Childhood gender atypicality, victimization, and PTSD among lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth

This study examined childhood gender atypicality, lifetime victimization based on sexual orientation, and current mental health, including trauma symptoms and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), among 528 lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth. Nearly 80% reported verbal victimization, 11% physical, and 9% sexual, with males reporting significantly more victimization. Victimization began, on average, at age 13. Verbal attacks occurred as early as age 6, physical attacks at 8, and sexual attacks at 9. Youth who were considered gender atypical in childhood reported more victimization and more current mental health symptoms. PTSD was found in 9% of youth and was associated with past physical victimization.     

On Theory, Models, Model-Testing, and Estimation

I reply to comments and criticisms of my article raised in this Special Issue by Cantor and Land, Britt, O'Brien, Levitt, and Paternoster and Bushway.     

Property Rights, Theft, Amnesty, and Efficiency

In this paper we show that costs associated with infractions of property rights, such as theft, can be reduced by imposing lower penalties on individuals who admit to such infractions and make restitution. We find that the socially optimal penalty on a confessed thief may be zero (complete amnesty) or even negative—a person may be given a reward for confessing a theft. This is because a thief's valuation of a good is generally lower that its valuation by its legal owner, and an amnesty permits the trade that such a difference in valuation makes calls for. It is interesting to note that the benefits of amnesties were apparently recognized in ancient times and they constitute part of Biblical Law. Moreover, such amnesties have also been informally incorporated into modern legal systems, wherein leniency (a form of partial amnesty) is generally shown to individuals who confess their infractions.     

Risk,Precaution, Responsibility,and Equal Concern

Systemic risks are risks produced through interconnected non‐wrongful actions of individuals, in the sense that an individual's action is a negligible cause of the risk. Due to scale effects of interaction, their consequences can be serious but they are also difficult to predict and assess via a risk assessment. Since we can have good reason to engage in the interconnected activities giving rise to systemic risk, we incur a concurrent collective responsibility to ensure that the risks are fairly distributed and well regulated. James argues that fairness in this context requires taking reasonably available precautions ensuring for each risk‐bearer a favourable ratio of expected benefits over expected losses. In sections 2 and 3 we argue that such a conception of fairness applies but only on the condition that the systemic risks created are irreversible risks and that the general background conditions of justice are imperfectly fair. When risks are reversible, compensatory justice can correct for unfairness in risk imposition. Where risks are irreversible, compensatory justice necessarily fails, giving rise to a collective responsibility to regulate fairly ex ante. Additionally, where background conditions of justice are fully fair and the systemic risk is well understood, risk bearers can be said to have consented to the systemic risk. If they are not fair, we argue that the primary political obligation should lie in fixing the fairness of the backgrounds of justice. A related reason for addressing the general background conditions of fairness is that James’ account of fairness in systemic risk imposition encounters a baseline problem. If expected risks and benefits are calculated again an unfair historic background condition, systemic risk imposition would not be fully fair. Section 4 shows why differences in evidentiary uncertainty as to probability and levels of harm and effective responses require a normatively appropriate response in the form of additional precautions. We show that the evidentiary standards set for risk‐based cost‐benefit analysis have a connection with deontology because they express a postulate of equal treatment in formal terms. Systemic risks can have different possible degrees of epistemological certainty due to factors of social and natural origin, such as more available research funding or higher degrees of complexity for some systemic risks but not others. These differences have to be mitigated by taking even greater precautions in difficult‐to‐research systemic risks.     

模仿、续写、改写与合理使用

对已有名著进行模仿、续写与改写等后续创作而形成新的作品 ,是常见的文学创作形式 ,古今中外莫不如此。后续创作不同于改编等演绎性创作 ,根据《著作权法》的立法目的、合理使用的认定条件及后续创作本身的特点 ,将原作的人物、场景等作为背景而体现了后续创作者自己的思想和风格的作品后续创作行为 ,属于著作权意义上的合理使用。     

Consent,Legitimation, and Dysphoria

Ideals of consent and consensuality are rapidly displacing ideals of legality as the demarcation of lawful from unlawful, legitimate from illegitimate, and good from bad.  This is a particularly pronounced trend in the areas of sexual and reproductive rights and ethics.  Consensual sex has almost completely displaced marital sex as the demarcation of not only criminal from laudatory sex but also good from bad sex.  Likewise, the consensuality of a pregnancy is increasingly the demarcation of a celebrated rather than mourned pregnancy, rather than its marital province.  This development is justly celebrated as a breakthrough in women's rights and equality, but it carries costs.  This essay develops some of the limits and perils of an over-reliance on consent and consensuality as the primary criterion of the morality of sex and reproduction.  Consent is not always a trustworthy guide to wellbeing, for both general reasons, and reasons specific to sexual and reproductive life.     

Litigation, experimentation, and reputation

This paper develops a multiple-plaintiff game with a correlation across plaintiffs' private information (damage levels). It argues that the defendant engages in experimentation to learn (or remain uninformed about) the plaintiffs' types and play tougher (or softer) in the initial case when another party may also have an interest in the suit.     

Certainty, Severity, and Skyjacking

A central issue in the controversy surrounding the death penalty is the question of deterrence. Specifically, does the additional severity of capital punishment over life imprisonment serve to deter potential criminals? I attempt to deal with this question by separating the effects of severity of punishment from those of certainty of punishment by examining various woys in which these factors have been manipulated in the attempt to curb the incidence of skyjacking. I conclude that increasing the certainty of punishment results in a decrease in crime, whereas increasing the severity does not, in effect arguing against the necessity of the death penulty.     

Probability,danger, and coercion

Young adults were shown hypothetical stimulus vignettes describing mental patients and were asked to judge (a) the probability that the patient would harm someone else, (b) whether or not the patient should be categorized as “dangerous,” and (c) whether coercion should be used to ensure treatment. Probability and dangerousness judgments were systematically related and were predictive of the judged necessity for coercion. However, judged probability was strongly dependent on the form of the response scale, suggesting that probability was not represented consistently and quantitatively in participants' minds. Study 2 replicated these findings with forensic clinicians as participants. These results underscore the importance of violence to others in mental health law and have important implications for the manner in which risk assessments are formulated for use by the legal system.     

Nation-states,Market-states,and Virtual-states

The advent of a global economic and physical superinfrastructure is in the process of transforming terrorism, guerrilla warfare, and the nation-state. A useful model for understanding this process of transformation is Philip Bobbitt's work, “The Shield of Achilles.” Bobbitt's work demonstrates that the nation-state is in a difficult and dangerous process of transition to a new form of governance, called the market-state, that is built to withstand and prosper despite the pressures of globalization. This process is complicated by the emergence of a vicious asymmetric competitor, in the form of a virtual state that leverages the huge flows of the global criminal economy, combined with the weakness of the nation-state during its phase transition to the market-state. This essay details the structure of this conflict and provides a scenario for its potential outcome.     

Religion,Conversion, and Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation and conversion within the penal context are deeply ambiguous concepts. This ambiguity stems in part from the fact that little consensus has been reached among scholars as to the meaning of the terms beyond their ability to foster adjustment to institutional rules and obedience to law. This paper argues that each concept receives greater clarity and practical significance when understood in terms of moral transformation. The article will utilize the methodological framework of social scientific studies to underscore a contention, most commonly found in theological literature that conversion, and a fortiori rehabilitation, signal a shift from a divided to a unified consciousness based upon the experience of unconditional acceptance and, ultimately, its bestowal upon others and upon all forms of life.