Verfassungsreform: Zusatzargument Gemeinschaftsrecht?

Das Programm der derzeitigen Bundesregierung sieht eine Reform der Gerichtsbarkeit öffentlichen Rechts vor, derzufolge (neben der Einrichtung von Verwaltungsgerichten in den Ländern und eines Verwaltungsgerichtes erster Instanz auf Bundesebene) nach einer Entscheidung des VwGH auch noch der VfGH angerufen werden kann. Der folgende Beitrag befasst sich mit den Konsequenzen einer solchen Konstruktion für den Vollzug von Gemeinschaftsrecht.     

Strafrecht im Wandel

Der Beitrag analysiert die Entwicklung der Strafrechtswissenschaft und der Kriminalpolitik und gibt eine Standortbestimmung des materiellen und formellen Strafrechts sowie des kriminalpolitischen Diskurses heute. Die kritische Bewertung zeigt zugleich Entwicklungslinien für zukünftige Herausforderungen auf.     

Zwischen Ordnung und Chaos

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Die Garantien für Selbstverwaltung und Universität

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Public Eyewitness Confidence Can Be Influenced by the Presence of Other Witnesses

Four experiments were conducted to examine whether witnesses' public confidence ratings differ from their private ratings when there are social pressures to use confidence as an impression-management tool. In all four experiments, participants answered questions about a source event (a series of faces in the first three experiments and a simulated crime scene in the fourth). Half of the responses and confidence ratings were given privately and anonymously, and half were given publicly in front of one or more mock jurors. Two central findings emerged from the results. First, public confidence differed from private confidence only when there was more than one witness; when there were no other witnesses, public and private confidence were the same. Second, the direction of the change in public confidence in the multiple-witness settings was influenced by whether or not there was a possibility of being contradicted by the other witnesses. When there was no chance that the participants' responses could be contradicted, they raised their confidence ratings in public; when there was a chance that the other witnesses might contradict them, the participants lowered their public confidence ratings. The results are discussed in terms of self-presentation theory and implications for the legal system.     

Youth Psychopathy and Criminal Recidivism: A Meta-Analysis of the Psychopathy Checklist Measures

Although narrative reviews have suggested that "youth psychopathy" is a strong predictor of future crime and violence, to date no quantitative summaries of this literature have been conducted. We meta-analyzed recidivism data for the Psychopathy Checklist measures across 21 non-overlapping samples of male and female juvenile offenders. After removing outliers, psychopathy was significantly associated with general and violent recidivism (r (w)'s of .24 and .25, respectively), but negligibly related to sexual recidivism in the few studies examining this low base rate outcome. Even after eliminating outliers, however, considerable heterogeneity was noted among the effects, with some of this variability being explained by the gender and ethnic composition of the samples. Effect sizes for the small number of female samples available for analysis were mostly small and nonsignificant, and psychopathy was a weaker predictor of violent recidivism among more ethnically heterogeneous samples. In relation to predicting both general and violent recidivism, psychopathy performed comparably to an instrument designed specifically to assess risk, the Youth Level of Service/Case Management Inventory (Hoge & Andrews, 2002).     

Psychopathy and Violent Crime: A Prospective Study of the Influence of Socioeconomic Status and Ethnicity

The relationship between psychopathy and violence is well-established. However, few studies have examined the extent to which this relationship is influenced by sociodemographic predictors of violent criminality. In this prospective study we examine the power of psychopathy to predict criminal violence across ethnicity and levels of socioeconomic status in 199 European American and African American U.S. county jail inmates. A Psychopathy x SES x Ethnicity interaction was identified such that among European Americans psychopathy predicted recidivism at lower levels of SES but was unrelated to recidivism at higher levels of SES. The predictive power of psychopathy was relatively stable across SES among African Americans. The implications of our results for psychopathy and violence prediction are discussed.     

Catching the Bad Guy: Morphing Composite Faces Helps

Composite faces built by eyewitnesses commonly are poor likenesses of the target face. When there are multiple witnesses, however, an opportunity exists to morph the composites. Morphs were rated as more similar to the target face than were the mean ratings of the individual composites. However, as hypothesized, the morph also came to resemble non-target faces more than the individual composites did (a prototype effect). This prototype effect was so strong that the morphs resembled non-targets more than the individual composites resembled the targets. In addition, morphing composites produced an attractiveness bias, which made the morphing of composites less effective for less attractive targets. Even when the prototype effect and the attractiveness bias were controlled for, however, a true morph-superiority effect continued to exist. The author won the Psi Chi/APS Albert Bandura Graduate Research Award in 2005--2006 for this study.     

The null hypothesis is not called that for nothing: statistical tests in randomized trials

This article aims to update readers on different ways to arrange one’s thinking about conventional null hypotheses in randomized trials. It covers basic criticism of conventional hypotheses and, beyond this, covers relevant developments in methodological, organizational, and science policy arenas. This article includes coverage of new ways to frame null hypotheses, new technical resources, standards for registering trials and reporting on them, cumulating results, common mistakes, and post-trial analysis of null results. The paper includes ideas for research and development on each topic.

Unilateral CDM—can developing countries finance generation of greenhouse gas emission credits on their own?

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) was originally seen as an instrument with a bi- or multilateral character where an entity or fund from an industrialised country invests in a project in a developing country. The sluggish implementation of incentives for industrialised country companies to embark on CDM projects and low carbon prices led to a preference for just buying Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) instead of investing in projects. Thus a third option has gained prominence—the unilateral option where the project development is planned and financed within the developing country. We propose that a project should be called “pure unilateral” if it involves no foreign direct investment (FDI), only has the approval of the Designated National Authority (DNA) of the host country and sells its CERs after certification directly to an industrialised country. Unilateral projects can become attractive if the host country risk premium for foreign investors is high despite a high human, institutional and infrastructural capacity and domestic capital availability. Moreover, transaction costs can be reduced compared to foreign investments that have to overcome bureaucratic hurdles. On the other hand, technology transfer is likely to be lower, capacity building has to be undertaken by the host country and all risks have to be carried by host country entities. The potential to carry out unilateral CDM projects strongly varies among host countries. Whereas several countries from Asia and Latin America can design and implement projects autonomously, most of the Sub-Saharan countries rely on foreign support. International donors of capacity building grants should increasingly address those countries that are not presently focused on by foreign investors and support them in the design of local projects.