Sanctioning corporate crime: How do business executives and the public compare?

Previous literature on attitudes toward the punishment or seriousness of criminal behavior has largely neglected to focus systematically upon five issues: (1) public perceptions of corporate illegality rather than perceptions of street crime or other forms of white-collar lawlessness; (2) how evaluations are conditioned by the degree of culpability and harm an offense involves; (3) the circumstances under which citizens will support the use of legal sanctions against an individual executive as opposed to a corporate entity; (4) the public's willingness to support criminal as opposed to civil intervention into various kinds of illegal corporate activities; and (5) how business executives' attitudes toward corporate legal sanctioning compare to those held by the general public. Through a survey of residents and business executives in a midwestern metropolitan area, an attempt was made to shed light on these issues. The analysis revealed a pervasive willingness among the sample to embrace the use of civil sanctions against corporations regardless of the circumstances surrounding the conduct being rated. By contrast, advocacy of civil remedies against executives and criminal penalties against either the corporation or its executives was found to vary considerably according to the culpability and harm manifested by a given illegal act. Also, public support for sanctioning corporate behavior was consistently higher than the support evidenced by executives, especially where the sanctions were directed at individual corporate managers.     

AGE,GENDER, AND THE CRIME OF CRIMES: TOWARD A LIFE‐COURSE THEORY OF GENOCIDE PARTICIPATION*

This article asks whether genocide follows the age and gender distributions common to other crime. We develop and test a life‐course model of genocide participation to address this question using a new dataset of 1,068,192 cases tried in Rwanda's gacaca courts. Three types of prosecutions are considered: 1) inciting, organizing, or supervising violence; 2) killings and other physical assaults; and 3) offenses against property. By relying on systematic graphic comparisons, we find that the peak age of those tried in the gacaca courts was 34 years at the time of the genocide, which is older than the peak age for most other types of crime. We likewise find that women were more likely to participate in crimes against property and comparatively unlikely to commit genocidal murder. Symbolic–interactionist explanations of crime suggest people desist from crime as a result of shared understandings of the expectations of adulthood. We argue that this process may be turned on its head during genocide as participants may believe they are defending their communities against a perceived threat. Thus, in contrast to other criminological theories suggesting that people must desist from crime to be accorded adult status, some adults may participate in genocide to fulfill their duties as adult men.     

Public values, health inequality, and alternative notions of a "fair" response

The fact that disadvantaged people generally die younger and suffer more disease than those with more resources is gaining ground as a major policy concern in the United States. Yet we know little about how public values inform public opinion about policy interventions to address these disparities. This article presents findings from an exploratory study of the public's values and priorities as they relate to social inequalities in health. Forty-three subjects were presented with a scenario depicting health inequalities by social class and were given the opportunity to alter the distribution of health outcomes. Participants' responses fell into one of three distributive preferences: (1) prioritize the disadvantaged, (2) equalize health outcomes between advantaged and disadvantaged groups, and (3) equalize health resources between advantaged and disadvantaged groups. These equality preferences were reflected in participants' responses to a second, more complex scenario in which trade-offs with other health-related values - maximizing health and prioritizing the sickest - were introduced. In most cases, participants moderated their distributive preferences to accommodate these other health goals, particularly to prioritize the allocation of resources to the very sick regardless of their socioeconomic status.     

关于查禁卖淫嫖娼活动的立法、执法思考

当前卖淫嫖娼屡禁不止,究其原因与公安机关对卖淫嫖娼活动打击不力有很大关系,具体表现为 对卖淫嫖娼人的处罚以罚款为主,拘留处罚、收容教养的比例比较低、劳动教养处理的少之又少。 为此,应完善立法,提高罚款幅度,取消对卖淫嫖娼人员的警告处罚规定,进一步明确收容教育的 条件,限制公安机关的自由裁量权。在现行的法律框架下,应完善公安信息系统,重视已查处卖 淫嫖娼人员的信息收集与加工利用;加大对嫖娼人员的处罚力度,铲除买方市场;规范《治安管理 处罚裁决书》的送达,动员社会力量,共同参与对卖淫嫖娼活动的治理。     

"牛玉琴等人的法律难题"解析

"牛玉琴等人的法律难题"归结到一点,就是如何保护林木所有权人的合法权益问题.要切实保护牛玉琴等人的合法权益,就必须由国家针对牛玉琴等人的投入和牺牲,在林木的经济价值之上、生态价值之下,确定一个适当的数额对他们进行补偿.除此之外,诸如"砍伐方案"、"购买方案"、"补助方案"、"奖励方案"等都是不可取的.     

Coming Clean About the Criminal Law

This paper addresses three doctrinal phenomena of which it finds evidence in English law: the quiet extension of the criminal law so as to criminalise that which is by no means an obvious offence; the creation of offences the goal of which is not to guide potential offenders away from crime; and the existence of offending behaviour which is not itself thought to justify arrest or prosecution. While such phenomena have already been criticised by other criminal law theorists, this paper offers a critique to which little attention has yet been paid. It argues that the existence of these phenomena has been concealed from public view: that the organs of state have encouraged the belief that they are no part of English law. The paper then argues that it is high time the state came clean. The state owes its people answers for the imposition of the criminal law: it must account for the creation and enforcement of any given criminal offence. When the state misleads its people about the criminal law’s scope, goals and enforcement, it refuses to provide those people with the answers they are owed.     

构建公权与私权平衡下的中国物权法

《物权法》乃是保护权利人物权、规范财产秩序之法,然因物权涉及社会公共利益和第三人的合法权益,现代财产所有权社会化的结果导致《物权法》中蕴含了大量的属于公法范畴的强制性规范,使得物权相较于其他私权而言更容易受到以保护公共利益为核心的公权力的干涉和限制。《物权法》一方面要保护私人的合法权利不受公权力的过度干预,另一方面又要防止私权的过度滥用。《物权法》本身的实践需要构建一个公权与私权平衡的环境。     

The Unbounded Disorder of the Time of Transformation of Property

Surveys of the population indicate that the problem of crime disturbs people as greatly as the problem of inflation and rising prices. Many factors are at work here, both real and mythical. Long years of Soviet propaganda represented social life as generally good, darkened by only a few shortcomings. A lack of reliable comparative statistics and silence concerning the actual state of affairs, against a background of selective publication regarding the most nefarious crimes and the punishments for them, created the illusion that the Party program of finally eradicating crime was being successfully accomplished. Propaganda created a positive picture of the law-enforcement authorities, who enjoyed universal popular support. Workers enlisted in voluntary people's brigades and were recruited into other ways of promoting law and order. Objectively, this helped maintain public tranquillity, but to a far greater degree it created an appearance of well-being.     

Provisional Court Protection in Administrative Disputes in Europe: The Constitutional Status of Interim Measures Deriving from the Right to Effective Court Protection. A Comparative Approach

Abstract: Interim protection in remedies against the public administration has proved to be one of the key issues in today's justice. In effect, the slowness of judicial proceedings means that final judicial decisions cannot guarantee the rights and interests of the litigants any more, because those decisions arrive too late. Thus, effective judicial protection is at stake. On the other hand, public administrations have traditionally disposed of privileges, one of the most important of them being the so‐called executive character of administrative acts. The national debate on the equilibrium between both principles—effective judicial protection and the executive character of administrative acts—needs to be exported to the Community law context. Community law should therefore learn from national experiences, as other legal orders, such as the Spanish one, have done, turning to comparative law in order to improve their own model of interim protection.     

Facultad libre de la autoridad para reinstalar a los miembros de las corporaciones policiales como resultado del juicio de ponderación

Due to the existing climate of violence, corruption and public insecurity, the Constitution was amended to stop police forces' members from being reinstated in their jobs despite having obtained a judicial decision proving their dismissal was unfounded. This amendment was adopted in order to Streamline the police forces but it ultimately affects other constitutional rights and principles such as police forces members' careers and their professionalism. Based on the use of a weighted assessment or a proportionality test, this article proposes an alternative application of the constitutional reform to satisfy the enforcement of the will of the constituent and to avoid unnecessary or disproportionate action against the police forces' above-mentioned fundamental rights.     

Public Eyewitness Confidence Ratings Can Differ from Those Held Privately

Despite much research on eyewitness confidence, we know very little about whether confidence ratings given in public might differ from those held privately. This study tested a prediction derived from self-presentation theory that eyewitnesses will give lower confidence ratings in public when there is a possibility of their account being contradicted by other witnesses as compared to when they report their confidence in private. In groups of 3 or 4 people, 96 participants watched a videotape of a simulated robbery and then answered 16 forced-choice questions about details from the videotape. In half of the experimental sessions, the participants shared their answers and confidence ratings aloud with the other participants (public condition), and in the other half, the answers and ratings were not shared (private). As predicted, confidence ratings were significantly lower in the public condition than in the private condition, but the privacy manipulation had no effect on response accuracy. These results are consistent with a self-presentation explanation, and they highlight the need to examine public confidence ratings more thoroughly.     

Measuring Government Favouritism Objectively: The Case of Romanian Public Construction Sector

Government favouritism in the allocation of public funds raises costs for any society in which corruption prevails. Particularistic transactions can be identified in three different situations: uncompetitive awards of public contracts when there is only one “competitive” tender, when public money is spent on contracts supplied by politically connected firms, and a situation of capture in which one private contractor obtains a disproportionate share of contracts issued by some public agency. This present research has tested for the relevance of those three types of particularistic transactions that signal government favouritism as they apply to the Romanian construction sector for the period from 2007-2013, and to do so has made use of original public procurement databases. Furthermore, it will be proposed here that the “kickback”—a percentage of particularistic awarded values—can be used as a measurement of corruption. Even conservatively estimated, kickbacks account for much of the cost borne by any society that fails to eradicate corruption. For our purposes here, amounts of kickbacks at county level have been controlled against criminal convictions for corruption at county level. As a result, data analysis provides strong evidence that kickbacks based on particularistic allocation of public funds are indeed relevant in the measurement of corruption, and the steps used to evaluate kickbacks can be used just as well for other countries.     

Genetic Information and the Challenge to Privacy

Genetic screening and testing techniques provide a new and powerful diagnostic tool for the acquisition of predictive information. The potential value of such diagnostic techniques cannot be overstated. Genetic diagnostic tests pave the way for the development of gene therapy techniques which may provide remedies for diseases previously considered untreatable. There are clearly tremendous opportunities for improving the quality of life of those who suffer from genetic disorders as well as opportunities for biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to swell their profits. A complex of pressures and tensions is currently developing around the use of genetic technology for therapeutic purposes in human beings. This paper considers only one element of this complex and dynamic situation, that of the regulatory climate surrounding the use of genetic screening in Europe. If, as many pharmaceutical companies concede, the key to the development of successful gene therapy products is the freedom to use genotyping and genetic screening without significant legal restriction, then the regulatory climate has a crucial significance for the future of this technology. It emerges, however, that there are other interests at stake apart from just those of the patients and the pharmaceutical companies. Insurance companies and employers are also highly interested in the acquisition and use of genetic information. There are arguments both for and against permitting such entities to use or request genetic testing and screening which shall be traversed in the body of the paper. However, the interest of insurance companies and employers in genetic information has stimulated a countercurrent of public pressure for restrictions on the use that can be made of genetic diagnostic information. In a number of countries, this pressure has generated enough concern to stimulate legislatures to seek to enact laws that curtail the use and acquisition of genetic information. This pattern has clearly emerged in the United States and there are strong indications that similar trends are developing in Europe. This article catalogues and critiques the laws and regulations currently affecting genetic screening and testing in Europe.     

Crisis intervention skills training for police negotiators in the 21st century

Summary While Crisis Management training and intervention skills are not new areas for police officers or for police crisis negotiators, it is certainly true that such training must be included in the overall preparation for police officers in general and for police crisis negotiators in particular. Not to do so ignores the need for such skills in the day-to-day functions and calls-for-service of these groups. It has been the experience of this author, in talking with police negotiators, that more and more calls for their services are being made, in situations which are non-hostage related, than ever before. These areas continue to include barricaded individuals, suicidal persons, family disputes in which one member of the family is holding other members of the family against their will, and abuse situations including spouse abuse and child abuse. Additional areas include those in which there are juveniles involved as well as within school settings. Some of the latter may involve hostages while others do not. Finally, it is becoming less unusual for negotiators to be summoned only to find that the subject has engaged in acts designed to evoke fatal responses from those officers involved. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as “death by cop.” Further, it is also important that those indirectly involved in these situations receive this type of Crisis Intervention training. These may include first response officers, first response police and security personnel in our public and private schools, security officers in our hospitals and courthouses, and others who, due to their particular jobs, may be involved in these types of incidents.     

Building Norms from the Grassroots Up: Divestment,Expressive Politics,and Climate Change

The fossil fuel divestment movement is at the forefront of civil society initiatives to raise public consciousness about the need for a “fossil‐free” future. Through the lens of the social movement literature, this article shows how the movement has harnessed grassroots activists, engaged in innovative and sometimes disruptive forms of protest, and used cognitive framing and symbolic politics to gain media interest and persuade the public of the importance and legitimacy of its claims as well as to promote a new social norm. The relative instrumental, structural, and discursive power of the movement and its adversaries is also examined, showing how, notwithstanding the fossil fuel industry's deeply embedded structural and instrumental power, the movement has managed to shift the contest onto a terrain where it holds a comparative advantage. Finally, the movement's role in nonstate climate governance is considered, taking account of its interactions with and impact on a range of other climate actors. This article's conclusion is that climate governance is not only an instrumental or pragmatic process of mandating changes in behavior but an expressive and symbolic one of nurturing a new norm and institutionalizing a new set of moral principles.     

Preparing the design of robust climate policy architectures

The design of climate policy architectures depends on how its multiple designers identify the climate problem, on the principles they adhere to, and on the criteria they apply for assessing the performance of the constructed agreements. This article presents five core features of the climate policy problem, five principles demanding respect when designing policy, and a particular specification of the four general criteria: efficacy, efficiency, equity, and institutional feasibility. The central policy problem of climate change is the phasing out of non-sustainable energy use by orchestrating trillions of decisions by billions of people. Principles like universality, realism, and transparency are important, but when balancing a global agreement, taking into account diversity and sovereignty are outstanding. For addressing the climate change challenges, the equity criterion should be taken more seriously by the negotiating countries than at present. In a diverse world, equity conflicts are likely to be further exacerbated by attempts to impose uniform approaches like global carbon trading or a harmonized global carbon tax rate. The uniform approaches, lauded by economists and policy makers as superior, are also criticized here as not being so effective and efficient as pretended.     

Independent Discretion or Democratic Legitimisation? The Relations between National Regulatory Authorities and National Parliaments under EU Regulatory Framework for Network‐Bound Sectors

The European legislator, being supported in that regard by the Court of Justice, confers upon national regulatory authorities (NRAs) the exercise of the most important tasks concerned with the regulation of the network‐bound sectors, while at the same time guarantees NRAs a far‐reaching independence in exercising of their discretionary powers and shielding NRAs against other public authorities, including national parliaments. This, in turn, raises many doubts from the perspective of some essential constitutional principles of the Member States, such as, among others, ‘the domain of the law,’ which reserves the regulation of issues sensitive to the citizens as an exclusive parliament's prerogative. It is submitted in this article that national parliaments should play a much more active role in regulating the network‐bound sectors. The main point is to strengthen the protection of fundamental rights of regulated parties and create the real democratic legitimisation of NRAs, while not undermining those regulatory objectives that are already accorded at the EU level.     

Donor conception legislation in Victoria, Australia: the "Time to Tell" campaign, donor-linking and implications for clinical practice

The State of Victoria in Australia was one of the first jurisdictions in the world to introduce legislation regulating donor conception. Under the Infertility (Medical Procedures) Act 1984 (Vic), donor-conceived people, aged 18 years and over, parents of children under 18 years, and donors gained the right to apply for the release of identifying information about each other recorded in a Central Register. As a result, of this and subsequent legislation, services providing donor treatment were obliged to change clinical practice relating to recruitment of donors, counselling of donors and recipients and recordkeeping. Since this legislation was introduced in 1988, over 5,000 donor-conceived children have been born and in 2006 the first 100 of these children reached the age of 18. The Victorian Infertility Treatment Authority (ITA) conducted a public education campaign to provide information and support to people affected by the legislation. This article describes clinical practice changes prompted by legislation, the 'Time to Tell" campaign and the service model developed for linking parties on the donor registers. The Victorian experience demonstrates that laws allowing the parties involved in donor conception access to information about each other must be accompanied by changes to clinical practice, public education about the implications of the laws, and services to meet the needs of those seeking information relating to donor conception and those contacted as a result.     

Flooding the Permafrost: The Role of Environmental Claims in the Effort to Regulate Global Warming Emissions

This article focuses on the role that public and private claims play in spurring, supporting, supplementing, and, at times, impeding, climate change initiatives. Sections 1 and 2 describe the essential features of greenhouse gases and briefly detail the history of federal initiatives and the collapse of will that precipitated many of the claims filed by states, municipalities, and environmental groups. Section 3 discusses plaintiffs' early challenges and efforts to compel regulatory action; nuisance actions that have been filed by states, public interest groups, and individuals; and the possible trajectory of future claims. Section 4 discusses the role of climate change claims in enforcing compliance, improving corporate responsibility, and promoting interorganizational benchmarking in governmental and market-based standards programs. Section 5 concludes with a discussion of the precautionary principle and ways in which companies can protect themselves against future climate change-related claims.     

警事治理:国家警事社会化的新定义

治理理论对国家与市民社会关系的认识思路是国家和市民社会相互"型塑"达致社会公共事务管理的"善治"。在国内外警务战略模式变革中成为潮流的"国家警事社会化"战略,是指在警察机关专业警务活动的同时,动员社会组织和社区公众共同参与防控违法犯罪、维护社会治安秩序活动的过程。显然,"国家警事社会化"寻求警察与社会组织及社区公众的互动合作基础上公共安全管理的改善。因为警察与国家的对应、社会组织及公众正是市民社会的具象,所以可以用治理理论作为分析"国家警事社会化"的框架,并将其定义为"警事治理"。