The effect of e-cigarette taxes on pre-pregnancy and prenatal smoking

E-cigarette taxes are an active area of legislation and have important regulatory implications by proxying e-cigarette accessibility. We examine the effect of e-cigarette taxes on prepregnancy and prenatal smoking using the near-universe of births to mothers conceiving between 2013 and 2019 in the United States. Using fixed effect regressions, we show that e-cigarette taxes increase prepregnancy and prenatal smoking. We also find evidence that e-cigarette taxes reduce prepregnancy and 3rd trimester e-cigarette use. Finally, we show that e-cigarette taxes increase news coverage of e-cigarettes and raise perceptions of risk of e-cigarettes.     

Pampered or pariah: does animal type influence the interaction between animal attitude and empathy?

ABSTRACT

Research into the interaction between deliberate harm of animals and potential risk for human directed violence has burgeoned in the past two decades. In light of an underlying premise that attitudes are predictive of behaviour, a number of researchers have examined demographic and personality variables that affect attitudes to, and by extrapolation behaviours towards, animals. One particularly active topic of research in this area is the potential relation between human-directed empathy and attitudes to animals, with researchers consistently finding that those with higher human-directed empathy scores tend to hold more pro-animal welfare attitudes. The current study adds to this literature by evaluating the effect of different animal types (Pet, Pest or Profit) in this overall animal attitude/human-directed empathy relationship with a large (n?=?1606), community-based, Australian sample. As anticipated, attitudes towards animals in the Pet category were significantly more pro-welfare than for either Pest or Profit animals and women indicated more pro-welfare attitudes across all three than men. The strength and significance of the relation between human-directed empathy and attitudes to animals varied across Pet, Pest and Profit animal categories and affective vs cognitive empathy. The strongest correlation was found between Pet and the Empathic Concern subscale of the Davis Interpersonal Reactivity Index. The implications of these differences for the previously observed link between attitudes to animals and empathy, humane education and future research directions are discussed.     

Legal Fictions and Fictional Entites in Renaissance Jurisprudence

This article charts the history of England's laws and customs regarding the oaths and declarations required of those appointed or elected to public office, and in particular parliamentary office and offices under the Crown. It provides a brief account of medieval law and practice from the mid-thirteenth century and a fuller account of changes effected by statute over the centuries which followed England's break with the Church of Rome during the reign of Henry VIII. The article shows that well into the nineteenth century the statutes were effective to exclude from many important public offices persons who were not communicants of the Church of England, and that the reforms achieved in that century were achieved in a piecemeal fashion. The article concludes with an account of changes made in the twentieth century in the law and practice regarding oaths to be sworn and declarations to be made by the monarch on accession to the throne.     

Privatisation in France 1993–94: New departures,or a case of plus ça change?

The present article focuses on the privatisation programme currently being implemented in France. It seeks to isolate the principal ways in which this programme differs from its predecessor of 1986–88, and to consider its likely impact on the French corporate landscape. This study finds the latest round of privatisations to be budget‐driven and ideologically spent, as the convergence criteria for economic and monetary union specified by the Maastricht Treaty become top government priorities in the countdown to 1997 (or 1999). The interest the programme has generated is almost entirely restricted to which purposes are to be served (and which are not) by its receipts. Those who look to it for new departures may well be disappointed: all the signs are that dirigisme is alive and well in France, with establishment solidarity representing as powerful a force in French capitalism as it ever did.     

Marriage and the Moral Bases of Personal Relationships

Marriage is a legal institution. Current debates about whether it should be extended beyond its traditional heterosexual constitution, and whether many of its legal incidents should apply to couples who live together without marrying, and about the introduction of civil partnership (modelled closely on marriage) for same-sex couples, make an examination of its contemporary role particularly timely. This article is about the interplay between the institution of marriage and ideas of obligation within personal relationships. It takes as its starting point some commonly held opinions. First, that the sense of obligation which hitherto guided people's behaviour in their personal relationships has much diminished or even disappeared. Second, that this diminution is reflected in the decline in marriage. We will then examine what the evidence of an empirical study conducted by the Oxford Centre for Family Law and Policy reveals about the way people in married and unmarried relationships understand the nature of their personal obligations. In doing this it will be seen that the moral bases which underpin people's personal relationships is complex and does not correspond in a simple way with formal, external social categories.     

Left realism,local crime surveys and policing of racial minorities

The inner-city riots of 1980s Britain provoked an important set of debates in the progressive criminological literature about police accountability and the policing of racial minorities. Two main oppositional political strategies emerged. Following the pioneering work of Hall et al. (1978) some British criminologists supported a police monitoring strategy that proceeded on a case by case approach. In a more generalized approach, the strategy employed by the left realist school made use of the local crime survey in order to gather data on crime and policing practices that were used in public forum to make police accountable. In fulfilling this mandate, the first sweep of the Islington Crime Survey (ICS) provides an empirically grounded analysis of focused military-style policing in the Black community. These authors argue that differential policing practices, such as stop and search patterns, alienate Black youth from the police and contribute to the reduced flow of information from the community to the police vital for police effectiveness at crime control.The premise of this paper is that while both of these positions have been conceptually useful, they probably oversimplify the more complex social response of the Black community to focused policing methods. The paper begins with a critique ofPolicing The Crisis and suggests that it was this critique that primarily motivated the left realist response. In examining the scope of this response, the paper reviews two specific models of these relationships as proposed in various publications from the realist school. It is suggested that seven hypotheses can be deduced from these models, and that data from the first sweep of the ICS allow some assessment of the empirical support for these models.After examining the empirical evidence from the ICS, the paper concludes that while there is considerable empirical support for the analysis provided inThe Islington Crime Survey, the authors have probably not gone as far in their analysis as the data allow. A further analysis suggests that the response to military-style and focused policing, far from being uniform, is, in fact, bifurcated. In some instances, the very people who are the targets of biased policing practices demand more of the same. A model that depicts the complex nature of this response is provided.