CRIMINOLOGY, CRIMINAL JUSTICE, AND THE WAR ON CRIME

This detailed assessment reviews the nation's “war on crime” during the past ten years, examines what has heen accomplished in that period, and outlines the likely prospects for the future. Although important and tangible progress in improving criminal justice has been made. it has not produced relief from high crime rates. In fact, “things are worse than ever.” For the future, there will be both more advances and frustrations in the war on crime. It is emphasized that the progress achieved so far has been to create a more efficient and fairer rystem of justice and that we should take pride in this. If not eclipsed by the quarterly release of crime statistics, we can maintain our momentum and gain even more significant improvements in the next decade.     

Vagueness in Progress: A Linguistic and Legal Comparative Analysis Between UN and U.S. Official Documents and Drafts Relating to the Second Gulf War

This paper is based on a doctoral thesis which aimed at investigating on whether the use of strategic vagueness in Security Council resolutions relating to Iraq has contributed to the breakout of the 2002–2003s Gulf war instead of a diplomatic solution of the controversies. This work contains a linguistic and legal comparative analysis between UN and U.S. documents and their drafts in order to demonstrate how vagueness was deliberately added to the final versions of the documents before being passed, and thus strategically used vagueness has played a crucial role in UN resolutions related to the outbreak of war in Iraq, and in relevant legislation produced by the United States for its Congressional authorisation for war. The comparative analysis between S/RES/1441(2002) and US legislation has evidenced that that there would have been diplomatic solutions to the Iraq crises which were not synonymous of light-handed intervention against Iraq, but deliberately vague UN wording allowed the US to build its own legislation with a personal interpretation implying that the UN did not impede military action.     

US concept wars,civil liberties and the technologies of fortification

The horrific events of September 11, 2001 led to calls for the deployment of state-of-the-art security systems and the creation of an “invisible shield” to protect America. Such proposals immediately triggered debate about the constitutional ethics of surveillance in the United States. While there has been widespread support for the surrender of some cherished civil liberties in the war against terror, surveillance, especially the visual variety, is still seen to be innately un-American. Technologies like biometric face recognition systems, critics argue, are not consistent with the values of an open society and should consequently be considered with great caution. The widespread introduction of such invasive technology, pundits claim, would signal a victory for the terrorists.Many American commentators fail to recognize, however, that the United States, far from being the open society they imagine, has long been characterized by exclusion. Moreover, such exclusion is increasingly enforced by the same high technology of which biometrics is a part. In fact, for at least a decade before the declaration of the war on terror, the United States has been undergoing a multifaceted process of fortification both within its cities and at the US-Mexican frontier. Investigation of this phenomena reveals the central role of the US’s longest running concept war, the war on drugs. This paper argues that within this narrative biometric surveillance and the creation of “an invisible wall” should not be regarded as a break with American traditions but as the next organic phase of an ongoing process of fortifying the United States.     

Trends in the proportion of married women of reproductive age in Spain, 1887–1991

Using the Princeton nuptiality index I_m, we analyzed historical developments in the proportion of married women of reproductive age in Spain. We show the internal diversity in nuptiality patterns and offer an explanatory statistical model based on panel data analysis to identify the main variables influencing these changes over more than a century (1887–1991). We found that Spain has been the developed country with the greatest contrasts in its provincial nuptiality patterns (measured by I_m), although this diversity has lessened over the course of time. We also found that some socioeconomic variables (the gross domestic product per capita and the percentage of population living in cities) do not have a linear relationship with female nuptiality but rather have a U shape or an inverted U shape. This may partly account for some of the controversy that has raged on this topic over the past few decades on an international level.     

Whose Fault Is it Anyway? Political Orientation, Attributions of Responsibility, and Support for the War in Iraq

Political orientation has been shown to be a strong predictor of attitudes toward war. Specifically, political conservatism has been associated with increased support for war and with decreased attribution of responsibility for war to one’s own government. The present research aims to test whether the relationship between political orientation and support for the war in Iraq is mediated by attributions of government responsibility. In Study 1, survey data showed that the relationship between political orientation and support for the Iraq war was mediated by beliefs about the US government’s motivations for the war. Study 2 provided a conceptual replication of the proposed mediation model and extended the findings from beliefs about US government motivations to perceived threat from the pre-war Iraqi government. Study 3 used an experimental paradigm to manipulate perceived threat to show that such beliefs directly affected support for the war. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.     

Cruelty and the Imperative to Wage Virtuous War

This paper considers the newly imperative force of the jus ad bellum, when it acts as a guarantee of the moral. An emotive sense of cruelty now mobilizes as legitimate some forms of virtuous killing, whether in the 'war on crime' waged upon a country's own citizens, or in the conduct of war upon other nations. The recoil against cruelty authorizes virtuous wars against 'brutal' regimes, and underwrites the imposition of maximal penalties for atrocious crimes. Cruelty obliges military force, that naked arm of sovereign power, to be placed at the service of an ailing humanity. This turn towards a pitiful virtuous war suggests a jurisprudence critical of those intimations of cruelty that tend to secure compassion as an authorizing stamp, or guarantor, of the moral.     

Mt. Laurel: A View from the Bridge

Across the Delaware River from the “region” which the New Jersey Supreme court appears to suggest should be the planning base for Mt. Laurel Township's land use decisions lies the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania which has been having some severe land use pangs of its own. Long before even the initiation of the Mt. Laurel litigation, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had begun to decide “exclusionary zoning” cases. And it has continued, intermittently, ever since its National Land ¹ decision in 1965 to admonish municipalities that they must not commit exclusionary² zoning. Thus, the court held a 4 acre minimum lot size exclusionary and then, five years later, held a 2 acre minimum lot size similarily invalid³.     

Don't Mention the War! R. v Bottrill,ex parte Kuchenmeister (1946) Revisited

R. v Bottrill, ex parte Kuchenmeister (1946) established that a ministerial certificate is determinative of whether a state of war exists between the United Kingdom and another state. But of the ‘Aryan’ German, Kuchenmeister, long a resident in Britain and with a British family, virtually nothing is known. The present paper seeks to uncover the complex story of Kuchenmeister's business activities in the British armaments industry before the war, MI5’s determination to have him interned on the not wholly convincing footing of his loyalty to Germany during the war, and Kuchenmeister's prolonged legal battles with the Home Office. A distinction between the law in books and the law in action may be sharply drawn from the affair.     

Masculinities,Money, and Mosques in Algeria’s Civil War

To what extent did economic marginalization and political crisis activate prejudice, violence, and religious faith in Algeria’s civil war during the 1990s? The Algerian novel Les Agneaux du Seigneur (In the Name of God), by Yasmina Khadra offers a glimpse. The novel shows how political and economic disparities intertwined with an increasingly strict interpretation of Islam. In turn, Islam’s political applications and its militarized enforcement soon drew the country into a veritable civil war. The resulting breakdown of the cultural order simultaneously increased the pressure on men to fulfill a socially prescribed gender role and made the fulfillment of that role more difficult.     

War as a pretext to wave the rule of law goodbye? The case for an EU constitutional awakening

The war in Ukraine triggered significant changes at the European Union level. The speed at which the EU has achieved progress on sanctions, migration and defense is particularly impressive. But the Russian aggression against Ukraine has also served as a pretext for putting aside internal discussions about the rule of law, and provided additional political rationales for inaction against Member State governments responsible for the violation of European values, as well as triggered the deepening of double standards in several fields. Against this background, the paper argues that using this crisis as a justification for further inaction in the context of EU values is not a sustainable course of action. The Union must not delay further the need to act to halt the insidious erosion of democracy and the rule of law within its own borders both at the national and supranational level.     

Building a post-war justice system in Afghanistan

This paper examines key dimensions of justice in post–war Afghanistan. These areshari'a(Islamic law), traditional institutions of informal justice (jirga), the Afghan interim legal framework, and human rights principles. It is argued that despite their apparent incompatibility, these various dimensions of justice could be integrated within a coherent framework of a new justice system in post–war Afghanistan –– a framework that would promote interaction between local institutions of informal justice and a district level court of justice, on the one hand, and between these two and a proposed human rights unit, on the other. On the basis of this analysis, an experimental model of a system of justice is proposed, which integrates local jirga and human rights units into the existing formal justice (based on shari'a and positive law) and law–enforcement institutions. This experimental model provides a multi–dimensional framework that both reflects the cultural and religious values of Afghan society, and at the same time, has the capacity to draw on human rights principles. It is maintained that the model has the capacity to deliver justice expeditiously and in cost–effective ways; it also has a strong potential to act as a channel of communication between ordinary people and a modern participatory state in post–war Afghanistan. However, in order to test the applicability of this model in the real world, it needs first to be thoroughly discussed among Afghan and international legal experts as well as among ordinary Afghan people, and then piloted in selected districts in Afghanistan.     

The Problem of Emergency in the American Supreme Court

Sixty years before Carl Schmitt wrote his Political Theology, and more than a 100 years before President Bush announced a ‘war on terrorism’ the American Supreme Court grappled with the difficult issue of emergency powers in connection with issues arising out of the American Civil War (1861–1865). The question confronting the Court in a set of cases named the Prize Cases was whether President Lincoln’s decision to respond to acts of aggression by the secessionist Southern states with measures of war was lawful. The legal problem was that Lincoln had made this decision unilaterally although the American Constitution specifically allocates the power to declare war to Congress. The Court solved the dilemma by arguing that in cases where no war has been declared, the decision whether the country is in a state of war is ultimately ‘a question to be decided by him [the President], and [the Supreme] Court must be governed by the decisions and acts of the political department of the Government to which this power was entrusted’ (Prize, p. 669). The precedent, which the Court thereby laid down, has since played out as an important leverage for the Bush government’s legal arguments in connection with the war on terrorism. This article engages the theoretical framework of Locke, Schmitt and Agamben in order to come to a better understanding of this important set of cases.     

UNWCC Policy on the Prosecution of Torture 1943–1948

This article provides a cursory overview of the development of torture as a war crime and/or a crime against humanity. While torture may at one time have been an accepted method of interrogation and punishment, matters changed in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. After presenting the approaches to torture common before World War II, the article focuses on the United Nations War Crimes Commission’s (UNWCC) internal debates on the crime, as well as it’s scrutiny of the national war crimes prosecution programmes of its members. As torture was, however, not at the core of UNWCC’s discussions, the author calls for further comparative research on the legacy of the UNWCC, particularly in the records of national authorities which were responsible for the prosecution of war crimes following World War II.     

Civic Liberalism and the “Dialogical Model” of Judicial Review

In a world that is inherently indeterminate, a suitable theory of distributive justice must perhaps itself be indeterminate, and its indeterminacies must accommodate those of the world where relevant.

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Geopolitical change and congressional committee governance: The Case of the US House armed services committee

This article examines the Armed Services Committee of the United States Houses of Representatives (HASC) at the beginning of the post‐cold war era. Utilising Fenno's 1973 framework, the article traces HASC's evolution through three periods: the ‘textbook’ period (1947–70); the transition period (1970–89); and the post‐cold war period (since 1989). It explores how changing environmental constraints and member goals have shaped its strategic premises, in Fenno's terms. Reporting on recent trends at HASC, I consider whether, in the post‐cold war era, HASC may be said to operate on the basis of any strategic premises at all. The article concludes by considering two key questions about Fenno's framework. Is it time bound? And, can it explain change?     

Freedom and Sovereignty a Fatal Relationship Outlined with Jean-Luc Nancy and Marquis De Sade

Sovereignty and freedom are interlinked in a manner of both ambivalence and interdependence. Neither can sovereignty confirm itself without presupposing for itself a pure state of freedom; nor can freedom conceive and realise itself without interweaving with sovereignty. Both concepts collide with each other as sovereignty usually signifies a certain social or cultural power or order; and freedom regularly is related to a sovereign subjectivity. Therefore, the question is: how far might sovereignty serve as a source of freedom that, at the same time, has to be limited by this freedom itself. When the sovereign (subject) defines where the limits of freedom are, he will mostly define the limits of experiencing such freedom for all those who have to follow his decision on the limit. Further, if the free (sovereign) subject itself defines its own limits, it will supposedly end up rejecting its interweaving with any other subjectivity beyond its own. The problem remains: both sovereignty and freedom cannot be realised if they are already limited.     

Policing of Political Protest. The Security Police's Control of the Extra-parliamentary Opposition in Sweden During and after the Cold War

Throughout history, those in power have monitored and exercised control over individuals and groups who have been perceived as representing some form of threat to their power. Irrespective of the system of government in place, political crime is a matter of central interest to a society's security police. Political crimes are often committed by extra-parliamentary groups or organizations. The focus of this paper is how the Swedish secret police (SÄPO) have acted against what they have perceived as the extreme left, mainly anarchists and autonomists, during and after the cold war. Did SÄPO's perception of this part of the extra-parliamentary opposition change when the cold war was over in the early 1990s? Were these groups and individuals perceived as the new enemy in the threat vacuum that temporarily arose in the aftermath of the cold war? Furthermore, had the new security concept that was introduced at that time any impact on SÄPO's activities?     

The treatment of Chinese customary law in British colonial Hong Kong

A struggle has been underway in Beijing, othering Hong Kong’s British common law legal system by rhetorically subordinating it as a foreign colonial relic. How did the British develop their Hong Kong governance policies for proper law, as they ruled Hong Kong? These policies developed without resort to all the available scholarship, so that they could other the Hong Kong people into a subaltern group. Hong Kong was already constituted as a township with its own continuing township liturgy, customary ritual and social structure. The colonial administration ignored this, creating a Hong Kong subaltern.     

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and the “Odd Consequence” of Progress

The Time Machine of H. G. Wells stands as one of the foundational works of science fiction. It is a true product of its time, a reflection of the fast pace of technological development and social change that makes a romance of the ideology of advancement for its own sake. But between the lines of its “adventure” plot, we find evidence of another, more complex story being told. Wells's work is plagued by ambivalence about the outcome of social and scientific progress—the selfsame progress that gave birth to the time machine in the first place. The Time Machine, in short, is preoccupied by an anxiety about a catastrophe just around the corner, not one born of global war or political turmoil but rather of the absence of turmoil, of need, of struggle. The idea and possibility of fiction itself becomes entangled in this problem of the everyday catastrophe, as it nearly suffocates under the conditions of the utopian society which it creates.     

Male Violence,Marital Unity,and the History of the Interspousal Tort Immunity

The interspousal tort immunity has been understood as a common law rule that was codified in the English Married Women's Property Act, 1882. It was explained as a necessary consequence of the wife's coverture and was justified by the doctrine of marital unity. This conventional account mischaracterizes the complexities underlying the development of the immunity and the reasons for its reformulation in the nineteenth century. This article traces a different trajectory, showing that the interspousal tort immunity was not articulated until Phillips v Barnet in 1876, and examining the way it came into being as a result of the reforms to divorce law and to the property rules of coverture. Although already implicit in the governing principles of the pre-reform law, the nineteenth-century expression of the rule concerning interspousal tort immunity was a product of the contemporary reforms to coverture at least as much as it was a product of coverture itself.