What I require is a convening of my culture's criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them and as I may pursue them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture's words may imagine for me: to confront the culture with itself, along the lines it meets in me. Stanley Cavell.

In the domain of legal information retrieval, an important challenge is to compute similarity between two legal documents. Precedents play an important role in The Common Law system, where lawyers need to frequently refer to relevant prior cases. Measuring document similarity is one of the most crucial aspects of any document retrieval system which decides the speed, scalability and accuracy of the system. Text-based and network-based methods for computing similarity among case reports have already been proposed in prior works but (...) not without a few pitfalls. Since legal citation networks are generally highly disconnected, network based metrics are not suited for them. Till date, only a few text-based and predominant embedding based methods have been employed, for instance, TF-IDF based approaches, Word2Vec and Doc2Vec based approaches. We investigate the performance of 56 different methodologies for computing textual similarity across court case statements when applied on a dataset of Indian Supreme Court Cases. Among the 56 different methods, thirty are adaptations of existing methods and twenty-six are our proposed methods. The methods studied include models such as BERT and Law2Vec. It is observed that the more traditional methods that rely on a bag-of-words representation performs better than the more advanced context-aware methods for computing document-level similarity. Finally we nominate, via empirical validation, five of our best performing methods as appropriate for measuring similarity between case reports. Among these five, two are adaptations of existing methods and the other three are our proposed methods. (shrink)

The paper seeks to understand India’s evolving rights framework in the backdrop of cow vigilantism. To that end it discusses the human right to food and nutrition, international discussion on minority rights issues in India and the relevant legal and constitutional discussion in India. It finds that India’s rights framework has evolved since proclamation of India as a Republic in 1950 based on the supremacy of its written constitution containing fundamental rights and directive principles of state policy interpreted finally by (...) its Supreme Court. The government took a wise step by not challenging a judicial rebalancing of the rights framework in response to certain executive measures and the Supreme Court interpreted the right to life to include not only the right to the choice of food but also the right to privacy and thereby underscored the obligation of the State to compensate the victims of cow vigilante violence. However, a constitutional polity and secular state would do all well if it did any further necessary to better guard against any recurrence of the breach of civil peace, much less violence, on purely secular issues, including by strengthening and increasing dialogue with all representative communities in all its decision-making on such matters. (shrink)

Along with economic strength, space technology and software expertise, India is also a leading nation in fraudulent scientific research. The problem is worsened by vested interests working in concert for their own benefits. These self-promoting cartels, together with biased evaluation methods and weak penal systems, combine to perpetuate scientific misconduct. Some of these issues are discussed in this commentary, with supporting examples and possible solutions.

Sumit K. Mandal uncovers the hybridity and transregional connections underlying modern Asian identities. By considering Arabs in the Malay world under European rule, Becoming Arab explores how a long history of inter-Asian interaction was altered by nineteenth-century racial categorisation and control. Mandal traces the transformation of Arabs from familiar and multi-faceted creole personages of Malay courts into alienated figures defined by economic and political function. The racialisation constrained but did not eliminate the fluid character of Arabness. Creole Arabs (...) responded to the constraints by initiating transregional links with the Ottoman Empire and establishing modern social organisations, schools, and a press. Contentions emerged between organisations respectively based on Prophetic descent and egalitarianism, advancing empowering but conflicting representations of a modern Arab and Islamic identity. Mandal unsettles finite understandings of race and identity by demonstrating not only the incremental development of a modern identity, but the contested state of its birth. (shrink)

In a Common Law system, legal practitioners need frequent access to prior case documents that discuss relevant legal issues. Case documents are generally very lengthy, containing complex sentence structures, and reading them fully is a strenuous task even for legal practitioners. Having a concise overview of these documents can relieve legal practitioners from the task of reading the complete case statements. Legal catchphrases are (multi-word) phrases that provide a concise overview of the contents of a case document, and automated generation (...) of catchphrases is a challenging problem in legal analytics. In this paper, we propose a novel supervised neural sequence tagging model for the extraction of catchphrases from legal case documents. Specifically, we show that incorporating document-specific information along with a sequence tagging model can enhance the performance of catchphrase extraction. We perform experiments over a set of Indian Supreme Court case documents, for which the gold-standard catchphrases (annotated by legal practitioners) are obtained from a popular legal information system. The performance of our proposed method is compared with that of several existing supervised and unsupervised methods, and our proposed method is empirically shown to be superior to all baselines. (shrink)

This paper argues that Weber ought to be read as a comparative ethicist who brings his German intellectual inheritance, especially Schopenauer and Nietzsche, to a dialogue with ethical traditions in India and China. It shows that Weber not only had a supple understanding of the tensions within Hindu ethics, his own account of value often closely corresponds to Hindu axiology and was enriched by an encounter with it.

BackgroundRationing of care in nursing is nurses' inability to complete all care activities for patients because of scarcity in time and resource. Literature suggests that rationing of care is closely related to patient safety and quality of care. The phenomena have been defined and studied from varied perspectives and contexts. A systematic review of studies related to the concept was aimed at identifying and synthesizing the finding.MethodsThe review followed Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta‐analysis guidelines, and literature searches (...) were conducted in MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycInfo, Web of Science and EMBASE databases. Fifty‐seven quantitative studies were included in the review.FindingsThe review observed that nursing activities addressing the emotional, educational, mobility and hygiene needs of the patients were commonly rationed. Antecedents of rationing included resource inadequacy and organizational work environment. Rationing influenced patient satisfaction, mortality and a number of adverse events and was associated with decreased job satisfaction, increased intention to leave and high turnover among nurses.DiscussionsThis review concludes that rationing in nursing is ubiquitous, embedded in the work environment and poses a threat to the professional health and philosophical base of nursing in addition to having serious implications on patients' safety. Strategies to reframe and reconsider organizational traits, and open discussion with other healthcare stakeholders can reduce rationing of nursing care. The review suggests future researchers adopt different methodological layout to study rationing. (shrink)

Mehta examines, briefly, whether America is vulnerable to the "corruptions" of empire and the weight we should place on this moral consideration.

The topic of the article concerns the issue of place attachment and its determinants. An analysis of place attachment was performed in terms of place identity and place dependence. Moreover, links between place attachment and selected geographical, demographic and psychological variables were investigated. The study group included 759 respondents: 398 women and 361 men, aged 18-83 years, residing in 74 places in the Silesian Province, a region in Poland: in 10 sub-regions in the Upper Silesian conurbation and outside the conurbation. (...) The study used the Place Attachment Scale, the Satisfaction with Life Scale and a personal information section containing questions regarding place of permanent residence, sex and age. Results showed that subjects residing in smaller and non-industrial places had a stronger place attachment than those residing in larger and industrial cities. People living outside the Upper Silesian conurbation were more strongly attached to their place of residence in terms of place identity than those residing in the Upper Silesian conurbation. People living in the Zagłębie sub-region were more strongly attached in terms of place dependence than those residing in the Bytom sub-region. Satisfaction with life was positively correlated with place attachment. Older subjects were more strongly attached to their place of residence. Men and women did not differ in the sense of place attachment and life satisfaction. (shrink)

The article attempts to describe adonization, a specific tactic for exerting influence which employs physical attraction, as well as its determinants. The article presents a proprietary model of determinants and motivational mechanisms which constitute the basis of the attitude toward adonization. A cycle of 3 studies on individual determinants for the attitude toward adonization was described. Results of study 1 confirmed that male gender, psychological masculinity, narcissism, Machiavellianism and high self-monitoring were correlates of a positive attitude toward adonization. Study 2 (...) showed that extraversion was the predictor of a positive attitude toward adonization of men and women and that agreeableness was the predictor of a less positive attitude of women. In Study 3 it was established that there were no differences in the attitude toward adonization in young and middle-aged men. Comparison among young and middle-aged women proved that younger women had a more positive attitude toward adonization in the cognitive and in the affective components than older women. (shrink)

Research in recent years suggests that fairness concerns could mitigate hold-up problems. In this study, we report theoretical analysis and experimental evidence on an opposite possibility: that fairness concerns could also induce hold-up problems. In our setup, hold-up problems will not occur with purely self-interested agents, but theoretically could be induced by demand for distributional fairness among agents without sufficiently strong counteracting factors such as intention-based reciprocity. We observe a widespread occurrence of hold-up in our experiment. Relationship-specific investments occurred less (...) than half of the time, resulting in significant inefficiencies. Moreover, whenever a relationship-specific investment was made: (a) it was typically not reciprocated by the partner; (b) nor did the investor’s offers at the bargaining stage exhibit expectations for reciprocity. Consequently, the partner extracted all the additional expected payoff from relationship-specific investments. Further experimentation suggested that our results were driven by a fundamental lack of intention-based reciprocity in fairness concerns, rather than self-serving bias. (shrink)

The genetically and experimentally accessible organs of Drosophila, such as the heart or blood‐forming tissues, have become a fertile ground for systematic projects of gene discovery and for functional studies of gene networks and signaling pathways. One argument justifying this approach is the often‐tacit assumption that clear‐cut homologies can be established between the Drosophila organs and their vertebrate counterparts. Here we investigate this assumption by surveying pertinent aspects of vascular structure and development in different invertebrate phyla, in the hope that (...) this information will help to reveal the ancestral condition of the vascular system. Evolutionary scenarios that derive the structure of the cardiovascular system of extant animal taxa from the ancestral condition will be used to qualify hypotheses regarding homologies that are based on molecular similarities. BioEssays 28: 1203–1210, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Contributed articles presented at the National Workshop on "Innovative Courses on Applied/Practical Philosophy" held on Dec. 10-12, 2001 organized by Indian Council of Philosophical Research.

John Gray argues that the doctrine of value pluralism poses a serious challenge for liberalisms of the Rawlsian and Millian kind. The only proper political doctrine that is compatible with value pluralism is a modus vivendi that can take various forms. But in truth, value pluralism does little to diminish the appeal of liberalism. Under modern conditions, any half‐decent modus vivendi will look more like liberalism than Gray supposes.

Contributed research papers on various aspects of Hindu philosophy, Sanskrit grammar and poetics.