Ross's Analysis Research Articles

Alf Ross on the Nature of Law

AbstractIn his work, On Law and Justice, Alf Ross sought to explain law in scientific/empirical terms, in terms that would require no recourse to what he called “metaphysics” or “idealism.” The result is a sort of translation of legal rules and official actions into propositions of behavior, predictions of behavior, and shared ideology. The present work raises questions about the tensions within Ross's work(s), and discusses the places where Ross's analysis seems to fall short of its ambitions. In the course of the discussion, the article considers issues relating to legal mistake, explanations of judicial behavior, and different types of normativity.

AlfRoss on the Concept of a Legal Right

AbstractIn this article, I discussAlfRoss's claim that the concept of a legal right is best understood as a technical tool of presentation, which ties together a disjunction of operative facts and a conjunction of legal consequences, and that rights statements render the content of a number of legal norms in a convenient manner. I argue that whileRoss's analysis is appealing, it is problematic in at least three respects. I also argue, however, that despite these difficulties Ross's analysis deserves our continued attention, because the fundamental idea—that the concept of a legal right must be understood functionally—is sound.

End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945 ed. by Rachael Gilmour and Bill Schwarz (review)

Gilmour, Rachael, and Bill Schwarz, eds. 2011. End of Empire and the English Novel since 1945. Manchester: Manchester University Press. $95.00 hc. 272 pp.The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so that they don't know it means, says stuttering Whisky Sisodia in The Satanic Verses (1988, 343). It is precisely this lacuna in postwar British fiction that the present collection addresses. In the volume's afterword Elleke Boehmer argues that the revisionary purpose of this collection is to present several examples of occlusion, tendency in postwar fiction to forget that the empire is crumbling into pieces (2011, 242). Bill Schwartz argues that the essays also seek to address the role that English insularity and parochialism have played in obscuring colonial realities (5). End of Empire discloses what occurred historically at the by analyzing rearticulations of colonial legacies on transnational and regional scale (5). The collection foregrounds the literary dialogue between the provincial and the transnational, the social and cultural networks existing on regional scale and across nations. As James Procter notes, debates on empire and its aftermath have tended to flicker between metropolitan center and postcolonial periphery while paying scant attention to the internal margins of provincial (203). The book seeks to bring into the spotlight the theoretical centrality of marginal discourses located outside the metropolitan context yet participating in the creation of the same cultural and racial dichotomies inherent in the center/ periphery opposition.This collection brings together number of interventions on the ambivalent attitude toward the fall of empire. It draws on wide range of texts by canonical writers such as D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell and less well-known authors including William Boyd, Josephine Tey, and David Peace. The essays are organized around four main thematic blocks: the veiled anxiety perceivable in texts that do not explicitly interrogate the consequences of Britain's decline as an imperial power; critique of Britain's insular mentality; the necessity to adopt comparative stance, bringing together novels by E. M. Foster and Alan Hollinghurst; and the idea that British imperialism is progressively being replaced by the United States' hegemony in the world.In the first grouping, Richard Jones focuses upon ways in which John Masters's novels dealt with key events in the history of India's decolonization. For example, in Nightrunners of Bengal (1951), the Indian Mutiny is regarded as moment of treachery and barbarity by the British hero (132). There is tendency in these and other novels of the decade to subvert the significance of historical events that take place in the colony. Thus, despite Golding's commitment in Lord of the Flies to attack the imperialist ethos, Rachael Gilmour believe that the text tends to create a historically rooted, culturally homogenous-and by implication, exclusionary-vision of Englishness and English literature (93).Essentialist and homogenous notions of national belonging are discussed by Michael Ross in his analysis of Armadillo, in which insular anxiety rather than imperial nostalgia . . . is the major source of laughter (131). If Ross's analysis focuses upon the text's ability to deride English cultural myopia, Huw Marsh's reading of Lively's Moon Tiger suggests bleaker view of the present, the necessity to revisit the past with stern judgment and a skeptical eye (160). …

Comparative Political Economy, Gender, and Labor Markets

The publication in 2008 of Michael Ross's “Oil, Islam, and Women” by the discipline's flagship journal, the American Political Science Review, is a welcome development. It is the first empirical work with a primary focus on gender and political economy ever published in the journal and portends well for the development of research that focuses on such questions. My essay has two foci. The first is a critical engagement with Ross's analysis of why oil production negatively affects women's employment prospects. The second is how to further develop the study of gender in the comparative political economy of labor markets.

Alf Ross on the Concept of a Legal Right

In this article, I discuss Alf Ross's claim that the concept of a legal right is best understood as a technical tool of presentation, which ties together a disjunction of operative facts and a conjunction of legal consequences, and that rights statements render the content of a number of legal norms in a convenient manner. I argue that while Ross's analysis is appealing, it is problematic in at least four respects. First, it is designed primarily to account for one type of legal right concept only, namely ownership; and although it can be used to account for other types of legal right concepts as well, the practical benefits of doing so will not be anywhere near as impressive as they are in the case of ownership. Second, Ross's attempt to distinguish the concept of a legal right from other concepts that might also be conceived of as connective concepts - by rather loosely characterizing the situations in which we typically say that a person has a legal right - is not successful as it doesn't indicate what is necessarily the case, but only what happens to be the case. Third, Ross's analysis cannot account for the concept of a legal right as it occurs in the legal object language. Fourth, Ross's analysis may in some circumstances give rise to an infinite regress. I also argue, however, that despite these difficulties Ross's analysis deserves our continued attention.

Embodiment below discourse: The internalized domination of the masculine perspective

Synopsis This paper focuses on the embodied experience of gender. It draws upon Bourdieu's sociology of practice, cognitive sciences, and feminist phenomenology to highlight instances of non-discursive, cultural conditioning of embodied experience. Specifically, the paper focuses on the internalization by both men and women of the masculine perspective. It does so by discussing regular patterns of word ordering in English, comportment and motility, and orientation to the body. These patterns are cultural in that they are acquired through social interaction. They are non-discursive, though, in that they are not encoded in any system of representations and are not generally transmitted through discourse. Rather, they are infra-discursive, in that they exist below discourse. It emerges that, in general, the prototypical perspective adopted by male and female European social agents is distinctly more masculine than feminine. However, in restricted contexts, such as parenthood, this prototypicality is inverted. In this, we see how internalized structures match the broad overarching social structures. In the course of the discussion, we seek to further develop and contextualize some further analyses, such as Iris Young's phenomenology of corporeal experience and Cooper and Ross's analysis of word ordering. We ultimately hope to demonstrate the critical analytical importance of the embodied reality which is clearly culturally variable, yet not, strictly speaking, discursively constituted.

Unemployment, Inflation, and Common Stock Returns

THIS PAPER INVESTIGATES whether there exist risk premia for common stock returns associated with unemployment and inflation. Over the last decade, there have been large fluctuations in both macroeconomic and financial variables. The main purpose of this paper is to provide some empincal insight into the effects of this recent macroeconomic activity on mean common stock returns. Merton [71 showed that economy-wide state variables that affect investors' earnings opportunities can affect equilibrium secunty returns. In Merton's intertemporal setting, the anticipated return on a security is a linear function of the return on the zero-beta portfolio and a set of state variable betas, where each reflects the security's systematic movement with respect to the associated state variable. While Merton used an equilibrium setting, Ross [91 developed a similar pricing relationship from arbitrage conditions. In both cases, the slope coefficients in the expected return equations are the pnces of systematic risk associated with the factors. They reflect the risk premium for an asset whose return is perfectly correlated with the respective factor and is uncorrelated with the other factors. Brock [4] has extended Merton's and Ross's analysis to a production economy, and is able to derive asset