Breaking the Silence: Gender Mainstreaming and the Composition of the European Court of Justice

Why has it taken so long for member states to appoint women to the Court of Justice? Despite having won relatively significant policy instruments for equal treatment at work and high levels of legislative representation, women in the European Union have been slow to extend the demand for gender mainstreaming to courts. Prior to 1999, the Court of Justice had had one woman member until Ireland appointed Fidelma Macken in late 1999, and Germany appointed Ninon Colneric and Austria appointed Christine Stix-Hackl Advocate General in 2000.The 1995 U.N. meeting in Beijing was a catalyst for the demand for balanced participation of women and men in decision-making processes within the E.U., and it coincided with Sweden, Finland and Austria joining and championing the cause of gender equality. In 1999, the Commission published a report on women in the judiciary and women lawyers began to organize across Europe. After tracing the appointment process, I review the European Parliament's role in championing women on the Court and consider recent developments. Courts, particularly supranational and federal courts, are representative institutions even if their representative function differs from legislatures. Non-merit factors have always been a factor in judicial appointments and thus the demand for women on the bench is not a terrible deviation from merit. An all male bench is no longer legitimate. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Unwilling Fathers and Abortion: Terminating Men's Child Support Obligations?

There is broad agreement across the western industrialised world that men who father children outside of marriage share in an obligation to support their offspring financially. Against this consensus, some men's groups have claimed that if women are accorded control over the decision to continue or to terminate a pregnancy then it is unfair to hold genetic fathers financially liable for child support. This paper assesses the merits of this claim from a feminist perspective. Having considered a number of arguments, it suggests that the currently accepted grounding of child support liability (in voluntary creation of need) provides little scope for refuting the men's groups' argument. The paper then moves on to argue that voluntary creation of need is, however, inadequate as a basis for child support liability, and that the current analysis offers compelling grounds for preferring a collective model of support obligations.     

The changing of the guard: Top management characteristics, organizational strain, and antitrust offending

From within an organizational strain perspective, this paper examines the effects of managerial succession, CEO background, decentralized management, and product dominant strategies on the reported corporate antitrust offending levels of 43 basic manufacturing companies over a 22-year period. In the aggregate, findings suggest that past illegal involvement predicts future offending; companies headed by finance and administrative CEOs have higher offending levels than do firms headed by CEOs from other backgrounds; a turnover in top management generally decreases offending levels; the pursuit of product dominant strategies increases the number of anticompetitive acts; and offending levels are unrelated to whether new leaders are recruited from within or outside the firm, whether the CEO is also Chair of the Board of Directors, or whether management is centralized or decentralized. The effects of some variables on corporate offending interact with firm performance.     

Is technology transfer more than a “mechanical” process?

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Jury decision making in the capital penalty phase

There are large bodies of research on the deterrent value of the death penalty and public attitudes towards capital punishment. However, little is known about how jurors decide whether a particular defendant should live or die. This article briefly summarizes the case law that attempts to guide the discretion of jurors in the penalty phase of capital murder trials, reviews empirical research on penalty decision making, suggests a methodological strategy for investigating the penalty phase, and identifies several promising directions for future research. Four broad categories of research are identified: the effects of guiding juror discretion, comparisons of juries that vote for life with those that vote for death, the relationship between guilt and penalty phases, and models of decision making in the penalty phase. Several testable hypotheses are proposed.