What is the goal of access to health care?

This article first examines the justifications for the goal of access to health care and the variations between health systems in their endorsement of individuals' rights to health care irrespective of income, ethnicity, age and other characteristics. It then examines the meanings of the goal of "access" to health care and considers four key dimensions--service availability ("having" access), service utilisation ("gaining" access), the relevance and effectiveness of services and equity of access. These dimensions provide a common framework that can be applied across countries and health systems and employed to assess the extent to which access to health care is actually achieved.     

Is the Impact of Alcohol Consumption on Violence Relative to the Level of Consumption?

Two ideas concerning the link between bullying in school and violence on the streets are investigated. (1) Bullying and victimization in school is a product of the school situation and people's inability to choose their levels of exposure to others. According to this hypothesis, bullying is largely a phenomenon that is isolated to the school context. (II) Bullying behaviour in school and inflicting damage to others outside school is a reflection of a more general aggressive behaviour pattern and, hence, bullying in school and violence on the streets will, to a great extent, involve the same individuals. The literature offers suggestions that either could be the case. Participants were 2915 14-year-olds in a medium-sized county in Sweden who responded to a self-report questionnaire.Theresults showed that bullying others in school was strongly linked to violent behaviour and weapon-carrying on the streets, both among boys and girls. It was also found that bullying others in school was related to being violently victimized on the streets. The findings remained the same when statistically controlling for loitering and nights spent away from home, which were both related to bullying behaviour. It is concluded that bullying behaviour in school is in many cases a part of a more general violent and aggressive behaviour pattern and that preventive efforts targeting individuals with bullying behaviour in school could, according to the present study, decrease violence among adolescents out in the community as well.     

Too Fine to be Good? Issues of Granularity,Uniformity and Error in Spatial Crime Analysis

Journal of Quantitative Criminology - Crime counts are sensitive to granularity choice. There is an increasing interest in analyzing crime at very fine granularities, such as street segments, with...     

Free Trade: What is it Good For? Globalization,Deregulation, and ‘Public Opinion’

Deliberation is an essential element in legitimate and sound decision making. The deliberative ideal has much resonance with ideas of ‘localization’, employing the value of local and applied knowledge. Participation is also of particular value under globalization. We argue that the capacity of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to absorb and reflect participatory aspects of decision making is crucial to its future legitimacy and status. Should the WTO be seen as one of the darker forces of globalization? Or as an emerging institution of global accountability? The latter depends upon recognition that the potential deregulatory effect of the WTO is contingent, and that the liberalization of international trade should enhance welfare, rather than be a goal in its own right. Deliberative solutions require a strong public sphere, and we therefore consider whether solutions based on ‘empowered consumer choice’, rather than public deliberation, are unsatisfactory responses to the deregulatory impact of international trade disputes and their outcomes.     

Where the Action is in Crime? An Examination of Variability of Crime Across Different Spatial Units in The Hague, 2001–2009

Objectives

To identify how much of the variability of crime in a city can be attributed to micro (street segment), meso (neighborhood), and macro (district) levels of geography. We define the extent to which different levels of geography are important in understanding the crime problem within cities and how those relationships change over time.

Methods

Data are police recorded crime events for the period 2001–2009. More than 400,000 crime events are geocoded to about 15,000 street segments, nested within 114 neighborhoods, in turn nested within 44 districts. Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients are used to describe the crime concentration at the three spatial levels. Linear mixed models with random slopes of time are used to estimate the variance attributed to each level.

Results

About 58–69 % of the variability of crime can be attributed to street segments, with most of the remaining variability at the district level. Our findings suggest that micro geographic units are key to understanding the crime problem and that the neighborhood does not add significantly beyond what is learned at the micro and macro levels. While the total number of crime events declines over time, the importance of street segments increases over time.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that micro geographic units are key to understanding the variability of crime within cities—despite the fact that they have received little criminological focus so far. Moreover, our results raise a strong challenge to recent focus on such meso geographic units as census block groups.

     

High Policing Theory and the Question of ‘What is to be Done?’

Within the field of high policing theory it has become increasingly difficult to pose the question of ‘What is to be done?’ in ways that do not result in a pragmatic accommodation of existing political arrangements. This essay proposes a way of reanimating the normative impulse of earlier high policing theory such that this outcome is exceeded. It does so by drawing upon Fredric Jameson’s distinction between representation and representation in motion, such that the emergent state of normativity takes the form of normativity as a representation of itself in motion. This form of normativity draws upon the performative character of the power that is particular to the practices associated with high policing. The proposition is illustrated with normative responses made to instances of political policing within the New Zealand context.     

It��s Good to be Autonomous: Prospective Consent, Retrospective Consent, and the Foundation of Consent in the Criminal Law

What is the foundation of consent in the criminal law? Classically liberal commentators have offered at least three distinct theories. J.S. Mill contends we value consent because individuals are the best judges of their own interests. Joel Feinberg argues an individual’s consent matters because she has a right to autonomy based on her intrinsic sovereignty over her own life. Joseph Raz also focuses on autonomy, but argues that society values autonomy as a constituent element of individual well-being, which it is the state’s duty to promote.     

It is the worst time in living history to be a law graduate: or is it? Does Australia have too many law graduates?

According to the Australian legal profession and media, law schools are producing too many graduates relative to the number of vacancies within the profession. This claim, however, is hardly new. This paper identifies a number of junctions at which there has been concern about the overproduction of law graduates, showing that this discourse appears during periods of major economic stress. It also shows that until the most recent episode of concern, the perception that there are too many law graduates relative to employment opportunities has not been supported by empirical evidence. In the past, the increasing supply of law graduates has been met with increasing demand. However, the legal profession is now facing unprecedented market competition and restructure, and opportunities in the profession for new graduates have declined. This still does not mean that the law schools are producing too many graduates. The current cohort of graduates is likely to continue into a professional occupation, although not necessarily in private legal practice, and there is a lack of lawyers working in disadvantaged communities.     

Climate change and the credibility of international commitments: What is necessary for the U.S. to deliver on such commitments?

The engagement of the United States is critical to the success of any international effort against global climate change. Although international climate efforts require long-lasting, credible commitments by participating countries, risk of failure to deliver on such commitments rises with the degree of gap that the domestic institutions permit between the executive and the legislature. The U.S. withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol indicated that the Clinton administration’s effort to bring international solutions into the domestic arena before domestic consensus was obtained was counterproductive. The congressional politics over budgetary allocation regarding the Bush administration’s technology policies showed that general preference to a technology-oriented approach to climate change alone did not ensure the credibility of international commitments. These cases revealed that the U.S. climate diplomacy was lacking in domestic institutional mechanisms that bring the executive branch’s deal at international negotiations, and the legislators’ preferences at home, closer together. For the U.S. to take leadership in international climate cooperation, domestic institutional frameworks which reconcile the interests of the two branches are necessary. This paper suggests that such domestic institutional frameworks feature two components: regular channels of communication between the two political branches; and, incentive mechanisms for the two branches to swiftly come to terms with each other.

Is it to the advantage of a defendant to infer a greater number of contributors to a questioned sample than is necessary to explain the observed DNA profile?

When a forensic scientist presents the results of a comparison between a DNA profile from a questioned sample with that of a defendant the interpretation will be based on the premise of a given number of contributors. It is quite common practice for defence counsel to ask how consideration of a greater number of putative contributors to the profile would affect the interpretation. This note discusses the response to such a request.     

Advocacy 20 years on from Hampel: is it time we revisited the postgraduate teaching of advocacy?

This paper seeks to discuss the teaching of advocacy as a discipline with specific reference to the way in which advocacy is taught on the Bar Professional Training Course in England and Wales. The Advocacy Training Council favours the Hampel Method of teaching advocacy first developed more than 20 years ago in Australia. The paper seeks to review the use of the Hampel Method by offering a critique of behaviourist learning theory from a constructivist standpoint and putting forward alternative teaching techniques which are in harmony with the principles of constructivism, experiential learning and productive failure. We conclude that the teaching of advocacy can be improved and that greater scholarship is needed in this important area to ensure students are taught using the best techniques.