. The traditional approach to low-energy nuclear physics is to treat nucleons as immutable objects interacting via phenomenological forces. The use of phenomenological interactions, rather than one derived from a microscopic theory, raises questions as to the reliability of predictions for exotic regions of the nuclear chart. The quark-meson coupling (QMC) model uses a relativistic mean-field approach to provide a microscopically derived nucleon-nucleon interaction, which takes into account the quark structure of the nucleon. The Skyrme energy density functional is a popular phenomenological tool in studies of nuclear structure and reactions. In this work, the QMC density functional was used to produce a set of Skyrme parameterisations, in the hopes that they will give more reliable predictions for exotic nuclei. In conjunction with Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov (HFB) calculations, the Skyrme-QMC (SQMC) parameterisations have been used to model the ground-state properties of individual nuclei and nucleus-nucleus potentials for Ca + Sn reactions. The SQMC parameterisation performs with an accuracy comparable to modern phenomenological functionals. From this, one can investigate the importance of the isovector terms of the nucleon-nucleon interaction, which are particularly significant for exotic, neutron-rich regions of the nuclear chart. One of the notable successes of the QMC model is its derivation of nuclear spin-orbit coupling. The isovector dependence of the spin-orbit equation of state is remarkably similar to that of the modern UNEDF1 phenomenological density functional. HFB calculations along the Sn isotopic chain reveal that the isovector properties of the spin-orbit term impact binding energies to a level that will be significant for astrophysical r-process modelling.E. McRae, C. Simenel, E.C. Simpson, and A.W. Thoma

Models for Galactic cosmic-ray propagation

A new numerical model of particle propagation in the Galaxy has been developed, which allows the study of cosmic-ray and gamma-ray production and propagation in 2D or 3D, including a full reaction network. This is a further development of the code which has been used for studies of cosmic ray reacceleration, Galactic halo size, antiprotons and positrons in cosmic rays, the interpretation of diffuse continuum gamma rays, and dark matter. In this paper we illustrate recent results focussing on B/C, sub-Fe/Fe, ACE radioactive isotope data, source abundances and antiprotons. From the radioactive nuclei we derive a range of 3-7 kpc for the height of the cosmic-ray halo.Comment: Invited talk at the 33rd COSPAR Scientific Assembly (Warsaw 2000); 10 pages including 10 ps-figures and 2 tables, latex2e, uses cospar.sty. To appear in Advances in Space Research 2001. More details can be found at http://www.gamma.mpe-garching.mpg.de/~aws/aws.htm