Bemerkungen zur reform des Reichsjustizwesens in der Zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts

Summary

Voltaire and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688

From the start of his career Voltaire was pro‐English. Britain was for him the country of a ‘sage liberté’ which was the beneficial result of the civil wars. His contacts with the British community in Paris and the exiled Lord Bolingbroke help explain why he sought refuge in London after his imprisonment and his subsequent passion for English institutions. Voltaire's view of institutions was not always very accurate; he only saw the positive side and, intentionally or not, concealed a great deal. The religious foundation of the English character escaped him, as did the agrarian problems. For him the regime of 1689 constituted a constitutional ideal; the balance it achieved was a perfection to whose defects he was blind.

Voltaire had always been split between his admiration for the English system and his respect for the ‘enlightened’ work of Frederick the Great and Catherine Il. He inclined, especially towards the end of his life, towards England. He was one of the originators of a current, still very much alive in France, of an anglophilia of the left’. But the undeniable weakness in Voltaire's thought was his failure ever to ask how far the representative government he so admired was capable of being practised by the French.     

Dangerous decisions: the impact of first impressions of trustworthiness on the evaluation of legal evidence and defendant culpability

Abstract

There is little support for the long-standing assumption that judges and jurors can accurately assess credibility. According to Dangerous Decisions Theory (DDT; Porter & ten Brinke, Legal and Criminological Psychology, 14, 119–134, 2009), intuitive evaluations of trustworthiness based on the face may strongly bias the interpretation of subsequent information about a target. In a courtroom setting, the assessment of evidence provided by or concerning a defendant may be fundamentally flawed if its interpretation is influenced by an initial, spontaneous assessment of trustworthiness. In an empirical test of DDT, participants were presented with two vignettes describing major or minor crimes, accompanied by a photograph of the supposed defendant, previously rated as highly trustworthy or untrustworthy in appearance. Participants evaluated culpability following the presentation of evidence in each case. Participants required less evidence to arrive at a guilty verdict and were more confident in this decision for untrustworthy-appearing defendants. The current evidence supports DDT and has implications for legal decision-making practices.     

Popular Perceptions of Income Tax Law in the Nineteenth Century: A Local Tax Rebellion

The Exeter tax rebellion of 1871 is taken as a model to examine popular perceptions of income tax law at a time of national discontent. The discontent was with the administration of the tax rather than its substance. In a complex commercial society the statutory system of local lay Commissioners, possessing neither sufficient time nor expertise, was inadequate to make assessments or determine appeals. In practice the expert Crown official, the Surveyor, dominated the process, though the law gave him merely a supervisory role. The popular resentment of the Commissioners paradoxically confirmed the desire to retain that body as an independent buffer between the State and the taxpayer. The rebellion reflected the tensions of the age, illustrating the confidence of the Victorian middle class and its questioning of the traditional property-owning classes in the lay administration of justice.     

Does intermunicipal cooperation increase efficiency? A conditional metafrontier approach for the Hessian wastewater sector

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the relationship between intermunicipal cooperation and efficiency of public service provision. Organisational arrangements of public service production, including self-provision, joint provision or contracting, affect incentives and internal transaction costs. Hence, cooperation gains from scale effects need to be balanced against technical inefficiencies. We analyse relative efficiency of wastewater disposal for German municipalities. We employ a conditional analysis in conjunction with a metafrontier approach to calculate relative efficiency measures and technology gap ratios controlling for organisational arrangements and further environmental variables. Jointly providing municipalities and contractor municipalities exhibit lower technical efficiency than self-providing and contracting municipalities. As confirmed by previous research, scale effects from cooperation and contracting apply to small municipalities primarily.     

Analysis of cognitive inhibition and flexibility in juvenile delinquents

Executive functions are still developing during adolescence. It is important to analyse if juvenile delinquency is related to a delay in the development of these functions. The objective of this study was to analyse cognitive inhibition and flexibility, two components of executive functions, in juvenile delinquents. Participants were 81 males, 17.46 ± 1.60 years old. Three groups were compared: a juvenile delinquent inmate group (IG), an age-paired group (APG), and an age- and education-paired group (AEPG). A modified Stroop task was used to assess cognitive inhibition and flexibility. The IG and the AEPG (low-education adolescents) had significantly more difficulties than the APG on inhibition; the IG and the AEPG had no significant differences. No group differences were found on flexibility. Since all low-education adolescents have difficulties on inhibition, these difficulties are not an exclusive characteristic of juvenile delinquents. Analysis of cognitive processes in juvenile delinquents must control for education to determine how specific are the difficulties found in these adolescents.     

China Investment Corporation’s Forays into Europe and the United States: explaining the different receptions

This study analyses the changing investment climates for China’s sovereign wealth fund, the China Investment Corporation (CIC), in the US, the UK and France. It assesses legislative flexibilities, public opinions and macroeconomic conditions in the three polities in order to ascertain whether the investment review process of each is susceptible to politicization, and if such susceptibility has changed in line with macroeconomic variations. The study finds that the US investment review process is susceptible to politicization and that such politicization has likely taken place following the recovery from the global financial crisis, resulting in a worsened investment climate for Chinese investors, including CIC. The investment review processes in the UK and France have not been susceptible to politicization. Moreover, negative macroeconomic conditions for each of the two countries following the eruption of the Eurozone crisis have resulted in an improved investment climate for CIC, although brought about by the proactive stance of governments and companies rather than by any de-politicization.