Sue-and-settle is the name applied to a federal agency’s use of litigation to create policy outside of the normal regulatory process. This paper discusses the impact that the sue-and-settle policy has had on Congress, the judiciary, and the Environmental Protection Agency. Specifically, this paper will discuss the issues caused by the perception of collusion within the sue-and-settle policy. First, this paper examines whether a relationship occurs between the litigants. The paper then discusses whether the relationship between the litigants in sue-and-settle cases tends to be collusive or not. The second part of the paper examines how Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the judiciary are viewed because of the continued perception of collusion in the agency’s settlements. Overall, this paper finds that, the impacts of the sue-and-settle policy, and the perception of collusion, has affected Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the judiciary by increasing regulation, distorting the purpose of the courts, and resulting in a lost value for the regulatory process.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Western Australia, 2006. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on Feb. 9, 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 246-263).

Diese Arbeit untersucht die Motive zur Konzeption fiktiver Frauenfiguren in deutschsprachiger, moderner Fanfiktion. Die Fragestellung wird aus Perspektive der Psychologie, Soziologie und der feministischen Literaturwissenschaften betrachtet. Insbesondere die Bewegung des feminine writing nach Cixous dient als Ausgangspunkt vorliegender Untersuchung. Eine textnahe Analyse deutschsprachiger Fanfiktion bestätigt befindliche Forschungsresultate der Psychologie, Sozialwissenschaften und écriture feminine zu Konzeption und Funktion von Frauenfiguren in der Fiktion. Demnach beschreibt die fiktive Figur ein harmonisierendes Bindeglied auf einer Metaebene zwischen fiktiver und realer Welt. Die fiktive Figur artikuliert das Bedürfnis nach Befreiung, der Schreibprozess dient dem Aspekt der Neudefinition und Selbstverwirklichung.

This paper investigates whether greater investor distraction on the Swedish stock market during the summer months of June, July and August leads to a more pronounced post earnings announcement drift (PEAD) effect, during the ten year period between 2000 and 2009. PEAD is an anomaly whereby the information contained in earnings announcements is not immediately or completely incorporated into stock prices, in the cases where the announcement contains an ‘earnings surprise’. The methodology involves using the standardised unexpected earnings (SUE) metric to measure the level of ‘earnings surprise’ and a buy and hold abnormal returns (BHAR) trading strategy to measure return. The study tests and confirms the existence of greater investor distraction during summer months on the Swedish market. For a holding period of 12 months, a BHAR trading strategy generates a greater abnormal return for summer months (11.3%) compared with the abnormal return for non-summer months (10.5%). These results are also interesting in a broader context, as they confirm the existence of the PEAD effect, one of the strongest counter-arguments to the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH); the foundation of many financial models used for stock market valuation. This is because, according to the EMH, in an efficient market it should not be possible to generate abnormal returns based on available information. However, it may be noted that these results do not take into account transaction costs. This means that while it can be demonstrated that there is greater investor distraction during the Swedish summer, in order to implement a successful trading strategy based on this finding, further testing would be required. Therefore, based on the findings of this paper, a number of areas for future research have been identified.

Analyzing novels by Sheri Reynolds, Lee Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Sue Monk Kidd, I argue that these authors challenge religious structures by dramatizing the struggle between love and resentment that brings many women to the point of crisis but also inspires imaginative and generative processes of appropriation and revision, emphasizing not destination but process. Employing first-person narration in coming-of-age stories, Smith, Reynolds, and Kingsolver highlight the various narratives that govern the experiences of children born into religious cultures, including narratives of sexual development, gender identity, and religious conversion, to portray the difficulty of articulating female experience within the limited lexicon of Christian fundamentalism. As they mature into adulthood, the girl characters in these novels break from tradition to develop new consciousness by altering and adapting religious language, understood as open and malleable rather than authoritative and fixed. Smith, Kidd, and Naylor incorporate the Virgin Mary and divine maternal figures from non-Christian traditions to restore the mother-daughter relationship that is eclipsed by the Father and Son in Christian tradition. Identifying the female body as a site of spiritual knowledge, these authors present a metaphorical return to the womb that empowers their characters to embrace divine maternal love that transgresses the masculine symbolic order, displacing (but not necessarily destroying) the authority of God the Father and His human representatives. Reynolds and Walker portray physical pain, central to the Christian image of crucifixion, as destroying the ability of women to speak, denying them subjectivity. Through transgressive sexual relationships infused with religious significance, these authors disrupt the Christian moral paradigm by presenting bodily pleasure as an alternative to the Christian valorization of sacrifice. The replacement of pain with pleasure inspires imaginative work that makes private spirituality shareable through artistic creation. The novels I study present themes that also concern Christian and non-Christian feminist theologians: the development of feminine images of the divine, emphasis on immanence over transcendence, the apprehension of the divine in nature, and the necessity of challenging the reification of religious images and dualisms that undermine female subjectivity. I show the reciprocal relationship between fiction and theology, as theologians treat women's literature as sacred texts and fiction writers give life to abstract religious concepts through narrative.

No description available.

No description available.

Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2002) tells the story of a motherless fourteen-year-old Lily Owens, raised by a cruel father, who desperately searches for clues to unlock her mother’s past. Kidd’s bildungsroman reveals the incredible power of black women, particularly a group of beekeeping sisters and a black Mary, to create a safe haven where Lily can examine her fragmented life and develop psychologically, finally becoming a self-actualized young lady. Lily’s matriarchal world of influence both compares and contrasts with the patriarchal world represented in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exposing the matriarchy’s aptly structured ways of providing a more healing environment than is Huck Finn’s. Kidd’s novel also showcases the stylistic strategies of first person narrative point of view, language, dialect, and the motif of place in order to contextualize the social awareness and psychological development Lily gains through her journey.

Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2002) tells the story of a motherless fourteen-year-old Lily Owens, raised by a cruel father, who desperately searches for clues to unlock her mother’s past. Kidd’s bildungsroman reveals the incredible power of black women, particularly a group of beekeeping sisters and a black Mary, to create a safe haven where Lily can examine her fragmented life and develop psychologically, finally becoming a self-actualized young lady. Lily’s matriarchal world of influence both compares and contrasts with the patriarchal world represented in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, exposing the matriarchy’s aptly structured ways of providing a more healing environment than is Huck Finn’s. Kidd’s novel also showcases the stylistic strategies of first person narrative point of view, language, dialect, and the motif of place in order to contextualize the social awareness and psychological development Lily gains through her journey.