Whose Best Practices? The Significance of Context in and for Transnational Criminal Justice Indicators

To what extent is it possible to identify transnational good or best practice and what are the difficulties and challenges in doing so validly? The claim made in this article is that it may be helpful to examine the spread of global social indicators as a series of projects that themselves reproduce ideas of what counts as ‘good’ practice. This will help identify the ‘politics of comparison’ in each case. Taking as an example recent calls for criminologists to engage with the global targets for change set by the United Nations, the article discusses the aims of comparison, the uses of indicators, and the way that commensuration misrepresents contexts in the drive to evaluate local conditions in terms of overarching standards. It then revisits the debate concerning the so‐called knowledge and governance ‘effects’ of global social indicators.     

Criminological Research and the Death Penalty: Has Research by Criminologists Impacted Capital Punishment Practices?

American Journal of Criminal Justice - At the request of the SCJA president this paper addresses five questions. Does criminological research make a difference relative to the death penalty? - If...     

AMBER Alerts: Are School-Type Photographs the Best Choice for Identifying Missing Children?

We investigated how well adults could recognize the faces of children when they differed in appearance from photographs shown in an alert. College students in three studies saw a mock AMBER Alert while watching a television show. The children appeared either well-groomed with positive affect (as in a school photograph) or disheveled with poor affect (as abducted children might appear). Recognition accuracy and confidence were significantly lower when the faces differed in appearance from the alert displayed during the television show. Thus, AMBER Alerts may be more effective if they are accompanied by more than one type of photograph of a missing child, particularly if a photograph is shown in which the child does not appear well-groomed and happy.     

“Just Describing is Not Enough”: Policy Learning,Transfer, and the Limits of Best Practices

Despite widespread use in the cultural field, best practices remain theoretically and empirically under-researched. The aim of this article is to achieve better understanding of their use and effectiveness in policy learning and transfer, using a case study of a cross-national policy coordination process in the European Union, the Open Method of Coordination. Using empirical data from interview and participant observation material, the article highlights several fundamental challenges of best practices, such as issues of contextualization, representativeness, and critical analysis. It finishes by offering six critical reflection questions on the use of best practices.     

The Threat of the Thief: Who Has Normative Influence in Georgian Society?

This piece gives an account of the Georgian government's recent attempts to crackdown on the institution of thieves-in-law [vory-v-zakone] within Georgian society. The events surrounding the problematisation of the thieves-in-law are examined and different answers are offered to the underlying question of the article: what threat does this subversive group pose to the government? It is argued that the vory do not represent a potential criminal revolution but are victims of a resurgent state producing a politics of law that seeks to stamp out subverting influences within society. The thieves' world represents an alternative moral order which is attractive in a country which suffers from acute alienated statehood. Thus the fight against the vory should be understood as a battle to win back the hearts of the Georgian people for the state and for the law.     

Are Children's Best Interests Really Best? ZH (Tanzania) (FC) v Secretary of State for the Home Department

Although the Supreme Court's decision in ZH (Tanzania) is an important one, as this note explains, it is less novel than many suppose – and is in some ways disappointing. By stressing the importance of immigrant children's best interests, it fails to use this opportunity to promote their Convention rights effectively.     

Is the Magic Still There? The Use of the Heckman Two-Step Correction for Selection Bias in Criminology

Issues of selection bias pervade criminological research. Despite their ubiquity, considerable confusion surrounds various approaches for addressing sample selection. The most common approach for dealing with selection bias in criminology remains Heckman’s [(1976) Ann Econ Social Measure 5:475–492] two-step correction. This technique has often been misapplied in criminological research. This paper highlights some common problems with its application, including its use with dichotomous dependent variables, difficulties with calculating the hazard rate, misestimated standard error estimates, and collinearity between the correction term and other regressors in the substantive model of interest. We also discuss the fundamental importance of exclusion restrictions, or theoretically determined variables that affect selection but not the substantive problem of interest. Standard statistical software can readily address some of these common errors, but the real problem with selection bias is substantive, not technical. Any correction for selection bias requires that the researcher understand the source and magnitude of the bias. To illustrate this, we apply a diagnostic technique by Stolzenberg and Relles [(1997) Am Sociol Rev 62:494–507] to help develop intuition about selection bias in the context of criminal sentencing research. Our investigation suggests that while Heckman’s two-step correction can be an appropriate technique for addressing this bias, it is not a magic solution to the problem. Thoughtful consideration is therefore needed before employing this common but overused technique.

What's the Use of a Hashtag? A Case Study

Although there are now sophisticated techniques for the analysis of social media, socio‐legal studies has yet to draw on them fully. In this article, we demonstrate how Twitter can produce insights about protest, law, and legality, through a case study of protests against the ‘bedroom tax’. The first involved challenging a policy in the courts using a test case or cases. We discuss the litigation strategies and the mess they created and counterpose those strategies with those of four prolific ‘tweeps’ who participated in our study. We argue that, despite the small number of participants, these people have, in their own way, been enormously influential and made things happen. Our position is not evaluative of the different strategies – but, rather, one that recognizes that legality is mobilized in different ways.     

Homosexuality as Defamation: A Proposal for the Use of the “Right-Thinking Minds” Approach in the Development of Modern Jurisprudence

False imputations of homosexuality have long been considered by courts to be defamatory per se, but many jurisdictions are beginning to revisit the issues surrounding homosexuality and defamation in the wake of a national debate over gay rights. This article examines whether courts should abandon false imputations of homosexuality as per se defamation and concludes that, at a minimum such statements should no longer be defamatory per se and further provides courts with a framework to go a step further and hold that such statements hold no defamatory meaning.     

‘A Fair Day’s Wage for a Fair Day’s Work’? Exploring the connection between the parliamentary work of MPs and their electoral support

Electoral systems across Europe increasingly invite candidates to build up a personal reputation to earn votes. In this article, we investigate whether parliamentary work can be considered as a personal vote-earning attribute for incumbent MPs based on data of the 2014 elections in Belgium. The results show that when parliamentary work is operationalised in a narrow way (i.e. as the number of bills and the number of oral and written questions of an MP), this has no influence on the amount of preferential votes. When parliamentary work is defined in a broader way (i.e. also including other aspects of the legislative and control function of MPs), parliamentary work has a significant positive effect for MPs from opposition parties. This supports the claim that the number of legislative and control activities is not sufficient to measure the impact of parliamentary work on preferential votes, but that also other aspects of the work should be taken into account.     

Abortion in Northern Ireland: Has the Rubicon Been Crossed?

On 7 June 2018, the Supreme Court delivered their long anticipated ruling on whether the abortion laws in Northern Ireland are compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Although the case was dismissed on procedural grounds, a majority of the court held that, obiter, the current Northern Irish law was incompatible with the right to respect for private and family life, protected by Article 8 ECHR, “insofar as it prohibits abortion in cases of rape, incest and fatal foetal abnormality”. This Supreme Court decision, seen alongside the May 2018 Irish referendum liberalising abortion, and the 5 June 2018 Parliamentary debate seeking to liberalise abortion laws in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, places renewed focus upon the abortion laws of Northern Ireland and Great Britain, which suggests that the ‘halfway house’ of the Abortion Act 1967 Act finally be close to being reformed to hand the decision of abortion to women themselves.     

Command Responsibility: Mode of Liability for the Crimes of Subordinates or Separate Offence of the Superior?

The nature of command responsibility is still open to debatein international criminal law: is a superior to be held criminallyresponsible for the crimes committed by his subordinates ‘asan accomplice’, for having participated in the commissionof the crime by omission, or as a perpetrator of a separateoffence of dereliction of duty? This article surveys the post-WW2case law and the first international instruments on this point,and then analyses the jurisprudence of the International CriminalTribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The judges appearto have recently adopted a new approach to Article 7(3) ICTYSt.in that the superior is held responsible ‘for failureto prevent or punish with regard to the crimes of the subordinate’and no longer ‘for the crimes of his subordinates’.It is a responsibility ‘sui generis’ indeed, wherethe crime of the subordinate plays a central role in the attributionof responsibility to the superior. It is, therefore, necessaryto carefully consider the relationship between the superior'sfailure to act and the subordinate's crime, both with regardto objective and subjective elements. The same question finallyarises in relation to Article 28 of the Rome Statute, the literalinterpretation of which implies that a superior shall be punishedfor the same crime committed by his subordinates. In order toavoid the risk of holding a person guilty of an offence committedby others in violation of the principle of personal and culpablecriminal responsibility, it is crucial to consider separatelythe different cases of command responsibility, which are basedon distinct objective and subjective requirements.     

Has Legal Realism Damaged the Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court?

Does understanding how U.S. Supreme Court justices actually decide cases undermine the institutional legitimacy of the nation's highest court? To the extent that ordinary people recognize that the justices are deciding legal disputes on the basis of their own ideological biases and preferences (legal realism and the attitudinal model), the belief that the justices merely “apply” the law (mechanical jurisprudence and the myth of legality) is difficult to sustain. Although it is easy to see how the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, the most unaccountable of all American political institutions, is nurtured by the view that judicial decisionmaking is discretionless and mechanical, the sources of institutional legitimacy under legal realism are less obvious. Here, we demonstrate, using a nationally representative sample, that the American people understand judicial decisionmaking in realistic terms, that they extend legitimacy to the Supreme Court, and they do so under the belief that judges exercise their discretion in a principled and sincere fashion. Belief in mechanical jurisprudence is therefore not a necessary underpinning of judicial legitimacy; belief in legal realism is not incompatible with legitimacy.