Promissory Note Research Articles

Elements of Negotiability in Jewish Law in Medieval Christian Spain

Changes in the foundations of the negotiability of deeds took place in Jewish law in Christian Spain towards the end of the thirteenth century and in the fourteenth century. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, sages there adopted the legal tradition that had been shaped in Muslim Spain and North Africa in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This was a direct continuation of the tradition of the Geonim in Babylon of the ninth to the eleventh centuries, and was based on Talmudic law. According to this tradition, a creditor could sell a loan deed, which is a necessary condition for the possibility of developing a negotiable bill, but two other decrees significantly impeded the emergence of the negotiable bill: one was the rule enabling a lender who sold the deed to forgive the debt, and the other was the requirement of a bill of sale in order to transfer ownership of the loan deed. In the kingdom of Catalonia, the famous scholar Rashba stood at the forefront of the changes, blocking the forgiveness of a debt by a lender who sold a deed of the types: "to the lender and to whom he has empowered," and "to lender or bearer." Both deeds resemble the "pay to order" promissory note in English law. However, there is no evidence of modern negotiable instruments, where the transferee as a holder in due course obtains a bill without defects and with almost no direct links to the transferor. Rashba’s and his followers’ position appears consistent with the economic reality in the region of Catalonia and its capital city of Barcelona as a result of the transformation of the kingdom into a Mediterranean empire. Changes in the kingdom of Castile were hesitant and focused on easing the transferability of deeds by adding special clauses. Harosh ruled in the case of a deed "to lender and whom he has empowered" or a deed "to lender or bearer" that the lender/seller can forgive the debt to the borrower after the sale of the deed, rejecting the innovation of Rashba, his contemporary in Catalonia. Thus, the legal tradition in Castile, a powerful landlocked country, failed to make significant progress toward negotiability at that time, perhaps, unlike Catalonia, because of a lack of economic pressure to do so.

Collecting Income at Kerkesoucha Orous: New Light on P. Cairo II 30625*

This paper aims at an improved reading of P. Cairo II 30625, which was published in 1908 by W. Spiegelberg in the CGC. The text discovered during the excavations of B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt in the years 1899/1900 in Tebtunis is a promissory note concerning a lease of the right to collect temple related contributions in the village of Kerkesoucha orous.

Legal Review on the Electronic Promissory Note Act

Legal Review on the Electronic Promissory Note Act

Slouching Toward Coherence: Rhetoric, Religion, and the Broken Promissory Note of Racial Justice in the United States

article reviews several books including Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-1965, edited by Davis W. Houch and David E. Dixon, Luther King and the Rhetoric of Freedom: Exodus Narrative in America's Struggle for Civil Rights, by Gary Selby and The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King Jr., by Jonathan Rieder.

Promissory Note as Payment Security Instrument in the Republic of Croatia

In the modern world, a legal framework has been set up and a market regulator has been defined so that payment as a relation between the debtor and creditor can not be put in question regarding the realization of their integral rights. Countries in transition, including Croatia (the Republic of Croatia), are still trying to define not only the short term, but also the long-term regulators that would clarify all open questions both in the economic and in the legal segment. Promissory note as the payment security instrument has in practice become operative only through a consistent use of Distraint law. A theoretical and an implementation mechanism merge into one functional mechanism, on the basis of which it can be said that in this segment the Republic of Croatia has truly overcome the transitional barriers.

Gift Tax Effects of Substituting a Lower AFR Note for a Higher AFR Note

This article explores the gift tax consequences of an exchange of promissory notes between family members when interest rates have dropped from when the original or old note was issue to the present time when the new note is issued. More specifically, the scenario contemplated involves two events. At the first, which is T=0, a parent loans money to a child and the loan is evidenced by a promissory note (old note) which provides for adequate interest (i.e., interest at a rate equal or greater than the Applicable Federal Rate or AFR that set by the Treasury Department) when it is issued by the child. Under section 7872 of the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 as amended (Code), the value of this note at T=0 is its face amount, as it bears adequate (AFR) interest. However, Code section 7872 does not determine that note's value at a later time, T=5, when the interest rates have gone down (or even if they have gone up or remained the same). At that time, Treas. Reg. § 25.2512-4 generally provides that the value of the old note is presumed to be its face value. Thus, if the old note is exchanged for a new note which provides for adequate interest (new note) and so would also be valued at face under section 7872, there should be no adverse gift tax consequences, as the notes exchanged have equal values: the old note likely will be valued at its face amount and a new note bearing current AFR will be worth its face amount. Hence, each party will receive back in money or money's worth an asset having a value the same as the one transferred. And when parties make such an equal worth exchange, there can be no gift for Federal gift tax purposes.

Symposium: Asians: The Present Absence in Crash

“Crash” strives to show that just as culpability belongs equally to all racial groups, so, too, is redemption equally available. But that promissory note goes unpaid when it comes to the film’s Asian characters.

Reaching Higher in Community Psychology: Social Problems, Social Settings, and Social Change

Forty years after the founding of community psychology, we have yet to deliver on the full promissory note of our birth, where we were poised to address social problems, social settings, and social change. Despite some success, we are at risk for selling ourselves short, for dying out in the discipline of psychology, and for failing to improve the common good. Given changes in demographics and in the safety net, the problem of entrenched disparities is even more urgent-in perception of the other, in the provision of opportunities for development, and in outcomes. Envisioning and enabling will be critical as we work with unified purpose toward a cumulative science where failure will not be predictable.

PELAKSANAAN UNDANG-UNDANG NOMOR 38 TAHUN 1999 TENTANG PENGELOLAAN ZAKAT OLEH BADAN AMIL ZAKAT PEMERINTAH KABUPATEN SLEMAN

The research results show that method of zakah collecting is based on promissory note to pay zakah (from a state official) or take directly (from the others), and the distributing of zakah is based on a proposal that be accepted by the Board. To hold responsible for public, the Board gives a zakah managing report to muzakki and to local parliament. The pursue factors of the board to execute the Act number 38 year 1999 are (1) the staff are not professional, (2) the facility is not enough, and (3) the leadership is not participative. On the other hand, the supporting factor of the board to do their task is political supporting of Sleman Regency Government for those board.

Environmental Crime

Enhanced protection of the physical environment was the focus of legislative and regulatory initiatives in many nations in the closing decades of the twentieth century. The strength of the environmental movement and the attention paid to environmental crime are belied by the paucity of systematic data on its extent and distribution, its perpetrators, and responses to it. Organizational offenders have received by far the greatest attention from investigators, and case studies compose a substantial part of the research literature. Rational-choice approaches predominate. Most states give regulatory agencies primary responsibility for responding to environmental illegalities and crime. They generally do not operate vigorously, and penalties imposed are not severe. Criminal prosecution of environmental offenders occurs infrequently. Responsive regulation is touted as an effective response to traditional problems of control and regulation, but it remains a promissory note. The increasing globalization of economic relationships makes more diffcult and further challenges regulatory oversight of increasingly transnational corporations.

Slovenia: at a distance from a perfect religious market

SERGEJ FLERE Introduction Slovenia is surrounded by predominantly Catholic countries and is also 'historically Catholic'. During modern times, the Catholic prevalence in Slovenia has somewhat diminished, but Slovenia can hardly be called confessionally pluralist, since other religious groups (mainly Lutherans) are very small. During most of the twentieth century Slovenia formed part of Yugoslavia, a multinational and multiconfessional state. After the Second World War, as a communist state, Yugoslavia was known for a 'soft' political system and a liberal stance towards religion. In fact the earlier period (until 1965) was characterised by a repressive policy towards the major religions. This is partly to be accounted for by the potentially divisive nature of religion in this composite country, and partly by the need for this particular brand of communism to assert its 'authenticity' and 'purity' (Alexander, 1979; Mojzes, 1992). Within Yugoslavia, Slovenia was regarded as the most liberal environment from the religious point of view. Slovenia acquired independence in 1991 and avoided involvement in the conflicts that subsequently engulfed the rest of Yugoslavia. Since then Slovenia has seen peaceful development, and the economy is doing rather well, Slovenia taking the 29th position in the world according to the Human Development Index (Human 2003). At independence a constitution was adopted and, as in other postcommunist transition countries, it guaranteed the principle of separation of church and state (Article 7 Para.l). The political objective of this principle may be to guarantee freedom of conscience, but its latent social function goes beyond this. Its social and societal function is to create space in which religious views and practices can be freely exercised and can compete in a free environment; or, to put it in contemporary parlance, where religious entrepreneurs have the perfect market possibilities to offer the variety of their services, or 'goods', and to enter into 'exchange' relations with religious consumers, while the latter have the widest opportunity to choose among various 'religious products'. Thus some will choose a strict religion and a correspondingly greater 'return' for a greater (alleged) renunciation of this-worldly goods, albeit a 'return' that is somewhat postponed and comes in the form of a sort of 'compensatory' promissory note. One may choose liberal or restricted religion, ascetic or hedonistic, ritual-rich or ritual-poor, or may combine these elements in the most varied fashions. These types of religion, furthermore, may be combined with a variety of creeds and doctrines as well as with a variety of organisational forms, which call for further choice. This view of religious life (Stark and Finke, 2000) as a specific market that is not substantially different from the commerical market or the marriage market provides a perspective for an understanding and close analysis of certain processes in religious life.

Editorial comment

The impetus for minimally invasive surgery was originally patient driven, embraced by surgeons because of its “promissory note”—for in surgery, all other things being equal, smaller incisions are better. For those involved in laparoscopy at its inception, it was difficult to find data to support this concept. Laparoscopy nonetheless evolved and flourished and is now a mainstay of adult urology.

Is the Promissory Note of Personality as Vulnerability to Depression in Default? Reply to Zuroff, Mongrain, and Santor (2004).

Is the Promissory Note of Personality as Vulnerability to Depression in Default? Reply to Zuroff, Mongrain, and Santor (2004).

Evolutionary Explanation and Consciousness

If there is a received orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science, it is that all features of the mind, including meaning, action, and consciousness, can and perhaps must be naturalized (i.e., accommodated within the framework of the world of nature as understood by the natural sciences). At the same time, just about everyone working in philosophy of mind has realized for at least a decade that there are substantial problems with this enterprise of naturalizing the mind, in that there are features of the mind that do not seem to lend themselves to naturalistic explanation: in particular, meaning, consciousness, and free will. For naturalists (who comprise the majority of the field at the moment), this is seen as an urgent problem: they feel that we must naturalize the mind, and yet it looks as though we do not know how to do so. Oddly, even many of the writers who have forcefully argued that the mental cannot be reduced to the physical, or cannot be explained in evolutionary terms, still call themselves “naturalists,” even when they have no concrete naturalization of the mind to offer. A few other anti-naturalists and I, on the other hand, have tried to argue that the problems the naturalist faces are abiding and principled problems, and not merely a symptom of a current lack of development of psychology or neuroscience. In this article for the special issue, I shall attempt to do three things. First, I shall attempt to describe the current situation in philosophy of mind and cognitive science with respect to one special facet of the mind: consciousness. I shall try to explain, in a very abbreviated form, the historical factors that have led to the popularity of reductionist forms of naturalism, and then summarize several influential arguments to the effect that consciousness cannot be reduced to neuroscience or physics. I shall then differentiate two very different strands of this conversation: one which is about explanation (i.e., physical science cannot explain consciousness), and another which is about metaphysics (i.e., physical facts are not enough to determine facts about consciousness). Finally, I shall explain why I think that naturalizers of the mind can look for no solace from evolutionary explanation if–-as appears to be the case–-attempts at reductive explanation of the mind in terms of physics or neuroscience should continue to fail: in brief, because evolutionary explanation depends upon the fulfillment of a promissory note which only reductive explanation could make good on. It is thus only in the final section of this article that I shall approach the uniting theme of the special issue. However, to understand the status of evolutionary explanation in philosophy of mind, it is in my opinion necessary to see where it fits within a broader framework of naturalizing the mind.

Integral water protection along the Danube - trite or concept - and how is IAD engaged?

Integral water protection, which aims ultimately at the function of aquatic ecosystems and includes qualitative, quantitative and morphological aspects, cannot remain just a promissory note. The integral approach mediates between use and protection of waters and should provide the basis for a modern water management. In the Danube River Basin, the International Association for Danube Research (IAD) can significantly contribute to such strategies.

Karl Marx as a Conservative Thinker

AbstractAccording to a long-standing conservative critique, the proponents of fundamental or revolutionary social change necessarily fail by sacrificing the organic complexity of society and the individual upon a procrustean bed of dogmatic and rigid universal principles. I will argue that Marx's concept of proletarian self-emancipation is not only compatible with this conservative critique but is appropriately understood as a variant of it. The self-emancipation of the working class is the core of Marx's critique of the Utopian socialists, for whom socialism is the instantiation of universal ideals rather than the product of class struggle. This critique should be construed, not as a theoretical promissory note for the realisation of these ideals through the agency of the workers, but as a criticism of the very project of founding political ethics on the basis of universal ideals. Marx's political thought bears a structural similarity to conservative thought in that each seeks to ground its political programme upon the study of society as it actually exists, rather than upon a vision of human nature considered apart from society. If Marx's critique of Utopian socialism holds water, the intellectual roots of Stalinist authoritarianism may be traced, not to the failure of Marx fully to outline the ideal communist society, but to the assimilation of elements of his thought to the Utopian style and tradition of political thought. There should be no surprise, therefore, when attempts to transcend Stalinism by basing radical politics upon sanitised versions of a socialist Utopia or socialist renditions of such universal liberal principles as human rights prove counter-productive.

Ethics and Rules

Of all Foucault's sometimes obscure texts, none is more enigmatic than are the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality. The work intended to serve as the introduction to the series, La volonte de savoir, had seemed to provide a theoretical apparatus fruitful enough to warrant the five volumes Foucault promised would soon follow. But when the promissory note was finally honored, the theory had been abandoned. In its place was a series of detailed readings and exegeses of a number of Greek and GrecoRoman texts, some well known, some obscure. Scholars, and, more especially, those intellectuals who had found in Foucault such a valuable resource for political struggle, could hardly hide their mystification, and their dismay. Mystification, for it was far from clear what Foucault was attempting to say in these works. Was he advocating a return to Greek conceptions of ethics? Surely such a return is impossible. And if Foucault was not proposing something of this kind, why the patient, detailed exegesis of these Greek and Greco-Roman texts? Foucault supplies few theoretical signposts to clarify his project. And dismay, for it appeared that in these last works Foucault, previously the most engaged of all the poststructuralists, was renouncing political involvement. In the elaboration of an aesthetics of the self, commentators detected a turning away from the world, and a concomitant withdrawal into an abstract, aestheticized, realm of the solitary subject, a turning from, and a subordination of, politics to aesthetics.' Indeed, compared to the politically engaged genealogical writings, Foucault's two last major works are far removed from concrete political problems. But neither do they advocate a turning away from such engagement. Instead, they can most profitably be viewed as taking a step back from political engagement, in order to examine some of the larger problems it raises. Rather than proposing ethical principles or rules which we could seek to apply, The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self are meditations on the status of such rules. Rather than seeking to diagnose an inadequate existing set of rules and codes, to which he might oppose a better, Foucault examines the place of rules in ethical action. Foucault's most important contribution to the history of ethical thought lies in his distinguishing of two primary axes along which ethics develops: of and of behavior.2 Although no ethical system can ever completely dispense with either component-indeed, the two are always necessarily interrelated-some moralities emphasize one aspect, some others: in certain moralities the main emphasis is placed on the code, on its systematic ity, its richness, its capacity to adjust to every possible case and to embrace every area of behaviour... On the other hand, it is easy to conceive of moralities in which the strong and dynamic element is to be sought in the forms of subjectivation and the practices of the self. In this case, the system of codes may be rather rudimentary. Their exact observance may be relatively unimportant, at least compared with what is required of the individual in the which he has with himself. (UP, 29, 30) All ethics necessarily contain a set of rules that guide actions. But the degree to which these rules attempt to determine action in advance, the degree to which they are open to the future (and, as Levinas reminds us, this means open to the Other) is neither constant nor uniform. The morality developed by classical Greek reflection was relatively uncodified. There were indeed a certain number of laws, prohibitions, and obligations. But in this ethics, the accent was placed, not on these laws, but on the relationship with the self which enabled an individual to achieve mastery of his (essentially his) passions and appetites, in order to exert a relation of mastery over himself. Later ethics, by contrast, placed the emphasis not upon forms of subjectivation, but on the codes of behavior. …

Can Connectionists Explain Systematicity?

Abstract: Classicists and connectionists alike claim to be able to explain systematicity. The proposed classicist explanation, I argue, is little more than a promissory note, one that classicists have no idea how to redeem. Smolensky's (1995) proposed connectionist explanation fares little better: it is not vulnerable to recent classicist objections, but it nonetheless fails, particularly if one requires, as some classicists do, that explanations of systematicity take the form of a‘functional analysis’. Nonetheless, there are, I argue, reasons for cautious optimism about the prospects of a connectionist explanation.

Trading spaces: A promissory note to solve relational mapping problems

Clark & Thornton (C&T) have demonstrated the paradox between the opacity of the transformations that underlie relational mappings and the ease with which people learn such mappings. However, C&T's trading-spaces proposal resolves the paradox only in the broadest outline. The general-purpose algorithm promised by C&T remains to be developed. The strategy of doing so is to analyze and formulate computational mechanisms for known cases of recoding.

Body and Ritual in Farquhar

Body and Ritual in Farquhar Derek Hughes In the first incident in Farquhar's first play, the hero inspects and interprets a maimed body. Roebuck arrives, penniless, in England and meditates on possible ways to maintain himself. He considers robbery or soldiership, but is instantly deterred from the latter when a disabled ex-soldier enters, begging: "a glimpse of Damnation just as a Man is entering into sin, is no great policy of the Devil," he reflects (Love and a Bottle, 1.1. 10-1 1).1 But, after a comparative reading of his and the beggar's body, he concludes that the latter's may be better written: the bullet has given the beggar "a Debenter in thy broken Leg, from which thou canst draw a more plentiful maintenance than I from all my Limbs in perfection" (1.1.21-23). In a recent article, I studied the compulsive counting that runs through Farquhar's plays: the representation of social structure and status through the image oíplace is constantly superseded by numerical systems (as when Scrub in The Beaux Stratagem enumerates the different places he has in the Sullens' household on each day of the week), and number even takes over from language as the prime means of articulating and sustaining social existence.2 As the encounter with the beggar shows, the individual body too becomes an object of numerical significance—an atomistic, materialistic unit of economic exchange. It is almost superfluous to say that the beggar's body offers no parallel to the political organism and that his injuries lack the social symbolism of Lavinia's mutilations or Coriolanus's scars. After all, hardly any dramatist since 1660 had used the body in this way, especially in sphere of comedy (though, as it happens, Vanbrugh had used the fable of the belly in /Esop [1696]).3 What can be said, however, is that, unlike comedy-writers of the previous generation, Farquhar creates situations in which such comparisons force themselves on our attention. Indeed, strikingly recreating and redefining the deformed figure of Richard III in The Twin414 Derek Hughes415 Rivals, he writes the part of a hunchback for Cibber, who played Richard in his own adaptation of Shakespeare.4 Here, clearly, Farquhar is writing against an older image of the significant body. In doing so, as we shall see, he turns the deformed body from a moral sign into an economic indicator: because of his body, Benjamin needs money to get women. Benjamin is a deformed man and a vicious man, but the relationship between the two facts is not an immediate, or analogical, or symbolic one. There is an intermediate term: the commercial consequences of deformity. Similarly, the significance of the beggar's body arises from its economic function—its participation in a chain of monetary cause and effect.5 In describing the beggar's shattered leg as a "Debenter," Roebuck treats the maimed body as a text, but a text recording numbers: a debenture is "A voucher certifying to a soldier or sailor the audited amount of his arrears for pay" (OED lb). Moreover, the economic significance of the text is contingent and changing, according to periods which are also numerically measured: the disabled man was five years a soldier, but fifteen a beggar. It should be noted, however, that Farquhar does not take the usual method of subjecting the body to definition by economic forces—namely, portraying it as a commodity. As the image of the body as promissory note indicates, the beggar 's body is a form of currency, a unit of exchange; and so the body is to be throughout the play.6 There is another way in which this incident subordinates language to number. Poor soldiers, the beggar explains, are more generous than well-fed clergymen; for "A Captain will say Dam'me, and give me Six-pence; and a Parson shall whine out God bless me, and give me not a farthing. Now I think the Officers Blessing much the best" (1.1.34—37). A curse is numerically preferable to a blessing in that it is accompanied by sixpence. The awful comminations of earlier generations have declined into empty verbal...