Criminal justice education: The dilemma of articulation

There exists a major problem for criminal justice students in transferring from the two- to four-year institution. This article addresses the historical foundation of this dilemma and provides a path toward solution.     

The prisoner's dilemma: Theory and reality

The prisoner's dilemma has become the classic example of a situation in which the process of cooperation itself produces incentives to not cooperate. An implication of the dilemma is that the prosecutor can obtain leverage in cases involving codefendants not available in other cases, by exchanging a prospect of reduction in sentence by way of plea bargaining in return for information or testimony against other codefendants. The prisoner's dilemma is described, previous analyses of the dilemma are reviewed, and then the implication stated above is tested against available data. For a cohort of defendants in robbery cases, it is found that neither the plea rate, conviction rate, nor incarceration rate is significantly higher in cases involving codefendants than in other cases.     

The reformers’ dilemma: media,policy ownership,and reform

Current proposals for strengthening policy ownership in reforming economies are fundamentally flawed. Modeling the reform process as a prisoners’ dilemma demonstrates that political agents must overcome this conflict of interests before present proposals for bolstering ownership will work. A politically autonomous mass media is one important mechanism enabling political agents to do this. Reforming countries without free media face an uphill battle overcoming the problems associated with transition. We test our theory by investigating the relationship between media freedom, foreign aid, and economic development in 26 post-socialist transition countries. The results of this analysis support our theory.      

The double-design dilemma: political science,parliamentary crisis and disciplinary justifications

Two separate, but inter-linked, dilemmas have highlighted the importance of design-led thinking. First, the crumbling physical fabric of the Palace of Westminster has prompted a multi-billion rebuilding project, which will require the parliamentary studies specialism to engage with questions of design, space, and architecture. Separately, political science more generally has been challenged to utilize the insights of design-thinking and design-practice: a challenge to which it is culturally and methodological ill-equipped. This article considers what a design-led approach to political science looks like in theory, and in practice, in the case study of the Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster. This represents a first attempt at how such a fusion could be beneficial for both politics as theory and politics as practice. The main conclusion is that although design-orientated political science is not a panacea for the challenges of modern democratic governance – in intellectual or practical terms – it does appear to offer significant potential in terms of theoretically-informed but solution focused research.     

The search engine's dilemma: implied licence to crawl and cache?

A German court rules that web publishers who choose not to usewidely available technical protection measures, such as therobot exclusion protocol (robot.txt), grant an implied licenceto search engines to crawl and cache for the purpose of indexingcontent on the internet.     

The patient who refuses medical treatment: a dilemma for hospitals and physicians

This article reviews recent case and statutory law concerning patients who refuse medical treatment. Among the special cases considered are: the competent adult patient who refuses treatment on religious or privacy grounds; the incompetent patient whose own wishes were never expressed, but whose family refuses treatment; the incompetent patient who expressed the wish not to be treated before becoming incompetent; and parents who refuse treatment on behalf of their child. It is pointed out that recent court decisions have blurred the distinctions between "extraordinary" care and "ordinary" care and between withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining treatment. Reference is made to the recent trend toward allowing the family of an incompetent patient to assert the patient's rights without court intervention either in the form of direct court order or through guardianship proceedings. Finally, the implications of these legal developments for health care institutions are discussed. A protocol pertaining to incompetent patients is proposed. Health care institutions are encouraged to develop formal policies for dealing with patients who refuse treatment, and to work with their professional associations in lobbying for legislation which will clarify the law in this area.     

The Davis dilemma: how to prevent battles over frozen preembryos

Cryopreservation of preembryos, or the freezing of fertilized human eggs, is a procedure increasingly used by infertile couples to improve the odds of success of advanced reproductive technologies. As a consequence, divorcing couples are finding themselves in dispute over the disposition of frozen preembryos that have not been implanted. Courts have been called on to decide to whom the frozen preembryos should be awarded, but the law is unclear whether frozen preembryos should be treated as marital property, as children, or as something else. The author analyzes various arguments concerning the appropriate legal status of frozen preembryos, and suggests a new rule to settle such disputes.