Human-nonhuman chimeras: a regulatory proposal on the blurring of species lines

The chimera of modern biotechnology is defined broadly as a single organism composed of a mixture of materials from two or more organisms possessing distinct genetic backgrounds. Unlike the United States, which does not regulate chimeras directly, Canada has responded to the unregulated pursuit of chimera technology by banning certain chimeras as part of comprehensive legislation designed to regulate human reproductive technologies. In 2004, the Canadian Parliament passed the Assisted Human Reproduction Act despite criticism urging greater legislative justification for the Act's provisions and modification to it statutory definitions. Because current regulatory mechanisms in the United States, including patent law and administrative oversight, fail to regulate chimera technology, the United States should enact new legislation, using Canada's legislation as a model, to prohibit embryonic chimeras and to regulate other human-nonhuman combinations. Unregulated biotechnology threatens to disrupt legal and social institutions; therefore, the United States must make a balanced effort now to protect the public interest.     

Attitudes Toward the Police: A Comparison of Canadian and American Adolescents

The present inquiry is an attempt to determine the attitudes which adolescents in Canada and the United States have toward the police and the determinants of these attitudes. In addition to providing a diverse sample of youths from two countries, each with unique policing structures and policies, the study represents the first attempt to assess the attitudes twoard the police held by a sample of Canadian adolescents. The sample for the inquiry consists of 869 youths from a rural Rocky Mountain State and three West Coast cities in the United States and 1200 youths from a major metropolitan area on the West Coast of Canada.

To assess the attitudes which adolescents hold toward the police in their respective countries and areas, a 16–item Likert scale was employed along with a series of questions eliciting a variety of social-biographical, experiential (type and extent of contacts with police) information as well as the prestige rating of the police. Analysis of the data indicates that the majority of adolescents in both countries have positive attitudes toward the police, regardless of the type of police force (Canadian RCMP, Canadian Municipal, U.S. Sheriff, U.S. Municipal) they are policed by. In addition, none of the social-biographical variables in either sample contributed significantly to the attitudes which were held toward the police, nor were certain juveniles more likely to have more negative experiences with the police. Rather, the primary determinant of juvenile attitudes toward the police in both countries seems to be the type of contact which the adolescent had with the police. The findings have significant implications for the police literature and police operational policy which are discussed.     

Paying Workers or Paying Lawyers: Employee Termination Practices in the United States and Canada

This article explores one multinational corporation's employee termination practices in the United States and Canada. There are fairly insignificant differences in employees' legal protections in the two countries and the company claims a uniform corporate employee termination process cross‐nationally. However, there are major structural and procedural differences in the employee termination process. The differences, including the way attorneys are utilized, the use of quasi‐legal personnel to comply with regulatory requirements, and the substance of the severance package are explored. In the United States money is directed toward legal professionals –"paying lawyers" while in Canada expenses associated with employee termination go to severance packages –"paying workers."     

Public servants or police soldiers? An analysis of opinions on the militarization of policing from police executives,law enforcement,and members of the 114th congress U.S. house of representatives

Despite the dramatic rise in use of militarized weapons, equipment, and tactics by police departments across the nation, no study has examined the opinions of those responsible for designing, funding, and implementing police militarization in the United States. Therefore this study collected and analyzed opinion data from 465 key stakeholders from the 114th Congress U.S. House of Representatives, law enforcement executives, and local police officers regarding police militarization. Results suggest that while most practitioners and policymakers favor police militarization, Congress and law enforcement differ in support of critical issues such as oversight of military procurement programs, use of surplus military weapons and vehicles, and overall support for the militarization of policing in the United States.     

Intimate Violence in Canada and the United States: A Cross-National Comparison

Using data from the 1985 U.S. National Family Violence Resurvey and the 1986 Canadian National Family Life Survey, this paper compares incidence of intimate violence or “common couple violence” (Johnson, 1995) in both countries. As expected, gender symmetry characterizes common couple violence, which is a product of the privatized setting of many American and Canadian households. Although the United States exhibits significantly higher rates of societal violent crime than Canada, Canadian women and men were more likely than their American counterparts to use severe intimate violence and to inflict it, as well as minor violence, more often, which is contrary to the culture of violence theory that guided the study. Similarly, the higher rates of wife-to-husband severe violence across the life course in both countries are inconsistent with the theory. Several ad hoc explanations are presented to account for these unexpected findings.     

SERIOUSNESS OF OFFENSES

This experimental study, which was partly a replication of two previous studies in Canada and the United States, had a group of Norwegian students judge the seriousness of a set of offenses based on the magnitude estimation technique of psychophysics. Although it appeared that a considerable degree of consensus regarding the rank ordering of offense seriousness extended across the social and cultural differences between the three subject populations, some clear differences did emerge. In general, any change in the judgment of offense seriousness by the Norwegian subjects exceeded the corresponding changes perceived by the Canadian and the U.S. subjects.     

The Ethics of Restrictive Licensing for Handguns: Comparing the United States and Canadian Approaches to Handgun Regulation

The United States and Canada regulate firearms, particularly handguns, quite differently. With only a few state and local exceptions, the U.S. approach emphasizes the ability of most individuals to purchase, possess, and carry handguns. By comparison, Canada has a form of restrictive licensing for handguns that places a premium on community safety. The authors first review the potential individual and community level harms and benefits associated with these differing fre-arm policies. Using this information, they explore the ethical dimensions of the U.S. and Canadian approaches through three major themes of autonomy, prevention of harms, and social justice. The authors conclude that the Canadian approach is consistent with respect for the autonomy of persons, fosters the prevention of harms, and more appropriately furthers social justice.     

The development of national medical care programs in the United Kingdom and Canada: applicability to current conditions in the United States

After a hiatus in the early to mid-1980s, a growing number of policy leaders, policy organizations, and citizen groups are advocating programs that ensure basic medical care for all. Although a large literature examines the applicability to the U.S. of national medical care programs that have been established in other countries from the perspective of operations and effectiveness, little attention has been given to the applicability of the experience of other nations in securing these programs. This paper examines the development of national programs in the U.K. and Canada and addresses two questions. First, what factors were critical to the establishment of the British National Health Service and the Canadian hospital and physician insurance programs? Second, how applicable are those factors to current conditions in the U.S.? The paper reviews the roles played by dislocations in society, by established models of state-sponsored medical care programs, by political institutions and leaders, and by the major medical sectors. It shows that the U.S., while differing in many particulars, presents several parallels to the U.K. and Canada. The paper argues that the current environment in the U.S. offers the nation the opportunity to develop at state or local levels government-sponsored programs that guarantee basic medical benefits to all. A new and powerful coalition, moreover, may in the coming years advance the cause of broader, more substantive change at the national level.     

The form and context of federalism: meanings for health care financing

This article examines the meaning of federalism for health care financing (HCF) and is based on two considerations. First, federal institutions are embedded in their national context and interact with them. The design and performance of HCF policy will be influenced by contexts, the workings of the federal institutions, and the interactions of these institutions with different elements of the context. This article unravels these influences. Second, there is no unique model of federalism, and so we have to specify the particular form to which we refer. The examination of the influence of federalism and its context on HCF policy is facilitated by using a transnational comparative approach, and this article examines four mature federations: the United States, Australia, Canada, and Germany. The relatively poor performance of the U.S. HCF system seems associated with the fact that it operates in a context markedly less benign than those of the other national HCF systems. Heterogeneity of context appears also to have contributed to important differences between the United States and the other countries in the design of HCF policies. An analysis of how federalism works in practice suggests that, while U.S. federalism may be overall less favorable to the development of well-functioning HCF policies, the inferior performance of these policies is to be principally attributed to context.     

Through the Back Door: Applying Theories of Legal Compliance to Illegal Immigration During the Chinese Exclusion Era

This article applies theories of legal compliance to analyze the making of this country's first “illegal immigrants”—Chinese laborers who crossed the U.S.‐Canadian and U.S.‐Mexican borders in defiance of the Chinese exclusion laws (1882–1943). Drawing upon a variety of sources, including unpublished government records, I explore the ways in which Chinese laborers gained surreptitious entry into the United States during this period and ask, what explains their mass noncompliance? I suggest that while an instrumental perspective is useful for understanding these border crossings, it overlooks other important determinants of noncompliance: normative values and opportunity structures. Specifically, the exclusion laws were widely perceived by the Chinese as lacking social and moral legitimacy, and thus not worthy of obedience. In addition, the existence of smuggling networks and liberal immigration policies in Canada and Mexico played a critical role in facilitating noncompliance. The article concludes with a discussion about the benefits and challenges of using this theoretical framework to analyze noncompliance in immigration law.     

The Impact of Legal Mobilization and Judicial Decisions: The Case of Official Minority-Language Education Policy in Canada for Francophones Outside Quebec

The article investigates the impact of legal mobilization and judicial decisions on official minority-language education (OMLE) policy in the Canadian provinces outside Quebec, using the "factor-oriented" and "dispute-centered" theories of judicial impact developed by U.S. scholars. The Canadian Supreme Court's decision in Mahé v. Alberta (1990), which broadly interpreted Section 23 of the Charter of Rights to include management and control of OMLE programs and schools, along with federal funding to the provinces to implement OMLE policy, are important to explaining OMLE policy change as predicted by the factor-oriented approach. The dispute-centered approach, on the other hand, helps us understand how the Charter of Rights and judicial decisions shaped the goals and discourse of Francophone groups in the policy process and, more instrumentally, provided opportunity structures that Francophone groups exploited effectively. The article concludes that both approaches to explaining judicial impact could be accommodated within an institutional model of judicial impact that construes institutions as state actors, as sets of rules, and as frameworks of meaning and interpretation. Such an approach would allow for the development of a more comparative model of judicial impact.     

The Expansion and Normalization of Police Militarization in Canada

Despite extensive analysis of police militarization in the United States (US), the case in Canada has been overlooked. Building on Kraska’s (in Policing 1(4):501–513, 2007) framework of police militarization indicators, this paper examines militarization within Canadian police forces between 2007 and 2016. Drawing from data on deployments disclosed under freedom of information law, our research shows deployment of special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams have escalated in many major Canadian cities and are even higher in some cases than those reported by Kraska on militarization of US public police. We show how SWAT teams are increasingly used by public police for routine police activities such as warrant work, traffic enforcement, community policing, and even responding to mental health crises and domestic disturbances. We also analyze data on SWAT team growth, and benchmarking between police service SWAT units. We conclude by reflecting on the implications for public policing in Canada and avenues for future research on police militarization and police violence in Canada and other countries.     

Women and the dynamics of marriage, household status, and aging in victorian canada and the united states

This article compares the life course transitions and household statuses of Canadian and American women and men in late nineteenth-century Canada and the United States. Using a set of integrated census data from 1871 Canada and the United States in 1880, the article suggests that household status differences between the two nations centered on gender. Canadian and American men timed or experienced their own transitions into and out of marriage and household headship at similar ages and to a similar extent. Demographic and economic differences between Victorian Canada and the United States, however, produced distinctions in Canadian and American women's life course transitions and household status: for Canadian women, older ages at first marriage, and the prolongation of the duration of the status, spouse of the household head. For their part, American elderly women more frequently lived as single and widowed heads of households than did their Canadian counterparts.     

Women and the dynamics of marriage,household status,and aging in victorian canada and the united states

This article compares the life course transitions and household statuses of Canadian and American women and men in late nineteenth-century Canada and the United States. Using a set of integrated census data from 1871 Canada and the United States in 1880, the article suggests that household status differences between the two nations centered on gender. Canadian and American men timed or experienced their own transitions into and out of marriage and household headship at similar ages and to a similar extent. Demographic and economic differences between Victorian Canada and the United States, however, produced distinctions in Canadian and American women's life course transitions and household status: for Canadian women, older ages at first marriage, and the prolongation of the duration of the status, spouse of the household head. For their part, American elderly women more frequently lived as single and widowed heads of households than did their Canadian counterparts.     

美国社会学毕业生的变化与就业状况

在过去的一个世纪,美国社会学专业的学生随着美国社会快速的现代化和城市化而迅速增长,也随着美国社会的剧烈波动而出现大起大落的变化。近年来,社会学者在美国的就业面广阔但竞争日益激烈。随着社会研究资助的减少和就业的困难,美国社会学专业的设置更加注重实用,专业课程设置更加注重实用性。在就业方面,21世纪社会学专业的学生必须具有全球化的视野,实用的知识与技能,以及极强的适应于快速变化的就业市场的能力。从美国社会学毕业生的变化与就业发展状况,中国社会学教育应充分吸收其优点,力避其不足。     

State Courts, the U.S. Supreme Court, and the Protection of Civil Liberties

Advocates of federalism, both in the United States and elsewhere, often cite the potential for enhanced protection of individual civil liberties as an emerging rationale for a federal system dividing governmental responsibilities between central and regional governments and central and regional judiciaries. Echoing this, some judicial officials and scholars, confronting an increasingly conservative U.S. Supreme Court, have called for state supreme courts to use the state constitutional grounds to preserve and increase the protections of the Bill of Rights. Using event count analysis, we examine state search-and-seizure cases for 1981 to 1993 to ascertain under what circumstances state courts would use this opportunity to eliminate Supreme Court review. We find that the relative ideological position of the state supreme courts and the U.S. Supreme Court often prevents, or does away with the need for, liberal courts to use the adequate and independent state grounds doctrine to expand the rights of criminal defendants and that state supreme court justices react more predictably in the assertion of constitutional protection law than the general consensus suggests.     

Another special relationship? Interactions between health technology policies and health care systems in the United States and the United Kingdom

Confronted with similar challenges, the United States and the United Kingdom have adopted very different health technology policies. In the United States, the focus has been on technology creation, in particular the funding of basic biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health. This both reflects and reinforces an innovation-first culture in the United States, including in health. By contrast, the United Kingdom has been much more heavily committed to applied research and evaluative research, including health-technology assessment. That is, while U.S. policy has focused on technology creation, U.K. policy has been more oriented toward technology diffusion. This article surveys the sources of these differences. We consider the impacts of institutional, cultural, and other factors that may explain them, and emphasize that it is hard to disentangle the separate effects of those factors. We conclude with a discussion of the difficulties in drawing cross-national lessons in health technology policy.     

Crime victimization, alcohol consumption, and drug use in Canadian public housing

This exploratory study attempted to deal with the surprisingly small amount of scientific study of crime victimization specifically on public housing estates, particularly in Canada. In this study, 325 public housing residents in six estates in an Eastern Ontario urban center filled out survey questionnaires, while fifty-one were interviewed. Compared to the United States, there were significantly fewer single mothers and significantly more Whites. Predatory crime victimization was reported by these residents at a much higher level than for the general population in other Canadian or U.S. surveys. Still, males and youth were the residents most at risk for predatory crime victimization and substance abuse.     

Innovation in the public sphere: reimagining law and economics to solve the National Institutes of Health publishing controversy

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) are responsible for the largest proportion of biological science funding in the United States. To protect the public interest in access to publicly funded scientific research, the NIH amended terms and conditions in funding agreements after 2009, requiring funded Principal Investigators to deposit published copies of research in PubMed, an Open Access repository. Principal Investigators have partially complied with this depository requirement, and the NIH have signaled an intent to enforce grant agreement terms and conditions by stopping funding deposits and engaging in legal action.The global economic value of accessible knowledge offers a unique opportunity for courts to evaluate the impact of enforcing ‘openness’ contract terms and conditions within domestic and international economies for public and economic benefit. Through judicial enforcement of Open Access terms and conditions, the United States can increase economic efficiency for university libraries, academic participants, and public consumers, while accelerating global innovation, improving financial returns on science funding investments, and advancing more efficient scientific publishing models.     

Transformation: the Progression of Immigration Petitions for Transgender Spouses

U.S. citizens who marry foreign nationals may petition for their spouses so that the couple can reside permanently together in the United States. The guidelines set forth in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Adjudicator's Field Manual provide guidance to immigration officials for determining whether to grant or deny spousal petitions. Previously, the Adjudicator's Field Manual imposed a requirement that transgender individuals undergo costly and dangerous sex reassignment surgery in order to qualify as married for the purposes of a spousal petition. However, revisions to the Adjudicator's Field Manual issued in April 2012 provide transgender binational couples the opportunity to remain together in the United States without forcing one partner to undergo sex reassignment surgery. Given the history of discrimination against transgender individuals under U.S. immigration law, these revisions are a significant step in equality for transgender couples. Although these revisions provide many transgender binational couples with a means to remain together in the United States, this Note proposes that, to continue on the path toward equality for transgender couples, special guidelines should not be applied to marriages involving transgender partners if their marriage is deemed a valid heterosexual marriage in the state where solemnized. The goals of U.S. immigration law and compliance with the federal definition of marriage can be achieved without implementing individualized guidelines for transgender binational couples.

Key Points for the Family Court Community:
• Transgender spouses of a binational couple should not be subjected to additional guidelines when submitting spousal petitions that, if granted, would afford the couple the opportunity to reside together in the United States
• Transgender individuals should not be subjected to disparate treatment solely because the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services seeks to enforce discriminatory provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act
• A marriage should be recognized by immigration law if it is a valid marriage under the law of the state where the marriage was celebrated
• In order to achieve U.S. immigration law's mission of family unification, nontraditional couples should be afforded the same opportunity to remain together in the United States without additional scrutiny