When Abuse Happens Again: Women's Reasons for Not Reporting New Incidents of Intimate Partner Abuse to Law Enforcement

Although most women abused by intimate partners experience a patterned behavior of abuse (by either the same or new partners), little is known about their decision making regarding whether to call the police for subsequent abuse. The current study found that 90 percent of women who had encountered the criminal legal system for previous intimate partner abuse victimizations did not contact the police for some or all recurrences. Qualitative analysis was conducted among a sample of 102 women regarding their reasons for not re-engaging the legal system for subsequent victimizations. The results suggested 5 overall reasons as to why women involved with the criminal legal system choose not to engage the system again.     

The Symbiosis of Property and English Environmental Law – Property Rights in a Public Law Context

This article argues that environmental regimes entailing considerable administrative discretion are now serving to contextualise and partly to constitute property rights in English law. In particular, rights to use land are ‘democratised’ to varying degrees through the administration of environmental regulation, and are adapted to land‐use problems on an evolving basis. In return, property rights affect environmental regulation, through legal protections for property interests, although the nature of the discretion exercised within environmental regimes seems to determine the kind and extent of this symbiotic influence. As a result, environmental law challenges property scholars to reflect on the impact of administrative decision‐making on property rights, conceptually, doctrinally and in terms of its legitimacy. At the same time, environmental lawyers need to take seriously the nature and legal treatment of property rights in the application and analysis of modern environmental law.     

The Transparency Trap: Non‐Financial Disclosure and the Responsibility of Business to Respect Human Rights

This article examines the potential for transparency programs to improve corporations’ human rights performance. The primary focus is on “general” transparency programs such as the inclusion of human rights issues in sustainability reports. Regulators increasingly rely on such programs, one of which is the EU Directive on the Disclosure of Non‐financial Information, which many commentators view as a model for legislation in other countries and for a business and human rights treaty. This article identifies several problems with this approach. The human rights metrics used in current sustainability reporting standards often lack validity or are based upon data that is most easily collected, rather than most important. Moreover, the empirical evidence on sustainability reporting shows continued problems of selective disclosure, impression management, incomparable disclosures, and the use of disclosure as an end in itself (as opposed to a process that leads to organizational change). To move forward, regulators should shift focus to a model grounded in regulatory pluralism. Under this approach, regulators would combine a selection of targeted transparency mechanisms to create a more complete regulatory system that corrects for one disclosure mechanism's weaknesses by including others that have complementary strengths.     

Promoting Human Rights within the Union: The Role of European Private International Law

Abstract:  This article aims to contribute both to the 'Refgov' project, which is focused on the ambition to find ways of promoting human rights within the EU, but also, more in general and apart from the project, to an improved understanding of the crucial place conflict of law rules occupy in the building of a common Europe—a highly political question behind apparently technical issues. In the study the author deals with the parameters, points of interest, etc in relation to private international law which should be heeded if European Member States 'look at' each other's laws, and—in the context of the 'Refgov' project—if the idea is to exchange 'best practices' or harmonise substantive law, or to harmonise private international law, etc further through a type of open method of coordination. The contribution also shows that private international law issues are decisive in respect of every evaluation of the impact of European integration on human rights, both if this integration process takes place through 'negative' harmonisation (for example by falling back on the principle of mutual recognition) and through 'positive' harmonisation.     

Bridging the Gap – Non‐state Actors and the Challenges of Regulating New Technology

Designing a system of regulation that will deliver defined policy objectives is not easy. This is particularly so when regulating new technologies, where challenges relating to uncertainty and risk, resource asymmetry, and regulatory disconnection are especially significant. By adopting a pluralistic, decentred approach to regulation that utilizes a range of soft‐law regulatory techniques, non‐state actors can contribute in a variety of ways to these special challenges. However, using non‐state resources in this way (either formally or informally) is not a panacea. Public trust and confidence in the regulation of risk is crucial in ensuring the viability of the control framework. Yet, it is difficult to maintain, not least because regulatory pluralism often envisages state and industry cooperation. Nevertheless, the involvement of non‐state actors, including industry, is important if the regulatory framework is not to hamper technological development or expose the public to unacceptable risks.     

Rights of Non‐humans? Electronic Agents and Animals as New Actors in Politics and Law

Personification of non-humans is best understood as a strategy of dealing with the uncertainty about the identity of the other, which moves the attribution scheme from causation to double contingency and opens the space for presupposing the others' self-referentiality. But there is no compelling reason to restrict the attribution of action exclusively to humans and to social systems, as Luhmann argues. Personifying other non-humans is a social reality today and a political necessity for the future. The admission of actors does not take place, as Latour suggests, into one and only one collective. Rather, the properties of new actors differ extremely according to the multiplicity of different sites of the political ecology.     

Between Human Rights and Sovereignty*—An Examination of EU–China Political Relations

This paper will study the differences between the EU and China on the understanding of human rights and national sovereignty and their impact on EU‐China political relations. The paper will be divided into the following parts. The first part will give a review of the concepts of both sovereignty and human rights and the rising concern of human rights in the contemporary world. The second part will study the EU's policy of human rights to see why the EU adheres to its values. The third part will look at China's policy on sovereignty and human rights. The fourth part will examine EU‐China political relations and analyse the difficulties in bilateral relations, due to differences in values between the EU and China. The fifth part will draw some tentative conclusion.     

Family Law and Social Change: Judicial Views of Joint Custody, 1998–2011

Rapid changes in family life over the last forty years have led to substantial alterations in family law policy; specifically, most states now endorse joint custody arrangements for divorcing families. However, we know little about how lower court judges have embraced or resisted this change. We conducted in‐depth interviews with judges in twenty‐five Indiana jurisdictions in 1998 and 2011. Our findings suggest that judges' views of joint custody dramatically changed. Judges in Wave II indicated a strong preference for joint custody—a theme that was relatively absent in Wave I. The observed change in judicial preferences did not seem to be related to judicial replacement, gender, age, or political party affiliation. Although our conclusions are exploratory, we speculate that shifts in judicial views may be related to changing public mores of parenthood and, relatedly, Indiana's adoption of Parenting Time Guidelines in 2001.     

Evaluation of Non‐Natural Deaths among Veterans: New Mexico Medical Examiner‐Investigated Deaths, 2002–2011

While it is recognized that veterans have increased rates of depression, post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicide, and substance use disorders, rates of homicide and unintentional injury deaths in veterans have been minimally investigated. We evaluated all non‐natural deaths in New Mexico veterans between 2002 and 2011 in comparison with non‐natural deaths among non‐veterans. We reviewed all decedents in New Mexico with a history of military service and investigated by the medical examiner, excluding natural deaths and deaths due to fall from standing height. The most common manner of death was unintentional injury (62%), most of these deaths due to motor vehicle accidents (29%) followed by unintentional overdose (26%). Suicide rates among veterans were consistently higher than the general population. The most common mechanism of suicide in men was gunshot wound (72%), and intentional overdose in women (49%). Services are needed for veterans that are tailored to all ages and both sexes.     

Relational Human Rights: Shed‐DNA and the Identification of the ‘Living Disappeared’ in Argentina

Through an ethnographic reading of an Argentine Supreme Court decision I explore the changing nature of the legal subject of human rights in light of emerging technologies. Guillermo Gabriel Prieto was suspected of being a ‘living disappeared’, one of the estimated 500 infants or young children forcibly abducted by the last military dictatorship in Argentina. They were raised by the perpetrators of the crime or their accomplices and kept unaware of their birth origins. The Court's deliberations focused on Guillermo's appeal of a lower‐court decision to carry out an identity test based on his shed‐DNA. The decision demonstrates that while the subject of human rights has often been equated with the bounded individual, new technologies challenge us to reconsider the subject's core characteristics: physical boundedness, autonomy, and individuality. I argue that the ruling offers us an alternative conception of the subject that could become the foundation for a new vision of human rights     

Mobilizing Migrant Workers’ Rights in “Non‐immigration” Countries: The Politics of Resonance and Migrants’ Rights Activism in Israel and Singapore

How are the rights of migrant workers mobilized in non‐immigration regimes? Drawing on an ethnography of human rights NGOs in Israel and Singapore, two countries that share similar ethnic policies but differ in their political regime, this study contributes to scholarship on migrants’ rights mobilization by expanding cross‐national analysis beyond the United States and West Europe and diverting its focus from legal institutions to the places where rights are produced. Findings show that differences in the political regime influence the channels for mobilizing claims but not the cultural politics of resonance that NGOs use when dealing with the tensions between restrictive ethnic policies and the expansion of labor migration. While restraints in authoritarian Singapore operate mainly outside the activists’ circle, in the Israeli ethno‐democracy they operate through self‐disciplining processes that neutralize their potential challenge to hegemonic understandings of citizenship. Paradoxically, success in advancing rights for migrants through resonance often results in reinforcing the non‐immigration regime.     

Translating Human Rights of the “Enemy”: The Case of Israeli NGOs Defending Palestinian Rights

This article explores the practices, discourses and dilemmas of the Israeli human rights NGOs that are working to protect and promote the human rights of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. This case can shed light on the complex process of “triangular translation” of human rights, which is distinct from other forms of human rights localization studied thus far. In this process, human rights NGOs translate international human rights norms on the one hand, and the suffering of the victims on the other, into the conceptions and legal language commonly employed by the state that violates these rights. We analyze the dialectics of change and reproduction embedded in the efforts of Israeli activists to defend Palestinian human rights while at the same time depoliticizing their work and adopting discriminatory premises and conceptions hegemonic in Israeli society. The recent and alarming legislative proposals in Israel aimed at curtailing the work of human rights NGOs reinforce the need to reconsider the role of human rights NGOs in society, including their depoliticized strategies, their use of legal language and their relations with the diminishing peace movement.     

Why Judicial Control of Price Terms in Consumer Contracts Might Not Always Be the Right Answer – Insights from Behavioural Law and Economics

Regulators everywhere are confronted with the question of how to react to contractual pricing structures that serve to hide rather than reveal the real cost of goods and services and thereby abuse limitations in the cognitive competences of consumers. Given that sellers/service providers systematically make use of insights from behavioural sciences to refine their manipulative pricing techniques, regulators should also integrate scientific findings on human decision making to correct behavioural market failures through more tailored policy choices. A holistic approach regarding similar problems is still missing in the EU and the issue is often disguised behind a discussion on unfair terms control, which does not serve the purpose of finding a lasting solution. The aim of this article is twofold: first, to show the weaknesses of an ex post judicial control of pricing techniques, and second, to discuss policy tools which could counterbalance consumer biases on which the techniques rely.     

‘On the Perimeter of the Lawful’: Enduring Illegality in the Irish Family Planning Movement, 1972–1985

Between 1935 and 1985, Irish law criminalized the sale and importation of condoms. Activists established illegal markets to challenge the law and alleviate its social consequences. They distributed condoms through postal services, shops, stalls, clinics, and machines. Though they largely operated in the open, their activities attracted little direct punishment from the state, and they were able to build a stable network of medical and commercial family planning services. We use 30 interviews conducted with former activists to explore this history. In doing so, we also examine the limits of ‘illegality’ in describing acts of everyday resistance to law, arguing that the boundaries between legal and illegal, in the discourses and practices of those who sought to challenge the state, were shifting and uncertain. In turn, we revisit ‘illegality’, characterizing it as an assemblage of varying selectively‐performed political practices, shaped by complex choreographies of negotiation between state and non‐state actors.