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.     

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.     

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.     

“Staatswirtschaftslehre”—A Component of “Staatswissenschaften” Today and Tomorrow

The paper starts from problems of reorganization of the Welfare State. The second paragraph contains definitions and materials. The third paragraph turns to the development of Staatswissenschaften, especially to cameralistic views, public choice and deregulation. The fourth section deals with present Staatswirtschaftslehre as a component of Staatswissenschaften. The fifth paragraph is focussed on deregulation and reorganization of the state.The paper demonstrates: Staatswissenschaften and Staatswirtschaftslehre will be important academic disciplines also tomorrow, though the State will be reorganized by privatization, non-government-organizations and rearrangements of private and public sector activities under the conditions of new technologies and open markets.     

Globalisation and Conceptualisation in the Sphere of International Criminal Law

Professor Wiener mentions that [w]hile an agreement has evolvedin the juris-prudence concerning the meaning of criminal law' and publicinternational law', the opinions regarding what international criminallaw is still diverge to a great extent.1 The task of this report isto clear up what we mean by international criminal law, because itis not an exact expression.     

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.     

The state,public policy,and AIDS discourse

The paper probes the deep structure of perceptions of AIDS and the ensuing public policy trends. AIDS has become the latest symbol indexing 20th century conflicts over the family and sexuality and recapitulates some features of early debates over contraception and the control of sexually transmitted diseases. From 1981 to 1983, public talk about AIDS was virtually taboo. Since 1983, the massive proliferation of AIDS discourse has led to the development of an official story common in the press and clear in the presumptions underlying recent state policies in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. These policies have favored state control of sexual speech and education, as well as control of people blamed for HIV infection, while community-based groups have sought to empower people to affirm their sexuality while avoiding viral transmission.     

Preferential Selection Independent of Race and Gender: Effects on Self-Evaluations and Newcomer Information-Seeking Behaviors

The current study investigated the effects of an experimentally imposed program of preferential selection on beneficiary self-evaluations and newcomer information-seeking behavior. One hundred-twenty undergraduates were randomly assigned to a classification condition (in which they were informed that they tended to think in either an analytical or abstract manner) and collaborated on a task in groups of three. A fourth participant was introduced into each of these 40 extant groups under either a condition of preferential selection or not. Preferentially selected newcomers were shown to have more positive self-evaluations than their nonpreferentially selected counterparts. The presence or absence of a similar (in terms of thinking style) incumbent moderated the effect of being preferentially selected on the use of specific information-seeking behaviors.     

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.     

Plan and counterplan: Notes on moving beyond the crisis in planning theory

Conclusions In developing a working class perspective of planning theory, I have suggested that neither bourgeois nor Marxist planning theories can incorporate the dissensus tactics that are at the heart of working-class movements. Neither can they deal with the class nature of planning nor the class composition of planners. As the current social, political and economic crisis was forced on capital by the struggles (plans) of the working class, it follows that working-class counter-plans should deepen the crisis so that benefits will accrue to our side. The development of our successful counter-plans will throw their planning theory deeper into crisis. Ultimately, crisis resolution must be on the terms of the (ex-)working class.     

The effects of delay on voice recognition accuracy

Two experiments were conducted in which 176 listeners heard male and female objectively defined high- and low-recognition voices and then attempted to identify these voices from a voice parade containing 20 distractors after either 10, 40, 100, or 130 minutes (experiment 1), or 10 minutes, one day, seven days, or 14 days (experiment 2). In experiment 1 delay had no overall effect, although further analysis revealed that the shortest delay did produce better performance than all other delay conditions. Further, high-recognition voices were better identified than low-recognition voices. In experiment 2 delay had an overall effect, with the shortest delay interval again being significantly better than all other conditions, which did not differ among themselves. High- and low-recognition voices, however, did not exhibit a statistically significant difference, although these two factors entered into a marginally significant interaction. Theoretical speculation and forensic implications were drawn.This research was funded by the British Home Office, research grant no. RES 741/1/1, although the views expressed are not necessarily those of the funding body.     

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.     

“Who made the code in the first place?”: Delinquency and justice in an American Indian community

This paper examines the emergence of official categories of delinquency and a formal system for the legal processing of youth on one American Indian reservation. The creation of the legal code, Children's Court and Juvenile Detention Center, and the ongoing activities of these agencies are placed in the context of the larger social system of the reservation and the history of federal policies toward Indian peoples. Through in-depth interviews, participant observation, case file review, and the analysis of existing statistics, perceptions of delinquency and justice and trends in the legal processing of adolescents in this community are explored. The implications of this imposed system of law and justice for this community are discussed.     

Death penalty attitudes and conviction proneness

Attitudes toward the death penalty are consistently predictive of jurors' verdicts in criminal trials. Two studies were conducted to find out why. In Study 1, eligible jurors viewed a videotape showing conflicting testimony by a prosecution and defense witness in an assault case. Death-qualified subjects (those permitted to serve on capital juries) interpreted testimony in a manner more favorable to the prosecution than excludable subjects (those excluded from serving on juries in capital cases due to their opposition to the death penalty), suggesting that differing interpretations of evidence may mediate the relationship between attitudes toward the death penalty and verdicts. In Study 2, the same jurors indicated their reactions to a number of hypothetical situations in which a jury had convicted an innocent defendant or acquitted a guilty one. Death qualified subjects expressed less regret concerning erroneous convictions and more regret concerning erroneous acquittals than excludable subjects. Theoretical interpretations of this pattern of results suggest that death qualified subjects may have a lower threshold of conviction than excludable subjects; thus the relationship between attitudes toward the death penalty and verdicts may also be mediated by differing thresholds of conviction.During the course of this research, William C. Thompson was supported, in part, by a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship.     

Appeals to community and crime prevention

This paper considers the growing appeals to the idea of community in criminal justice policy and the involvement of actual communities in criminal justice initiatives. It draws on a completed two year research study of a number of community-based crime prevention initiatives in the South East of England. The paper considers the nature of community to which appeals are made in criminal justice discourse and policies, the contribution of community to the practices of social order and the nature of community representation and participation in crime prevention initiatives. It is argued that appeals to community in crime prevention, and crime control more generally, embody shifts in what constitutes the legitimate responsibilities of individuals, collectivities and the state. This has a number of implications, the first of which is a redrawing of the cost of policing and security services. Additionally, there is an associated shift in blame for failure. Finally, actual community involvement in crime control gives rise to new structures and forms of local governance that evoke key questions about the regulation of social relations, the nature of conflict resolution, citizenship, democracy and social justice.     

Why Japanese citizens evaluate the new indirect tax as unfair: Fairness criteria and their relative importance

The study examined citizens' fairness evaluation of the consumption tax recently introduced in Japan, and explored the underlying criteria and their relative importance in judging the fairness of the tax and the procedural fairness by which the tax was introduced. Five dimensions were obtained in factor analysis. Multiple regression analysis revealed that three dimensions contributed to total fairness of the tax: Procedural Fairness, Outcome Evaluation, and Affective Responses. Further analyses revealed that ramming the bill, sufficient discussion, and reflection of citizens' opinions were crucial for Japanese citizens judgment of procedural fairness. The results supported Leventhal's theory: ethicality, accuracy, and correctability were important.     

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.     

“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.     

Retributivism,Consequentialism, and the Intrinsic Goodness of Punishment

Retributivism is commonly taken as an alternative to a consequentialist justification of punishment. It has recently been suggested, however, that retributivism can be recast as a consequentialist theory. This suggestion is shown to be untenable. The temptation to advance it is traced to an intrinsic good claim prominent in retributive thinking. This claim is examined, and is argued to be of little help in coping with the difficulties besetting the retributive theory, as well as clashing with a desert claim equally central to that theory.     

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.