Multiple regime shifts in concurring and dissenting opinions on the U.S. Supreme Court

In a previous issue of this journal, Smyth and Narayan (2004) examine structural change in the level of consensus on the High Court of Australia. In this article we adopt a similar strategy to that employed in Smyth and Narayan (2004) to estimate both the number and location of structural breaks in concurring and dissenting opinions on the U.S. Supreme Court. Although it has commonly been believed that there has been one regime shift on the U.S. Supreme Court, corresponding to the breakdown in the consensual norm in the 1930s or 1940s, we find that there have been three breaks in consensus. We find that two of the three breaks in dissenting opinions correspond closely to the beginning of the terms of Taney and Stone as Chief Justice, with the third occurring in the middle of Chase's term. We find that two of the three breaks in concurring opinions correspond closely to the beginning of the terms of Taney and Hughes and that the third break in concurring opinions occurs in the middle of the Warren Court.

Modelling the linkages between the Australian and G7 stock markets : common stochastic trends and regime shifts

This paper examines whether the Australian equity market is integrated with the equity markets of the G7 economies by applying both the Johansen (Statistical analysis of conintegrating vectors, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 12, 231-54, 1988) and Gregory and Hansen (Residual-based tests for cointegration in models with regime shifts, Journal of Econometrics, 70, 99-126, 1996) approaches to cointegration. Some evidence of a pairwise long-run relationship between the Australian stock market and the stock markets of Canada, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom is found, but the Australian equity market is not pairwise cointegrated with the equity markets of France, Germany or the USA.

The IUCN red list of ecosystems: motivations, challenges, and applications

In response to growing demand for ecosystem-level risk assessment in biodiversity conservation, and rapid proliferation of locally tailored protocols, the IUCN recently endorsed new Red List criteria as a global standard for ecosystem risk assessment. Four qualities were sought in the design of the IUCN criteria: generality; precision; realism; and simplicity. Drawing from extensive global consultation, we explore trade-offs among these qualities when dealing with key challenges, including ecosystem classification, measuring ecosystem dynamics, degradation and collapse, and setting decision thresholds to delimit ordinal categories of threat. Experience from countries with national lists of threatened ecosystems demonstrates well-balanced trade-offs in current and potential applications of Red Lists of Ecosystems in legislation, policy, environmental management and education. The IUCN Red List of Ecosystems should be judged by whether it achieves conservation ends and improves natural resource management, whether its limitations are outweighed by its benefits, and whether it performs better than alternative methods. Future development of the Red List of Ecosystems will benefit from the history of the Red List of Threatened Species which was trialed and adjusted iteratively over 50 years from rudimentary beginnings. We anticipate the Red List of Ecosystems will promote policy focus on conservation outcomes in situ across whole landscapes and seascapes.

Recovery pathways from small-scale disturbance in a temperate Australian seagrass

Recovery from disturbance is a key element of ecosystem persistence, and recovery can be influenced by large-scale regional differences and smaller local-scale variations in environmental conditions. Seagrass beds are an important yet threatened nearshore habitat and recover from disturbance by regrowth, vegetative extension and dispersive propagules. We described recovery pathways from small-scale disturbances in the seagrass Zostera nigricaulis in Port Phillip Bay, a large embayment in southeastern Australia, and tested whether these pathways differed between 5 regions with different hydrodynamic conditions and water quality, and between sites within those regions. Recovery pathways were broadly consistent. When aboveground biomass was removed, recovery, defined as the point at which disturbed areas converged with undisturbed controls, took from 2 to 8 mo, but when we removed above-and below-ground biomass, it took between 2 and 13 mo. There was no evidence of recovery resulting from sexual reproduction at any sites regardless of the presence of seeds in the sediment or flower production. We found no differences in recovery at the regional scale, but we found substantial differences between local sites. At some sites, rapid recovery occurred because seagrasses grew quickly, but at others, apparent recovery occurred because regrowth coincided with overall declines in cover of undisturbed areas. Recovery time was unrelated to seagrass canopy height, biomass, percentage cover, stem density, seed bank density, epiphyte cover or sediment organic matter in seagrass adjacent to disturbance experiments. This study highlights the importance of understanding fine-scale variation in local recovery mechanisms, which may override or obscure any regional signal.

Dominant drivers of seedling establishment in a fire-dependent obligate seeder: climate or fire regimes?

Climate change is causing fire regime shifts in ecosystems worldwide. Plant species with regeneration strategies strongly linked to a fire regime, such as obligate seeders, may be particularly threatened by these changes. It is unclear whether changes in fire regimes or the direct effects of climate change will be the dominant threats to obligate seeders in future. We investigated the relative importance of fire-related variables (fire return interval andfire severity) and environmental factors (climate and topography) on seedling establishment in the world's tallest angiosperm, an obligate seeder, Eucalyptus regnans. Throughout its range, this species dominates the wet montane forests of south-eastern Australia and plays a keystone role in forest structure. Following major wildfires, we investigated seedling establishment in E. regnanswithin 1 year of fire as this is a critical stage in the regeneration niche of obligate seeders. Seedling presence and abundance were strongly related to the occurrence of fire but not to variation in fire severity (moderate vs. high severity). Seedling abundance increased with increasing fire return interval (range 26-300 years). First-year seedling establishment was also strongly associated with low temperatures and with high elevations, high precipitation and persistent soil water availability. Our results show that both climate and fire regimes are strong drivers of E. regnans seedling establishment. The predicted warming and drying of the climate might reduce the regeneration potential for some obligate seeders in future and these threats are likely to be compounded by changes in fire regimes, particularly increases in fire frequency.

Regime change in Australian maternity hospitals

Contemporary attempts to ‘organise’ risk and manage uncertainty are remaking many ‘industrial-era’ institutions – including maternity hospitals. Health policies are encouraging a shift away from hierarchical, medically dominated structures towards new governance systems and ‘women-centred’ care, often led by midwives. To understand the resulting contestation, in this article we argue for a wider conceptual frame than a focus on neo-liberal state regulation of the professions. We utilise theories of the ‘second modernity’, in particular those concerning socio-cultural changes associated with shifts in risk regimes, to interpret findings from qualitative research studies undertaken in Australian maternity hospitals. Whereas analysis confined to macro or institutional levels emphasises stability and hegemony, we demonstrate that when cultural and interactional levels are examined, considerable fluidity and uncertainty in the identification and negotiation of risk is evident, resulting in new work practices with inevitable shifts in professional identities and allegiances.

Introducing personal liability under the continuous disclosure regime : The essentials and non-essentials

Under the Federal Government's CLERP 9 legislation, expected at the time of writing to come into force in July 2004, personal liability will be introduced for the first time under the continuous disclosure regime. Individuals who are 'involved' in a failure to immediately disclose materially price sensitive information to the market will be subject to a civil penalty, in addition to the company being liable. According to the author, the introduction of personal liability per se is not contentious and indeed is a favourable change; what is questionable, however, is whether 'involvement' in a contravention is the appropriate test for imposing personal liability in relation to breaches of the continuous disclosure provisions. Based on the case law to date on the meaning of 'involved', there is particular uncertainty as to whether an individual would need to have actual knowledge that non-disclosed information is 'materially price sensitive' in order to satisfy the test of 'involved' in the context of continuous disclosure, or whether mere knowledge that the information has not been disclosed would be sufficient. This uncertainty arises due to the vague concept of 'essential matters' which the courts have developed as a test for what degree of knowledge a person needs to have in order to be 'involved'. The author argues that all the confusion as to what 'involved' means could be addressed by removing the word 'essential' from the dialogue, so that the test of 'involvement' would simply be based on whether the particular person had actual knowledge of each of the factual elements constituting the offence.

Methodological shifts in ratio-based modelling of corporate collapse

The year 1968 saw a major shift from univariate to multivariate methodological approaches to ratio-based modelling of corporate collapse. This was facilitated by the introduction of a new statistical tool called Multiple Discriminant Analysis (MDA). However, it did not take long before other statistical tools were developed. The primary objective for developing these tools was to enable deriving models that would at least do as good a job asMDA, but rely on fewer assumptions. With the introduction of new statistical tools, researchers became pre-occupied with testing them in signalling collapse. lLTUong the ratio-based approaches were Logit analysis, Neural Network analysis, Probit analysis, ID3, Recursive Partitioning Algorithm, Rough Sets analysis, Decomposition analysis, Going Concern Advisor, Koundinya and Purl judgmental approach, Tabu Search and Mixed Logit analysis. Regardless of which methodological approach was chosen, most were compared to MDA. This paper reviews these various approaches. Emphasis is placed on how they fared against MDA in signalling corporate collapse.

Hydrological regime and macrophyte assemblages in temporary floodplain wetlands: implications for detecting responses to environmental water allocations

This study describes the macrophyte assemblages of temporary floodplain wetlands situated on the floodplain of the Murray River, southeast Australia. Wetlands in the study are subject to flooding, the frequency, duration, and magnitude of which are dictated by the current, regulated river-flow regime. Our aim was to examine the influence of the existing flooding regime on macrophyte assemblages and to trial a monitoring program, based on a multiple before-after-control-impact (MBACI) design, to detect the impact of proposed environmental water allocations (EWAs) on the wetlands. Two categories of flooding regime were identified based on the flow magnitudes required for flooding to occur (flooding thresholds). In this scheme, wetlands with relatively low flooding thresholds are classed as ‘impact’ and those with higher thresholds are classed as ‘control.’ The wetlands were surveyed over a two-year period that incorporated at least one wetting-drying cycle at all wetlands. Results showed significant differences between survey times (season and year), but differences between flooding regime categories were significant only for some components of macrophyte assemblages. Differences between survey dates appear to reflect largely short-term responses to the most recent flood events. However, macrophyte differences observed between control and impact wetlands reflected the cumulative effect of flood events over several years. Differences between control and impact wetlands were strongest for post-flooding surveys based on full assemblages (using ANOSIM) and among specific taxa and functional groups (using ANOVA). Power to detect differences between control and impact wetlands was greatest for species richness and total abundance, but taxa with low variability among wetlands, and hence good power, were actually less sensitive to hydrologic change. We conclude that the MBACI design used in this study will be most effective in detecting wetland ecosystem responses to the implementation of EWAs if response variables are carefully chosen based on their sensitivity to hydrologic change.