Kafka: The Judgment ; Judgment without trial?

At the beginning of The Judgment, we find Georg Bendemann, who has just finished a letter to his friend in Russia, reliving once more the agonizing decision to write the letter in the first place. The decision had not been easy. Like many of Kafka's characters, Georg Bendemann is obsessed with the idea of analysis, with the painstaking exploration of all sides of a given issue. "What could one write to such a man without hurting him?" had been the question. "On the other hand, by writing only casual gossip or not at all one would doubtless increase the friends isolation" had been the counter-argument. What follows now is an exercise in looking at alternatives that spawn new alternatives that leaves the reader dazzled. Each conclusion is in turn explored to its possible opposite implications, which are in turn qualified, which leads to more questions followed by more partial conclusions plus qualifications thereof. The process could continue ad infinitum, in fact, has gone on for years--we are merely presented with a condensed version of it

The Early Bird Waits for the Worm: May Federal Judgments Be Registered Prior to Appeal?

The federal registration statute, codified at 28 U.S.C. § 1963, permits a judgment creditor to register his or her judgment in another state by simply filing a copy of the judgment with the clerk of the registering court. Registration is permitted when the judgment becomes final by appeal, when the time to appeal expires, or when the court that entered the judgment orders registration for good cause shown. The majority of courts have interpreted good cause as a showing that the judgment debtor lacks assets in the forum jurisdiction to fulfill the judgment, but possesses substantial assets in the registering jurisdiction. District courts are split, however, on whether there must be a pending appeal before registration can be ordered. Registration gives the judgment creditor power to create a lien on the judgment debtor’s property in another district. The effect of the registered judgment depends on a state’s laws regarding liens. Liens in some states may reach personal property, creating the potential for a registered judgment to have harsh effects on the debtor’s livelihood and placing restrictions on the alienability of real property. The posting of a supersedeas bond can stay the enforcement of a judgment and alleviate the need for registration. This Note argues that a judgment creditor should be permitted to register her judgment without waiting for the judgment debtor to file an appeal. However, a court should have discretion to consider whether permitting registration when the judgment debtor has not yet posted a supersedeas bond would cause irreparable harm to a good faith debtor, and if so, grant the debtor time to post a bond

The Early Bird Waits for the Worm: May Federal Judgments Be Registered Prior to Appeal?

The federal registration statute, codified at 28 U.S.C. § 1963, permits a judgment creditor to register his or her judgment in another state by simply filing a copy of the judgment with the clerk of the registering court. Registration is permitted when the judgment becomes final by appeal, when the time to appeal expires, or when the court that entered the judgment orders registration for good cause shown. The majority of courts have interpreted good cause as a showing that the judgment debtor lacks assets in the forum jurisdiction to fulfill the judgment, but possesses substantial assets in the registering jurisdiction. District courts are split, however, on whether there must be a pending appeal before registration can be ordered. Registration gives the judgment creditor power to create a lien on the judgment debtor’s property in another district. The effect of the registered judgment depends on a state’s laws regarding liens. Liens in some states may reach personal property, creating the potential for a registered judgment to have harsh effects on the debtor’s livelihood and placing restrictions on the alienability of real property. The posting of a supersedeas bond can stay the enforcement of a judgment and alleviate the need for registration. This Note argues that a judgment creditor should be permitted to register her judgment without waiting for the judgment debtor to file an appeal. However, a court should have discretion to consider whether permitting registration when the judgment debtor has not yet posted a supersedeas bond would cause irreparable harm to a good faith debtor, and if so, grant the debtor time to post a bond

Reforming the Summary Judgment Problem: The Consensus Requirement

If one or more federal trial or appellate court judges disagree on whether summary judgment should be ordered, summary judgment can still be granted when an appellate majority finds in favor of summary judgment. The case will be dismissed, and a jury will not try it. Logically, however, should this occur? At least one judge has stated that a reasonable jury could find for the party against whom summary judgment has been ordered. In these situations where judges disagree on whether summary judgment should be granted, they often portray the case’s facts in very different ways—what I refer to as “massaging facts. The massaging of facts, along with the issues of summary judgment’s unconstitutionality and the underlying reasonable jury standard’s impossibility, make summary judgment legally problematic. At the same time, courts extensively employ summary judgment to dismiss many factually intensive cases, including police brutality and sexual harassment cases. Given that summary judgment has no prospect of being eliminated any time soon, the question is whether the “summary judgment problem” can be reformed to make the procedure more defensible. This Article explains the summary judgment problem including the concept of massaging facts. It then analyzes “the consensus requirement”—an effort to make summary judgment more justifiable given its continued use today

Reach and speed of judgment propagation in the laboratory

In recent years, a large body of research has demonstrated that judgments and behaviors can propagate from person to person. Phenomena as diverse as political mobilization, health practices, altruism, and emotional states exhibit similar dynamics of social contagion. The precise mechanisms of judgment propagation are not well understood, however, because it is difficult to control for confounding factors such as homophily or dynamic network structures. We introduce a novel experimental design that renders possible the stringent study of judgment propagation. In this design, experimental chains of individuals can revise their initial judgment in a visual perception task after observing a predecessor's judgment. The positioning of a very good performer at the top of a chain created a performance gap, which triggered waves of judgment propagation down the chain. We evaluated the dynamics of judgment propagation experimentally. Despite strong social influence within pairs of individuals, the reach of judgment propagation across a chain rarely exceeded a social distance of three to four degrees of separation. Furthermore, computer simulations showed that the speed of judgment propagation decayed exponentially with the social distance from the source. We show that information distortion and the overweighting of other people's errors are two individual-level mechanisms hindering judgment propagation at the scale of the chain. Our results contribute to the understanding of social contagion processes, and our experimental method offers numerous new opportunities to study judgment propagation in the laboratory

Aesthetic Rationality

We argue that the aesthetic domain falls inside the scope of rationality, but does so in its own way. Aesthetic judgment is a stance neither on whether a proposition is to be believed nor on whether an action is to be done, but on whether an object is to be appreciated. Aesthetic judgment is simply appreciation. Correlatively, reasons supporting theoretical, practical and aesthetic judgments operate in fundamentally different ways. The irreducibility of the aesthetic domain is due to the fact that aesthetic judgment is a sensory-affective disclosure of, and responsiveness to, merit: it is a feeling that presents an object, and is responsive to it, as worthy of being liked. Aesthetic judgment is thus shown to be, on the hand, first personal and non-transferable; and, on the other hand, a presentation of reality. We thereby capture what is right in both subjectivist and objectivist conceptions of aesthetic judgment

Blind insight: metacognitive discrimination despite chance task performance

Blindsight and other examples of unconscious knowledge and perception demonstrate dissociations between judgment accuracy and metacognition: Studies reveal that participants’ judgment accuracy can be above chance while their confidence ratings fail to discriminate right from wrong answers. Here, we demonstrated the opposite dissociation: a reliable relationship between confidence and judgment accuracy (demonstrating metacognition) despite judgment accuracy being no better than chance. We evaluated the judgments of 450 participants who completed an AGL task. For each trial, participants decided whether a stimulus conformed to a given set of rules and rated their confidence in that judgment. We identified participants who performed at chance on the discrimination task, utilizing a subset of their responses, and then assessed the accuracy and the confidence-accuracy relationship of their remaining responses. Analyses revealed above-chance metacognition among participants who did not exhibit decision accuracy. This important new phenomenon, which we term blind insight, poses critical challenges to prevailing models of metacognition grounded in signal detection theory

Judgment Proofing: A Rejoinder

The paper compares the Limpopo and Orange Rivers in Southern African Development Community (SADC), and the Juba and Shabelle Rivers in the Horn of Africa (HoA), which all are internationally shared basins. The aim is to identify differences and similarities between the river basins in the two regions in order to increase our knowledge and understanding of the issue of shared rivers. Relevant data were mainly collected and methods applied include document and literature review, text analysis, interviews with key professional persons during several study visits to the regions. Both the physical geography and the sectoral water uses of the rivers were presented and analyzed. Climatic similarities stand out when comparing the basins, as they are characterized by unevenly distributed rainfall patterns with great seasonal and annual variations, and the regions are water scarce. In both regions, the population is increasing, while the available water resource is decreasing. In all of the four basins, the regions are facing inevitable crisis of water scarcity. The river basins differ however primarily in terms of physical development of rivers’ water resources. The rivers in SADC have been developed for varieties of uses while the rivers in HoA are under-developed and under-utilized. The SADC rivers have established joint institutions for cross-border river cooperation while the HoA rivers have never had any type of river cooperation. Since the rivers have almost similar climatic and physical conditions, the legitimate research question in the future could be: what caused the differences in resource development and cooperation?QC 20140926</p

Strategic Judgment Proofing

A liquidity-constrained entrepreneur needs to raise capital to finance a business activity that may cause injuries to third parties --- the tort victims. Taking the level of borrowing as fixed, the entrepreneur finances the activity with senior (secured) debt in order to shield assets from the tort victims in bankruptcy. Interestingly, senior debt serves the interests of society more broadly: it creates better incentives for the entrepreneur to take precautions than either junior debt or outside equity. Unfortunately, the entrepreneur will raise a socially excessive amount of senior debt, reducing his incentives for care and generating wasteful spending. Giving tort victims priority over senior debtholders in bankruptcy prevents over-leveraging but leads to suboptimal incentives. Lender liability exacerbates the incentive problem even further. A Limited Seniority Rule, where the firm may issue senior debt up to an exogenous limit after which any further borrowing is treated as junior to the tort claim, dominates these alternatives. Shareholder liability, mandatory liability insurance and punitive damages are also discussed.