Middlemen of the Law: An Ethnographic Inquiry into the English Legal Profession

The accomplishments of empirical research are often presented in a context that fails to show the process by which the results came about. This article examines the problems, hitches, and struggles encountered in a research project carried out on the English bar. And emphasis is given to the difficulty of tackling hitherto unexplored occupations that have had a long history of resisting research.     

Hostage-Taking in the Context of Domestic Violence: Some Case Examples

Initial reports of domestic violence are generally made to law enforcement officers who must respond and intervene. A subset of these episodes involves cases in which the victim, and, in many instances her child(ren), have been taken hostage by her husband or partner. Moreover, there are indications that the number of such incidents is growing. The purpose of this project was twofold: (1) to provide one of the first reports on the prevalence and characteristics of these events, and (2) to more closely analyze domestic crisis (hostage) situations using actual case examples. All information was obtained from the Hostage Barricade Database System (HOBAS) of the FBIs Crisis Negotiation Unit. HOBAS is a postincident information collection tool which stores historical data from law enforcement agencies across the nation on hostage/barricade incidents. An examination of this database yielded different types of domestic hostage-taking acts and outcomes (e.g., tactical vs. negotiated resolutions, survival vs. death/injury of perpetrator and/or victim[s]). Implications of the findings, for future crisis negotiation efforts directed toward nonviolent resolution of these high-risk critical incidents, are discussed.     

Charter rights & health care funding: a typology of Canadian health rights litigation

Canadian health consumers have increasingly relied on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to demand certain therapies and reasonably timely access to care. Organizing these cases into a 5-part typology, we examine how a rights-based discourse affects allocation of health care resources. First, successful Charter challenges can, in theory, lead to courts granting and enforcing positive rights to therapies or to timely care. Second, courts may grant a right to certain health services; however, subsequently government fails to deliver on this right. Third, successful litigation may create negative rights, i.e. rights to access care or private health insurance without government interference. Fourth, consumers can fail in their legal pursuit of a right but galvanize public support in the process, ultimately effecting the desired policy changes. Lastly, a failed lawsuit can stifle an entire advocacy campaign for the sought-after therapies. The typology illustrates the need to examine both legal and policy outcomes of health right litigation. This broader analysis reveals that the pursuit of health rights seems to have caused largely a regressive rather than progressive impact on Canadian Medicare.     

The Vietnamese refugees in Thailand: Minority manipulation in counterinsurgency

Abstract

The purpose of this brief survey is to clarify the political role of the Vietnamese minority in recent Thai history. The importance of this subject derives from the long-held but unexamined assumption on the part of the Thai ruling classes and, since World War II, U.S. academic ideologues of neo-colonialism, that social revolution is somehow extraneous to Thai history. If it does rear its ugly head—so the thinking goes—it must be the result of transborder subversion and not of factors indigenous to Thai social history. One villain in this piece of wishful thinking—and the principal one since the 1950s—has been the Vietnamese revolutionary movement. The immediate scapegoats have been those militant anti-imperialist Vietnamese who took temporary refuge in Thailand from the destructive effects of French and later American expansion into their homelands. They have long been viewed—and are still seen by the present regime in Bangkok—as virtual “saboteurs,” frontline agents of revolution that would otherwise be alien to “happy” Thailand.