A temporary occupant of no. 10? : prime ministerial succession in the event of the death of the incumbent

The Prime Minister in the United Kingdom is head of government. He is the sovereign’s principal minister, chair of the Cabinet, and the nation’s representative at various international gatherings, including the European Council, who holds the office matters for the purpose of the direction of government and the formulation of public policy. The method by which a politician becomes Prime Minister therefore matters. Prime ministerial succession is usually determined by an established and accepted process. This article addresses an exception. We begin by addressing the process that is established, before addressing the exception and why it merits attention

Scrabble and Retrograde Analysis

Reading Mike Keith\u27s article Scrabble-Tile Double Word Squares and Rectangles (WW Feb 2011) led me to ask the following question: which of the word grids he gave are actually legal positions in a game of Scrabble? Chess problemists use the term retrograde analysis for the study of how chess positions might have arisen in a legal game; this concept is of course equally applicable to other games, including Scrabble

The fixed term Parliaments Act and votes of confidence

The Government in the UK rests for its continuation in office on the confidence of the House of Commons. Until 2011, it was a convention of the constitution that a Government defeated on a motion of confidence resigned or requested the dissolution of Parliament. There were different categories of confidence votes. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 puts on a statutory basis the conditions for a general election following the loss of an explicitly worded motion of no confidence. Although not intended to do so initially, the provisions of the Act limit the options available to the Prime Minister in the event of a vote of no confidence and in so doing removed a significant power to maximise parliamentary strength in key votes

Constraining Public Employee Speech: Government’s Control of Its Workers’ Speech to Protect Its Own Expression

This Article identifies a key doctrinal shift in courts\u27 treatment Of public employees\u27 First Amendment claims-a shift that imperils the public\u27s interest in transparent government as well as the free speech rights of more than twenty million government workers. In the past, courts interpreted the First Amendment to permit governmental discipline of public employee speech on matters of public interest only when such speech undermined the government employer\u27s interest in efficiently providing public services. In contrast, courts now increasingly focus on-and defer to-government\u27s claim to control its workers\u27 expression to protect its own speech. More specifically, courts increasingly permit government to control its employees\u27 expression at work, characterizing this speech as the government\u27s own for which it has paid with a salary. This trend frustrates a meaningful commitment to republican government by allowing government officials to punish, and thus deter, whistleblowing and other valuable on-the-job speech that would otherwise facilitate the public\u27s ability to hold the government politically accountable for its choices. Courts also increasingly consider government workers to be speaking as employees even when away from work, deferring to the government\u27s assertion that its association with employees who engage in certain off-duty expression undermines its credibility in communicating its own contrary views. Implicit in courts\u27 reasoning is the premise that a public entity\u27s employment relationship with an individual who engages in certain expression communicates a substantive message to the public that the government is entitled to control. Courts\u27 unfettered deference to such claims would permit government agencies to fire workers for any unpopular or controversial off-duty speech to which the public might object, potentially enforcing orthodox expression as a condition of public employment. To be sure, government speech is as valuable as it is inevitable. But taken together, these trends lead to the rejection of government workers\u27 First Amendment claims in a growing number of cases that undermine workers\u27 free speech rights as well as the public\u27s interest in transparent government. Because of this shift\u27s normatively troubling implications, this Article proposes a new constitutional framework for public employee speech cases that attends more carefully to what it is that government seeks to communicate and whether that message is actually impaired by employee speech. It thus proposes a less deferential approach to assessing government\u27s expressive claims to its workers\u27 speech both on and off the job, exploring both categorical and contextual frameworks for identifying more precisely the comparatively small universe of workers\u27 speech that actually threatens government\u27s own expression

If time travel to our location is possible, we do not live in a branching universe

This paper argues for the following disjunction: either we do not live in a world with a branching temporal structure, or backwards time travel is nomologically impossible, given the initial state of the universe, or backwards time travel to our space-time location is impossible given large-scale facts about space and time. A fortiori, if backwards time travel to our location is possible, we do not live in a branching universe

Social democracy is not the ideology we need in an economic downturn: even if the Left can sell social democracy to the UK electorate, it will have a hard time selling it to global markets

In our continuing series on social democracy, Lord Norton rejects Pete Redford’s idea that social democracy is the best way forward for the Left. But the appeal of social democracy is tarnished for three reasons: it rests on an inaccurate perception of the Conservatives as slavishly devoted to neo-liberalism; it focuses too strongly on the state’s ability to solve people’s problems, and it is wholly inadequate in dealing with globalised markets

There are no universal rules for induction

In a material theory of induction, inductive inferences are warranted by facts that prevail locally. This approach, it is urged, is preferable to formal theories of induction in which the good inductive inferences are delineated as those conforming to universal schemas. An inductive inference problem concerning indeterministic, nonprobabilistic systems in physics is posed, and it is argued that Bayesians cannot responsibly analyze it, thereby demonstrating that the probability calculus is not the universal logic of induction. Copyright 2010 by the Philosophy of Science Association.All right reserved