Cooperation between criminal investigators and forensic medicine. A complementary system and its peculiarities, illustrated by a case from general practice

Usually criminal investigations involving issues of medical misconduct require comprehensive inquiries which normally include the confiscation of medical files and the determination of certain events in their chronological order. This information is then submitted to the relevant experts as a basis for preparing their opinions. Where the subject of the investigations is complex, however, or where no suitable patient documentations are available, cooperation with the medical experts should start at an earlier stage already and be more comprehensive. On the basis of the relevant legal principles an already concluded investigation ("dietary capsule case") is critically discussed.     

Getting Real or Staying Positive: Legal Realism(s), Legal Positivism and the Prospects of Naturalism in Jurisprudence

The relationship between Legal Realism and Legal Positivism has been a recurrent source of debate. The question has been further complicated by the related difficulty of assessing the internal relationship between the two main original strands of Legal Realism: American and Scandinavian. This paper suggests considering American and Scandinavian Realism as instantiations of forward‐looking and backward‐looking rule skepticism respectively. This distinction brings into sharp relief not only the fundamentally different relationship between each of these two Realist schools and Legal Positivism but also their equally different potentials as starting points for naturalizing jurisprudence.     

Central bank independence and inflation revisited

We re-examine the relationship between central bank independence (CBI), proxied by the central bank governor’s turnover rate and an indicator based on central bank laws in place, and inflation using a random coefficient model with the Hildreth-Houck estimator for more than 100 countries in the period 1980 to 2005. We conclude that there exists no general significant negative relation between our indicators of central bank independence and inflation. Central bank independence has a significant effect only in a minority of the countries in our sample.