Competition and combativeness in courtship: Reports from women

The relationship between a partner's perceived level of competitiveness and combativeness in courtship is examined, based on reports from 296 women. Competitiveness is seen as a direct measure of efforts to control. Results show that even high levels of competitive behaviors experienced as pleasant are unrelated to combativeness. However, as scores on a measure of unpleasant competitiveness increase, so do scores on a measure of psychological and physical combativeness. Findings are compared with those from an earlier study based on reports from men.     

Truth and veridiction in law

Translated from French by F. Ringham, B. Martin and E. Pinner (Vérité et véridiction en droit,Droit et Société 8 (1988), 45–59).     

Insights on Technology Transfer from the Bureau of Mines

The U.S. Bureau of Mines was established in 1910 to reduce the high accident rate in the nation's coal mines. For 85 years, it conducted a wide variety of tasks related to mining before it was abolished in 1995. The BOM had many technology transfer successes in its lifetime, including more than a dozen R&D100 awards. This essay identifies and discusses five transfer factors that can explain the success (or failure) of many Bureau of Mines projects. These five factors are termed pressure, pitfalls, path, price, and profit.     

Beyond the Law?: The Justice of Deconstruction

This paper offers a close reading of Derridas essay Force of Law that emphasises the twin strengths of a deconstructive approach to questions of law and justice -- textual analysis and political context. Derridas interest is in limit or test cases, and so he engages with the fraying edges of the law, its borders, the frontiers that are most heavily policed because they are most fragile, for example capital punishment, genocide, general strikes and terrorism. Derrida undertakes an exploration of violence through a reinterpretation of Walter Benjamins Critique of Violence. At the heart of Derridas difficult argument is a demand for justice that goes beyond the cataloguing of specific injustices, and beyond the terms of Benjamins critique. The utopian impulse that underpins Force of Law is carried over into Specters of Marx, Derridas recent explicit grappling with the legacy of Marxism. The links between these two texts by Derrida implies a sustained politics of radical commitment on the part of deconstruction, a commitment to future forms of legality and egalitarianism, a theory of justice posited upon prescience rather than precedent.     

Interviewing Preschoolers: Comparisons Of Yes/No and Wh- Questions

This study investigated the influence of question format on preschool-aged children's errors, their response accuracy, and their tendency to say I don't know when given non-misleading questions in a neutral, unbiased context. Children (3 to 5 years old) participated in a craft-making session that included a staged accident with two experimenters differing in gender and appearance; the environment also had several distinctive features. One week later children were interviewed about actions, participants, and environment; questions were yes/no format with the veridical response yes (yes questions), yes/no format with the veridical response no (no questions), and specific wh- format questions. Question format substantially influenced children's responses: they were most likely to make errors if asked no questions, and were unlikely to answer either yes/no question with I don't know. In contrast, children spontaneously and frequently said I don't know to wh- questions about content they did not recall (environment), but not about content that was well recalled (actions). Implications of question format for reliability of eyewitness testimony by preschoolers are discussed.     

MCMI-III Results for Batterer Program Participants in Four Cities: Less “Pathological” Than Expected

Previous research using diagnostic inventories describe the extent and nature of psychopathology among batterers. MCMI-III scores from batterers in a multisite program evaluation (n = 840) were used to replicate this previous research. As in previous batterer research using the MCMI-I and MCMI-II, the MCMI-III results suggest a complex diversity of psychological problems that does not readily conform to previous profiles. However, less than half of the men had scores suggesting a personality disorder (BR scores 85), as opposed to 80% in a previous batterer study using the MCMI-II. Only one quarter of the men (25%) show evidence of a severe mental disorder. Narcissistic or antisocial tendencies were evident in 39% of our batterer sample, reflecting the sense of entitlement often attributed to batterers. Voluntary, as opposed to court-referred men, were more likely to have depressive and dependent tendencies and evidence of severe disorders. Our multisite sample appears to be less pathological than previous batterer samples and samples of psychiatric or drug outpatients.     

Status and practices of the legal text

Translated by Isabelle Llasera from Statut et pratiques du texte juridique, in D. Bourcier and P. Mackay (eds.),Lire le droit. Langue, texte, cognition (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1992).     

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.     

Comparing the Social Service Utilization, Exposure to Violence, and Trauma Symptomology of Domestic Violence Female “Victims” and Female “Batterers”

Although some authors have suggested that women batterers may really be self-defending victims, to date, no research has been initiated to empirically support this assertion. This paper describes the design and outcomes of a research project that investigated the similarities and differences between women adjudicated as domestic violence batterers and women identified as domestic violence victims. Findings indicated group similarities in the areas of exposure to violence and social service utilization. Although both groups reported high levels of trauma symptomology, victim scores were significantly higher.     

Expanding coupled shock fronts of urban decay and criminal behavior: How U.S. cities are becoming “hollowed out”

This work attempts to formalize an emerging paradigm in criminology, examining the structural consequences of feedback between community physical decay and behavioral pathologies caused by the social disintegration resulting from that decay. Adaptation of a standard reaction/diffusion approach produces a model of radially expanding coupled traveling-wave shock fronts of interrelated contagious physical decay and criminal activity. The standard threshold theorem associated with the model equations suggests that currently advocated triage policies, which recommend the virtual abandonment of bad communities behind the expanding front, will fail spectacularly. The model suggests that, just as the hollowing-out process has a complex, synergistic and dynamic structure, so, too, must interventions be interactive and mutually reinforcing, adaptively, targeted at communities in all stages of the phenomenon.     

Egocentric bias in perceived fairness: Is it observed in Japan?

Experiment 1 was a Japanese replication of the studies reported by Messicket al. (1985) and Liebrandet al. (1986). Subjects were asked to write down fair or unfair behaviors that they or others did, giving as many examples as possible in 5 min. As in the previous studies, the subjects began more fair behaviors with the word I than with others. Likewise, they began more unfair behaviors with the word others than with I. In Experiment 2, 80 examples of behaviors (40 fair and 40 unfair) were selected randomly from the results of Experiment 1. The difference between the number of frequent behaviors sorted into the fair/I category and that sorted into the unfair/I category was greater than that between the number of behaviors sorted into the fair/others and that sorted to be unfair/others. Salient behaviors were more likely to be sorted into the category of unfair than into fair, and more likely to be sorted into others than I. On the whole, the egocentric bias of fairness was confirmed in Japan as well as in the Netherlands and the United States. However, in both experiments, gender differences were found; women, compared to men, recalled more others' behavior than their own and were likely to attribute fair and/or unfair behavior to others rather than to themselves.     

European Editors of Economics Journals—A General Discussion

In a final inquiry at the end of the Conference on Editorial Policies the three editors, Bruno S. Frey (Kyklos), Manfred J. Holler (Homo oeconomicus), and Jürgen G. Backhaus (European Journal of Law and Economics), were asked to comment on their editorial policies. They answered by explaining the challenges they were or still are confronted with, which strategies they have already developed to go on and of course what they have learnt from the deliberations at this conference. In their statements they referred to their preceding paper presentations, and the contributions by Wolfgang Bergsdorf, who is the chief editor of Die Politische Meinung, and Peter Senn.     

Between hermeneutics and semiotics

Translated by David Pellauer from the French, Entre herméneutique et sémiotique,Nouveaux Actes Sémiotiques (Vol.II, 1990, forthcoming).     

Continuing barriers to women's credibility: A feminist perspective on the proof process

This article is an expanded version of a paper presented at the Society for the Reform of Criminal Law Conference on Reform of Evidence Law, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, August 3–7, 1992.     

“Does Contain” vs. “Does Not Contain”: Does it Matter which GMO Label is Used?

An analytical framework where heterogeneous consumers are imperfectly informed about product content is used to investigate the welfare effects of a public labeling system. Although a mandatory label that reads Does Contain or one that reads Does Not Contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs) provides information for both the labeled and the unlabeled goods, there is no reason why these labels should cause the same welfare effects. This paper shows that the two labels imply different distortions due to the associated cost of labeling. It is shown that the label Does Contain should be used if the ratio of consumers with a strong reluctance for consuming GMO goods to indifferent consumers is high, while the label Does Not Contain should be used if this ratio is low. Given the findings, the authors argue that current labeling differences in various countries need not be the result of protectionist trade regulations.     

Rethinking the Probative Value of Evidence: Base Rates,Intuitive Profiling,and the “Postdiction” of Behavior

It is argued that American courts may be routinely admitting evidence with little to no probative value and great potential for prejudicial impact. This may be particularly likely with regard to what is essentially intuitive profiling or stereotype related evidence, defined herein as evidence suggesting that the defendant (or other party), or his (her) behavior, fits intuitive profiles (or stereotypes) of the type of person likely to commit the crime or behavior in question. In other words, intuitive profiling evidence is admitted to postdict behavior. Formal empirically based profiling evidence (testimony regarding the fit of a defendant's characteristics or behaviors to formal or scientific profiles of the typical perpetrator of the crime in question for use to prove guilt is inadmissible in American courts. However, we suggest that everyday use of informal intuitive profiles underlies both judicial determinations of probative value diagnosticity, and thus admissibility, of evidence, and jurors' use of the evidence in determining guilt. Demonstrations of the use of base rate information to evaluate the probative value of such intuitive profiling evidence both as evidence of guilt and as evidence of innocence are provided. Demonstrations of both how to evaluate the actual probative value of evidence (when all necessary values are known), and the theoretical limit of its probative value (in circumstances where some values are not known) are provided. It is argued that such evaluations may provide the basis for (1) support of motions to either admit or to exclude evidence, (2) testimony to the jury to help them weigh or interpret evidence, (3) exculpatory profiling (profiling evidence of innocence), (4) pretrial research to establish probative versus prejudicial value of evidence, and (5) sufficiency analyses to determine maximum likelihood of guilt, given multiple items of evidence. Among these, the first two are considered most important, as it can be demonstrated that many profiling characteristics currently admitted in trial (such as evidence of battery to support a murder charge) are not probative of guilt.