Law, Politics, and Violence Against Women: A Case Study of Palestinians in Israel

Major controversies regarding the value of legal and policy reforms have accompanied research on wife battering and social reactions to it. The present study examines the utility of law enforcement and emphasizes the relationship between gender, culture, and politics. It points to the difficulties arising from the shift from private, traditional methods of dealing with violence against women to a more public approach characterized by intervention of the state and the criminal justice system. In this connection, it was hypothesized that enforcement of the Israeli Law Against Family Violence among the oppressed and discriminated Palestinian minority generates new conflicts within the group, exacerbating control and abuse and re-victimizing women. Social control agents (formal and informal) who were interviewed about their perceptions and attitudes regarding the applicability of such a law pointed to obstacles created by sociocultural variables, the political legacy and procedural barriers. An attempt is made to show that application of the law without prior preparation and understanding of its sociocultural and political ramifications may produce adverse effects at the victim's expense. That is, unless power struggles, cultural pressures, and political priorities are taken into consideration, criminal strategies that seek to eliminate abuse may prove to be dangerous.     

Law's Allure and an Interbranch Perspective on Law and Politics

This essay views Gordon Silverstein's book Law's Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves, and Kills Politics (2009) from the perspective of the burgeoning interbranch literature on law and courts, which seeks to place judicial decision making within the context of ongoing political and policy-making processes. It argues that Law's Allure reflects the strengths and weaknesses of this literature. On the plus side, it compellingly reinterprets the concept of legal precedent in political terms, showing how the content of judicial decisions serves as an iterative framing mechanism within and across various policy areas. On the downside, it struggles to provide a rigorous framework for analyzing the risks of the juridification of American politics. Despite any weaknesses, its attempt to map different pathways of legalistic court-based policy development in diverse settings represents a useful step for those interested in bringing the study of law and courts back into the core of analyzing American politics and policy making.     

The Emergence of Penal Extremism in California: A Dynamic View of Institutional Structures and Political Processes

This article examines legal and political developments in California in the 1970s and early 1980s that led to extreme changes in the state's use of imprisonment. It uses historical research methods to illustrate how institutional and political processes interacted in dynamic ways that continuously unsettled and reshaped the crime policy field. It examines crime policy developments before and after the passage of the state's determinate sentencing law to highlight the law's long‐term political implications and to illustrate how it benefited interest groups pushing for harsher punishment. It emphasizes the role executives played in shaping these changes, and how the law's significance was as much political as legal because it transformed the institutional logics that structured criminal lawmaking. These changes, long sought by the law enforcement lobby, facilitated crime's politicization and ushered in a new era of frenetic and punitive changes in criminal law and punishment. This new context benefited politicians who supported extreme responses to crime and exposed the crime policy process to heightened degrees of popular scrutiny. The result was a political obsession with crime that eschewed moderation and prioritized prison expansion above all else.     

试论公安机关行政执法转型

在计划经济时期公安行政执法取得了很大成效。随着我国社会的快速发展,经济体制在转型,政治体制在完善,政府职能在转型,为此公安行政执法必须加快转型,以适应经济社会发展的需要,推进和谐社会建设。     

Morality, Law and the Fair Distribution of Freedom

Hart’s criticism of Devlin’s stance on the legal enforcement of morality has been highly influential in shaping a new liberal sensibility and in paving the way to many important legal reforms in the UK. After 50 years it is perhaps time to go back to Law, Liberty and Morality to see it in the perspective of the general evolution of Hart’s thought since the early 50s. This is a period of extraordinary creativity for the Oxford philosopher, in which he writes many important contributions to legal, moral and political philosophy. Prominent among these is ‘Are There Any Natural Rights?’, an article that sets the agenda for Hart’s subsequent work on liberty, fairness and rights, and provides the philosophical background for the liberal understanding of the relations between law and morality defended in Law, Liberty and Morality.     

The Reconstitution of Law in Local Settings: Agency Discretion, Ambiguity, and a Surplus of Law in the Policing of Hate Crime

An important yet poorly understood function of law enforcement organizations is the role they play in distilling and transmitting the meaning of legal rules to frontline law enforcement officers and their local communities. In this study, we examine how police and sheriff's agencies in California collectively make sense of state hate crime laws. To do so, we gathered formal policy documents called “hate crime general orders” from all 397 police and sheriff's departments in the state and conducted interviews with law enforcement officials to determine the aggregate patterns of local agencies' responses to higher law. We also construct a “genealogy of law” to locate the sources of the definitions of hate crime used in agency policies. Despite a common set of state criminal laws, we find significant variation in how hate crime is defined in these documents, which we attribute to the discretion local law enforcement agencies possess, the ambiguity of law, and the surplus of legal definitions of hate crime available in the larger environment to which law enforcement must respond. Some law enforcement agencies take their cue from other agencies, some follow statewide guidelines, and others are oriented toward gaining legitimacy from national professional bodies or groups within their own community. The social mechanisms that produce the observed clustering patterns in terms of approach to hate crime law are mimetic (copying another department), normative (driven by professional standards about training and community social movement pressure), and actuarial (affected by the demands of the crime data collection system). Together these findings paint a picture of policing organizations as mediators between law‐on‐the‐books and law‐in‐action that are embedded in interorganizational networks with other departments, state and federal agencies, professional bodies, national social movement organizations, and local community groups. The implications of an interorganizational field perspective on law enforcement and implementation are discussed in relation to existing sociolegal research on policing, regulation, and recent neo‐institutional scholarship on law.     

Role Conflict and the Psychological Impacts of the Post-Ferguson Period on Law Enforcement Motivation,Cynicism, and Apprehensiveness

In the wake of high-profile deadly force cases in the post-Ferguson era, a number of negative psychological outcomes have been depicted by law enforcement officers. We examine if negative post-Ferguson outcomes predict current cynicism, motivation, and apprehensiveness. Further, we account for whether role orientations, specifically support for a law enforcement orientation or a community policing orientation, mediate the psychological effects of the post-Ferguson period. Since the law enforcement orientation, exercised through strict enforcement of the law, has been called out of favor in the post-Ferguson area, supporting this role may negatively impact officers via role conflict. The opposite may be observed for those supporting a community policing orientation. We test these arguments using results from an online survey of law enforcement officers in the USA, administered 6 months following highly publicized incidents in Dallas and Baton Rouge where police were targeted and killed. Results showed that post-Ferguson psychological impacts continued to affect current levels of cynicism, motivation, and apprehensiveness. Support for law enforcement or community policing orientation did not mediate the effects of post-Ferguson sentiments. Nonetheless, role orientations played a significant role in predicting current cynicism, motivation, and apprehensiveness and provided support for the theory of role conflict.     

Antitrust Law and Distributive Politics in the American States

State enforcement by state attorneys general (AGs) has become a major component of American antitrust law. Much has been written about state antitrust enforcement, but existing accounts of AG incentives and behavior are incomplete. As elected officials in forty‐three states, AGs must represent their constituents and, therefore, will be drawn to cases that maximize the level of settlement reward—cases with large, wealthy defendants. I hypothesize and find that state AGs represent their constituents along ideological lines, but this relationship is conditioned by case characteristics that involve the potential settlement reward. Moreover, incentives to participate are likely to be higher when there are clear violations of the law, as in price‐fixing cases, rather than in merger cases, where no wrongdoing has necessarily been established. The study adds to our understanding of antitrust law but also has implications for how distributive politics shapes political responsiveness to the electorate.     

The Dead, the Law, and the Politics of the Past

This article explores the role of law in cultural and political disputes concerning dead bodies. It uses three interconnecting legal frameworks: cultural and moral ownership, commemoration, and closure. It begins with a critique of the limitations of the private law notion of 'ownership' in such contexts, setting out a broader notion of cultural and moral ownership as more appropriate for analysing legal disputes between states and indigenous tribes. It then examines how legal discourses concerning freedom of expression, religious and political traditions, and human rights and equality are utilized to regulate the public memory of the dead. Finally, it looks at the relationship between law and notions of closure in contexts where the dead have either died in battle or have been 'disappeared' during a conflict, arguing that law in such contexts goes beyond the traditional retributive focus of investigation and punishment of wrongdoers and instead centres on broader concerns of societal and personal healing.     

Science,Politics, and Persistent Organic Pollutants: The Role of Scientific Assessments in International Environmental Co-operation

International measures to address environmental problems increasingly rely on scientific information, and a growing number of international agreements require periodic scientific re-assessments. However, the arena of scientific assessment, governed by a combination of scientific criteria and political interests, is not well-understood, and few case studies have mapped the influence of scientific assessment on the birth and development of environmental policy issues. This article examines the role of scientific assessments and the science-politics interplay in international attempts to regulate persistent organic pollutants (POPs), focusing on the processes within the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The study shows that scientific and political activities are intrinsically linked in international POPs work. Scientific and political agendas are co-constructed with no clear boundary between the science and politics spheres. Scientific assessments played a prominent role in constructing POPs as an issue of international concern, setting agendas and shaping policies.     

The “Local” Migration State: The Site‐Specific Devolution of Immigration Enforcement in the U.S. South

This article examines the implementation of 287(g) authority and Secure Communities by several law enforcement agencies in Wake County and Durham County, North Carolina. I argue that despite being federally supervised programs, 287(g) and Secure Communities take shape within specific political, legal, policing, and biographic contexts, and, as such, take on a site‐specific form. I conclude that although site specificity is a characteristic of devolved immigration enforcement in the U.S. context, devolution also predictably relocates interior immigration enforcement to immigrant populations' spaces of social reproduction. Accordingly, programs like 287(g) and Secure Communities work at a suprasite level to amplify immigrant populations' everyday insecurities.     

创新执法质量监督机制科学评估依法行政水平

北京市公安局的执法质量评估预警机制是首都公安依法行政进程中的一项内部执法监督机制创新。该机制以强化执法监督、推进首都公安依法行政、强调公安执法法律效果和社会效果的统一为主要内容,紧密围绕公安法定职责,以执法质量管理为核心,引入现代执法管理手段,实现了对全局执法质量的等级化管理,对有效掌控全局执法态势、推进依法行政工作起了重要作用。同时,也对建立健全依法行政评估考核机制的探索具有重大理论和实践意义。     

反垄断私人诉讼困境与反垄断执法的管制化发展

中国反垄断法私人诉讼的发展与预期落差巨大。原因在于,反垄断法私人诉讼强调法院的作用,但法院受限于司法机构的根本性质,存在难以调节原被告力量失衡、对于特定行为无法救济以及救济不及时的问题。相比之下,反垄断法行政执法机构具有资源与权力配置上的显著优势。更重要的是,现代反垄断法执法的不断发展和演化,使原来简单判断是否违法的执法方式向以提高社会整体福利为目标的管制方式转变。在这一过程中,建立独立的反垄断执法机构、颁布反垄断指南、广泛采用同意裁决、深入运用经济学分析等都是具体表现。与之相应,当反垄断行政执法占据中心地位时,为了确保其不偏离反垄断法的目标,须建立完善的行政机构内部执法程序以及司法审查程序,进行有效制约。     

独具特色的中国海关法律制度

人们常谈到上世纪五、六十年代．“整个国家就靠一部宪法、一部婚姻法、一个土地法大纲管理”。其实，早在新中国成立伊始．国家就紧张起草并很快实施了一部多年後许多人也不了解的法律。这部法律1951年4月公布生效，即使在“文化大革命”期间，也在有效实施。造就是《中华人民共和国暂行海关法》。《暂行海关法》一直适用到改革开放以後的1987年，才为新的《中华人民共和国海关法》（以下简称《海关法》）所取代。建国之初．百废待兴、百法待立；十年动乱，“无法无天”。显而易见，海关法规有此“特殊待遇”，在於它的存在对一个国家的必要性。     

Law, Struggle, and Political Transformation in Northern Ireland

This article analyses the role of law as an element of the Republican Movement's violent and political struggle during the Northern Ireland conflict. The trials and legal hearings of paramilitary defendants, the use of judicial reviews in the prisons, and the use of law in the political arena are chosen as three interconnected sites which highlight the complex interaction between law and other forms of struggle. The author argues that these three sites illustrate a number of themes in understanding the role of law in processes of struggle and political transformation. These include: law as a series of dialogical processes both inside and outside a political movement; law as an instrumental process of struggle designed to materially and symbolically 'resist'; and the constitutive effects of legal struggle upon a social and political movement. The article concludes with a discussion as to whether or not Republicans' emphasis upon 'rights and equality' and an end to armed struggle represents a 'sell out' of traditional Republican objectives.     

规范行政执法行为 提高政府公信力

提高政府公信力是建设人民满意的服务型政府和法治政府的必然要求。行政执法是依法行政的重要环节,执法行为是否规范,直接关系到政府的形象和政治文明的实现。提高政府公信力应把规范行政执法行为作为行政法治建设的重中之重,应在深化执法理念、提高执法能力、强化执法监督和营造执法环境等方面下功夫。     

Privatization in Poland: Politics,Society, and the Law*

The paper presents the beginning and the initial results of the process of privatization in Poland. Starting from the summer of 1990 it examines the political debate on the Privatization Act and corresponding social reaction. It shows how the society answers such important questions as: who, and on what principles, is to take over the hitherto state-owned property? The next question is on the content of the “social contract on privatization”: the legal starting point and the first empirical results. It appears that the most visible social effect was the growth in the inequalities between workers and the elites of the society. The role of workers in the process of transformation is also of special interest. Finally, the paper examines the role of privatization law, which on the one hand presents a compromise between the ruling class and the society and on the other hand has been replaced by current privatization policy.     

Lessons from Tuskegee: What Law Enforcement Can Learn from the History of Bioethics

Though Black lives continue to be lost during encounters with law enforcement, we remain far from a policy solution. While leading presidential candidates fail to offer concrete proposals, the recommendations of Campaign Zero appear to have found little traction. Furthermore, we are far from understanding the causes of the disproportionate use of violence against minorities. Faced with a growing crisis, law enforcement would do well to consider professions that have taken successful steps to outgrown their history of racial violence. The medical community’s response to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment is particularly instructive. Much as the medical community responded to a crisis of racial violence by fundamentally reconceptualizing the role of the physician, the time has come for a new ethics of policing that will reshape our understanding of the role of law enforcement.     

刑事政策与刑法关系的应然追求

刑事政策与刑法的关系一直是个争议问题.在刑事法治观念日益深厚而刑事政策地位日隆的今天,讨论二者的关系意义尤其重大.刑事政策与刑法关系的核心,是在区别二者前提下的互动、制约、促进关系.刑法对刑事政策的制约主要涉及刑事政策的制定和实施,这是法治的要求,是权利保障的要求;刑事政策对刑法的指导主要体现在法律的制定、实施和法律变革上,这是时代发展的要求,也是社会防卫的要求.而倡行法治、保障人权是刑事政策和刑法都应该奉行的基本原则,是已为现代法治国家的刑事司法实践所证实的理性选择.     

The Shifting Sands of Punishment in China in the Era of “Harmonious Society”

This article about the politics of punishment in China today follows some of the political machinations involved in the development of a new policy called “Balancing Leniency and Severity.” It treats this new policy as an exemplar of how politics works in the Hu Jintao era to change the way crimes are addressed in judicial decision making. This paper underscores the important ways in which political ideology informs criminal justice policy and practice in China. It examines a number of stages of development within the last decade during which Balancing Leniency and Severity has emerged as a foundational criminal justice policy.