Evaluating the Scottish Public Defence Solicitors' Office

The debate continues over whether salaried public defenders are more cost–effective than private practitioners. A three–year evaluation of the Edinburgh pilot office found that public defenders resolve cases at an earlier stage. Their clients were more likely to plead guilty at preliminary hearings, and less likely to hold out to the day of trial. This has the (so far unrealized) potential to save legal aid costs, and it inconvenienced fewer witnesses. But it also meant that public defenders had a higher conviction rate. Furthermore, in Scotland (unlike Canada) earlier pleas did not lead to lower sentences. Clients described public defenders as businesslike but felt less emotionally supported. Finally, the study showed that it is not easy to realize cost savings. Pilot offices, operating in the glare of publicity, incur some additional costs.     

Translocal family reproduction and agrarian change in China: a new analytical framework

ABSTRACT

This paper advances a new framework for analysing agrarian change in rural China and elsewhere in developing Asia, which centres on translocal family reproduction. The framework highlights the crucial connections between rural families’ translocal strategies for meeting reproductive (especially care) needs, their changing aspirations for reproduction, and other aspects of agrarian change, including de-peasantisation, de-agrarianisation and social differentiation. In developing this framework, the paper refers to a village case study in central China and draws on a critique of the ‘livelihoods perspective’ on agrarian change, approaches focusing on ‘global householding’, and the cultural reproduction of class and gender.     

Recovery of a mummified pregnant woman from a 55-gallon drum more than 30 years after her death

The body of a 28-year-old near-term pregnant woman was found in a 55-gallon steel drum in a crawl space under a house more than 30 years after her disappearance and death. At autopsy the body was remarkably well preserved and mummified, as was that of a male fetus. The decedent had 10 scalp lacerations and multiple comminuted depressed skull fractures and had died as a result of blunt force head trauma.     

Empathy and Jurors' Decisions in Patricide Trials Involving Child Sexual Assault Allegations

In a mock-trial paradigm, 205 participants considered a patricide trial in which a child defendant claimed the patricide was done in self-defense after years of sexual abuse. Participants in an empathy-induction condition were asked to take the perspective of the defendant and to detail how they would be thinking and feeling if they were the defendant. Control condition participants received no such instructions. Results indicated that, compared to jurors in the control condition, jurors who were asked to take the defendant's perspective had more empathy for the defendant (without feeling more similar to or more sympathy for the defendant), found the defendant less guilty and less responsible for the murder, and were more likely to consider abuse to be a mitigating factor in the killing. Overall, compared to men, women were more likely to believe the defendant's abuse allegations, find the defendant credible, and consider the defendant to be less responsible for the murder. Women in the empathy condition found the defendant less guilty than did all other jurors. Finally, child defendant gender was also varied, but this had few effects on case judgments overall. Jurors, however, were more likely to believe that the girl defendant was sexually abused than the boy defendant. We discuss theoretical implications for understanding the social psychological construct of empathy as well as implications for understanding jurors' decisions in cases involving child sexual assault allegations.     

A history of sex and the state in Southeast Asia: class,intimacy and invisibility

This essay offers a history of international marriages that questions the definition of marriage and what it meant to belong, as a legal subject or citizen, to a colonial state in Southeast Asia. European imperial states deployed monogamous marriage alongside other weapons of empire as a justification for intervention into Southeast Asian societies. With monogamous marriage came also European notions of belonging that traced surnames and legal subject status (later citizenship) via husbands and fathers. The ramifications for individuals in international marriages between Asian women and European men are well known. However, the vast majority of ‘international marriages’ were not those between colonial Europeans and Southeast Asian women, but between Southeast Asian women and lower class Asian men from India and China. Colonial states ignored or failed to register these lower class intra-Asian intimacies because their unions did not threaten colonial rule so long as they ensured a continuous pool of labor and promoted the colonial economy. Unlike recent theories which argue for an omniscient state that penetrates into the personal lives of its populations, this essay maintains that states intensely regulated marriage and belonging for some subjects but not for others. This longstanding unevenness in the management of intimate unions provides a historical context for understanding shifts in the marital regimes of contemporary postcolonial states. Taking a long-term view, the essay asks if recent increases in international marriages might be better understood as spikes rather than as absolute increases resulting from ‘globalization’. A historical framework ties the rise and fall of international marriage to early modern trade patterns, imperialism's labor requirements, war, and the recent demand for labor that has arisen from low birth rates and economic changes. Each of these ‘events’ entailed a large-scale movement of populations which resulted in the development of intimate unions.     

Determinants of Public Administrators' Use of Performance Information: Evidence from Local Governments in Florida

Performance management has been a focus of scholars and practitioners for more than 25 years, yet the use of performance information has not greatly expanded as a result of this attention. Acknowledging that performance measurement is not an end in itself but rather a means to enhance focus on results and value, this article evaluates the determinants of the use of performance information by local government administrators. An online survey was administered to local government employees involved in the 2015–16 Florida Benchmarking Consortium. Analysis of the data demonstrates that institutionalization of performance measurement has the strongest statistically significant positive association with the use of performance information, followed by the design adequacy of the performance measurement system.     

Heated policy: policy actors’ emotional storylines and conflict escalation

Policy Sciences - Policy conflict is gaining attention in policy studies. In this paper, we explore the relation between emotional storylines and policy conflict escalation in the case of the Dutch...     

Diversity in times of austerity: documenting resistance in the academy

What happens to feminism in the university is parallel to what happens to feminism in other venues under economic restructuring: while the impoverished nation is forced to cut social services and thereby send women back to the hierarchy of the family, the academy likewise reduces its footprint in interdisciplinary structures and contains academic feminists back to the hierarchy of departments and disciplines. When the family and the department become powerful arbiters of cultural values, women and feminist academics by and large suffer: they either accept a diminished role or are pushed to compete in a system they recognize as antithetical to the foundational values of feminist priorities of social justice. Collaborative work to nurture diversity and interdisciplinarity does not register as individual accomplishment. This paper considers the necessity of this type of academic work to further the vision of a society committed to the collective values espoused by feminism and other areas in social justice.