THE EGGHEAD, THE FLATFOOT, AND THE SCREW

The growth of the American Society of Criminology has strengthened it not only in numbers but by the active participation of leading criminologists. Practitioners entering the ranks of the organization offer an opportunity for collegial interaction of social scientists with police, correctional, and other personnel. This association may be mutually beneficial, but it may also result in faction-ridden organizations whose facades of dialogue conceal dissatisfaction. The author envisages a scientific organization true to a mission that is neither elitist, exclusionary, nor isolated from the administration of justice or penology.     

THE FIRST MAN AND THE COMPANY MAN: THE COMMON GOOD, TRANSCENDENCE, AND MEDIATING INSTITUTIONS

An enormous oblivion spread over them, and actually that was what this land gave out, what fell from the sky with the night over the three men returning to the village, their hearts made anxious by the approach of night, filled with that dread that seizes all men in Africa when the sudden evening descends on the sea, on the rough mountains and the high plateaus, the same holy dread that has the same effect on the slopes of Delphi's mountain, where it makes temples and altars emerge. But on the land of Africa the temples have been destroyed, and all that is leR is this soft unbearable burden of the heart.     

PUNCHING THE PARENTING TIME CLOCK: THE APPROXIMATION RULE,SOCIAL SCIENCE,AND THE BASEBALL BAT KIDS*

The American Law Institute proposes that in contested physical custody cases the court should allocate to each parent a proportion of the child's time that approximates the proportion of time each has spent performing caretaking functions in the past. Examined through the lens of child development research, the approximation rule is unlikely to improve on the best interests standard. It is difficult to apply; is perceived as gender‐biased; creates a new focus for disputing parents; renders a poor estimate of parents’ contributions to their child's best interests; overlooks parents’ intangible, yet significant, contributions to their child's well‐being; and miscalculates the essence of how a child experiences the family. A preferable alternative is a better defined, contemporary best interests standard that accommodates new knowledge and reforms that encourage nonadversarial, individualized resolutions of custody disputes.     

THE HUMAN RIGHT TO INFORMATION,THE ENVIRONMENT AND INFORMATION ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT: FROM THE UNIVERSAL DECLARATION TO THE AARHUS CONVENTION

Citizen access to government-held information and the amelioration of environmental problems are considered statutory matters in the United States, but at the international level these are seen as fundamental human rights. In recent years two categories of human rights demanded by activists, the right to government information and the right to environmental protection, have converged into a new human right—the right to government information about the environment. The 1998 Aarhus Convention, binding in more than forty nations in Europe and Central Asia, is the first multilateral treaty to specifically denote a human right to government information about the environment. While the Aarhus Convention has some untested procedural difficulties and laborious bureaucratic requirements, the treaty can serve as a model for the world's nations at large, because citizen oversight of government actions toward the natural world is a powerful tool for those concerned about both the environment and government transparency.