Suchergebnisse

The people's right to referendum in Washington State is substantively limited in only one way: the people cannot block through referendum "such laws as may be necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health or safety, support of the state government and its existing public institutions." This emergency exception to the referendum power must be explicitly invoked by the Washington State Legislature in what is called an "emergency clause." Washington courts are willing to review emergency clauses to determine if a bill is, in fact, "necessary for the immediate preservation of the public peace, health or safety." However, the courts have failed to articulate a coherent rule for deciding whether a bill meets that standard. As a result, the Legislature routinely exempts from referendum bills that do not address traditional emergencies—a practice that has been widely criticized. To strike the right balance between the people's referendum right and the Legislature's need to effectuate certain laws immediately, the courts should reexamine the purpose of the emergency exception. This Comment proposes a standard for evaluating whether a bill addresses an emergency. To meet that standard, the bill must accomplish a public purpose that would be substantially destroyed if the Legislature was unable to act immediately. This standard would allow the Legislature to effectively address circumstances that fail to resemble traditional emergencies but nevertheless require immediate action. This standard is also consistent with a key policy reason behind Washington's emergency exception: preventing a small minority (4% of voters required for a referendum) from undermining the ability of the majority's elected representatives to fulfill their legislative duty.

An analysis of the reactions of about 200 UK newspapers & periodicals, from 1933 to 1947, to the persecution of Jews by Nazis indicated that, despite a general disgust based on a full knowledge of the facts at every stage of the persecution, all of which were printed & rarely disputed, there was little general inclination to practically help the victims. Comparison with other indicators of opinion, ie, the poll, suggested that this negative attitude was partly caused by the Nazis' success in slightly infecting UK opinion with an attenuated version of their own Jewish stereotype, & partly by a basic failure of imagination. While it is unlikely that press att's influenced gov policies to the refugees, it is probable that an opportunity was lost of furthering better understanding between groups when Jewish refugees actually settled in the UK. AA.

Modern exponents of mindfulness meditation promote the therapeutic effects of "bare attention"—a sort of non-judgmental, non-discursive attending to the moment-to-moment flow of consciousness. This approach to Buddhist meditation can be traced to Burmese Buddhist reform movements of the first half of the 20th century, and is arguably at odds with more traditional Theravāda Buddhist doctrine and meditative practices. But the cultivation of present-centered awareness is not without precedent in Buddhist history; similar innovations arose in medieval Chinese Zen (Chan) and Tibetan Dzogchen. These movements have several things in common. In each case the reforms were, in part, attempts to render Buddhist practice and insight accessible to laypersons unfamiliar with Buddhist philosophy and/or unwilling to adopt a renunciatory lifestyle. In addition, these movements all promised astonishingly quick results. And finally, the innovations in practice were met with suspicion and criticism from traditional Buddhist quarters. Those interested in the therapeutic effects of mindfulness and bare attention are often not aware of the existence, much less the content, of the controversies surrounding these practices in Asian Buddhist history.