Perceiving China

This chapter examines the perspectives of Vietnamese and Indonesian elites towards China and the extent to which efforts to promote a positive Chinese national image have been successful in these two countries. Utilizing information gathered from field research, I argue that both countries perceive China as attempting to modify – not entirely revise – the rules of the international system to suit its purposes. Territorial issues remain a primary focus in the two countries’ relationships with China, and they also express concerns that China’s growing influence will cause an unstable regional environment. Interviewees also expressed considerable doubt about the idea of Chinese exceptionalism and tended to perceive China as acting like any other big power.

The relationship between mothers’ and their daughters’ family size emerged in the United States during the 19th century

For more than a century, a key question of the social sciences has been whether daughters’ family sizes relate to their mothers’ family sizes. Contemporary evidence confirms that, in developed countries, women from larger families indeed tend to have more children themselves. There is considerable doubt, however, whether intergenerational continuity in childbearing constitutes a universal feature of human societies. Based on a large-scale web-harvested collection of online memorials, we show that intergenerational continuity in childbearing in the U.S. emerged only in the first half of the 19th century, paralleling the country’s marked fertility decline. Furthermore, we show that statewide differences in intergenerational continuity in childbearing coincide with statewide differences in abortion laws. This suggests that control over individual fertility was a major driver of the emergence of intergenerational continuity in childbearing. This finding suggests that, although intergenerational continuity in childbearing has appeared only relatively recently in the history of humankind, it will eventually become relevant worldwide.

Retaining the Royal Prerogative of Mercy in New South Wales

This article argues that the prerogative of mercy should be retained in New South Wales as a necessary and appropriate power of the Executive. Historically, pardons have provided opportunities for redemption. Currently, the statutory appeals process is limited to cases involving a miscarriage of justice where there is considerable doubt as to a person’s guilt. In cases where a person is guilty but is nevertheless deserving of mercy, the prerogative of mercy is the only avenue available. As a purely executive power, the prerogative of mercy can achieve the aims of the criminal justice system by tempering justice with mercy. The role of the sovereign involves maintaining order, but also enacting some conception of the good, driven by compassion, love, and mercy. Finally, this article argues that grants of mercy should be a matter of public record, for transparency and as a means of demonstrating this compassion to the public.

Functions of Indeterminacy

This chaptersheds light on the potential use of linguistic indeterminacy. It identifies conditions under which indeterminacy in general (if not semantic vagueness) can be strategically used.The negative results of this examination are that most arguments for the value of semantic vagueness are unsound and that even our best game theoretic models of vagueness only show that some form of indeterminacy is beneficial under some conditions. On the positive side, the examination provides evidence based on formal models of signalling games for the possibility to strategically use conversational vagueness, ambiguity, and pragmatic indeterminacy - at least for certain conditions: for example, if there is a conflict of interests. Thus, while most forms of linguistic indeterminacy arguably can have a positive function, there is considerable doubt about any potential value of semantic vagueness.

Autonomy Isn’t Everything: Some Cautionary Notes on McCoy v. Louisiana

The Supreme Court’s May 2018 decision in McCoy v. Louisiana has been hailed as a decisive statement of the priority of the value of a criminal defendant’s autonomy over the fairness and reliability interests that also inform both the Sixth Amendment and the ethical obligations of defense counsel. It also appears to be a victory for the vision of client-centered representation and the humanistic value of the inherent dignity of the accused. However the decision is susceptible to being read too broadly in ways that harm certain categories of defendants. This paper offers a couple of cautionary notes, in response to McCoy, regarding the ethical obligations of defense counsel. The most important caution is that, as a matter of constitutional law and professional ethics, the preference for autonomy and the standard allocation of decision making authority presupposes a fully competent client, not a client who merely passes the extremely low constitutional bar of competency to stand trial. A client capable of participating in a fully autonomous way in the representation is far more than minimally competent. Where the client has diminished capacity to make adequately considered decisions in connection with a representation, the usual division of decision making authority within the lawyer-client relationship breaks down. The Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Indiana v. Edwards muddles the issue considerably by recognizing a gray area between competency to stand trial and entitlement to self-representation under Faretta v. California. The self-representation right in Faretta is based on the same autonomy interests that animate McCoy. Autonomy is a capacity, and the Edwards decision questions whether a client lacking this capacity can participate in the representation in the usual way. Edwards therefore casts considerable doubt on whether autonomy should have the same priority over fairness and reliability interests in a representation involving a borderline-competent defendant. Observing that a lawyer’s decision has the effect of limiting the client’s autonomy is the beginning of the recognition of a complicated issue, not the end of the analysis. In many cases the lawyer should respect a client’s fully-informed decision regarding the representation. There will be other cases, including the representation of questionably competent clients, in which the client’s autonomy interest must be subordinated to other legal values. This ranking should not be conducted on an ad hoc basis but in a principled way. This paper therefore proposes a sliding-scale approach to autonomy and other professional values, in which the most important consideration is a balance between the importance of the decision and the client’s capacity to participate in a meaningful way in the representation. A clearly competent, well-informed client still has the right to make what a lawyer believes to be unreasonable decisions regarding the representation. However, the threshold for concluding that a client is competent and a decision is fully informed should be set sufficiently high to ensure the protection of “gray area” client and also to provide appropriate incentives to trial counsel to conduct a thorough investigation and mount an effective defense.

Who was Arnobius the Younger? Dissimulation, Deception and Disguise by a Fifth-Century Opponent of Augustine

Twentieth-century scholars believed that Arnobius the Younger was an African monk living in Rome. This is untenable. There is now considerable doubt over the authorship of several works ascribed to him by Germain Morin: the Expositiunculae has been proved to date from the early medieval period, but the author of the anti-predestinarian Commentarii in Psalmos, one ‘Arnobius’, is also responsible for writing the mid fifth-century Praedestinatus, an attack on Augustine's predestinarian theology and its champion, Prosper of Aquitaine. The content of these works and related evidence point to Julian of Eclanum as the true author.

Whither neoliberal penality? The past, present and future of imprisonment in the US

Debates about the trajectory of prison rates in the US, on one hand, and about the prospects of the neoliberal international order, on the other hand, suggest the time is ripe for a reappraisal of penological scholarship on the relationship between neoliberalism and imprisonment. With the aim of responding to this challenge, this article considers the relevance of the so-called ‘neoliberal penality thesis’ as a framework through which to interpret recent and ongoing developments in US imprisonment. We first set out the core propositions of the thesis and engage with a range of critiques it has attracted regarding the role of crime and government institutions, the evolution and functions of state regulation and welfare provision, and reliance on imprisonment as an indicator of state punitiveness. We then outline the principal arguments that have arisen about the direction of contemporary prison trends in the US, including since Donald Trump was elected to the presidency and took office, and proceed to distil their commonly opaque treatment of the intersections between neoliberalism and imprisonment, also clarifying their respective implications for the neoliberal penality thesis in light of the main critiques levelled previously against it. In so doing, we go beyond the penological field to take into account concerns about the vitality of neoliberalism itself. We conclude that international politico-economic developments have cast considerable doubt over the pertinence of neoliberalism as an organising concept for analysis of emergent penal currents.

The identity of the bird known locally in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Norfolk, United Kingdom, as the Spowe

In the kitchen record books of the L'Estrange family in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there are references to a bird, widely shot on the Norfolk coast, called a Spowe. On the basis of the similarity to the Icelandic name, J. H. Gurney (sen.) and Fisher (in their “An account of birds found in Norfolk” published in 1846) assumed this to be the Whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus) as have all ornithological texts ever since. Internal evidence from the kitchen records strongly suggest that the Spowe was a winter visitor, not a passage migrant, thus throwing considerable doubt on Gurney and Fisher's ascription. We suggest that it is much more likely that the Spowe was the Bar-tailed Godwit (Limosa lapponica).

No Evidence for Differential Relations of Hedonic Well-Being and Eudaimonic Well-Being to Gene Expression: A Comment on Statistical Problems in Fredrickson et al. (2013)

In a study of the relation between well-being and gene expression, Fredrickson et al. (2013, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 110 (33), 13684–13689) concluded that hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being have similar affective correlates but different gene transcriptional correlates in human immune cells. This comment addresses four statistical problems in Fredrickson et al.’s (2013) analyses. First, an idiosyncratic two-factor scoring rather than the documented and well-validated three-factor scoring was used for the instrument assessing well-being. Second, the analyses relating hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being to affect did not include the same variables as the analyses relating these two well-being variables to gene expression, invalidating any comparison between them. Third, hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being were highly correlated, resulting in untheorized and unrecognized suppression effects that accounted for their supposed differential relations with gene expression. Fourth, the method of computing p values for the one-sample t tests discarded information and violated the assumption of independence for those tests. These problems cast considerable doubt on the validity of Fredrickson et al.’s (2013) conclusions.

Opportunities to improve the measurement of audit quality: a call for collaboration between the profession and academics

Audit research relies on a wide range of publicly available measures to examine which factors influence the quality of financial statement audits. While research to date has to rely largely on remote proxies due to a lack of access to proprietary data, there is considerable doubt about the validity of these proxies and the inferences drawn based on these proxies. In order to provide insight into the reliability of these measures, Rajgopal, Srinivasan & Zheng (2015) investigate whether commonly used proxies for audit quality (i.e. auditor size, abnormal audit fees, accrual quality, and the propensity to meet and beat analyst targets) are associated with deficiencies reported in SEC investigations and class-action lawsuits. Such alleged deficiencies reflect how external stakeholders assess audit performance. Their study indicates that the use of such proxies is highly problematic and that the performance of these measures, with the exception of auditor size, is poor.