Data protection 1998–2008

This article reviews key developments in data protection legislation, case law and practice between 1998 and 2008. Over this time data protection has become a mainstream compliance topic for business and government alike. Having started in 1998 as a specialist area of limited general application, over the decade this area of law has been widely applied to access rights, international transfers of information and data losses. We are now seeing major changes in enforcement of data protection legislation (including the power to fine and increased use of audits) which will continue the focus on compliance.     

Exploring Lawyer–Client Interaction

Personal injury victims involved in compensation processes have a worse recovery than those not involved in compensation processes. One predictor for worse recovery is lawyer engagement. As some people argue that this negative relation between lawyer engagement and recovery may be explained by lawyers’ attitude and communications to clients, it seems important to investigate lawyer–client interaction. Although procedural justice and therapeutic jurisprudence had previously discussed aspects relevant for lawyer–client interaction, the client’s perspective has been rather ignored and only few empirical studies have been conducted. In this qualitative study, 21 traffic accident victims were interviewed about their experiences with their lawyer. Five desirable characteristics for lawyers were identified: communication, empathy, decisiveness, independence, and expertise. Communication and empathy corresponded with aspects already discussed in literature, whereas decisiveness, independence and expertise had been addressed only marginally. Further qualitative and quantitative research is necessary to establish preferable lawyer characteristics and to investigate what would improve the well-being of personal injury victims during the claims settlement process.     

The talk–listen–respond (TLR) model of representatives on Twitter

Despite the existing research on how elected representatives use Twitter, there are few comparative studies and none that considers Israel, a country that differs from most democracies in its electoral system. This study has two levels of analysis. The first is the country level, in which the author compares and explains how representatives in four countries – the US, Canada, Australia and Israel – use the talk, listen and respond model to achieve their goals. The second is the individual level, in which the author analyses how personal characteristics such as gender and age, and political characteristics such as seniority and membership in the opposition or coalition affect the frequency of use of Twitter. Using quantitative data, it is demonstrated that representatives vary in the frequency of their use of Twitter. On the country level, Australian representatives use Twitter more often than their counterparts in other countries. On the individual level, first-term members, members of the opposition, and older representatives use Twitter more often than those with more seniority, coalition members, and younger legislators.     

Integrating the desire–for–control and rational choice in a corporate crime context

The “rational choice” framework, with its focus on risks and rewards, is often used to explain corporate criminality. In this paper, we build on this framework by integrating the notion of “desire‐for‐control.” Although common to many psychologists, the desire‐for‐control, or the general wish to be in control over everyday life events, has not been examined for its relevance in understanding criminal activity generally, or within corporate offending in particular. After demonstrating the importance of desire‐for‐control in the corporate context, we use data from a sample of managers and MBA students to examine the extent to which desire‐for‐control relates to rational‐choice considerations and corporate criminal decision‐making. Results suggest that desire‐for‐control (1) influences the interpretation of rational‐choice considerations and (2) is positively related to corporate criminality even after controlling for a number of important situational‐ and individual‐level factors. Implications for future theoretical and empirical research are addressed.     

The Enactment of Bayh–Dole

The Bayh–Dole Act of 1980 reversed 35 years of public policy and gave universities and small businesses the unfettered right to own inventions that resulted from federally funded research. The Act was opposed by the Carter administration, which had a different view of how to utilize the results of federally funded research to drive economic development. It is not widely appreciated that the bill had died in the regular sessions of the 96th Congress and was only passed into law in a lame duck session necessitated to pass the budget. Only a magnanimous gesture of respect for Senator Birch Bayh, who had been defeated in the 1980 election, on the part of Senator Russell Long allowed the bill to receive the unanimous consent needed to pass a bill in lame duck session. This article lays out the roles of the key congressional staffers who forged this historic compromise and the last minute maneuvers needed to obtain President Carters signature.     

Apology in victim–offender mediation

Victim–offender mediation practices bring conflicting parties together so they can engage in a two-way dialogue and ultimately negotiate a mutually agreeable resolution. The fact that apology may be a motivator for participating in the mediation process and that it is often a common outcome of mediation suggests that research on mediation ought to more carefully explore the nature of the apologies that are offered. The present study provides a qualitative exploration of the prevalence and nature of the apologies offered by offenders to their victims during face-to-face mediations. Fifty-nine mediation agreements recorded by the longest running mediation scheme in the UK were analysed. It was found that 50.8% of agreements contained mention of the perpetrator saying ‘I’m sorry’ or offering a partial apology (i.e. acknowledging harm and/or promising forbearance). Full apologies were absent in the mediation agreements. Agreements did not make explicit mention of the offender admitting responsibility or expressing remorse or regret. Finally, although the mediation agreements did not make any explicit mention of offenders offering reparation, they did record efforts at providing solutions to the conflict.     

Shifts in police–informant negotiations

This paper examines the impact of increasing criminal cooperation programmes for police handler–informant relationships. Over the last two decades, many countries have introduced policies to regulate the use of criminal informants and defendants who agree to provide information or testimony in exchange for financial incentives, protection, and leniency. Many researchers assume this trend has no bearing on the relationship between the handler and the informant. Following this assumption, they maintain that agreements made with criminal trade participants are still informally negotiated and unsupervised. I investigate this oversight, drawing on data obtained from in-depth interviews with handlers and informants. Findings from this fieldwork illustrate that, in order to compensate for weakening of their discretionary power, police officers are developing new deceptive tactics in dealing with informants. Furthermore, the increasingly institutionalised use of informants has given handlers a false sense of security. Informants gain skills and knowledge from their relationship with handlers, which they can use to undermine the handler's authority.     

Jewish–Gentile intermarriage in pre-war Amsterdam

Intermarriage is generally regarded as the litmus test in the process of assimilation of ethnic-minority groups. The Jewish community in Amsterdam was a religious minority. When a Jew married a Gentile it was assumed that Judaism lost a family. Odds ratio calculations based on marriage tables for 1911–1941 show that the rate of intermarriage among Jews was much lower than among Catholics, Protestants and religious unaffiliated. Although the Jewish community might still be more homogeneous than the Protestant and Catholic communities, it was rapidly assimilating as the log odds ratios for Jews dropped more heavily. While mutual aversion is reflected in the remaining high log odds ratios for Jewish–Catholic marriages, Jewish–Protestant marriages and Jewish–unaffiliated marriages increased because of the higher propensity among Protestants to marry a Jew and the higher propensity among Jews to marry an unaffiliated spouse from the 1920s onwards. Next, we created life courses for a sample of 480 descendants from Jewish grandparents living in Amsterdam in 1941 of whom we know were married to a Gentile or to a Jew. The collected data from the Amsterdam registry allow us to test several hypotheses on preferences, opportunities and third parties in a logistic regression analysis. One's own affiliation significantly influenced the preference to marry a Gentile or a Jew. Successive marriage cohorts showed a higher chance to marry a Gentile among those who had Jewish parents at birth. A similar but weaker effect is found for those born in the old Jewish neighborhood. These differences in effect on later marriage cohorts indicate that religious and social barriers within the Jewish community had largely diminished. Opportunities like the social network of the mother and the living district during one's adolescents' age also significantly influenced the choice of a spouse.     

University–industry collaboration and regional wealth

Substantial research has been conducted towards understanding why and how universities shape regional wealth and competitiveness. In this paper we extend this literature to examine empirically causal relationships between university-induced knowledge spillovers and regional wealth using a hand collected panel data set from 1998 to 2012. Literature has identified three possible effects of causality, namely that a university exogenously fosters and spurs regional wealth, second that universities are endogenously shaped by regional wealth and finally that regional wealth and universities follow an interlinked and co-evolutionary path. Our findings support the latter direction in that universities and their regional endowment are linked together.     

Jewish–Gentile intermarriage in pre-war Amsterdam

Intermarriage is generally regarded as the litmus test in the process of assimilation of ethnic-minority groups. The Jewish community in Amsterdam was a religious minority. When a Jew married a Gentile it was assumed that Judaism lost a family. Odds ratio calculations based on marriage tables for 1911–1941 show that the rate of intermarriage among Jews was much lower than among Catholics, Protestants and religious unaffiliated. Although the Jewish community might still be more homogeneous than the Protestant and Catholic communities, it was rapidly assimilating as the log odds ratios for Jews dropped more heavily. While mutual aversion is reflected in the remaining high log odds ratios for Jewish–Catholic marriages, Jewish–Protestant marriages and Jewish–unaffiliated marriages increased because of the higher propensity among Protestants to marry a Jew and the higher propensity among Jews to marry an unaffiliated spouse from the 1920s onwards. Next, we created life courses for a sample of 480 descendants from Jewish grandparents living in Amsterdam in 1941 of whom we know were married to a Gentile or to a Jew. The collected data from the Amsterdam registry allow us to test several hypotheses on preferences, opportunities and third parties in a logistic regression analysis. One's own affiliation significantly influenced the preference to marry a Gentile or a Jew. Successive marriage cohorts showed a higher chance to marry a Gentile among those who had Jewish parents at birth. A similar but weaker effect is found for those born in the old Jewish neighborhood. These differences in effect on later marriage cohorts indicate that religious and social barriers within the Jewish community had largely diminished. Opportunities like the social network of the mother and the living district during one's adolescents' age also significantly influenced the choice of a spouse.