F#ck Your Family!: The Visual Jurisprudence of Automobility

This paper considers the popular visual jurisprudence of bumper stickers. Drawing upon a sample sticker/driver/vehicle assemblages observed at the Gold Coast, Australia in 2014, we argue that the meanings and messages projected by the assemblages have a significant legal dimension. The argument is located at the intersection of past research into bumper stickers, increased scholarly interest in the relation of law to automobility and especially recent considerations of the popular visual jurisprudence of the motor vehicle, its cultures and semiotics. In particular we argue that the sticker/driver/vehicle assemblage represents an engagement with law and legality. We suggest this goes beyond immediate denotations of brands with intellectual property or flags and the sovereign nation state to more essential engagement with consumer capitalisms law of the image, the friend/enemy distinction, the ouroboros of rights and the essential legality of living in a polis.     

Progressive tax policy and informal labor in developing economies

Governments in many industrializing democracies face difficult policy trade‐offs. Liberalization and informality have placed electoral pressure on them to expand noncontributory social spending. However, governments in developing democracies face constraints when attempting to finance this expansion. In some countries, the informal labor market is very large, thereby undermining the revenue that can be collected through income tax. We argue that this has given rise to a paradoxical situation. Left governments in developing democracies with large informal labor markets have a strong electoral incentive to expand welfare regimes to previously excluded outsiders, but to fiscally underwrite this expansion, they have increasingly been forced to fund their redistributive strategies via a regressive policy instrument, indirect consumption taxation. We examine this argument for a sample of 17 Latin American countries between the years 1990 and 2016. Our results suggest that labor informality forces left governments to turn to indirect taxation.     

A suicide using a homemade carbon monoxide "death machine"

Deaths related to carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning are common. Most represent accidents and suicides, and most result from CO production via the incomplete combustion of carbon-containing substances. Suicide via CO toxicity is not uncommon and typically involves the use of motor-vehicle exhaust as a source of CO. Presented herein is a case of suicidal CO poisoning in which the CO was produced via a chemical reaction between formic acid and sulfuric acid within a homemade device.     

Trajectories of Positive and Negative Behaviors from Early- to Middle-Adolescence

Although the positive youth development (PYD) model initially assumed inverse links between indicators of PYD and of risk/problem behaviors, empirical work in adolescence has suggested that more complex associations exist between trajectories of the two domains of functioning. To clarify the PYD model, this study assessed intraindividual change in positive and problematic indicators across Grades 5–10, and the links between these trajectories of development, among 2,516 participants from the 4-H Study of PYD (58.1% females; 64.9% European American, 7.0% African American, 12.3% Latino/a American, 2.6% Asian American or Pacific Islander, 1.8% Native American, 3.0% multiethnic-racial, and 8.4% with inconsistent race/ethnicity across waves). Results from person-centered analyses indicated that most youth clustered in the high trajectories of positive indicators and in the low trajectories of the negative ones. Consistent with past research, overlap between trajectories of positive and negative behaviors was found. These results suggest that theory and application need to accommodate to variation in the links between positive and problematic developmental trajectories.     

Productivity: The Missing Link in Enterprise Bargaining for the NSW Police

The promised productivity gains of enterprise bargaining have yet to be realised by the NSW Police Service and its staff. This failure can be traced to a lack of understanding of workplace reform and productivity. Karpin (1995:3) forecast that improvement in management skills in Australia was required for growth. Enterprise bargaining demands increased productivity. Productivity demands performance management, which involves increased accountability with the establishment of practical performance indicators. As such, productivity and performance management are interrelated and require clear objectives (Directions in Government 1992a:26).     

Asia-Pacific news

This column provides a country-by-country analysis of the latest legal developments, cases and issues relevant to the IT, media and telecommunications' industries in key jurisdictions across the Asia Pacific region. The articles appearing in this column are intended to serve as ‘alerts’ and are not submitted as detailed analyses of cases or legal developments.