Housing Ex-Offenders in the Netherlands: Balancing Neighbourhood Safety and Human Rights

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research - The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognises stable housing as a prerequisite for an adequate standard of living. A home provides shelter...     

The Employment of Ex-Offenders and the UK's New Criminal Record Bureau

This article outlines the development of the UK's Criminal Records Bureau designed to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the screening arrangements for potential employees by disclosure of their criminal records to employers. The Bureau builds on existing arrangements that have been in place for a number of years. The authors argue that this development, which includes a much wider availability of criminal records, is an example of a new social policy that has the potential for an unintended consequence of large scale social exclusion, by limiting the prospects of employment for ex-offenders.     

公租房退出机制的地方立法分析——以北京等11省市的政府规章为分析样本

公租房准入机制保证申请人公平获得住房保障机会,实现"应保尽保",然而,公租房制度实践是一个动态运行过程,准入之后还有日常租赁管理、定期核查、合同期满重新申请等问题,这就需要完善的退出机制予以规范。退出机制直接关系到有限房源的充分流转使用和公租房制度有序运行。通过分析目前各地立法文本中退出条件、退出程序等方面存在的不足,分别从合理过渡期的设置、动态监控平台的完善、奖惩机制的配合,以及阶段性推进公租房可售几方面提出规范建议,以期有助于公租房立法进一步完善。     

The Death Penalty: Response to Ron Paul

Dr. Ron Paul, leader of the libertarian movement and former Congressman, favors the elimination of the death penalty. He argues from both a moral and economic, or pragmatic, perspective against executions. The present article takes issue with his stance and defends the killing of convicted murderers, with some caveats.     

The Legitimacy of Law: A Response to Critics*

Abstract
In this paper, the author responds to the claim that his critique of legal positivism, based on an account of adjudication in South Ahica, misses its target because it ignores, first, the positivist thesis of judicial discretion and, secondly, the fact that positivism offers no account of judicial obligation. He argues that these theses expose a tension in positivism between its commitments to liberal individualism and to the supremacy of positive law, a tension which can be resolved only by situating positivism in its true context, the Hobbesian argument for the legitimacy of law. Following Dworkin, he advocates the practice-oriented common law tradition, one that makes the legitimacy of law a matter of standards already implicit in law which are best revealed in adjudication.     

The Role of Non-State Actors: A Response to Professor Ryngaert

Netherlands International Law Review - A short article by Professor Ryngaert in an earlier issue of the NILR is here examined and criticised, in particular the suggestion there made that certain...     

The Priority of Participation: A Friendly Response to Professor Gargarella

A response to Roberto Gargarella’s review of Punishment, Participatory Democracy, and the Jury, by Albert W. Dzur.     

The War on Violence: Improving the Response to Domestic Violence in the Military

The Department of Defense has taken steps in recent years to improve outcomes for victims of domestic violence who reside on military installations. In 2000, the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence was established, a military‐civilian group of experts charged with improving the military's effectiveness in addressing domestic violence in the Armed Forces in a variety of areas including offender accountability, coordination between military and civilian communities, and changing the military climate around domestic violence. This article will provide an overview of the Task Force, its work during the past three years, and its recommendations.     

The curious case of Housing First: the limits of evidence based policy

Evidence Based Policy has been articulated and practiced in Europe, particularly under the ‘New Labour’ policies of the former Labour government in the United Kingdom. In the United States, the impact of research on policy has been inconsistent due to differing relationships between researchers and policy makers. This paper gives an overview of evidence based policy and presents critiques based on its reliance on positivist methods and technical approach to policy making. Using these critiques as a framework, the paper discusses the case of Housing First, a policy adopted by the Bush Administration in order to address the problem of chronic homelessness. The case is an example of research driven policy making but also resulted in a progressive policy being promoted by a conservative administration. In discussing the case, the paper elaborates on the relationship between evidence and policy, arguing that evidence based policy fails to integrate evidence and values into policy deliberations. The paper concludes with alternative models of policy decision making and their implications for research.     

The Legal Response of the League of Nations to Terrorism

Terrorism was first confronted as a discrete subject matterof international law by the international community in the mid-1930s,following the assassination of a Yugoslavian king and a Frenchforeign minister by ethnic separatists. The League's attemptto generically define terrorism in an international treaty prefiguredmany of the legal, political, ideological and rhetorical disputeswhich plagued the international community's attempts to defineterrorism in the 50 years after the Second World War. Althoughthe treaty never entered into force following the dissolutionof the League itself, the League's core definition has beenhighly resilient and has influenced subsequent legal effortsto define terrorism. While the League's 1937 Convention forthe Prevention and Punishment of Terrorism is often referredto obliquely in international legal discussions of terrorism,the drafting of the Convention has seldom been intensively analysed.By closely examining its drafting, this article elucidates howthe drafters of the Convention agreed on a definition of terrorism,and why they rejected alternative definitions. In doing so,it hopes to refresh and enliven current international debatesabout definition in the wake of the United Nation's 60th anniversaryyear, which saw renewed emphasis placed on the quest for definition.     

住房保障:一项急待法律护航的民生工程

在我国,随着住房制度改革实践的不断深入,国家已逐渐认识到住房保障是一项急待解决的重大民生工程,并且已初步建立了住房保障制度。但是,由于缺少法律制度的规范,该制度在运行中出现了种种困惑,影响了住房保障制度的有效落实。本文认为,应尽快制订《住房保障法》,加快配套制度的建设。同时,应结合各地的具体情况,加强地方立法,以使住房保障在法律的护航下得到很好落实。     

Response: The Politeness of History

In my response to the reviews of my book by Marianne Constable, Shai Lavi, and Renisa Mawani, I situate the argument of Common Law, History, and Democracy in America, 1790–1900: Legal Thought Before Modernism within a concern with contemporary forms of historical knowledge. Where contemporary historical knowledge practices subsume their objects of investigation, I adopt the temporality of the object of investigation—namely, the common law—as the structure my book. In different registers, Constable, Lavi, and Mawani urge me to take up more explicitly the foundational questioning about which they care. I welcome their readings. However, given the distinct problematic from which I start, I argue, the book is not in the first instance an argument about the ontology of history or law.     

The Ethics of Corporate Legal Strategy: A Response to Professor Mayer

In this issue of the American Business Law Journal, Professor Don Mayer continues an important conversation regarding the ethics of corporate legal strategy. 1 Addressing several of my published works, Mayer offers two primary criticisms: (1) the works are too sanguine with regard to the appropriate scope of the strategic decision to “breach‐and‐pay,” and (2) the works offer too little guidance for the well‐intentioned corporate executive. In this response, I briefly restate my views, address Mayer's two criticisms, and offer concluding remarks.     

In Defense of the Responsibility to Protect: A Response to Weissman

This article defends the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine (adopted by the United Nations in 2005) against critiques by Fabrice Weissman in this journal, and against similar criticisms of humanitarian intervention and human rights norms made by postmodern thinkers in the Nietzschean tradition, such as Alain Badiou and Anne Orford. I argue against Weissman that R2P can be effective in stopping or preventing mass atrocities, and in particular that opposition to military intervention in Syria during the 2013 debates was a terrible mistake. Moreover, the moral ground for humanitarian aid efforts is the same as the basis for forceful rescue from mass slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and persecution (when other conditions of just war can be met). Weissman's critiques misinterpret just war theory on key points and rely on inflated rhetorical strategies inspired by extreme forms of cultural and moral relativism that are intellectually bankrupt—both in blaming “Western imperialism” for most crimes against humanity committed by tyrants, and in leaving hundreds of thousands without the only protection that could prevent their murder and exile. These extreme positions and the strained rhetorical devices used to defend them do not deserve the wide respect they command in some parts of academia.