West African Voices

A new literary programme has been started in the West AfricanService of the B.B.C., and this article is a reprint of oneof the talks. The Ibo speaker was formerly in the Customs, andqualified as a barrister last November: he is also the authorof numerous poems in English, and of a novel, The Prince ofUtete. The other two are schoolmasters working as Assistantsat the School of Oriental and African Studies. For technicalreasons, the orthography is not quite complete.     

In-Between Worlds: Marleasing and the Emergence of Interlegality in Legal Reasoning

Abstract Lawmakers and scholars are so busy looking for new ways to develop a European private law that they are failing to see the virtues of an already existing private law harmonisation tool. This tool is the requirement of interpretation in conformity with directives as it has been designed by the Court of Justice in Marleasing and its progeny. In this paper, it is submitted that this case law operating at the level of rules on legal reasoning, and not at the level of substantive law, is a far more sophisticated means of private law harmonisation than all the measures discussed in the last years. Namely, the requirement of interpretation in conformity with directives is allowing the Common Market to develop coherently without neglecting the significance of national legal cultures. How this difficult equilibrium between harmonisation and legal pluralism might be maintained by the tool the Court of Justice developed in Marleasing is explained in this paper with the help of evolutionary jurisprudence.     

Randomized experiments in criminology: What have we learned in the last two decades?

This paper aims to review randomized experiments in criminology with offending outcomes and reasonably large numbers that were published between 1982 and 2004. A total of 83 experiments are summarized, compared with only 35 published between 1957 and 1981: 12 on policing, 13 on prevention, 14 on corrections, 22 on courts, and 22 on community interventions. Randomized experiments are still relatively uncommon, but there have been more large-scale multi-site experiments and replication programs. There have also been several experiments in which 100 or more places were randomly assigned. Relatively few experiments (only 10 out of 83) were conducted outside the United States. Meta-analyses suggest that prevention methods, correctional therapy, batterer programs, drug courts, juvenile restitution and deterrent policing were effective in reducing offending, while Scared Straight and boot camp programs caused a significant increase in offending.     

JUVENILITY AND PUNISHMENT: SENTENCING JUVENILES IN ADULT CRIMINAL COURT*

The study outlined in this article addressed a key limitation of prior research on the punishment of juveniles transferred to adult court by employing propensity score matching techniques to create more comparable samples of juvenile and young adult offenders. Using recent data from the Maryland State Commission on Criminal Sentencing Policy, it tested competing theoretical propositions about the salience of juvenile status in adult court. Findings indicate that even after rigorous statistical matching procedures, juvenile offenders are punished more severely than their young adult counterparts. We found no evidence that this “juvenile penalty” is exacerbated by an offender's race or gender, but it does vary starkly across offense type and mode of transfer, being driven primarily by drug crimes and discretionary waivers. The import of these findings is discussed as they relate to the future of juvenile justice policy regarding the continued use of juvenile transfer to adult court.     

The European Parliament and Comitology: On the Road to Nowhere?

The European Parliament has generally been deeply distrustful of the comitology system, primarily on the grounds that it allows the national administrations to undermine its supervisory role in the area of implementing legislation. Parliament has therefore sought to use the political, budgetary and jurisdictional means at its disposal to counteract the spread of comitology, or at least to promote the less intrusive forms of committee procedure. These initiatives have not, for the most part, been wholly successful; neither the interinstitutional agreements nor Parliament's arguments before the Court of Justice have produced the results it had hoped for. Parliament has been able, however, to use its Maastricht powers to influence the choice of committee procedure included in legislation adopted under codecision, and its budgetary tactics have forced the Commission to rationalise somewhat the annual expenditure on committees of all kinds and to bring a modicum of transparency into their operation. The imminence of the intergovernmental conference led to a suspension of hostilities towards the end of 1996.     

Intra-company technology transfer in a multinational industrial firm

Little literature has been developed to describe the process of transferring a corporation's technology between international units of that company for ultimate transfer to their external customers (Kimberly 1981 and Leonard-Barton and Sinha 1993). This paper addresses the issues at Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. involved in the transfer of applications technology. Technology is transferred from the unit of the corporation which develops the technology to international affiliates and subsidiaries. The ultimate goal is the support of product sales to the external industrial customer. A strategy for this type of organization is described which is supported by references to theoretical constructs in the literature and empirical observations from the organization itself.     

A PROACTIVE RESPONSE TO FAMILY VIOLENCE: THE RESULTS OF A RANDOMIZED EXPERIMENT

Recent British work has focused attention on preventing repeat victimization as part of an overall crime prevention strategy. Because domestic violence victims are among those most likely to suffer multiple victimizations, they are logical candidates for programs targeted at reducing repeat victimization.
This article reports on a joint law enforcement-social services approach to reduce the incidence of repeat domestic violence. The research design randomly assigned households reporting domestic incidents within two public housing police service areas in New York to receive or not receive a follow-up to the initial patrol response. (The follow-up visit was conducted by a police officer and a social worker.) In addition, housing projects in the same area were randomly assigned to receive or not receive public education about domestic violence.
Neither treatment produced a reduction in violence. However, households in projects that had received public education and households that received the follow-up visits were both more likely to report new violence to the police than households that did not receive the treatments. Moreover, the effect of the follow-up visit was most pronounced among households with more serious histories of violence. The results suggest that the interventions increased citizens' confidence in the ability of the police to handle domestic situations.     

The generality of criminal behavior: A confirmatory factor analysis of the criminal activity of sex offenders in adulthood

The presence of a general construct of deviance had not been investigated in sex offenders in spite of the presumption of specialization that characterized them. Consequently, the aim of this study was to investigate whether sex offenders' criminal behavior could be explained by a general construct of deviance. A semi-structured interview was conducted with each subject in order to assess deviant behavior during the life course. The official criminal behavior of 388 convicted sex offenders was analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis. The pattern of covariance observed showed that the onset, frequency, and variety of criminal activity in adulthood could be explained by a general construct of deviance in sexual aggressors. The results, however, also suggested that child molesters' frequency of sexual crime was not part of a general construct of deviance. In other words, the offending behavior of sexual aggressors of women was predominantly versatile, whereas that of sexual aggressors of children tended to be more specific, at least for one dimension of their criminal activity.