This paper develops the idea of transgenerational association. It addresses intrapersonal distributions of wellbeing over time. It develops the notion of temporal distributions between generations, and posits that it is possible to overcome the problems that obstruct ethical individualism. It argues that corporate personality allows us to compare distributions between generations to distributions between the stages of one person.

This article examines how the adoption of children under Hindu law in India is regarded by British private international law and immigration law. Through an analysis of case-law, it focuses particularly on how British judges regard the legitimacy of exclusion by the British immigration control system of children who have been adopted under a ‘foreign’ legal system which essentially permits private adoption arrangements. Examining the background to the regime of Indian Hindu law adoptions (which applies to Sikhs as well as Hindus), and the private international law and immigration rules which apply to such adoptees in the UK, the article finds some evidence in the judicial decisions of a more activist, human-rights-based, plurality-conscious position being taken. However, tracking the case-law further, the article concludes that such activism has not been followed through in more recent decisions leaving the conflictual position between transnational adopters and British legal systems largely unresolved.

During the 1790s, Mary Hays was one of the most influential radical novelists and polemicists in England. She counted amongst her closest friends and mentors the likes of Joseph Johnson, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. During this tumultuous final decade of the century, she published two novels, The Memoirs of Emma Courtney and The Victim of Prejudice. Both were controversial in the extreme, attracting the opprobrium of conservative critics. What caused such consternation was not merely their vivid description of the myriad political and social injustices suffered by her female compatriots, but the role of the law in perpetuating such injustices. For much of the last two hundred years Hays has been a largely forgotten figure, her novels occasioning rare interest amongst literary critics and historians, rarer interest still amongst jurists. The purpose of this article is to address this neglect, and to recommend Hays as one of the most intriguing and urgent prophets of modern literary and jurisprudential feminism.

Since the 1990s, a number of anti-corruption conventions have been adopted due to pressure from international financial institutions, donor countries and governments of major industrialised nations. One of these conventions is the Anti-corruption Protocol adopted by the Southern African Development Community. This article examines this Convention against the backdrop of the principal–agent–client (PAC) model which influences much of the current anti-corruption measures ranging from legal and civil service reform through to privatisation of the public sector. In focusing on the efforts to fight and prevent corruption through legal and public sector reform, this paper highlights the limitations of externally imposed solutions largely driven by donors. Using Tanzania, a country that has seen extensive technical input from donor agencies in reforming the law and bureaucratic structures, as an illustration, this article argues that the limited success of such donor-driven anti-corruption strategies is attributable to a number of reasons ranging from reform policies of donors and paternalistic attitudes to political shifts and antipathy towards external demands for reforms that are fuelled by the colonial past. This paper recommends that for a recipient country to take ownership of the anti-corruption strategies it is important to tailor the PAC model to the cultural, social and political context of the recipient country so that the solutions are seen as an indigenous initiative, thus enabling sustainable change in attitudes and behaviour.

The traditional tort system in medical malpractice is increasingly perceived as being incapable of addressing the mismatch between claims and negligent injuries. Tort reforms have been introduced in various developed countries in an attempt to bring about greater fairness and economic sustainability in the compensation of medical injuries and to reduce the overall rate of medical litigation. This paper reviews the key tort reforms that have been used in various countries, notably the US and the UK, and discusses the arguments that had been put forth by advocates and opponents of such reforms. The impact of these tort reforms, where studied and available, is also reviewed and discussed in the paper.