The concept of tianxia (All-under-Heaven) has been described as a Chinese version of cosmopolitanism. However, tianxia is a hard-to-define term, with political, cultural, and geographic meanings. From the fifteenth century onwards, maps exist that claim to show tianxia, therefore allowing us to reconstruct how Chinese mapmakers understood tianxia’s geographic extent. Other terms in the titles of maps that show space beyond the borders of the Ming and Qing states include huayi (civilized and barbarian/Chinese and non-Chinese), wanguo (10,000 countries), and sihai (four seas). This article examines the geographic extent of these terms and changes in their usage between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that Ming Chinese mapmakers and scholars presented tianxia as equivalent to the Ming empire and used terms such as huayi and wanguo to advertise the maps as showing regions far away, like western Asia and the Americas. Jesuits in China, on the other hand, applied a broader meaning of tianxia, equating it with the whole globe. During the Qing, the extent of tianxia expanded to represent a cosmopolitan empire connected to a range of surrounding states, embedded in a wider world.

There was published in the University of Chicago Law Review some years ago a debate between Professor Dworkin and Judge Posner in the course of which Judge Posner drew a distinction between “top down” and “bottom Up” reasoning. He accused Professor Dworkin of being a “top downer” and professed himself to be an unashamed “bottom upper”.

Let me explain the distinction. In “top down” reasoning the judge or legal analyst adopts a theory about an area of law. The theory is then used to organise and explain the cases; to marginalise some and to canonise others. In “bottom up” reasoning the judge or legal analyst starts with the mass of cases or the legislative text and moves only so far as necessary to resolve the case at hand. According to Judge Posner “[t]he top downer and the bottom upper do not meet”.

The distinction is useful although the dichotomy is not complete. The “bottom upper” would be lost in the wilderness of the single instance without some organising theory.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the significance of the Franklin Dam case for the use of implications in the interpretation of the Commonwealth Constitution.

Implications of various kinds, derived from various sources, are regularly made in the interpretation of the Constitution. The necessity for them has been frequently acknowledged. In West's case, for example, Dixon J said:

Since the Engineers’ Case a notion seems to have gained currency that in interpreting the Constitution no implications can be made. Such a method of construction would defeat the intention of any instrument, but of all instruments a written constitution seems the last to which it could be applied. I do not think that the judgment of the majority of the court in the Engineers’ Case meant to propound such a doctrine.'

Industrial law – Victorian award relating to notification and consultation by employers in relation to proposed technological change – Applicability of principles under the Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 (Cth) – Current status of traditional dichotomy between industrial matters and managerial prerogative – Commercial Clerks Award Clause 39 – Industrial Relations Act 1979 (Vic) ss 3(1), 34(1) – Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1904 (Cth)

Elections are commonplace events. Both in terms of their frequency, but also in the way they are taken for granted. Especially in Australia, but more generally in western democracies, their ebb and flow forms a seasonal rhythm, against which the more substantive work of government and public affairs – policy debates, law-making, administration and the (re)construction of community and national identities – is played out, through debate in the media, opinion polling and parliamentary and executive activity.

The magic long ago seeped out of our understanding and, for many, the experience of elections. They are major logistical events, certainly. But on the surface they appear to be relatively routine affairs, professionally run by full-time, non-partisan electoral commissions, who are bureaucratically guided, indeed bound, by enormously detailed legislative codes. The Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 (Cth) (CEA), for example, currently extends to more than 350 pages. By contrast, the inaugural Commonwealth Electoral Act 1902 (Cth) and accompanying Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 (Cth) together spanned fewer than 45 pages.

“…the concept of the Crown is…deeply ambiguous.”

The ambiguity surrounding the concept of the Crown stems from the very many functions that it has been required to perform. One tends to forget that it is merely a type of hat, as Maitland and Lord Simon have observed, so bound up in the symbolism of that headgear has the word become. So important was this symbolism that Oliver Cromwell ordered that the regalia should be totally broken. This symbolism, in its turn, metamorphosed from representing the person of the king or queen to the artificial person of a corporate body, though it was not clear whether the Crown was a corporation sole or corporation aggregate. This corporate manifestation was needed to explain how it was that government continued without being dependent on the person of the sovereign. The Crown was the government occupying a role not dissimilar to the Holy Trinity, being the executive, judicial and legislative arms of government in one. Each of these arms to this day, both in England and Australia, does things in the name of the sovereign.

Government outsourcing has become increasingly prevalent, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of the factors that drive success and maximize public value. This study introduces a novel framework for classifying outsourcing arrangements and examines its implications for performance management through a multidisciplinary lens. We identify thematic patterns and highlight the four quadrants of Government Outsourcing Performance Management: Building, Plumbing, Consulting, and Coaching. Each quadrant represents different roles of outsourcing agencies, emphasizing factors like accountability and relationship intensity as critical success differentiators. Our research outlines an adaptive performance management system tailored to these relationships, illustrated through case studies. This innovative approach equips policymakers and public administrators with a robust tool to optimize outsourcing strategies and enhance public value delivery. By offering fresh insights into the complex dynamics of government outsourcing, this paper contributes to both theoretical discourse and practical applications in public administration and management.

This essay links corporate regulation with developments in economic and corporate theory. The issue employed for this purpose is one that dates back more than one hundred years: whether companies should be regulated by the national government or by state governments. With the enactment of the Corporations Act 1989 (Cth) and the decision of the High Court in New South Wales v Commonwealth much attention has focused on the constitutional power of the federal government to regulate both the incorporation of companies and the trading activities of companies. A fundamental question however is whether it is better to regulate companies at the national level rather than the state level.

The Australian Founding Fathers paid no attention at all to the position of the Australian aboriginal race, and the only two references to aborigines in the Constitution are highly negative in character.They are:

s. 51. The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to:

...

(xxvi.) The people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws.

s. 127. In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.

Large language models are a powerful tool for conducting text analysis in political science, but using them to annotate text has several drawbacks, including high cost, limited reproducibility, and poor explainability. Traditional supervised text classifiers are fast and reproducible, but require expensive hand annotation, which is especially difficult for rare classes. This article proposes using LLMs to generate synthetic training data for training smaller, traditional supervised text models. Synthetic data can augment limited hand annotated data or be used on its own to train a classifier with good performance and greatly reduced cost. I provide a conceptual overview of text generation, guidance on when researchers should prefer different techniques for generating synthetic text, a discussion of ethics, a simple technique for improving the quality of synthetic text, and an illustration of its limitations. I demonstrate the usefulness of synthetic training through three validations: synthetic news articles describing police responses to communal violence in India for training an event detection system, a multilingual corpus of synthetic populist manifesto statements for training a sentence-level populism classifier, and generating synthetic tweets describing the fighting in Ukraine to improve a named entity system.

We consider faithful actions of simple algebraic groups on self-dual irreducible modules and on the associated varieties of totally singular subspaces, under the assumption that the dimension of the group is at least as large as the dimension of the variety. We prove that in all but a finite list of cases, there is a dense open subset where the stabilizer of any point is conjugate to a fixed subgroup, called the generic stabilizer. We use these results to determine whether there exists a dense orbit. This in turn lets us complete the answer to the problem of determining all pairs of maximal connected subgroups of a classical group with a dense double coset.

Patents provide inventors and their assignees and licensees with a fixed period of market exclusivity, during which they can exclude others from use of their inventions and charge monopoly prices on the sale of their products. In return, inventors are required to disclose to the public the nature of their inventions and the best methods of performing them. This public bargain provides the underlying justification for the patent system: patents are good for society because they provide the incentive to innovate and innovation benefits society. If inventors can recover the costs put into research and development and earn rewards through product pricing and licence fees, they will be encouraged both to take their inventions through to commercial production, and to engage in further innovation. Full disclosure further encourages innovation by allowing others to use the invention once the patent has expired.