Four years after it was launched with 200 members, the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (Apil) now numbers 1,400, and increasing by about 10 a week. At the organisation's annual meeting and spring conference on Tuesday, Michael Napier was confirmed as the association's...

The recent hoopla about the First Daughters, their attempts to consume alcohol in public and resulting brushes with law raise some important issues for our industry. As now two-time offender Jenna Bush (who could conceivably receive jail time for a third infraction, under...

A Kansas man who admitted stealing from a charity founded by President Dwight Eisenhower has been sentenced to 20 months in federal prison.David Schlotzhauer also was ordered Thursday to pay $128,144 in restitution to People to People International under the sentence imposed by U.S. District...

E-mail messages between the Hawaii governor's former top aide and a man who was blackmailing him cannot be publicly released, a federal judge ruled.Gov. Linda Lingle's former chief of staff, Bob Awana, has a right to privacy because he was the blackmail victim, U.S. District...

In the following essay, Reinsma traces Ōe's treatment of existential matters in A Personal Matter and maintains that the novel is central to the author's oeuvre “for reasons that are at once literary and personal.”

In the following essay, Cargas argues that guilt functions as a major component of the Japanese psyche and Ōe's fiction, particularly in A Personal Matter.

When Bird [protagonist of A Personal Matter] makes his final choice [to reject an adventurous life in favor of tedious domesticity], he is fulfilling, not [an] imported nineteenth-century romanticism, but an attitude native to Japan for almost as many centuries as [Westerners] have taken the attitude that action is intrinsically good, that rebellion is under a number of circumstances virtuous, particularly if it allegedly gives greater individual freedom, that fighting to the death against insurmountable od...