Little Black Boxes: Legal Anthropology and the Politics of Autonomy in Tort Law

[Excerpt] Law’s interdisciplinary turn toward social sciences suggests a growing realization that jurists may not be independently equipped to explain the world in and upon which they act. But if law embraces empirical social science for its usable output, it struggles to make sense of the more interpretive disciplines such as anthropology. This has proven to be a major setback for both law and anthropology and confounds the historically productive rapport between the two fields stretching back more than a century. While it may be tempting to conclude that today’s legal academic misunderstands the interpretive turn in anthropology, that conclusion offers little to facilitate a rapport of the kind badly needed today

2014 LSE Africa Summit : African entrepreneurs and the struggle to gain financing

LSE’s Mairi Tejani discusses ways in which Africa’s credit financing gap can be filled

Latent-Class Hough Forests for 3D object detection and pose estimation of rigid objects

In this thesis we propose a novel framework, Latent-Class Hough Forests, for the problem of 3D object detection and pose estimation in heavily cluttered and occluded scenes. Firstly, we adapt the state-of-the-art template-based representation, LINEMOD [34, 36], into a scale-invariant patch descriptor and integrate it into a regression forest using a novel template-based split function. In training, rather than explicitly collecting representative negative samples, our method is trained on positive samples only and we treat the class distributions at the leaf nodes as latent variables. During the inference process we iteratively update these distributions, providing accurate estimation of background clutter and foreground occlusions and thus a better detection rate. Furthermore, as a by-product, the latent class distributions can provide accurate occlusion aware segmentation masks, even in the multi-instance scenario. In addition to an existing public dataset, which contains only single-instance sequences with large amounts of clutter, we have collected a new, more challenging, dataset for multiple-instance detection containing heavy 2D and 3D clutter as well as foreground occlusions. We evaluate the Latent-Class Hough Forest on both of these datasets where we outperform state-of-the art methods.Open Acces

Financial Inclusion and Performance of Rural Co-operative Banks in Gujarat

In an Index of Financial Inclusion, India has been ranked 50 out of 100 countries. Only 34% of the India's population has access to basic banking services. The objective of the paper is to study financial inclusion in rural areas, reasons for low inclusion, satisfaction level of the rural people toward banking services and to assess the performance of the banks which are working in the rural areas which mainly include the co operative banks and regional rural banks. Structured questionnaire designed on the basis of literature review was used to collect data from 200 people residing in Ambasan, Jotana and Khadalpur villages of Gujarat. The paper first describes in detail the financial inclusion status in India and Gujarat followed with a review of scenario at the global level. The third section analyses the data with the help of Chi-square test and Tabulation followed with the discussion of analysis, recommendations and conclusion indicating that there is lot of opportunity for the commercial banks to explore the rural unbanked areas.  Though Regional Rural Banks (RRBs) and Primary Agriculture Credit Societies (PACS) have good coverage but most of them are running into losses. Commercial banks should seize this opportunity rather than looking at it as a social obligation. Keywords: Financial inclusion, rural banking, Gujarat, rural cooperative bank

Disputing ‘market value’: the Bombay Improvement Trust and the reshaping of a speculative land market in early twentieth-century Bombay

Urban expansion in the early twentieth century had a profound impact on India's urban land economies. Historians argue that in this period, urban India went through an increasing marketization of land and that improvement trusts had a significant hand in accelerating land speculation. In the case of Bombay, we still understand little of the relationship between the activities of the Bombay Improvement Trust and rising land values. The article examines key legal disputes around compensation for land acquired by the Trust for public purpose before and after World War I. Such cases show how the Trust and the judiciary shaped changing expectations around what comprised ‘market value’ and consequently became deeply involved in Bombay's land economy. Where officials had earlier resisted valuations that they believed encouraged speculation, after the 1920s the resolution of disputes incorporated future value as a legitimate and necessary part of the economy

National Geographics: Toward a “Federalism Function” of American Tort Law

This Article will situate the federalism function among existing scholarly frameworks and assess the “contoured” approach to federal and state power balancing across the existing subject matter of torts. Part II will assess conflicting characterizations of tort law as on one hand “private” and on the other “public” law. Part III will define and explain competing functions of tort law with an eye to whether federalism fits the common criteria of these coexisting objectives, goals, purposes, and methods for adjudication. In Part IV, the Article will explore historical and contemporary roles of federalism to understand why this process becomes so deeply implicated in the resolution of civil justice claims. Part V will explore patterns in modern tort federalization to draw observations about the way this process partakes in American nationhood and legal culture. Its first subpart explores federalization in the name of constitutional rights initially with respect to free speech in the theories of defamation, privacy, and emotional distress. It then looks to federalization under due process jurisprudence in public takings and civil damage awards. The second subpart reviews federal preemption—the displacement of state common law actions by express or implied national legislative purpose. That discussion will take the reader through preemption approaches in transportation and auto safety, food and drug regulation, environmental protection, and employment claims. Although jurisprudence across these discrete industries has cross-pollinated in recent decades, viewing them serially in this fashion, hopefully, will make better sense of the sociocultural logics underpinning preemption—even if the rules themselves still appear quite nebulous today. Finally, Part VI will offer a discussion of these various substantive areas to support the general proposition that current struggles to balance state and federal authority—the federalism function—form a legitimate new policy function of torts today

Cow Protection, Hindu Identity and the Politics of Hurt in India, c.1890–2019

Recent violence in India towards minority Muslim and Dalit communities in response to their alleged killing of cows is shocking in its brutality. Those responsible maintain the cow is sacred to Hindus and a threat to its life is an attack on Hinduism itself. They claim a deep sense of hurt at what they see to be the historic violation of their religion. In contrast, liberal commentators argue that right-wing forces have become emboldened since Hindu nationalists came to power in 2014. Yet, Hindu nationalism alone cannot explain the widespread belief that people whose livelihoods depend on cattle are beyond the democratic norms of tolerance. Rather, we must consider ‘affect’ and the role of history to understand the currency of cow protection in the cultural politics of hurt in contemporary India

Game Theory-based Allocation Management in VCC Networks

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have contributed significantly towards improving road traffic management and safety. VANETs, integrated with Vehicular Clouds, enable underutilized vehicular resources for efficient resource management, fulfilling service requests. However, due to the frequently changing network topology of vehicular cloud networks, the vehicles frequently move out of the coverage area of roadside units (RSUs), disconnecting from the RSUs and interrupting the fulfillment of ongoing service requests. In addition, working with heterogeneous vehicles makes it difficult to match the service requests with the varying resources of individual vehicles. Therefore, to address these challenges, this work introduces the concept of clustering resources from nearby vehicles to form Combined Resource Units (CRUs). These units contribute to maximizing the rate of fulfillment of service requests. CRU composition is helpful, especially for the heterogeneity of vehicles, since it allows clustering the varying resources of vehicles into a single unit. The vehicle resources are clustered into CRUs based on three different sized pools, making the service matching process more time-efficient. Previous works have adopted stochastic models for resource clustering configurations. However, this work adopts distinct search algorithms for CRU composition, which are computationally less complex. Results showed that light-weight search algorithms, such as selective search algorithm (SSA), achieved close to 80% of resource availability without over-assembling CRUs in higher density scenarios. Following CRU composition, a game-theoretical approach is opted for allocating CRUs to service requests. Under this approach, the CRUs play a non-cooperative game to maximize their utility, contributing to factors such as fairness, efficiency, improved system performance and reduced system overhead. The utility value takes into account the RSS (Received Signal Strength) value of each CRU and the resources required in fulfilling a request. Results of the game model showed that the proposed approach of CRU composition obtained 90% success rate towards matching and fulfilling service requests