A Comparative analysis of Roger B Taney and William Rehnquist :: essays papers

A Comparative analysis of Roger B Taney and William Rehnquist Roger b. Taney and William Rehnquist are two Supreme Court Justices separated by a time span of one hundred and fifty years. This distance between them means that while they may share the same views on some political issues, the majority of them will differ. Such differences have had and everlasting impact on the United States and made Taney and Rehnquist two highly recognized historical figures. In his early years, Rehnquist fluctuated between moderate and conservative tendencies. Taney on the other hand, was just the opposite. He seemed intent on agitating the conservatives with his outlandish opinions. One such opinion was delivered in the Charles River Bridge case in which Taney declared that " A state charter of a private business conferred only privileges expressly granted and that any ambiguity must be decided in favor of the state." This outraged conservatives who opposed any modification of the view that state issued charters are inviolable. Taney's action would have been opposed by Rehnquist if he had been alive at that time because he shares the views of conservatives meaning that he favors little or no change in the way that things are done. Rehnquist's conservatism and Taney's Democratic ways have led to many of the historic decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. Although Taney and Rehnquist wanted things to be done at different rates, they shared a common bond when it came to the limitations on federal interference in the affairs of state governments. Taney felt that a state should be entitled to make regulatory laws even if they appeared to override the provisions of the Constitution. When it came to federal interference with the states Rehnquist believed that the federal government should stay out of the way until needed. On the same note, Rehnquist held that executive agencies should be given considerable leeway in carrying out laws. These similar views provide insight into how the nation was shaped. Roger B. Taney made significant contributions to American constitutional law, but the case most closely associated with him inflicted enormous injury to the court as an institution was the Dred Scott v. Sanford case of 1857. Taney held that "Slaves (and even the free descendants of slaves) were not citizens and could not sue in court, ant that Congress could not forbid slavery in the territories of the United States".

Essay on Fate in Oedipus Rex and The Seagull :: comparison compare contrast essays

Role of Fate in Oedipus Rex and The Seagull       The inevitability of fate is a key theme in Sophocles' 'Oedipus Rex' and in Chekhov's 'The Seagull'. I was fascinated by the ways this inevitability was conveyed by Chekhov and Sophocles respectively and the ways in which the actions of the characters contributed to and heightened their fate. I shall attempt to compare and contrast the way in which Oedipus and, to a lesser extent, Nina make their fates more unbearable by their own actions and choices. In each case the author uses characterisation to enhance and increase the sense of inevitability and hence the sense of tragedy in the respective plays.      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   Sophocles has created his Oedipus not as innately evil but as a likeable character.   It is this that makes the conclusion of his play even more tragic.[1]   Had Oedipus been presented as an evil character we would have felt much less sympathetic towards him, as it is Oedipus appears to be the very essence of goodness at the commencement of the play and in this way makes his downfall owing to a realisation of the truth even more dramatic.   He is an 'ideal king' - one who feels for his people.   This addition to a well-known story by Sophocles makes the resultant dramatic irony extremely effective.   His evident flaws of character make it plausible that he could have unknowingly killed his father and married his mother.   He is human but at the start of the play his excessive pride, impetuousness and efficiency, all human failings, seem to obscure and divert his search for the truth. Furthermore, he is arrogant and conceited, particularly concerning his personal successes:    "Oedipus: Why, when the monster with her song was here, spak'st thou no word our countrymen to help? And yet the riddle lay above the ken...and called for prophets skill...but then I came...and slew her."      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   These features of Oedipus' personality lead him inevitably to assume that he, the great Oedipus, liberator of his people, could not possibly be the murderer that they seek. Hence, it is Oedipus' inflated ego that causes his fate to be so severe and his downfall so great at the end of the play.   Furthermore, despite Teiresias' words early in the play, Oedipus refuses to believe the truth that he is responsible for Laios' death.   His arrogance leads him to unknowingly curse himself, thus making his fate worse:

Female Juvenile Delinquency in Canada Essay -- Criminal Justice Essays

Female Juvenile Delinquency in Canada   The punishment for girls was much more harsh in the early days of Canada’s history when crime was seen as an intolerable part of town life.   Young girls of age thirteen and fourteen were often hanged for theft in the mid to late 17th century Quebec or put in detention centres (usually a hospital) for as much as six years at a time (Carrigan 8).   Age was sometimes taken into consideration for serious crimes and so whipping and branding was used instead of execution.   The practise in Halifax in 1815 was to whip a girl thirty-nine times at the community whipping post (Carrigan 37).   The most common problem among girls during this time and in the following years was prostitution and theft among young girls (Carrigan 23). Moving into more modern times, crime rates among young girls continue to increase.   From 1974 to 1993, crime went up about 6% among girls for all offences (Carrigan 203).   Prostitution, again, is a huge concern with girls as young as eleven years old participating and statistics such as 5,000 to 10,000 girls across Canada engaging in this form of deviance (Carrigan 186). Crimes that have been classed as particularly â€Å"male† crimes are now being committed more and more by females.   These crimes include drug abuse, robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and murder.   Girls also resort to punching, kicking, cutting off another girl’s hair, and burning with a cigarette as forms of assault (Carrigan 186-188).   The 1990’s has also seen the rise of female gangs, especially in the Toronto area.   Girls are seen as just as violent as boys and showing as little remorse.   Membership attitude is less rigid since members can come and go as they please, and often include bored, wealt... ... therapy session.   Individual counselling was also available.   Group homes turned out to be a more successful rehabilitation device than training schools.   The coming of the Young Offenders Act brought about the building of new facilities called detention centres in Canada.   The goals of these centres are to increase the offenders’ understanding of his/her behaviour, to improve their ability to control their behaviour, to promote interpersonal skills, and to provide for academic and vocational skills to build self-esteem and to provide access to employment once released (Carrigan 245).   The Nova Scotia Youth Centre in Waterville is the closest detention centre in the area and it can house 120 males and females.   It opened in July of 1988. Reference Carrigan, D. Owen.   Juvenile Delinquency in Canada: A History. Irwin Publishing, Concord, Ontario, 1998.

Character Analysis of Anne of “The Thousand Days” Essay

Thousand Days is a 1969 drama made by Hal Wallis Productions and distributed by Universal Pictures. Directed by Charles Jarrott and produced by Hal B. Wallis. In Anne of the Thousand Days, King Richard VIII plays the central role in the plot and progress of the play. As the king of England, Richard is the most prominent authority figure. It turns out that he is the main character and therefore the most important person in the play.Being the central character makes it easy for this character to progress the play. The main contribution to progress the play is King Richards urgent desire to have a son to take heir to his throne. This is what the entire play revolves around. There are several other contributions that he makes to move the play forward. Some of these include his infatuation with Anne Boleyn, manipulating his government to allow different women into his life, and Annes trial that leads to her eventual death. The playwright employed this character as the central story that the entire play is based upon. Being based on history, it seems to be a very interesting story about King Richard VIII and the playwright realized this. It only makes sense to make him the main character because the story is about him. This play absolutely could not have been made without the king.If I were cast into playing King Richard VIII, I would not change the central objectives of my role. Being that this play is mostly non-fiction, it does not make sense to try and alter history in a major way. In my opinion, retaining the true story as well as possible is the best way to tell a story that is heavily based on history. Bibliography Anne of the Thousand Days Tea at Trianon. 2008. 11 November 2008. http://teaattrianon.blogspot.com/2008/10/anne-of-thousand-days-1969.htmlAnne of the Thousand Days Wikipedia Encylopedia. 2008. 11 November 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_of_the_Thousand_Days

The Black Cat

â€Å"The Black Cat† by Edgar Allan Poe is one of Poe’s greatest literary works that embodies his signature themes of death, violence, and darkness. Poe’s main character begins his narration of his horrible wrongdoings regarding them as a â€Å"series of mere household events† (Poe 705). However, this is where Poe’s satire and irony begins and the story progresses to show the deranged mindset of this character as he tries to justify his actions. As the main character proceeds to rationalize his crime, Poe is able to convey a sense of irony through his use of foreshadowing, metaphors and symbolism. Irony begins within the narrator’s introduction to his confession by telling the reader that he will tell his story but â€Å"without comment† (Poe 705). Within this same ironic tone, the narrator continues to humanize his actions and plea for justification but predicts that what he has already done has destroyed him. Poe describes how â€Å"these events have terrified–have tortured–have destroyed† him (Poe 705). Poe adds an ironic tone to the story by telling it through the narrator’s perspective. The narrator is a demented individual and the average reader cannot relate to the evil that has erupted inside him. As he begins to rationalize, there is a vast difference between the narrator and the reader leading to the irony that the man feels that this was all a normal series of misfortune. Literary critic, Richard Badenhausen, explains Poe’s decision for telling the story from the narrator’s point-of-view, â€Å"Despite pledging to tell his tale â€Å"without comment,† the narrator is constantly qualifying, correcting, and explaining, in the hope that the audience will see events from his perspective. Although he ironically announces in the opening sentence that he â€Å"neither expect[s] nor solicit[s] belief† the narrator is obsessively concerned with both activities: he hopes for understanding from his listeners and energetically pursues approval by employing the various manipulative tools of the storyteller† (Badenhausen 487). Finally, Poe also thickens the suspense of the story with the early foreshadowing that the main character feels that he may harm his wife writing, â€Å"At length, I even offered her personal violence† (Poe 706 ). The greatest metaphor throughout this tale is the black cat. While the narrator’s wife has been known to refer to the dark-haired feline as a â€Å"witch in disguise†, the metaphor for Poe is that the cat is not only a superstitious monster but it is also a metaphor for being the narrator’s own personal demon (Poe 706). The recurring events with the black cats in the story portray that they are metaphors for the narrator’s own problems that haunt him. As the series of events continue throughout the story, the cat becomes a visual element in the scene for the narrator’s recurring violence and finally brings him to the point of his insanity. Moreover, it has been argued that the cat is a metaphor for the narrator’s wife. Critics claim that the following passage raises suspicion that the killing of the first cat was actually the murder of his own wife. Poe writes: Norton Anthology American Literature. 7th. 1. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. , 2008. 705-711. Print. Critics who support this notion feel that the â€Å"reversal is substitution in wife for cat and cat for wife† and that the narrator had clearly projected his feelings for his wife onto the cat (Amper 475). Literary critic, Susan Amper, commented on this metaphor-theory, â€Å"It is not merely that the wife was always the intended victim; she was the original, in fact the only victim. Moreover, this inference provides a much more compelling reason for the narrator's substitution of cat for wife or rather twin reasons, for his pretense that he has only killed his cat serves both to ease his own sense of guilt, and to shield him from prosecution for murder (Amper 475). This theory also supports the irony that the wife’s body was decomposed after merely three-days and leaves the reader with one of Poe’s signature suspenseful, disturbing endings. The final writing element that Poe uses throughout this short story is symbolism. Readers are introduced to one of the story’s main characters, Pluto, the black cat, who supposedly provokes the narrator into committing his heinous acts of violence but is merely symbolic for the narrator’s imbedded hatred and evil. Not only is this feline symbolic for evil because of superstitions regarding black cats, the cat’s name has a deeper symbolic meaning. According to Roman Mythology, Pluto is name of the god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. This symbolic name not only represents the narrator’s cruel intentions but also provides a sense of foreshadowing. After the first black cat is slain, a second black cat appears and is unwelcomed by the narrator. According to Professor Ann Bliss from the University of California, â€Å"looks remarkably like the original except in one respect: it is marked with a patch of white that, for the narrator, increasingly comes to resemble a gallows—reminding the narrator of his violence toward the first cat and foreshadowing acts of violence to come† (Bliss 97). The white color of the patch with the offsetting black fur is also symbolic to the good and evil confliction within the narrator. Finally, the second black cat leads to the narrator allegedly murdering his wife accidently. In conclusion, Poe’s literary masterpiece, â€Å"The Black Cat† is a suspenseful story filled with irony and hidden messages and themes. Although this is a short-story, Poe skillfully provides the reader with enough evidence to make conclusions about the motive, sequence of events, and the narrator’s denial of apparent mental disorder and alcoholism that plagues him.

Essay on Hiv

Home reading. As my qualification paper is devoted to the global health, I decided to analyze 4 newspaper articles from BBC, The Guardian and the NY Times concerning the cure for HIV/AIDS. In all the articles the topic of possible existence of the cure for HIV is discussed. They scientists from different world laboratories share their opinion on the right way of creation of this vaccine. It is extremely hard to find the appropriate therapy for patients, because the virus has a tendency to a very rapid mutation.So while the scientists are creating the drug for a patient according to his analyzes, the virus can change in a day and the treatment won’t be effective. Some scientists think that it’s necessary to create a cocktail of many steams of the HIV virus and then create one vaccine. But it will take a very long time and too much many. Moreover the reaction of the patient’s organism can be unpredictable. Other specialists presume that it’s important to pay attention to those patients who carry the neutralizing antibodies in their organisms.Because the cells that produce antibodies have to go through up to 100 mutations before they make neutralizing ones, Dr. Fauci said, a vaccine to induce that would require many shots, given month after month, to â€Å"push† the cells through those mutations. But the problem is that only 20 percent of the infected have the neutralizing antibodies in their organisms. There are two officially registrated cases when a patient didn’t have a virus in his blood after medical treatment.The first one was in Germany, when a patient with a destroyed immune system, induced by his cancer disease, was transplanted with a stem cell from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that resists HIV infection. The second case took place in the US with a new-born baby in a rural hospital, whose mother just received a positive HIV reaction. The treatment continued for 18 months from the first days of life of th is little baby-girl. After the treatment the scientists were astonished not to find the signs of the virus in her blood.But unfortunately not everything is so easy because this kind of treatment doesn’t suit to adults. The virus in the adult’s organism has already made a mutation and after several years of being infected the virus will infect all the cells in the body and then hides in the DNA, where it will be impossible to cure. On the other hand, 80 percent of all the infected live in the African countries where the possibilities to be cured and appropriate drugs are extremely poor. To conclude my essay I would like to say that an HIV pandemic has become a serious problem of our world.No one is safe enough not be infected by the virus. Nowadays there’s still no single way of treatment that can heal every patient. But the only thing that the scientists wanted us to remember that HIV virus is easier to prevent than to cure. Scientists use the most sophisticated technologies for eliminating this disease all over the world, but many people still don’t know usual requirements for protecting their health. It’s necessary to understand that your momentary pleasure can worth you a long-life HIV treatment. Internet resources: ) http://www. bbc. co. uk/news/health-21653463 – Analysis: A cure for HIV? By James Gallagher. 2) http://www. bbc. co. uk/news/world-us-canada-21651225 – US HIV baby ‘cured' by early drug treatment 3) http://www. nytimes. com/2013/04/04/health/aids-vaccine-path-suggested-by-study. html? ref=aids&_r=1& – Possible Path to Vaccine for AIDS Is Suggested. By DONALD G. Mcneil Jr. 4) http://www. guardian. co. uk/society/sarah-boseley-global-health/2012/jul/19/hiv-infection-infectiousdiseases? INTCMP=SRCH – A cure for Aids?

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn- Analysis Essay

All children have a special place, whether chosen by a conscious decision or not this is a place where one can go to sort their thoughts. Nature can often provide comfort by providing a nurturing surrounding where a child is forced to look within and choices can be made untainted by society. Mark Twain once said â€Å"Don’t let school get in the way of your education. † Twain states that this education which is provided by society, can actually hinder human growth and maturity. Although a formal education shouldn’t be completely shunned, perhaps true life experience, in society and nature, are a key part of development. In the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain throws the curious yet innocent mind of Huck Finn out into a very hypocritical, judgmental, and hostile world, yet Huck has one escape–the Mississippi River constantly flowing nearby. Here nature is presented as a thought provoking environment when experienced alone. The river is quiet and peaceful place where Huck can revert to examine any predicament he might find himself in: â€Å"They went off, and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low? Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on,- s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad? † (p. 127). Only a few weeks with Jim and still feeling great ambivalence, Huck returns to the river to think. Twain tries here to tell the reader how strong the â€Å"mob† really is, and only when totally alone is Huck able to make the morally correct decision. The natural flowing and calm of the river cause this deep-thought, show! ing how unnatural the collective thought of a society can be. The largest and most obvious test of Huck’s character is his relationship with Jim. The friendship and assistance which he gives to Jim go completely against all that â€Å"sivilization† has taught him; at first this concept troubles Huck and causes him a great deal of pain, but over time, through his life experiences and shared times with Jim, Huck crosses the line upheld by the racist South and comes to know Jim as a human being. Huck is at a point in his life where opinions are formed, and by growing on the river, Huck can stand back from society and form his own. Eventually he goes as far as to risk his life for Jim:†And got to thinking of our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t see no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind? I studied a minute sort of holding my breath, and then I s! ays to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’? † (pp. 270-271). After a long and thought-provoking adventure, Huck returns to the raft one final time to decide the fate of his friend. Symbolically, Huck makes the morally correct decision away from all others, thinking on the river. Although it might not be evident to himself, Huck causes the reader to see that â€Å"sivilization†, in their treatment of blacks especially, is not civilized at all. Every person Huck and Jim come across seems to just be following someone else blindly, as the whole country were some sort of mob. In the last few chapters, Tom Sawyer is re-introduced and the reader is left to examine how different environments: â€Å"sivilization† and nature (the river), have affected the children’s growth. It is distinctly evident that Huck has turned out to be the one with a clear and intelligent mind, and Tom, although he can regurgitate worthless facts about Louis XVI and Henry VIII, shows no real sign of maturity. â€Å"The first time I catched up to Tom, private, I asked him what was his idea, time of the evasion? – what it was he planned to do if the evasion worked out all right and he managed to set a nigger free that was already free before? And he said, what he had planned in his head, from the start, if we got Jim out, all safe, was for us to run him down the river, on the raft, and have adventures plumb to the mouth? † (p. 360). Huck has always thought of Tom as more intelligent than himself, but he cannot understand how Tom could toy with Jim’s life in such a way. For much time, Huck is! without the river and it is though his mind clouds; he follows along with Tom playing a sick game until the end when he is once again threatened with being â€Å"sivilized†. â€Å"But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before† (p. 362). Huck’s adventure, if nothing else, has given him a wary eye towards â€Å"sivilized† society. When the prospect of settling down with Sally is presented he light’s out for the Territory to distance himself from a restrictive, formal education. Twain ends his novel by setting Huck up for a new experience and personal growth. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn taught an important lesson, one that showed the importance of the self in the maturing process. We saw Huck grow up by having the river as a place of solitude and thought, where he was able to participate in society at times, and also sit back and observe society. Through the child’s eye we see how ignorant and mob-like we can all be. Then nature, peace, and logic are presented in the form of the river where Huck goes to think. Though no concise answer is given, the literature forces the reader to examine their surroundings, and question their leaders.