According to Lukas Graf's answer, sphinx 1.1.2 has your exact problem. I tried it out with 1.1.3: no problems. (On python 2.7, osx).
I don't see anything specific in Sphinx' 1.1.3 changelog, though there is a mention of "restoring compatibility with docutils trunk". This suggests that another docutils version could help you. I'm using version 0.9
.
So: sphinx 1.1.3
and docutils 0.9
, could you try those versions?