Building our future glass homes – An essay about influencing the future through regulation

The present paper surveys the prospects and possibilities of regulating the application areas of Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) – or in a broader sense, of influencing the future way of life – at the intersection of law, technology and society. It dissects the anticipated further erosion of personal privacy – the focus area of the essay – caused by technological developments and related interests. After sketching out an ironic dystopia, in which the idea of transparency is foisted upon the public by future technological developments, the author contemplates the relationships between legal regulation and the underlying values in the predictable but unknowable milieu of future life conditions. While studying the immutability of fundamental values, the author offers a brief survey of the role of public opinion, as well as of the limitations of taking into account the majority opinion, followed by a thought experiment about the possible ways of regulating the “Code”, approaching it from the direction of two fundamental rights, the right to human dignity and the freedom of academic research. After reaching conflicting conclusions and making a few suggestions about possible ways to regulate the area, the author makes a proposal about the introduction of a small-scale experimental tool, metaphorically named as a predictive learning model of regulation. Despite the difficulties and the uncertainties, the essay's overall perspective on the role of legal regulation is not a pessimistic one, as long as it is used flexibly and in conjunction with other means of regulation.     

政府与社会组织关系研究——以吉林省为例

合作伙伴关系是政府在认识和解决与社会组织关系问题的一种新视角、新思路,是政府在提供公共物品以及实施公共管理时,与其他社会组织建立的一种相互沟通、协调和协商合作的机制和分担责任、分享收益,实现共赢的一种合作模式,表明政府与社会组织之间不再完全是管理与被管理的关系,而是形成了具有很强契约特点的政府管理的新理念,体现出政府在公共治理中角色的转变及其对自身职能和地位的重新认识。     

Genetic and Environmental Influences on Delinquency: DF Analysis of NLSY Kinship Data

This paper follows earlier research (Rowe et al., 1992) in evaluating the basis of family influences on adolescent delinquent behavior. Delinquency is measured in a number of different ways to account for important theoretical distinctions that exist in the delinquency literature. We use recently identified kinship structure in a large national data set—the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth—to estimate genetic and shared environmental influences on self-reported delinquency scores. Our analytic model is based on DF analysis, a regression procedure used to estimate parameters reflecting genetic and environmental influence. Results suggest a consistent and moderate genetic basis to sibling similarity in delinquency and little evidence of a shared environmental basis. A large amount of variance is attributable to nonshared influences and/or measurement error. Our findings suggest that the search for environmental influences on adolescent delinquency should focus on those that are not shared by siblings.     

Jails and Public Health Service Delivery and Empirical Knowledge: The Impact of Jail Population “Flow”

Time/flow is a decisive variable when proposing public health interventions in jail populations and settings. The present paper argues that jail flow affects the types of public health interventions achievable in ways not acknowledged generally by public health/medical researchers. The paper explores how public health interventions vary among jail populations in terms of “flow” and how they are affected by a “period” effect. Interventions that will be effective and reach a substantial portion of the jail population are dependent upon the point in the jail processing process. In turn, the variables that affect the speed of population flow through the jail setting also influence who will be served by public health interventions.     

The Mutability of Public Reason

Rawls's “public reason” has not been without its critics. One criticism is that public reason is “conservative.” Public reason must rely on those beliefs that are “widely shared” among citizens. But if public reason relies on widely shared beliefs, how can it change without departing from those beliefs, thus violating public reason? In part one of my essay, I introduce the conservatism objection and describe two unsatisfactory responses to it. Part two argues that there are aspects of public reason which diminish the force of the conservatism objection: first, that public reason is historical, and second, that it is mutable.     

Kant, Copyright and Communicative Freedom

The rapid recent expansion of copyright law worldwide has sparked efforts to defend the ‘public domain’ of non-propertized information, often on the ground that an expansive public domain is a condition of a ‘free culture’. Yet questions remain about why the public domain is worth defending, what exactly a free culture is, and what role (if any) authors’ rights might play in relation to it. From the standard liberal perspective shared by many critics of copyright expansionism, the protection of individual expression by means of marketable property rights in authors’ works serves as an engine of progress towards a fully competitive ‘marketplace of ideas’ – though only if balanced by an extensive public domain from which users may draw in the exercise of their own expressivity. This article shows that a significantly different, and arguably richer, conception of what a free culture is and how authors’ rights underpin it emerges from a direct engagement with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. For Kant, progress towards a fully emancipated (i.e. a ‘mature’ or ‘enlightened’) culture can only be achieved through the critical intellectual activity that public communication demands: individual expressive freedom is only a condition, not constitutive, of this ‘freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters’. The main thesis defended in this article is that when Kant’s writings on publicity (critical public debate) are read in relation to his writings on the legal organization of publishing, a necessary connection emerges between authors’ rights – as distinct from copyrights – and what Jürgen Habermas and others have named the public sphere. I conclude that it is the public sphere, and not the public domain as such, that should serve as the key reference point in any evaluation of copyright law’s role in relation to the possibility of a free culture.     

The economics of environmental law enforcement: end-of-life vehicles

Abandoned End-of-Life Vehicles (ELVs) have been an environmental concern for a long time in a number of countries. This article examines different ways to address the issue by changing the incentive structure for agents. Following (Polinsky A. M., & Shavell, S. (2000). The Economic theory of public enforcement of law. Journal of Economic Literature, 38, 45–76.) a model is used to compare a fine-based system with a deposit-refund system; a combination of the two is then considered. It is shown that when the environmental harm is relatively low and constant, a deposit-refund system is preferred. When cases of high environmental harm are included, the optimal choice would be a combined system.      

Women, urban governance and the public service ethos

This article considers gender and the public sector, examining the degree to which women make a ‘difference’ to public service. In reporting on a research project into the 30% seat reservation or quota system for local female politicians in the Indian Mega-City of Mumbai (formerly Bombay), consideration is given to the ways in which women and men manage and organise their daily lives and contribute to public governance, with particular attention given to the cultural specificities of the Indian context in the period of post-colonial rule. It is argued that women politicians and officers are held in high regard as valued and respected holders of public office, that their values and attitudes are more closely aligned to a public service ethos than men's and that their role in the processes of change affecting India at the present time may prove to be significant. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Theoretical Integration and Unification: A Focus on Justice

A commonly shared goal among scientists is to reach the ‘holy grail’ of theoretical integration or unification. We list several examples of such attempts within sociology and psychology in general and, more specifically, within the subarea of social justice. A distinction is made between the seemingly interchangeable terms integration and unification. We note the scarcity of work concerned with untangling the meaning of theoretical integration, with differentiating among forms of integration, and with mapping the variety of ways in which integration might be accomplished. The five articles published in this issue of Social Justice Research, and here briefly reviewed, address these and related questions and/or exemplify theoretical integration with a focus on justice.     

Issues in public safety

This paper proposes to deal with the eternal dilemma of melding systems response and public expectations and issues relative to that fusion. Public Safety is defined by the writer as, “Those activities of government which promote the health, safety, and welfare of the people through regulatory policies which attempt to eliminate hazards.” Acting on behalf of the people as a whole, is a never ending concern of government and usually consumes a major portion of a municipality’s budget. The author attempts to illustrate the fact that there are ways of delivering the necessary services efficiently and effectively.     

The two facets of female violence: The public and the domestic domains

Violent behavior of women varies significantly in the public and private domains. Criminal statistics indicate a relatively low proportion of women among violent offenders in the public domain, while in the domestic and/or private domain statistics reflect almost no gender difference in violent behavior. The following paper proposes a dynamic model which draws upon psychological and sociological variables and suggests that the clue for understanding the paradoxical phenomenon lies in the relative importance the domestic domain plays in the woman's value structure. Among the variables considered were: social learning patterns regarding violent behavior; perception of danger; and the ways in which women express their frustration and/or anger.     

Client participation in paid sex markets under alternative regulatory regimes

To help inform the design and review of alternative public regulatory policies towards paid adult sex markets, this study uses economic reasoning to explore the nature of client participation. This is a timely focus given the increasing consideration and movement towards a greater role for demand-side policies and regulation that has emerged in some countries to complement, or, in some cases, even replace elements of supply-side regulation and policy. The analysis is based upon a time allocation model that characterises the nature and balance of incentives facing clients under various public regulatory regimes. The regimes considered range from the status quo in England, Wales and Scotland, to varying levels of state involvement or direction, featuring, inter alia, supplier registration, public health inspections and locational restrictions. All of these are shown to affect in various ways the extent to which risk, income and other factors can influence the pattern and intensity of leisure time usage, which is a key requirement for client participation in paid sex markets.     

Robots,standards and the law: Rivalries between private standards and public policymaking for robot governance

This article explains the complex intertwinement between public and private regulators in the case of robot technology. Public policymaking ensures broad multi-stakeholder protected scope, but its abstractness often fails in intelligibility and applicability. Private standards, on the contrary, are more concrete and applicable, but most of the times they are voluntary and reflect industry interests. The ‘better regulation’ approach of the EU may increase the use of evidence to inform policy and lawmaking, and the involvement of different stakeholders. Current hard-lawmaking instruments do not appear to take advantage of the knowledge produced by standard-based regulations, virtually wasting their potential benefits. This fact affects the legal certainty with regards to a fast-paced changing environment like robotics. In this paper, we investigate the challenges of overlapping public/private regulatory initiatives that govern robot technologies in general, and in the concrete of healthcare robot technologies. We wonder until what extent robotics should be governed only by standards. We also reflect on how public policymaking could increase their technical understanding of robot technology to devise an applicable and comprehensive framework for this technology. In this respect, we propose different ways to integrate the technical know-how into policymaking (e.g., collecting the data/knowledge generated from the impact assessments in shared data repositories, and using it for evidence-based policies) and to strengthen the legitimacy of standards.     

论环境损害赔偿立法中的环境公益保护 --从环境民事公益诉讼的角度

环境民事公益诉讼制度,可以规定社会团体提起环境民事公益诉讼必须以其成员主张环境公益受损为先决条件;可以明确公权机关的诉权优先于公民或社会团体的诉权;可以将环境保护行政主管部门或者其他依照法律规定行使环境监督管理权的部门规定为法定提起环境民事公益诉讼的公权机关,将检察机关定位为监督和支持有关主体提起环境民事公益诉讼,对救济是否充分及时进行法律监督的机关.环境公益的民事救济应当采取以恢复原状、消除危险为主,以赔偿、停止侵害、排除危害为辅的方式,同时探索新的民事救济方式.环境民事公益诉讼中的赔偿对象可以确定为某种环境公益基金,该基金独立于政府,负责对环境公益的维护,并不限于受损的环境公益范围填补或增进环境公益.     

Examining international responses to illicit arms trafficking

Concerns about illicit trafficking in small arms andlight weapons have moved rapidly up the internationalagenda since 1996. Within about three years a rangeof international responses to this problem, and to theclosely related issue of small arms proliferation,have developed at sub-regional, regional andinternational level – in Africa, Europe and theAmericas as well as globally. This article examinesthe development and design of each of the maininitiatives in this issue area. It analyses thedifferent ways in which the problems have been framedin each agreement or programme, and the significanceof linkages between them. These recent developmentsare judged to be substantial. Despite the regional andinstitutional variations, the shared normative andprogrammatic elements appear to be sufficient tosupport the development of winning global coalitions– able to establish a co-ordinated internationalaction programme even if not actually to preventillicit trafficking in the foreseeable future.     

Public Eyewitness Confidence Ratings Can Differ from Those Held Privately

Despite much research on eyewitness confidence, we know very little about whether confidence ratings given in public might differ from those held privately. This study tested a prediction derived from self-presentation theory that eyewitnesses will give lower confidence ratings in public when there is a possibility of their account being contradicted by other witnesses as compared to when they report their confidence in private. In groups of 3 or 4 people, 96 participants watched a videotape of a simulated robbery and then answered 16 forced-choice questions about details from the videotape. In half of the experimental sessions, the participants shared their answers and confidence ratings aloud with the other participants (public condition), and in the other half, the answers and ratings were not shared (private). As predicted, confidence ratings were significantly lower in the public condition than in the private condition, but the privacy manipulation had no effect on response accuracy. These results are consistent with a self-presentation explanation, and they highlight the need to examine public confidence ratings more thoroughly.     

Policy feedback and public opinion: the role of employer responsibility in social policy

This study extends the literature on policy feedback and explores the extent to which public attitudes reflect learning from past government initiatives. We analyze the ways in which feedback mechanisms affecting public attitudes may differ from those earlier identified in the literature. We apply this general analytic framework to help explain variation in public attitudes toward private employer involvement in health care, explore possible causal pathways, and offer some preliminary empirical tests of these hypotheses. There are different levels of public support for the notion of employer obligation involving medical care, long-term care, and the treatment of substance abuse. Our evidence suggests that lessons about the performance of institutions in each of these policy domains represent the most important effect of existing policy on public attitudes. Furthermore, these differences correspond to what one would expect based on our model of policy feedback and cannot be explained by other plausible sources of policy legitimacy.     

The Value of Quantitative Analysis for a Critical Understanding of Crime and Society

The value of quantitative analysis for a critical understanding of crime and society has often been questioned. This paper joins the debate by reviewing quantitative evidence on key criminological topics: the causes of crime, public opinion on crime, and the operation and impact of the criminal justice system. This evidence highlights the importance of economic deprivation and racial prejudice and discrimination for understanding U.S. crime and justice and points to the ineffectiveness of the nation’s “get tough” approach to crime control. In these ways, quantitative analysis has already bolstered central propositions in critical criminology and promises to continue to do so.     

Public versus private defense: Can money buy justice?

With the expansion of the right to legal counsel and the state's need to provide legal counsel, public defenders came to be viewed with suspicion and mistrust. The widely shared image by the public was that lawyers who became public defenders were those unable to succeed in the private sector. Very few studies had examined the legal outcome and efficiency of public versus private legal defense. The purpose of the current study was to examine the extent to which a private or public defense affects the outcome of the legal process in Israel.