Duress and undue influence

2021 ◽  
pp. 313-347
Author(s):  
Tracey Cooper ◽  
Ewan Kirk
Keyword(s):  
2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Carol Mejia Laperle

The critical field of The Masque of Blackness often annotates Queen Anne and her ladies’ blackface performance with a courtier's eye-witness comment that the “lean cheeked moors” were “loathsome” and “ugly.” Yet Ben Jonson's performance text, when read beside Dudley Carleton's correspondences, resists the undue influence of the aristocrat's anecdotal disparagement. This project refuses to take Carleton's denigration as fact. Instead, it investigates the masque's representation of Niger's daughters to develop the affective experience of pleasurable mixing across racial identities and to show how the opulence, innovation, and beauty afforded by blackface are the means to underwrite arguments of political authority. Rather than a deviation from the performance's magnificent appeal, racial impersonation is constitutive of the masque's demonstration of beauty and invention of pleasure. As such, the allegory of King James I's power hinges on a fiction of idealized incorporation that is ideologically powerful precisely because it is primarily an aestheticized, affective experience. Beyond the ostensible trope of racial transformation, Jonson presents the pleasure of mixing across racial identities as the precondition for Britannia's absorption of migrant bodies. Blackness is a visual reminder of an indelible difference that can be absorbed, incorporated, indeed “salved,” by the monarch's faculties of conversion. The affective experience afforded by blackface is thus an argument for the sovereign's power of unification, underwriting what was a largely unfulfilled and controversial political agenda: the coalition of realms under the aegis of Great Britain.


1961 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 89-98
Author(s):  
Karol J. Krotki

Discussions about the role of small enterprise in economic development tend to remain inconclusive partly because of the difficulty of assessing the relative importance of economic and non-economic objectives and partly because of the dearth of factual information on which to base an economic calculus. It is probably true, moreover, that, because of a lack of general agreement as to the economic case for or against small enterprise, non-economic considerations, including some merely romantic attitudes toward smallness and bigness, tend to exert an undue influence on public policies. There may, of course, be no clear-cut economic case. And noneconomic considerations should and will inevitably weigh significantly in policy decisions. If, however, some of the economic questions could be settled by more and better knowledge, these decisions could more accurately reflect the opportunity costs of pursuing non-economic objectives.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8431
Author(s):  
Taejong Kim ◽  
Hyosun Kim

Recent failures in COVID-19 prevention and control in some of the richest countries raise questions about the relevance of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the fight against pandemics. To examine this issue, we adopted the measure of countries’ progress for the SDGs in the SDG Index Scores (SDGS) and employed two analytical devices. The first was regression-aided adjustment of the number of deaths and confirmed cases. The second was the use of robust regressions to control the undue influence of outliers. The results are mixed. Between the SDGS and the adjusted infection rates, we found no significant correlation; however, between the SDGS and the adjusted death rates, the correlation was negative and statistically significant. These results provide a nuanced contrast to the hasty conclusions some of us might be tempted to draw from apparent positive correlations between SDGS and the cases and the deaths. The SDGs represent the fruit of painstaking global efforts to encourage and coordinate international action to enhance sustainability. We find the results reassuring, in that they suggest that the countries with higher SDGS have been able to control the devastation of deaths from COVID-19 more effectively, despite being unable to control the propagation of infections.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 475-478
Author(s):  
Matthé Scholten ◽  
Jochen Vollmann

In this case commentary, we analyze ethical concerns that were raised in response to an interview with a woman with bipolar disorder who was under involuntary commitment. We focus on competence and voluntariness as two prerequisites for valid informed consent. We recommend that judgments of competence be based on whether prospective research participants sufficiently possess certain decision-making abilities. Based on this functional approach, we argue that manic symptoms need not undermine competence and that, even if we were to assume that the research participant became incompetent during the interview, this would not invalidate her consent retroactively. It would, however, compromise her ability to revoke her consent. We furthermore show that obtaining additional proxy consent for research participation may compromise the autonomy of service users who are competent to consent. Then we turn to the issue of voluntariness. Arguing that neither the great strength nor the external etiology of a desire compromises voluntariness, we propose that the voluntariness of a decision instead depends on whether the decision-maker endorses it on reflection. The researchers disclosed that prospective research participants’ decision about study participation would have no influence on the duration of the commitment or the quality of care. We contend that because of this neither coercion nor undue influence was exerted in the informed consent process. Nevertheless, there is an increased likelihood of perceived coercion and undue influence under conditions of involuntary commitment, and we close by suggesting some safeguards to prevent this.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Felicity Maher ◽  
Stephen Puttick

What is the significance of the receipt of independent advice by the plaintiff in a claim to set aside a transaction on the basis of a vitiating factor – such as duress, undue influence or unconscionable conduct? The generally held view has been that it is highly significant. Indeed, the receipt of advice has been understood as an answer to many such claims. The High Court of Australia’s decision in Thorne v Kennedy apparently changes this. Although that case concerned advice in relation to binding financial agreements under the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth), the decision has important implications across banking, commercial and other areas of practice. This article, then, offers a reanalysis of this question in light of this decision and other developments. The authors propose a new framework – based around two key questions – for conceptualising the function and significance of independent advice in a particular case. The article considers and develops this framework with regard to the main general law vitiating factors in both two-party and three-party cases.


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