At the end of the 20th century, it was thought by many that the Anglo-American system of corporate governance was performing effectively and some observers claimed to see an international trend towards convergence around this model. There can be no denying that the recent corporate governance crisis in the US has caused many to question their faith in this view. This collection of essays by the leading British and American scholars provides a comprehensive attempt to answer the following questions: firstly, What went wrong—when and why do markets misprice the value of firms, and what was wrong with the incentives set by Enron? What has been done in response, and how well will it work? This study includes essays on the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US, UK company law reform, and European company law and auditor liability reform, along with a consideration of corporate governance reforms in historical perspective. Three approaches emerge. The first two approaches share the premise that the system is fundamentally sound, but these approaches part ways over whether a regulatory response is required. The third view, in contrast, argues that the various scandals demonstrate fundamental weaknesses in the Anglo-American system itself, which cannot hope to be repaired by the sort of reforms that have taken place.

O-DAY is rooted in yesterday. The harvest of the autumn presupposes the plowing and sowing of the spring. The men of the present are the inheritors of the past and are never the earners of their best possessions. No nationality, university, business, church, association is wise to forget its debt to the men who wrought in the times of its beginning. The men responsible for the guiding of the vessel, as it safely bears its present cargo, ought to remember gratefully those who laid the ship's keel and made the anvils ring in patient preparation.

The wider peacebuilding field has long suffered under the weight of an intriguing paradox: Violence has never been more studied, understood in terms of its dynamics and patterns, and officially identified as a policy challenge than it has in past the twenty years. And violence continues to unfold with extraordinary resilience in too many communities around the world. In this book Joe Bock makes a significant step into unpacking and suggesting creative ways to respond to this dilemma. I say that as a practitioner- scholar with thirty years of experience in community conflict and as a critic of the difficulties that this promising area of exploration — all too often misnamed as conflict prevention — has failed to deliver. From the standpoint of the practice of strategic peacebuilding several key contributions are worth highlighting from this book.

This fifth volume covers many of the most important philosophers and movements of the nineteenth century, including utilitarianism, positivism and pragmatism.

This volume of collected essays by some of the most prominent academics studying anarchism bridges the gap between anarchist activism on the streets and anarchist theory in the academy. Focusing on anarchist theory, pedagogy, methodologies, praxis, and the future, this edition will strike a chord for anyone interested in radical social change. This interdisciplinary work highlights connections between anarchism and other perspectives such as feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, disability studies, post-modernism and post-structuralism, animal liberation, and environmental justice. Featuring original articles, this volume brings together a wide variety of anarchist voices whilst stressing anarchism's tradition of dissent. This book is a must buy for the critical teacher, student, and activist interested in the state of the art of anarchism studies.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, in 1991, the until then almost unknown Caucasus has gradually become a familiar name in each household as it attracted growing – though sporadic – media attention. The war in Chechnya, the Islamisation of the conflict and the spread of violence and terrorism to other parts of the Northern Caucasus as well as Russia – all these increased the interest in the area and the need to study it. This volume intends to present the reader with a broad sample of the growing volume and range of studies on the contemporary Northern Caucasus. With this aim in mind, the chapters in this volume cover a great variety of subjects and are written in different academic disciplines – history, political science, sociology, anthropology and demography. Also the authors come from diverse countries – the US, Sweden, Turkey, Israel and, of course, various places in Russia. Most of the chapters in this volume are based on papers presented at the Ninth Conference of the European Society for Central Asian Studies (Kraków, September 2005) and the Sixth Annual Conference of the Central Eurasian Studies Society (Boston, October 2005).

The book is "full of profound insights, stimulating reflections and ideas, and creative provocations, such as the authors' continuous scepticism towards the liberal political and state theory". Defining the multicultural state as the essential political community of the 21st century and redefining the basic concepts of the theory of state to that effect, the book may become a milestone in the history of political and state theory (Ulrich K. Preuss in the "International Journal of Constitutional Law") 2006, p. 576-581."It is a great merit of Thomas Fleiner and Lidija R. Basta Fleiner that they identify both internal changes of a personal substrate of contemporary states and the challenges of globalization not only with an astonishing seismological sensitiveness; moreover, they do it in a manner, which distinguishes their book with regard to other works on the theory of the State."

This introductory book targets the reader who has the ambition to apply economic analysis but may be missing a technical introduction to its mathematical techniques or seeks a structured elaboration of its philosophical principles. The text juxtaposes economic analysis with moral philosophy, political theory, egalitarianism, and other methodological principles and then progresses to the details of methods such as model-building, derivatives, differential equations, statistical tests, and the use of computer programs.

This book is dedicated to my good friends Paula Herbst and Carol Hoffman,whose friendship and inspiration continue to be my guiding light; to my parents, who have always been my personal heroes; and to my good friend Audrey Taylor in Great Britain, who loves her pursuit of everything Thomas Paine and is a someone I am glad to have befriended.

I have been teaching in the areas of politics and literature for a number of years and have been fascinated especially by the work of George Orwell. In the early 1990s I began work on a book on Orwell and thought at the time that my interest in him would be satisfied. However, George Orwell: A Political Life, published by Manchester University Press in 1993, left me feeling that I wanted to say more than the essentially hybrid format of that book had allowed me to say about his political ideas. In 2003, Orwell’s centenary year, I was invited to give a number of papers on aspects of Orwell’s thought and was disingenuous enough to imagine that these could easily be brought together to make a book. Routledge were good enough to express an interest in the project, and so I immediately began to work on my individual papers. But of course I discovered that a great deal more work had to be done on each, and gaps between them, too, had to be filled. I am very grateful to those at Routledge who expressed an interestin the original project and to those, especially Harriet Brinton, who bore with me when it became clear that the task would be more difficult than originally envisaged. I would also like to express my gratitude to two friends, Claire Lightowler and Stanley Kleinberg, who read most of the original draft – in fact, in Stanley’s case, all the original draft. Their comments were very helpful and caused me frequently to rethink my approach. I am not a good proofreader; in fact, if I were any younger I would have been classified as dyslexic. In those days, however, that option was not available – only indolence. It has been my great good fortune to have a friend who is a meticulous proofreader and I am most grateful for the help that John Stewart offered and gave. Finally, my wife has been enormously and unstintingly supportive of my work. This project would not have been possible to complete without her help. All of these people are partly responsible for the successful completion of what follows, but only I am responsible for its deficiencies.

Intellectual property rights have undergone a significant expansion over the last half century, particularly since the Copyright Act of 1976. In The Political Economy of Intellectual Property Law, William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner (AEI Press; July 1, 2004) attempt to explain this expansion of intellectual property rights, and how it could have coincided with the deregulation movement. Should intellectual property be thought of as a form of regulation? Why did the movement for greater protection of intellectual property coincide with the deregulation movement? Landes and Posner apply public-choice theory to the growth and character of intellectual property protection over the last half-century. The authors argue that public-choice theory alone cannot explain the coincidence of the deregulation movement and the rapid growth of intellectual property protection. Political forces and ideological currents associated with the deregulation movement, combined with interest-group pressures, best explain the increases in intellectual property protection since 1976. The authors urge caution in equating intellectual property rights to physical property rights. They counsel skeptics of government to hesitate before extending a presumption of efficiency to a process by which government grants rights to exclude competition.

This book aims to define – or to re-define – anarchism in relation to the fundamental ethico-political problem of authority. Authority is defined in terms of the right to exercise social control (as explored in the ‘sociology of power’) and the correlative duty to obey (as explored in the ‘philosophy of practical reason’). Anarchism is distinguished, philosophically, by its scepticism towards such moral relations – by its questioning of the claims made for such normative power – and, practically, by its challenge to those ‘authoritative’ powers which cannot justify their claims and which are therefore deemed illegitimate or without moral foundation.

The role of the U.S. Supreme Court in the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election raised questions in the minds of many Americans about the relationships between judges and political influence; the following years saw equally heated debates over the appropriate role of political ideology in selecting federal judges. Legal scholars have always debated these questions—asking, in effect, how much judicial systems operate on merit and principle and how much they are shaped by politics. The Japanese Constitution, like many others, requires that all judges be "independent in the exercise of their conscience and bound only by this Constitution and its laws." Consistent with this requirement, Japanese courts have long enjoyed a reputation for vigilant independence—an idea challenged only occasionally, and most often anecdotally. But in this book, J. Mark Ramseyer and Eric B. Rasmusen use the latest statistical techniques to examine whether that reputation always holds up to scrutiny—whether, and to what extent, the careers of lower court judges can be manipulated to political advantage. On the basis of careful econometric analysis of career data for hundreds of judges, Ramseyer and Rasmusen find that Japanese politics do influence judicial careers, discreetly and indirectly: judges who decide politically charged cases in ways favored by the ruling party enjoy better careers after their decisions than might otherwise be expected, while dissenting judges are more likely to find their careers hampered by assignments to less desirable positions. Ramseyer and Rasmusen's sophisticated yet accessible analysis has much to offer anyone interested in either judicial independence or the application of econometric techniques in the social sciences.

Scott Mueller has gone where no computer book author has gone before right past all the warranty stickers, the hidden screws, and the fear factor to produce a real owner's manual that every laptop owner should have on his desk. Upgrading and Repairing Laptops, Second Edition shows the upgrades users can perform, the ones that are better left to the manufacturer, and how to use add-on peripherals to make the most of a laptop.

Upgrading and Repairing PCs is the runaway best-selling PC hardware book of all time and one of the best-selling computer books ever! This 15th Edition is loaded with the most up-to-date hardware information anywhere. World-renowned PC hardware expert Scott Mueller has taught thousands in his weeklong seminars and millions through his books, videos and articles. This edition contains hundreds of pages of new material, including the latest in processor and motherboard technologies.

Even if you aren't a networking professional, Upgrading and Repairing Networks explains those tough networking concepts in a way that won't make you reach for a bottle of aspirin, starting with the fundamentals and working through more advanced concepts. Now in its fourth edition, this industry classic networking reference gives you real world, in-depth explanations of confusing networking architectures and protocols, and helps you track down and repair networking problems that are costing you and/or your company money - right now. Don't be the only networking professional caught in a network meltdown without a copy of this trusty tome at your side.

The twentieth century brought enormous change to subjects such as language, metaphysics, ethics and epistemology. This volume covers the major developments in these areas and more.