The interlingual interpreter — Cypher or intelligent participant?

Conclusion The final question that arises here is whether interpreters' behaviour—in adding a word here or deleting a word there, as in the examples given above — actually justifies the suspicion of legal participants that they are not being told literally what the witness is saying. Interpreters argue that a literal rendering may confuse or mislead. Legal figures accuse interpreters of using their own words.Legal etiquette frequently precludes interpreters from identifying cultural or linguistic factors that are generating miscommunication, such as in the example given above of designating a particular winter. The mechanical, non-participatory role ascribed to interpreters in the lega setting further leads the legal professionals to denigrate the standing of the individuals performing language-switching. Failure to treat interpreters as participants, e.g. by supplying them with all documentation, including photographic material, leads to inaccuracies. The mechanical view of interpreters frequently precludes them from participating at their own initiative, either to request clarification of unclear material or to provide clarification where speakers' referents are based on different worlds of knowledge. I suggest that it is high time that the legal profession re-examined its attitudes towards foreign-language interpreters, and towards their product — interlingual interpretation.     

Anomie and corporate deviance

This paper elaborates on Merton's theory of anomie, while aiming at the enhancement of our understanding of processes conducive to corporate deviance. It attempts to consolidate points made by theorists operating in diverse, often considered as conflicting, orientations or perspectives. A synthetic or integrated scheme is, thus, put forward, which can help appreciate the background against which corporate deviance is likely to occur. Moreover, it is argued that contemporary societies are inherently conducive to anomic trends. Such trends bring about not only lower-class deviance and crime — to which anomie theory has been traditionally applied — but also high-class and corporate deviance. Against claims by some scholars that the former is a matter of greater concern, it is suggested that the latter is at least as serious a problem and that it has significant implications for the social order.Parts of an earlier version of this paper were presented at the 10th International Congress for Criminology held in Hamburg, FRG, in September 1988.     

Christian Wolff and the classics of“scientific socialis”

The paper analyses the reception of Christian Wolff in the work of the founders of scientific socialism. It is discussed how Marx, Engels and Lenin thought about a leading representative of German Enlightenment. The author argues that the classics of scientific socialism knew about Wolff in an off-handed and secondary way. As the case of Wolff shows their studies regarding philosophical, legal, sociological and economic theories and those who represented them were strongly influenced by thinking with the logic and in the categories of class antagonism and struggle. The Wolff treatment by Marx, Engels and Lenin determined his reception in the philosophy and economics of the state socialism.     

Precedent Externality, Network Effect, and the Possible Inefficiency of the Evolution of Laws

Using the traditional scenario of tort conflict as an example, I argue that the marginal precautionary costs of injurers and victims are not constant, as was assumed by most previous researchers. The precedent of a liability rule has some natural externality on the precaution technology, and hence marginal cost, faced by future agents involved in torts. The adoption of legal rules therefore has a network effect, meaning that the present prevalent adoption of one rule increases the probability of its future adoption. Treating the dynamic evolution of legal rules as a random process, we are able to apply an established result in the literature of network economies to conclude the path-dependence, non-predictability, and potential inefficiency concerning the final legal rule to which the dynamics converge.     

Social justice and legal justice

The main aim of this paper is to challenge the validity of the distinction between legal justice and social justice. It is argued that what we usually call legal justice is either an application of the more fundamental notion of social justice to legal rules and decisions or is not a matter of justice at all. In other words, the only correct uses of the notion of legal justice are derivative from the notion of social justice and, hence, the alleged conflicts between criteria of social and legal justice result from the confusion about the proper relationship between these two concepts. Two views about the social justice/legal justice dichotomy are of particular importance and will provide the focus for the argument: this dichotomy is sometimes identified with a classical distinction between distributive and commutative justice and sometimes with the distinction between substantive and procedural justice.     

Terrorism and the law: Historical contexts, contemporary dilemmas, and the end(s) of democracy

Recent proposals by the G7 (and Russia) to clamp down on terrorists and terrorism do not define that which is prohibited. Instead, a threat is communicated which in turn allows, among other things, greater attention to be paid officially to camouflage charities and terrorist use of the Internet. Nevertheless, it is somewhat of a truism to note that terrorist violence is ultimately defined or characterized, for purposes of legal prohibition, within a highly politicized atmosphere. Starting with a short summary of anti-terrorist codification efforts made this century, this article examines some of the security interests cited by governments today in their respective struggles against terrorism. More specifically, it is argued that individual perceptions of personal and societal threat are heightened unnecessarily not only by a constant stream of governmental anti-terrorist rhetoric, but further, by an awareness of official and unofficial methods of anti-terrorist surveillance, and the use to which the information so obtained can be put.     

Explaining Controversial Organizational Decisions: To Legitimize the Means or the Ends?

We investigated the influence of information legitimizing the means—or decision procedures—versus information legitimizing the ends—or the decision outcome—on observers' reactions to an undesirable organizational decision. One hundred and sixty-one employees read an account of a company layoff occurring in a nearby city. The content was experimentally manipulated, such that participants either (i) did or did not receive information legitimizing the layoff procedures, and (ii) did or did not receive information legitimizing the layoff itself. Furthermore, participants received one of two versions of the manipulations, to assess the generalizability of the results across two operationalizations of the primary independent variables. Whereas both information legitimizing the means and information legitimizing the ends were necessary (and neither sufficient) to mitigate observers' judgments of outcome unfairness, procedural information was necessary and sufficient to influence evaluations of the organization. Overall, the data are consistent with the notion that the effectiveness of managerial accounts might be determined not only by information explaining why but also information explaining how decisions are made.     

The New Water Legislation of Zimbabwe and South Africa – Comparison of Legal and Institutional Reform

Recently, several new pieces of water legislation have been promulgated in both Zimbabwe and the Republic of South Africa. The new acts are an attempt to correct injustices of a colonial past and to trigger development towards effective, equitable and efficient integrated water resources management influenced by the policy decisions in Agenda 21 and the need to respect economic and social human rights. This article aims at identifying and describing factors of prime importance in the process of legal and institutional reform. Major factors are earmarked and derived from the proceedings in Zimbabwe and are compared with the situation in South Africa. Thorough analysis by the author of proceedings, preambles, memoranda, legislation and addenda has induced roughly 5 major reform issues: The call for equitable water distribution based on a widely consented water resources management strategy; The need for effective and efficient integrated water resources management conducive to stakeholder participation through decentralisation processes; The redressing of legal shortcomings in former water legislation with the emphasis on the introduction of integrated approaches; The introduction of instruments of cost recovery for water resources management; The need to develop human resources capacity and institutional strength within the implementing agencies.For both Southern African states, these issues appear to be of comparable importance as major triggers for legal and institutional reform, although not always in the same sense.The resulting most important legal and institutional changes are presented, discussed and compared. Finally, prospects for and constraints on implementation of the new water legislation in these countries are compared.     

What Is Forensic Psychology,Anyway?

The issue of how forensic psychology is defined has taken on a new urgency in the context of an application to have forensic psychology designated a specialty by the American Psychological Association. To provide a historical perspective, I briefly review early attempts to apply psychological concepts to legal issues, beginning with the McNaughten trial in England in 1843. I then review current conceptualizations of forensic psychology, which have either a broad focus on all psychology–law interactions or focus more narrowly on clinical applications to the legal system. Potential advantages and disadvantages of each conceptualization are briefly discussed. After touching upon the major differences in the cultures of psychology and of law, I discuss three law-related areas of contemporary controversy: use of clinically based evidence in the courtroom, recovered memories of child abuse, and the use of the criteria-based content analysis technique to evaluate children's claims of sexual abuse. Issues concerning the education and training of psychology–law scholars and practitioners are briefly surveyed. I conclude that a broad conceptualization of forensic psychology is important in terms of relevant ethical standards, but that a more narrow distinction that differentiates between clinicians and researchers or legal scholars also is useful.     

The Short-Lived Influence of the Napoleonic Civil Code in 19th Century Greece

During the Greek War of Independence (1821–1827) from the Ottomans—which had a nationalistic and liberal character—and for the first decades after the liberation, a number of liberal French-educated politicians and scholars attempted unsuccessfully to introduce the Napoleonic Civil Code (or some clone of it) as the Greek Civil Code. Despite the fertile political and intellectual ground for such an introduction, they failed to achieve their goal due to the temporary introduction of Justinian's Roman law as the Greek civil law. This led the Greek academic community to Pandektenrecht and the predominance of the 19th century German legal theory (boosted by its organized propagation on the part of a number of German-educated legal scholars).     

Geodesy in the German Economy

Geodesy as a scientific, technical and management working field has reached its high water mark in global efficiency. Its success consisted in bringing justice in ground taxes, bringing transparency in securing property, in mapmaking and—very modern—pushing ahead the local based business. The branch has grown over three centuries and is equipped with a big formation sector, which produces the new generation in four levels. Nevertheless the actual political key word: Social justice lets this branch come into a more shadowy area of politics. The actual and prospective situation is illuminated.     

Distributing Adventitious Resources: The Effects of Relationship and Grouping

This study examines the effect of two variables—relationship and grouping—on the distribution of resources which are unearned, or adventitious. Strangers and acquaintances made decisions about the distribution of an adventitious resource either as individual decision makers or as members of a small group. Results indicate that acquaintances were more likely to share the resource than were strangers, and that group members were more likely to share than were individual allocators. Equality received the highest overall rating as a norm for distributing the adventitious resource. At the same time, subjects expected allocators to keep the resource instead of applying an equality distribution norm.     

The “Hired Gun” Effect: Assessing the Effect of Pay,Frequency of Testifying,and Credentials on the Perception of Expert Testimony

Three experiments addressed the proposition that jurors use short cuts in processing information when confronted with expert scientific testimony. The results of the first two studies demonstrated that experts who are highly paid for their testimony and who testify frequently are perceived as hired guns. They are neither liked nor believed. The results of the third experiment replicated the hired gun effect and showed that it is most likely to occur when the testimony is complex and cannot be easily processed. The results were discussed in terms of the theoretical differences between central and peripheral processing of persuasive messages in a legal context.     

Justifying law: An explanation of the deep structure of American law

Conclusion Charles Darwin argued that human beings are what happen whenphysical laws act upon a planet with the characteristics that earthhad five billion years ago. Similarly, I have argued that theprimacy of individual will is what eventually happens when asociety allocates and limits coercion based upon rights. From timeto time particular visions of the good or the right dominate publicbehavior, but they are eventually enframed by rights — the authoritative claim of each person to respect.I have argued that the propositional structure of American law—the laws themselves — can be seen to be a logically consistentsystem of propositions stemming from the axiom that the will ofeach person is worthy of respect. This is an explanatory, not anormative, proposition. The axiom was not put there by anyoneand the law derived from it, any more than the human brian wasput there and the theory of relativity derived from it. The axiomcame to be embodied in k because of a fact — the single universalcharacteristic of human beings that is relevant to the question ofarranging coercion is individual will — and a process — the right ofeach person to demand a justification for coercion used upon him.Since will is universal to human beings, this would suggest thatany rights-based legal system would evince a general structuresimilar to our own. Particularities of national culture, naturalresources, population density, and so on would produce a verydifferent liberty frontier from the one facing this country andhence, different laws. But the general structure of law — the relationship between principle and policy decision, the role of thebasic rights, and so on — should be similar. This similarity shouldprovide a common basis for cooperation between states, transcending particularities of economic structure, political structure and ideology. We have seen that a very broad range ofeconomic and political institutions may be justified. The essential difference between states lies not in the different ways that theyarrange institutions but in the different ways that they justifythem. Those that justify them to people as persons are similar.Those that justify them by conformity to a design are different.The theory set out here is not a design. It is an explanation. Onevirtue of explanations is that they draw forth other explanations.More importantly, they offer perspective — they tell us what weare up to. As the social relations which law must rationalizebecome ever more complex, perspective becomes ever more necessary. The simple laws have already been written. The connectionbetween the doctrine of consideration and the first principle isobvious. The connection between the hard look doctrine ofreviewing administrative agencies and the second principle isnowhere near so obvious (though it is a lovely example of thejudicial process enframing the realm of uncertainty). The morecomplex and artificial the institution, the poorer the guidance ofintuition and the more necessary are conscious guides to decision.Justification comes easy to printers. Most of them don't knowwhy a page of print that has straight margines left and right isjustified. They don't need to know, for the idea has immediateintuitive appeal; it is easy to accept and to remember, and, onceremembered, it is an effective guide to behavior. It is easy to seethat this line of print is not justified and to do somethingabout it. It is not so easy to tell whether the hard look doctrine orthe enforcement of a surrogate motherhood contract sits fairly on itspage. Justification of law requires an understanding of thecriterion against which it is being done. There is an intuitive core— a sense — to any act of judgment, but that core can be illuminated and developed by an understanding of the framework withinwhich it operates.     

Marxism and the criminal question

The question considered is whether it is possible to trace a theoretical strategy for a criminal policy on the basis of Marx's work. The answer offered is that Marxian political and economic analysis does not supply any general theory of criminality and that any attempt to formulate such a theory (as in Lenin, Paukanis or Gramsci) necessarily leads to authoritarian and regressive conceptions of crime and punishment. Nevertheless the authors maintain that it is possible to trace three theoretical suggestions within Marxian thought which allow of a fruitful approach to the criminal question. The first suggestion relates to the economic roots of many aspects of modern criminality; the second regards the Christian and bourgeois superstition of moral liberty and individual culpability; the third suggestion deals with the lack of a guaranteed social space as the prime root of crime. These theoretical suggestions permit clarification of the social character of penal responsibility and this character points to the need for the socialization (but not deregulation) of criminal treatment.This essay grew out of a reply to a questionnaire drawn up by La questione criminale, an Italian review which tries to approach the criminal question from a Marxist standpoint.     

An introduction: Fifty years later,Punishment and Social Structure in comparative analysis

Conclusions In the same way in which Durkheim explained the invention of imprisonment on the basis of a progressive secularization and mitigation of the criminal law, or Rusche related major penological changes to social structural changes, the discussion of sociological hypotheses regarding the quantitative production of imprisonment, allows us to return to a discussion of its quality, and modalities. My hypothesis is that the ongoing deep changes in the nature of the whole arena of social control, are connected to a decreasing role of imprisonment. We certainly know very little about the size of such arena, within which a process that appears to be of increasing carceration, at least in the United States and the other recarcerating countries, might instead represent a shrinking section of a much faster increasing arena of social control in general.We may accept as certain only that the course set by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer fifty years ago is still wide-open today to investigation by sociologists who, like Georg Rusche, dare step beyond the role of obliging technocrats of an unquestioned legal syllogism.     

Drug and violence prevention: Rediscovering the critical rational dimension of evaluation research

Following criticism of government-funded drug prevention activities of the early 1990s, a spate of best practice or science-based lists of alcohol, drug and violence prevention programs have been produced by federal agencies in recent years. The writings of Donald T. Campbell on validity have had a profound influence on the development of the methodological quality scales that have been utilized in the review processes used to generate these lists. Implicit in this approach to the identification of science-based prevention programs is the idea that science is equivalent to research methodology and study design. Following Karl Popper and Campbell, I contend that, while certain designs are clearly better than others in dealing with threats to internal validity and allow for better generalization of results beyond the study population, utilization of these designs in and of itself is not sufficient to designate an evaluation study as scientific. Nor can the accumulation of data from such studies be used to proclaim an entire area of research a science, as has occurred with the field of so-called prevention science. Rather, the fundamental criterion by which to judge the scientific status of a theory is falsifiability. If the field of drug and violence prevention is truly a science, then it should be subjecting its predictions about the effects of intervention programs to genuinely critical tests and not attempting to verify these hypotheses. It is argued that it has failed to do this, and two specific examples of prevention programs that appear on a number of science-based lists of prevention programs are discussed.     

Political corruption and the role of public prosecutors in Italy

This paper analyzes the problem of political corruption in Italy and the role public prosecutors have played in unraveling such a phenomenon. The factors that have contributed to fostering systemic corruption as well as those that have contributed to uncovering such a system are given careful consideration. The most relevant conclusion is that whereas endogenous forces in the judiciary (prosecutors and judges) — in particular, its low level of institutional autonomy — have prevented it from containing corruption, exogenous forces — which have broken the conditions that had favoured the stability of the so-called first Republic — have led prosecutors to engage in massive investigations.This article is a revised version of the paper prepared for delivery at the 1994 Workshop on Corruption and Politics held at the Instituto Internacional de Sociologia Juridica, Onati (Spain), July 13–14, 1994. I am appreciative to Prof. Giuseppe Di Federico (University of Bologna) for his deep insights of this complex matter and for his very useful comments.     

The purpose of knowledge: pragmatism and the praxis of marxist criminology

This paper revives and revises the argument that there is no place for a concept of crime in marxist theory, and consequently that there is no theoretical justification for the development of marxist criminology. However, earlier essays along these lines have adopted a rationalist epistemology in advancing this case — with its attendant difficulties of idealism, privileged conceptualization and inflexibility. The present paper attempts to escape such problems, and to extend the critique of criminological theorization, by developing its case on the basis of a pragmatist epistemology. It is argued that the conflicting aims of marxist theory and the bourgeois legal theory from which crime is transferred make it difficult for marxist criminology to generate a unified theory to guide political practice and research. Moreover, Marxists' privileging of the concept of crime may be systematically blinding them to political developments which render criminology historically obsolescent.