William Blair

This book tells the story of how Confederate civilians in the Old Dominion struggled to feed not only their stomachs but also their souls. Although demonstrating the ways in which the war created many problems within southern communities, Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 does not support scholars who claim that internal dissent caused the Confederacy's downfall. Instead, it offers a study of the Virginia home front that depicts how the Union army's continued pressure created destruction, hardship, and shortages that left the Confederate public spent and demoralized with the surrender of the army under Robert E. Lee. This book, however, does not portray the population as uniformly united in a Lost Cause. Virginians complained a great deal about the management of the war. Letters to the governor and to the Confederate secretary of war demonstrate how dissent escalated to dangerous proportions by the spring and summer of 1863. Women rioted in Richmond for food. Soldiers left the army without permission to check on their families and farms. Various groups vented their hatred on Virginias rich men of draft age who stayed out of the army by purchasing substitutes. Such complaints, ironically, may have prolonged the war, for some of the Confederacy's leaders responded by forcing the wealthy to shoulder more of the burden for prosecuting the war. Substitution ended, and the men who stayed home became government growers who distributed goods at reduced cost to the poor. But, as the case is made in Virginias Private War, none of these efforts could finally overcome an enemy whose unrelenting pressure strained the resources of Rebel Virginians to the breaking point. Arguing that the state of Virginia both waged and witnessed a "rich man's fight" that has until now been downplayed or misunderstood by many if not most of our Civil War scholars, William Blair provides in these pages a detailed portrait of this conflict that is bold, original, and convincing. He draws from the microcosm of Virginia several telling conclusions about the Confederacy's rise, demise, and identity, and his study will therefore appeal to anyone with a taste for Civil War history--and Virginia's unique place in that history, especially.

William Blair's Virginia's Private War is a close study of the home front in the Confederacy and a significant contribution to our understanding of the Confederate defeat. Blair challenges and effectively overturns the dominant assumption that internal stresses and conflicts, particularly along lines of class and race, undermined the Confederacy. Rather, he shows that for most of the South the centripetal forces of Confederate nationalism and defence of home and hearth against an invading enemy were more powerful. Internal problems, including dissent, wracked the state of Virginia, yet these private wars actually helped prolong the conflict as they forced authorities to turn the war into more of a rich man's fight.

When English surgeon William Blair (1766–1822) embarked on his career, he became familiar with the devastation caused by smallpox in urban areas. The virus was lethal to more than a fifth of the people infected, and the rest were at risk of long-term complications. The first effective vaccine against the disease had been developed by Edward Jenner, who had been made aware that smallpox infection was uncommon among milkmaids who had been exposed to a milder form of pox contracted from cows. Although Jenner's vaccine was made available soon after its public announcement in 1798, the objections by various sceptics deterred many from embracing the procedure. In this 1806 pamphlet, Blair employs the format of a dialogue between an anxious parent and an ardent vaccination opponent to convince Londoners of the benefits offered by the new vaccine. His account is complemented by a report from the Royal Jennerian Society.

On August 29–30 2014 the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation in co-operation with the Stockholm Centre for Commercial Law arranged an International legal symposium under the heading “Functional or dysfunctional – the law as a cure? Risks and liability in the financial markets”. The symposium was held in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation. The topic of the symposium mirrors a particular interest of the activities of the SCCL covering regulatory as well as liability questions thus dealing with legal subjects which have also relevance to the Foundation. After World War II financial markets have gradually undergone huge differences depending on new financial devices, new financial markets and new financial actors evolving together with changes in regulation and supervision. These are circumstances which have together created new frames for the financial industry. Table of contents: - Extraterritorial Financial Regulation: Why E.T. Can’t Come Home by John C. Coffee, Jr. - Generally on Risks and Liability – Directors’ Liability Under the Law and Regulation in Australia by Rowan Russell - South African Company Law – Directors’ Duty of Care and Skill and the Introduction of the Business Judgment Rule: Answering the Critics by Angela Itzikowitz - International legal risk for banks and corporates by Philip R Wood - Macro-prudential regulation from an English and European Perspective – The Legal and Institutional Dimension by Kern Alexander - Comment on the session on the risks and liabilities of financial markets by Jesper Lau Hansen - Handling Risks in Financial Markets Regulation: EMIR and the problem with CCPs being Too Big to Fail by Erica Johansson - Responsibility of Banks and Their Directors, Including Liability and Enforcement by Klaus J. Hopt - Is there a role for culture and ethics in financial regulation? By William Blair - Tort Law to the Rescue? By Michael D. Green & Brandon Jones - The (non)-liability of banks under English law by Ross Cranston - Implementing liability on the basis of model case procedures – the example of the German Capital Markets Model Case Act (“KapMuG”) by Brigitte Haar - Tort cases in Iceland after the bank crash in 2008 by Eiríkur Jónsson