Glaring Exception Research Articles

Top Ten Contributions of Pediatric Hematology/Oncology to the Diagnosis and Treatment of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.

Monumental progress has occurred in the diagnosis and treatment of childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia dating back to the classic paper of Farber and colleagues in 1948. This historical review from the perspective of an individual, familiar with many of the waystations on this superhighway, will offer an admittedly personal review of the top 10 major contributions to the field. Fortunately, there have been many more additional advances beyond these 10 as we have witnessed an impressive improvement in overall survival from a few months 75 years ago to a cure rate of 85% in the world's more advanced countries. Other workers in the field assuredly would create a different list and ranking of these advances but the takeaway summation of the make-up and order of these lists is that advances have yielded improved and prolonged responses, a rational understanding of factors, both clinical and biological, that predict response and prognosis, the application of those factors to tailor therapy's intensity and duration to those factors and to discover and design modalities and targets of therapy that target our much more complete understanding of this most common malignancy of infants and children. On a very personal note, I vividly recall an early, ill-advised decision to devote my academic career to hematology/oncology, with one glaring exception, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and other malignancies. The stark realities of clinical practice and the harsh unmet needs and mostly unanswered challenges redirected my path that resulted in participation in many of these advances, making my own journey so gratifying and that of most of our patients so favorable.

Repairing Our System of Constitutional Accountability: Reflections on the 150th Anniversary of Section 1983

Section 1983 is a landmark statute that provides the foundation for holding state and local governments and their agents accountable when they violate constitutional rights. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s interpretation of this statute is a glaring exception to the rule that courts should enforce the plain language of Congress’s statutory commands. Rather than enforce the statute’s text and ensure the accountability that its drafters passed it to achieve, the Supreme Court has created four interlocking doctrines that squelch its promise of accountability: qualified immunity, absolute immunity, strict limits on local governmental liability, and the exclusion of states from Section 1983. This Essay, written to mark the 150th anniversary of Section 1983, does a deep dive into the text and history of Section 1983 and recovers a critical part of the story of its enactment that is all too often ignored: Congress made a conscious choice not to provide any official immunities because it did not want to place state officials above the law. Indeed, Congress passed Section 1983 to ensure that governments and their agents could be held accountable in a court of law. By gutting Section 1983 through rank judicial legislation, the Supreme Court has let states and local governments and their agents violate our most cherished constitutional rights with impunity and left those victimized by abuse of power without any remedy.

Medicine, mental health and child welfare: "Three different worlds that need to amalgamate".

The past 50 years have witnessed a dramatic change in the morbidity and mortality of many (if not most) pediatric diseases. The primary driver for this improvement has been the billions of dollars invested in research by the National Institutes of Health and hundreds of not-for-profit advocacy groups that have raised awareness and money to support research, treatment, prevention, and advocacy for their cause. Child abuse and neglect is a glaring exception, with no significant improvement in mortality from physical abuse and neglect over the past 50 years. Furthermore, child protection in the U.S., which has been the responsibility of the state and county Child Welfare Departments, have been struggling for at least 30 years and have no data on the quality and outcomes of their services to children and families. This article discusses some of the past failures to address the issue, and suggests that for progress to be made, health, mental health, and child welfare professionals have to be able to work with each other in a way that allows child and families to be free of abuse and neglect. It builds on the recent efforts to embed mental health services and professionals in primary care practices. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Exotic Psyllids and Exotic Hosts: Accumulation of Nonnative Psylloidea in North America (Hemiptera)

AbstractThe Psylloidea (Hemiptera) comprise ~4,000 species of small sap-feeding insects known as psyllids or jumping plant-lice. We summarize species composition of the nonnative psyllid fauna in North America and review detection records, current distributions, host use, life histories, and geographical sources. Forty-six species are considered to be nonnative accounting for ~10% of the known North American psyllid fauna. The family Psyllidae is overrepresented in the pool of exotics (52% of exotic species) relative to global psyllid diversity, whereas Triozidae (at 11% of exotic species) is underrepresented. Records of initial detection range from the 1832 detection of a European pear psyllid to the 2016 detection of a Ficus specialist from Asia. Many species exhibit discontinuous distributions in North America presumably caused by multiple introductions or by secondary spread of established populations. Host plants of nonnative species are almost exclusively trees and shrubs. The factor most correlated with introduction is presence of hosts from the psyllid’s native region. Virtually all host plants in North America have been imported intentionally for human-related use, with initial importation beginning in the 1500s and 1600s. Arrival of host plants in North America often preceded psyllid detection or arrival by decades or centuries. There has been almost no spillover by psyllids onto native plant species reflecting the narrow host range of Psylloidea. A glaring exception is the recent damaging colonization of a native Fraxinus closely related to the psyllid’s European Fraxinus host. Biological and geographical traits correlated with arrival and establishment of nonnative psyllids have shifted through time. Temperate Europe was the source of the earliest arriving species, with initial detection records primarily in New England and eastern Canada. In contrast, recent arrivals are mostly Myrtaceae- and Fabaceae-feeding species from the Neotropics or Australia, with detection records limited mostly to Florida or California. Early-arriving, temperate zone species exhibit a formal winter diapause while recent arrivals from the Neotropics and Australia appear to reproduce more-or-less continuously.

Judicial Protection of Medical Liberty

The article discusses the history of vaccine jurisprudence in the courts and in particular the lower courts' failure to engage meaningful constitutional review of state vaccination mandates. The lack of separation of powers in conjunction with the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Act has resulted in unfettered discretion among legislators to mandate vaccines in order for the public to obtain necessary and very valuable services. Since late 2020, the Supreme Court has indicated that the judiciary may take a more active role in reviewing COVID-19 mandates and this may signal that the judiciary will also review vaccine mandates generally with more care. The balance of powers relative to vaccination law and policy that has been lost over a century of poor jurisprudence in the lower courts may be restored to protect individual liberties adequately.

Masques of the Red Death

The article focuses on the current pandemic of the coronavirus that has provoked very few such illusions of immunity with, obviously, one glaring exception Topics include reports that American exceptionalism will defeat the disease as it would take very little to rewrite this sentence as ‘Putting America first will defeat the invading forces of globalisation'

Short-term stability of particles in the WD J0914+1914 white dwarf planetary system

ABSTRACT Nearly all known white dwarf planetary systems contain detectable rocky debris in the stellar photosphere. A glaring exception is the young and still evolving white dwarf WD J0914+1914, which instead harbours a giant planet and a disc of pure gas. The stability boundaries of this disc and the future prospects for this white dwarf to be polluted with rocks depend upon the mass and orbit of the planet, which are only weakly constrained. Here, we combine an ensemble of plausible planet orbits and masses to determine where observers should currently expect to find the outer boundary of the gas disc. We do so by performing a sweep of the entire plausible phase space with short-term numerical integrations. We also demonstrate that particle-star collisional trajectories, which would lead to the (unseen) signature of rocky metal pollution, occupy only a small fraction of the phase space, mostly limited to particle eccentricities above 0.75. Our analysis reveals that a highly inflated planet on a near-circular orbit is the type of planet which is most consistent with the current observations.

Election Litigation in the Time of the Pandemic

In this brief essay, I consider how courts have deployed the framework of sliding-scale scrutiny in the time of the pandemic. In particular, three novel issues have arisen in recent cases: (1) how to conceptualize burdens that are attributable to both state action and the pandemic; (2) whether to fault plaintiffs for not having taken precautionary steps before the pandemic hit; and (3) what weight to give to the so-called Purcell principle, which frowns on late-breaking judicial changes to electoral rules. Overall, I think most courts have reached the right answers on these issues. The Supreme Court, however, is the glaring exception to this encouraging trend. This leads me to two conclusions. One is that sliding-scale scrutiny is an impressively flexible doctrine, able to resolve adequately new kinds of claims in the midst of an unprecedented calamity. The other is that the current Court remains what I have called the anti-Carolene Court, implacably hostile to efforts to vindicate democratic values.

Spectrum-Wide Quantum Criticality at the Surface of Class AIII Topological Phases: An “Energy Stack” of Integer Quantum Hall Plateau Transitions

In the absence of spin-orbit coupling, the conventional dogma of Anderson localization asserts that all states localize in two dimensions, with a glaring exception: the quantum Hall plateau transition (QHPT). In that case, the localization length diverges and interference-induced quantum-critical spatial fluctuations appear at all length scales. Normally QHPT states occur only at isolated energies; accessing them therefore requires fine-tuning of the electron density or magnetic field. In this paper we show that QHPT states can be realized throughout an energy continuum, i.e. as an "energy stack" of critical states wherein each state in the stack exhibits QHPT phenomenology. The stacking occurs without fine-tuning at the surface of a class AIII topological phase, where it is protected by U(1) and (anomalous) chiral or time-reversal symmetries. Spectrum-wide criticality is diagnosed by comparing numerics to universal results for the longitudinal Landauer conductance and wave function multifractality at the QHPT. Results are obtained from an effective 2D surface field theory and from a bulk 3D lattice model. We demonstrate that the stacking of quantum-critical QHPT states is a robust phenomenon that occurs for AIII topological phases with both odd and even winding numbers. The latter conclusion may have important implications for the still poorly-understood logarithmic conformal field theory believed to describe the QHPT.

Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 by Charles Postel

Reviewed by: Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 by Charles Postel Daniel Mandell Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896. By Charles Postel. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Pp. [x], 390. $30.00, ISBN 978-0-8090-7963-6.) Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 examines the origins, leadership, policies, and evolution of three huge organizations—the farmers' Grange, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and the Knights of Labor—that emerged after the Civil War and became prominent national organizations pushing deep egalitarian reforms. Unfortunately, as Charles Postel shows, when these organizations each launched a southern strategy to gain national strength, they and their egalitarian ideals foundered on the rocks of racism and Redemption. Postel begins with the Grange, organized in December 1867 to advocate for farmers' rights against corporate interests. Although it embraced sexual equality, when the organization emphasized politics, women found themselves relegated to kitchens. More significant, one of the Grange founders, Oliver Kelley, sought sectional reconciliation, which meant "white solidarity between the northern farmer and the southern planter, and silence on the question of equality for African Americans" (p. 21). By the mid-1870s, Grange groups in the South were known for Ku Klux Klan activities and helped Democratic "redeemers" impose white rule, and those in the North built anticorporate coalitions with racist Democrats. Equality then delves into the WCTU, organized in 1873 and for decades the country's largest and most powerful women's organization. The WCTU [End Page 925] connected prohibition to sexual equality in the family, community, and workplace, with a liberal wing (led by Frances Willard) advocating woman suffrage. The WCTU similarly pursued white nationalist reconciliation, as Willard traveled to the South and returned to launch a national party that would "weld the Anglo-Saxons of the New World into one royal family" (p. 138). The WCTU incorporated racialist ideas in calls to limit the political rights of African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans. Postel then examines how the Knights of Labor became the first significant national labor organization after Terence V. Powderly became its head in 1879. It enlisted all laborers regardless of trade, skill, sex, or race (with the glaring exception of the Chinese). But in 1885, Powderly went south, like Kelley and Willard, and endorsed racial separation. Black laborers in the South still joined in large numbers as Knights leadership continued to push for equal wages and conditions, but that egalitarian element was shattered when white Louisianans joined to massacre striking cane workers in 1887. Equality ends by examining how, despite these organizations and the egalitarian writings by Henry George and Edward Bellamy, the United States descended into the Gilded Age and violent apartheid in the late 1880s. The Supreme Court overrode the Fourteenth Amendment in order to protect economic and racial hierarchies; the WCTU defended lynch mobs as defenders of white women; and the Knights through Powderly applauded the explicitly "whites only" Farmers' Alliance. These organizations, in combination with other groups, formed the People's Party in 1892, which marked the crest of the post–Civil War egalitarian wave but ultimately failed as racism created fatal fissures. An epilogue brings readers to the present, noting how labor unions played a critical role in forging a more equal nation during the New Deal and the civil rights movement, but were dismantled by corporations and their political allies in the 1980s. Postel's view of late-nineteenth-century America spotlights how the efforts of reformers to counter the growing power of wealthy corporations and "bosses" were undermined by the embrace of racism. He emphasizes the role of the South in this process, as each organization went off the rails when their leadership forged alliances with white elites in the region. While readers might want to know more about the nation's racist soil that seemed so receptive to those southern seeds, Postel's deep dig into the farmers' Grange, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the Knights of Labor provides useful lessons about reform efforts during that period as well as about the persistent fissures in the long effort to build "a just and equal society" (p. 318). Daniel Mandell Truman State University Copyright © 2020 Southern...

If Not Now, When? Us Tax Treaties With Latin America After TCJA

Since the 1990s, the US tax treaty network has expanded to include most large developing countries. However, there remains a glaring exception: The US only has two tax treaties in Latin America (Mexico and Venezuela), and one pending tax treaty (Chile). The traditional explanation for why the US has no treaty with, for example, Argentina or Brazil is the US refusal since 1957 to grant tax sparing credits to developing countries. Before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA), this explanation was wrong, because the combination of deferral and cross-crediting meant that tax holidays in a source country would not lead to a shift in revenues to a residence country even without tax sparing. This traditional view needs however to be updated given TCJA. On the one hand, there is now an exemption for direct dividends, so that the traditional rationale for not entering into treaties is gone. On the other hand, GILTI means that deferral is abolished and to the extent the income of a CFC exceeds the GILTI threshold there can in fact be a transfer of revenue to the US. Nevertheless, I believe that Latin American countries should enter into treaties with the US, for three reasons. First, cross-crediting still means that even with GILTI there may not be a revenue shift. Second, there are good reasons to enter into treaties even with a revenue shift, such as attracting FDI and limiting tax evasion. Third, Latin American countries are increasingly capital exporters, and the absence of a treaty hurts their multinationals. Finally, now is an opportunity, because the entire US treaty network needs to be updated to take account of TCJA.

More than Mothers: Juries of Matrons and Pleas of the Belly in Medieval England

Common law was an all-male system, with one glaring exception: juries of matrons. If a convicted felon requested a reprieve from execution on the grounds of pregnancy, it was the responsibility of a group of twelve matrons to perform an inspection in order to determine if she was in fact pregnant. Matrons were in a position of great authority. Their verdicts were definitive: if they decided a woman was pregnant, then she was sent back to prison. Despite the significance of their role, little is known about medieval matrons and what qualified them to sit on a jury. Were they mothers? Honorable wives? Midwives? The goal of this paper is to argue that matrons had training in obstetrics. This was particularly important for medieval matrons because the quickening (that is ensoulment, signaled by the first fetal movements) did not become the focal point of the matrons' assessment until at least 1348. Before this, the diagnosis was much more medically challenging as matrons had to determine whether a felon had conceived. Overall, the medieval records demonstrate great confidence in medieval matrons and their obstetrical expertise.

The Scope of the Removal Power Is Ripe for Reconsideration

This article was requested by The Judges Journal for inclusion in a symposium devoted to the status of administrative law judges. Professor Pierce argues that the scope of the removal power is ripe for review; the Supreme Court should hold that the president must have the power to remove all officers with executive responsibilities at will to allow the president to perform the functions vested in the president by Article II; and the Court should hold that due process requires that officers with purely adjudicative functions must be insulated from potential control by the president by forbidding their removal without cause. Professor Pierce also argues that, with one glaring exception, the Court's prior opinions with respect to the scope of the removal power are consistent with the dichotomy he supports if those opinions are read with care and considered in the context in which they were issued. He urges the Court to eliminate the one glaring exception by overruling its 1955 opinion in Marcello v. Bonds and restating the principles it announced and applied in its 1950 opinion in Wong Yang Sun v. McGrath.

Advances in Translational Research and Clinical Care in Pancreatic Cancer: Where Are We Headed?

While significant advances have been made in the treatment of many different solid tumors, pancreatic cancer remains a glaring exception. Overall 5-year survival rates for pancreatic cancer remain in the single digits. While newer chemotherapy regimens such as FOLFIRINOX and nab-paclitaxel/gemcitabine have demonstrated modest improvement in survival benefit for metastatic disease and have improved the resectability rates of previously borderline or locally advanced tumors, clinically significant improvements from immunotherapy and targeted therapy remain to be demonstrated. Regardless, a wealth of basic science research in pancreatic cancer has been directed at understanding its aggressive biology and its resistance to therapy. We present a brief summary of key areas of laboratory research and its translation to clinical care.

Shadow Play: Patrick Modiano and the Legacy of the Holocaust

Shadow Play: Patrick Modiano and the Legacy of the Holocaust1 Alan Morris As might be expected of a Nobel Prize winner, Patrick Modiano stands out from the crowd. His œuvre is highly personal, and highly literary, thanks to its distinctive interplay of “fiction et diction” (Genette 2004). With each successive text, the same basic universe returns, albeit with slight variations. Typically, an autodiegetic narrator—the novelist’s ludically fictionalized, and sometimes autofictional, alter ego—embarks on a quest back into the past, because a now-distant event, or an abiding mystery, continues to impact upon the present. Revisiting once familiar sites (usually in Paris), this protagonist recalls (or occasionally imagines) old experiences, and seeks to preserve, through writing, the little that can still be saved from oblivion. Themes such as identity, difference, loss, remembrance, and forgetfulness predominate; characters and character types recur; a plethora of genres (biography, the historical novel, the roman noir, the love story, amongst others) intermingle; there is a constant va-et-vient between the real and the invented; and temporal levels collapse into a “présent éternel” (mirroring the workings of memory). Stylistically, a self-aware use of intertexts shows that literary creativity subtends the retrospection; the narrative combines with a meta-narrative, undermining any suspension of disbelief; and circularity proliferates, all of which reinforces the lack of final resolution, and ensures that each text is irrevocably non-totalizing. Incapable of being shoehorned into established categories, l’œuvre modianesque is, in a word, unique. Against this general backdrop, the present article will explore Modiano’s relationship to the Holocaust, in order to situate him vis-à-vis his peers, the members of “the second generation” or “those who come after” the Shoah,2 and to assess the extent to which he falls into, or remains detached from, this recognizable group of writers. More particularly, the analysis [End Page 13] which follows will have three broad centres of attention: firstly, Modiano’s family background; secondly, his writing; and finally, the question of how well or how poorly his writing reflects the Nazis’ attempted genocide. However, not all of his texts will be considered. He currently has a total of twenty-eight major works behind him, so the spotlight will be trained principally, but by no means entirely, on the two parts of his œuvre which seem to reveal the most about his treatment of the Holocaust, that is to say his first three novels and Dora Bruder. From this targeted, but nonexclusive, focus, it will emerge that, in his depiction of World War Two, Modiano’s aforementioned uniqueness is once again to the fore. He will be seen to be a second-generation, post-Shoah novelist who is haunted by the Occupation, but who, on the whole, and with the glaring exception of Dora Bruder, barely talks about the Holocaust at all. At first glance, Patrick Modiano appears to be a typical author “who comes after,” for he too is marked by the belatedness and the legacy of absence that commentators such as Marianne Hirsch and Eva Hoffman (on the second generation), and Susan Rubin Suleiman (on the 1.5 generation), see as characteristic of these writers. Born on 30 July 1945, of a Belgian, Flemish-speaking actress (Luisa Colpeyn) and a Paris-born Sephardic Jew (Albert Modiano), he did not live through the war years, so experiences them as a hole. Yet as he discloses in his most profoundly autobiographical text, Un pedigree, he believes these years, and especially the unwholesome period of the Occupation, to be fundamental to his inheritance: “le terreau—ou le fumier—d’où je suis issu” (20). Unlike many mothers and fathers of “those who come after,” Albert Modiano was not deported during the war, but this did not mean that, as he was growing up, Patrick had first-hand sources to inform him about the early 1940s. He was neglected by his parents, and regularly entrusted to a host of other people and to boarding schools all over France (from which he would often run away).3 This sense of solitude and upheaval was subsequently increased by an event that was to taint his life and his future writing—the...

Combined morphological and phylogenomic re-examination of malawimonads, a critical taxon for inferring the evolutionary history of eukaryotes.

Modern syntheses of eukaryote diversity assign almost all taxa to one of three groups: Amorphea, Diaphoretickes and Excavata (comprising Discoba and Metamonada). The most glaring exception is Malawimonadidae, a group of small heterotrophic flagellates that resemble Excavata by morphology, but branch with Amorphea in most phylogenomic analyses. However, just one malawimonad, Malawimonas jakobiformis, has been studied with both morphological and molecular-phylogenetic approaches, raising the spectre of interpretation errors and phylogenetic artefacts from low taxon sampling. We report a morphological and phylogenomic study of a new deep-branching malawimonad, Gefionella okellyi n. gen. n. sp. Electron microscopy revealed all canonical features of ‘typical excavates’, including flagellar vanes (as an opposed pair, unlike M. jakobiformis but like many metamonads) and a composite fibre. Initial phylogenomic analyses grouped malawimonads with the Amorphea-related orphan lineage Collodictyon, separate from a Metamonada+Discoba clade. However, support for this topology weakened when more sophisticated evolutionary models were used, and/or fast-evolving sites and long-branching taxa (FS/LB) were excluded. Analyses of ‘–FS/LB’ datasets instead suggested a relationship between malawimonads and metamonads. The ‘malawimonad+metamonad signal’ in morphological and molecular data argues against a strict Metamonada+Discoba clade (i.e. the predominant concept of Excavata). A Metamonad+Discoba clade should therefore not be assumed when inferring deep-level evolutionary history in eukaryotes.

Trump's FEMA administrator appointment: The pick he got correct

Donald Trump has made many controversial appointments since taking the office of President of the United States of America. Many of his appointees have had little to no experience in their substantive area. Some even argue that many of his appointees received their jobs from patronage. One glaring exception is Brock Long's appointment as Director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Long served as the Director of the Alabama Emergency Agency, the state level equivalent of FEMA. Given that he is an experience public servant, Long may prove to be of the better appointments made by President Trump.

London: Water and the Making of the Modern City by John Broich

Reviewed by: London: Water and the Making of the Modern City by John Broich Leslie Tomory (bio) London: Water and the Making of the Modern City. By John Broich. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Pp. 232. $32. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, private water companies supplied most cities in Britain. Municipal provision was rare. This would change profoundly, however, as municipalities acquired private companies in almost all major cities throughout the country. By 1900, urban water supply was largely in public hands. The glaring exception to this pattern was the capital city, London. It is this anomaly that John Broich sets out to explain. From the outset he makes clear that the issue was fundamentally one of politics, and so poses the question in a novel way: how did London water supply become so politically charged that rival factions battled over the nature of its governance for years? The first chapter describes how water supply became a symbol and a crucial component of the modernization of British cities. The reform of municipal governance that began in the 1830s eliminated the old local corporations and replaced them with elected town councils, with the exception of London. At the same time, a sense of crisis was dawning as cholera epidemics swept the country and Edwin Chadwick and his fellow reformers pressed for public action to improve the environmental health of towns. Reformers repeatedly condemned for-profit water companies for their failure to provide adequate clean water, and a royal commission in the 1840s recommended that towns seize control of water supply. Over the next couple of decades, the momentum for municipal water supply grew. Governments generally eschewed regulation in favor of public ownership because water supply became a centerpiece of the municipal reform movement. It served as an example of “moral government” in transforming the urban environment. Once in control, towns set about increasing supply. Tory politicians often opposed these schemes largely by complaining of their enormous costs. [End Page 264] London faced the same pressure for the reform as other cities. Indeed, the reform movement often was centered in London. It was, however, different in many ways. Many parliamentary acts did not apply to the metropolis as local political pressure created exceptions, often filled by special London-only laws. In addition, many new water companies had been founded after 1800, leading to a period of intense competition and allowing some to argue that commercial self-interest would ensure the best supply. The movement for “moral government,” however, led to the creation of the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) in 1855 to deal with the more pressing sewerage problem that had turned the Thames into a vast open gutter. Lacking the power and legitimacy of a town council, the MBW failed to move on to water supply. When the London County Council (LCC) replaced the MBW in 1889, it turned to the goal of municipalizing water supply with vigor. As the council was filled with members of the Fabian socialist movement, water supply was to be a vehicle for launching a revolution in local government toward a communitarian society, too long delayed by the central government’s unwillingness to reform London’s political structures. The Fabians’ desires soon collided with the Parliament’s, as it was then controlled by the Tories. Proposals to draw water from Welsh valleys were repeatedly defeated. Drought in the 1890s finally prompted the long-sought change to municipal ownership, but the national Conservatives parried the LCC’s moves by creating supra-municipal regional boards to run water, gas, and other services, diluting the LCC voting power by giving the less politically radical surrounding areas and towns disproportionate voting rights. Given its relative brevity and the chronological focus, this book is really the history of the LCC’s struggle with Parliament from the 1880s to the creation of the Metropolitan Water Board in 1903. For this period, the book is an effective history. Its date range, however, means that some of its claims about the deficiencies of private water companies are overstated. They certainly had very serious failures in the early nineteenth century, but Broich too readily accepts contemporary complaints about the companies. Some...

A Journey to Armenia: Visual Reminders of Genocide and Oppression

A Journey to Armenia: Visual Reminders of Genocide and Oppression

A Thundering Silence: Environmental Rights in the Dialogue between the EU Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights

The aim of the article is to shed light on the particular issue of absence of judicial dialogue between the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in the matter of environmental rights which represents a glaring exception to the generally cooperative disposition exhibited by the two courts in other domains linked to human rights protection. The article draws on this particular absence of judicial dialogue by examining the respective patterns of judicial reasoning employed by the CJEU and the ECtHR in cases before them that involve, or have a bearing on, environmental rights (substantive and procedural). Thus, the singular tendencies discernible in the ECtHR’s progressive jurisprudence in the field of environmental rights will be compared to CJEU’s jurisprudence relevant to environmental rights with the intention of detecting certain aspects in the CJEU’s approach which could further stand to be improved following the example of ECtHR’s activist environmental jurisprudence as a viable avenue for initiating the currently missing dialogue between the two courts in the matter of environmental rights.