Contesting Knowledge, Contested Space: Language, Place, and Power in Derek Walcott’s Colonial Schoolhouse

Derek Walcott's colonial schoolhouse bears an interesting relationship to space and place: it is both a Caribbean site, and a site that disavows its locality by valorizing the metropolis and acting as a vital institution in the psychic colonization of the Caribbean peoples. The situation of the schoolhouse within the Caribbean landscape, and the presence of the Caribbean body, means that the pedagogical relationship works in two ways, and that the hegemonic/colonial discourses of the schoolhouse are inherently challenged within its walls. While the school was used as a means of colonial subjugation, as a method of privileging the metropolitan centre, and as a way of recreating that centre within the colonies, Walcott's emphasis on place complicates and ultimately rewrites colonial discourses and practices. While the school attempts to legitimize colonial space, it in fact fosters what Walter Mignolo has termed "border thinking.

Grand Visions in an Age of Conflict

Last spring Professor Laurence H. Tribe commented that federal constitutional law is in a state of intellectual disarray: [I]n area after area, we find ourselves at a fork in the road--a point at which it\u27s fair to say things could go in any. of several directions and we have little common ground from which to build agreement. No doubt fortuitously, two of our most formidable constitutional scholars, Akhil R. Amar and Jed Rubenfeld, have recently published systematic studies that implicitly challenge Tribe\u27s conclusion that ours [is] a peculiarly bad time to be going out on a limb to propound a Grand Unified Theory--or anything close. With admirable boldness, Professors Amar and Rubenfeld have done precisely that--gone out on a limb, or rather two very different limbs, to propound their own accounts of what American constitutionalism is, or should be. Amar\u27s America\u27s Constitution and Rubenfeld\u27s Revolution by Judiciary are alike in that each is its author\u27s synthesis of a remarkable effort, sustained over a number of years, to develop a comprehensive vision of the Constitution. We have much to learn from their successes as well as from the points at which they are, I believe, in error

The Conflicted Assumptions of Modern Constitutional Law

Contribution to Symposium - The Nature of Judicial Authority: A Reflection on Philip Hamburger\u27s Law and Judicial Dut

Missing Market in Labor Quality: The Role of Quality Markets in Transition

This paper characterizes a key feature of the classic socialist economy and state-owned enterprise, namely that of missing markets in labor quality. Under the socialist regime in which students and workers were assigned to work units, the rights of managers to monitor and reward workers were limited. The exchange of labor services was based more on measures of quantity rather than quality. Workers who performed functions broadly consistent with that of their assigned occupations for the duration of the designated workweek received the standard wage. With the reassignment of property rights, this situation has changed. Students and workers have resumed control over the accumulation of their human capital the trade of skill and effort. Managers have acquired greater authority to monitor labor - to discriminate in setting wages and bonuses and to hire and fire - as well as stronger incentives to use this authority to raise efficiency and profits. The result is an emerging market in labor quality.A 1995 cross section of enterprise data spanning 10 ownership types is used to test the hypothesis of an emerging labor quality market. The results show that certain non-state forms of ownership, in which the rights of managers to monitor and reward skill and effort are presumed to be relatively well developed, encourage labor quality, most notably training, which raises productivity. The relative inability of state enterprises to monitor and reward high quality labor is likely to create an adverse selection problem in which the most skilled and motivated workers exit from the state sector, so as to cause a "hollowing" of skilled workers and weakened enterprise performance. The theoretical contribution of this paper is to generalize Coase's analysis of the critical role of property rights in creating resource markets to the creation and exchange of quality in all goods. Analytically, the conditions for a missing market in labor quality are equivalent to those for a missing market in pollution abatement and water quality. The analysis underscores the importance of property rights in creating the conditions for the accumulation and efficient exchange of human capital.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39645/3/wp260.pd

“Cardozo’s Foot”: The Chancellor’s Conscience and Constructive Trusts

The chancellor\u27s foot is a term coined by English legal scholar John Selden for the argument that equity is an unjustified and unfortunate interference in the regular course of the rule of law. This issue is examined by focusing on a particular doctrine of equity, the constructive trust, and on a seminal figure in the development of the modern US understanding of constructive trusts, Benjamin Cardozo