Local Government Action and Antitrust Policy: An Economic Analysis

At least partly as a result of the Supreme Court decision in Community Communications Co. v. City of Boulder, cities are facing antitrust challenges to their rights to franchise cable television systems. Other municipal activities have been similarly challenged. The prospect of costly and uncertain antitrust litigation challenging local government actions will restrict the scope and extent of local regulatory activity. Such restrictions could, in turn, preempt city residents\u27 ability to choose, through their elected representatives, the goods and services they prefer. This Article proposes that as a mater of policy the burden of proving a municipal antitrust violation should be on those who seek to restrict municipal action. This Article discusses the merits behind the general case for municipal antitrust immunity and the specific circumstances in which cities might face liability under antitrust laws. Further, this Article sets out three criteria by which the potential for adverse effects of a city\u27s action may be determined, then assesses the leading state action cases using these criteria. Finally, this Article concludes by describing the appropriate policies for dealing with potentially inefficient city actions and makes specific recommendations consistent with the current case law

The morphology of xenarthrous vertebrae (Mammalia: Xenarthra) /

n.s. no.41 (1999

A Sociosemiotic Analysis of Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!

This essay presents a sociosemiotic analysis of My Children! My Africa! (1989) by Athol Fugard. By considering the characters’ views about self, community, education, and time, it points to the Fugard’s anxious attempt to offer liberalism as the solution to apartheid in South Africa instead of oppositional politics, especially blacks’ calls for activism and communalism. Sociosemiotics is suitable to plays overtly political; it holds that political writers are troubled by political changes that do not correspond to a firmly held ideology—a tension between what a playwright believes is absolute and what s/he senses and perhaps fears is happening. Keys to the analysis are contemporary texts, including essays from leading Black writers and journalists and from studies and essays from attendees of a 1986 conference on liberal solutions to the unrest in South Africa

Instantons, finite N=2 Sp(N) theories and the AdS/CFT correspondence

We examine ADHM multi-instantons in the conformal N=2 supersymmetric Sp(N) gauge theory with one anti-symmetric tensor and four fundamental hypermultiplets. We argue that the ADHM construction and measure can also be deduced from purely field theoretic considerations and also from the dynamics of D-instantons in the presence of D3-branes, D7-branes and an orientifold O7-plane. The measure then admits a large-N saddle-point approximation where the D3-branes disappear but the background is changed to AdS_5 x S^5/Z_2, as expected on the basis of the AdS/CFT correspondence. The large-N measure displays the fractionation of D-instantons at the singularity S^3 in S^5/Z_2 and is described for instanton number k by a certain O(k) matrix model.Comment: 16 pages, jhep.cl