The Comparison Question Test: Does It Work and If So How?

In a mock crime study of the comparison question test (CQT), 35 subjects decided to participate as guilty and 30 as innocent. Two conditions were varied: Explaining the comparison questions in the pretest interview and re-discussing comparison questions between charts. Higher identification rates (approximately 90% for guilty and innocent participants) were achieved in groups with explanation of comparison questions than in groups without explanation. Re-discussing comparison questions had no effect on identification rates. Ratings of subjective stress due to relevant and comparison questions were also obtained and can be seen as indicators of the significance of the questions. The significance of comparison questions was hardly affected by the different testing conditions. When effects are detectable at all, they contradict theoretical expectations in their direction. Results are discussed in terms of the significance of comparison questions used in polygraph testing.     

The Legal Education and Training Review: regulating socio-legal and liberal legal education?

The Legal Education and Training Review (LETR) which reported in June 2013 conceded that undergraduate law degrees are generally outside the remit of the review other than when there is a direct impact on the provision of legal services. On first glance therefore the review has few implications for those of us interested in delivering a liberal legal education and developing socio-legal approaches to law and legal study. However, on closer reading, the report contains a number of suggestions which, if taken up by the regulators, have significant potential to change law degrees, even if regulation remains “light touch”. This article explores those issues with a particular focus on the implications for liberal law degrees and socio-legal approaches to law teaching. In particular the article will explore issues around possible changes to foundation subjects; the creation of a framework of learning outcomes; the possible strengthening of legal writing and research in the curriculum and the opportunities offered for the introduction of more socio-legal material; and the trickle-down effect likely to be felt by providers of undergraduate law degrees of changes in regulation of legal services and as a result of student, employer and other stakeholder expectations.     

Law’s Determinability: Indeterminacy,Interpretative Authority,and the International Legal System

Netherlands International Law Review - Authority claims remain rooted in the antecedent existence of a degree of indeterminacy, in particular in the international legal system, in which a lack of...     

“The Unnamed Third”: Roberta Kevelson's Legal Semiotics and the Development of International Law

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique -     

The Fundamental Contradiction Redux? Liberty,Coercion, and American Legal Development

In Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present, Gary Gerstle offers an ambitious account of American legal development from our nation's founding up to the present day. In many ways, Gerstle's account is in keeping with the long scholarly tradition of linking legal liberalism with changes in American law and politics. However, Liberty and Coercion also calls to mind critical legal scholarship, most notably Duncan Kennedy's “The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries” and the idea of the fundamental contradiction. After reconstructing Kennedy's central claims, I highlight how they actually undermine Liberty and Coercion and jeopardize the larger legal liberal tradition.     

The Error in “Error Rate”: Why Error Rates Are So Needed,Yet So Elusive

Establishing error rates is crucial for knowing how well one is performing, determining whether improvement is needed, measuring whether interventions are effective, as well as for providing transparency. However, the flurry of activities in establishing error rates for the forensic sciences has largely overlooked some fundamental issues that make error rates a problematic construct and limit the ability to obtain a meaningful error rate. These include knowing the ground truth, establishing appropriate databases, determining what counts as an error, characterizing what is an acceptable error rate, ecological validity, and transparency within the adversarial legal system. Without addressing these practical and theoretical challenges, the very notion of a meaningful error rate is limited.     

A European Legal Method? On European Private Law and Scientific Method

This article examines the relationship between European private law and scientific method. It argues that a European legal method is a good idea. Not primarily because it will make European private law scholarship look more scientific, but because a debate on the method of a normative science necessarily has to be a debate on its normative assumptions. In other words, a debate on a European legal method will have much in common with the much desired debate on social justice in European law. Moreover, it submits that, at least after the adoption of the Common Frame of Reference by the European institutions, European contract law can be regarded as a developing multi-level system that can be studied from the inside. Finally, it concludes that the Europeanisation of private law is gradually blurring the dividing line between the internal and external perspectives, with their respective appropriate methods, in two mutually reinforcing ways. First, in the developing multi-level system it is unclear where the external borders of the system lie, in particular the borders between Community law and national law. Second, because of the less formal legal culture the (formerly) external perspectives, such as the economic perspective, have easier access and play an increasing role as policy considerations.     

Governing Globalization? The State,Law, and Structural Change in Corporate Governance

Current analysis of the 'globalization' of the activity of capitalist corporations tends to argue that the legal institutional frameworks of the nation state are of little importance in determining the governance of those corporations, and that the regulation of those corporations therefore is impossible. This view simply ignores the role that those frameworks do in fact play. In this paper, various styles of corporate governance are analysed in terms of the influence of the company law, financial market regulation, and employment law promulgated by nations or nation state groupings. Rather than the globalization of corporate governance reflecting the unimportance of the nation state, it reflects a change in the style of regulation.     

Justice ‘Under’ Law: The Bodily Incarnation of Legal Conceptions Over Time

The article uses embodiment and the experiential basis of conceptual metaphor to argue for the metaphorical essence of abstract legal thought. Abstract concepts like ‘law’ and ‘justice’ need to borrow from a spatial, bodily, or physical prototype in order to be conceptualised, seen, for example, in the fact that justice preferably is found ‘under’ law. Three conceptual categories of how law is conceptualised is examined: law as an object, law as a vertical relation, and law as an area. The Google Ngram Viewer, based on the massive library of books that Google has scanned, has been used to study legally relevant conceptions over time within each of these three categories, from 1800 to 2000. In addition, the article suggests a type of analytical method of ‘metaphor triangulation,’ that is, the replacement of prevailing metaphors with unusual ones in order to increase the level of awareness of what conceptual content the prevailing metaphors involve.