The Horizon Conquerors: Post-war London through Colonial Eyes.

Doris Lessing and V.S. Naipaul both arrived in London a few years after the end of the Second World War. This paper looks at their perceptions of the city as 'colonials', as seen from their fiction and non-fiction writings

National Juries for National Cases: Preserving Citizen Participation in Large-Scale Litigation

Procedural evolution in complex litigation seems to have left the civil jury behind. Reliance on aggregating devices, such as multidistrict litigation and class actions, as well as settlement pressure created by “bellwether” cases, has resulted in cases of national scope being tried by local juries. Local juries thus have the potential to impose their values on the rest of the country. This trend motivates parties to forum-shop, and some commentators suggest eliminating jury trials in complex cases altogether. Yet the jury is at the heart of our uniquely American understanding of civil justice, and the Seventh Amendment mandates its use in federal cases. This Article makes a bold proposal to align the jury assembly mechanism with the scope of the litigation: In cases of national scope, juries would be assembled from a national pool. This proposal would eliminate incentives for parties to forum-shop, and it would make the decisionmaking body representative of the population that will feel the effects of its decision. The Article argues that we would see greater legitimacy for decisions rendered by a national jury in national cases. Moreover, it argues that geographic diversification of the jury would enhance the quality of decisionmaking. Finally, national juries would preserve the functional and constitutional values of citizen participation in the civil justice system

The Uses of Adversity: Matthew Flinders' Mauritius Writings

A discussion of Matthew Flinders' 'Biographical Tribute to the Memory of Trim' and of an extended journal entry, both written while he was detained on Mauritius

Good Versus Evil in Austen’s Mansfield Park and Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat

The character of Tallis Browne in Iris Murdoch's novel 'A Fairly Honourable Defeat' is characterised by her as a figure of good, taking the place of Christ in a post-Christian allegory. This article compares Murdoch's exploration of theological themes with the ethical world created in Jane Austen's 'Mansfield Park'. Various possibilities for theological schemes in 'Mansfield Park' are discussed, and the characters analysed and compared to Murdoch's characters in 'A Fairly Honourable Defeat'. It is established, by examining point of view and voice in both novels, that, while Tallis is the moral centre of Murdoch's novel, Fanny is far from embodying the implied morality of the author of Mansfield Park, whose world view is more worldly and sophisticated than Fanny Price's