Canadian Muslims,Islamophobia and national security

Demographic changes in Canada have resulted in an increase in the Muslim portion of the Canadian population. The anti-Muslim “Islamophobia” reaction to the 9/11 attacks led to an isolation and marginalization of Canada's Muslim citizens and residents. As the isolation and marginalization of any community creates a National Security vulnerability, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has been working with Muslim-Canadians using the principles of community policing to create trust and work towards the mutual goals of the safety of all Canadians.     

Evaluating Others If They Stand Up for Their Moral Convictions,and Evaluating Ourselves If We Don't Stand Up

Social Justice Research - Acting on one’s moral principles is not always easy. Upholding one’s moral beliefs may run counter to one’s social environment or situational demands. It...     

Age and family structures among the Jews of Mitau, Kurland, 1833–1834

The article analyzes an 1834 listing of the Jewish inhabitants in the city of Mitau in the province of Kurland, one of the Baltic provinces (the other two were Estland and Livland) of the Russian Empire. From Catherine the Great's reign onward, the Jewish population of the Baltic provinces rose steadily throughout the 19th century, but microstudies of Jewish communities in the region are virtually nonexistent, especially for the first half of the century. The Mitau list shows that the Jewish population there was very young, with about 45% being in the age group 0–14. Age at first marriage for males was about 24 years, and for females 21. From about age 35, 93% of males and 97% of females were married. The mean size of the family group was 5.8 persons, and about a third of all families were either extended (containing unmarried relatives beyond the nuclear family) or multiple (more than one kin-linked conjugal family unit). Judging by kinship terms in the source, the kin system tilted toward patrilineality, as would be expected. These characteristics need to be compared to other Jewish communities before and after 1834—in the Baltic area and surrounding regions—but the paucity of local studies suggests that some time will pass before the Mitau findings can be placed in an adequate comparative framework.     

沉默权制度的发展、利弊与限制

沉默权制度作为诸多国家在刑事诉讼中保障犯罪嫌疑人、被告人人权的一项重要制度,有必要对其历史发展、利弊及现今限制等问题予以了解,这对我国正在酝酿的刑事诉讼法的整体修改以及相关问题的废、改、立具有重要意义。     

Getting Marx and Foucault into Bed Together!

This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with a major book that influenced the author. Previous contributors include Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow, Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, and André-Jean Arnaud.     

Psychotropic Medication and Competence to Stand Trial

At any given time, as many as 15,000 persons are hospitalized for study or treatment regarding their competence to stand trial. Although most of the defendants found incompetent to stand trial "could rapidly be returned to competence and so maintained were the facilities and treatments of modern psychiatry made available to them", the impact of recent advances in psychiatry—particularly drug therapy—has not been fully absorbed by the legal system. Defendants restored to competence by psychotropic drugs frequently require ongoing medication. Some courts, mistakenly assuming that psychotropic drugs produce a "chemical sanity" that is unacceptable for participation in a trial, have adopted a practice—the "automatic bar rule"—of automatically prohibiting the return for trial of defendants under the influence of such drugs. A lack of statutory, regulatory, or judicial guidance leaves the question largely to the discretion of individual trial judges. This article critically examines the automatic bar rule in light of the effects of various psychotropic drugs and of the consequences of the rule both to defendants and to the state.     

About Each of Us and all of Us Together

Demographers are celebrating: the "Statistika" Press has published the collection Population of the USSR. 1973 [Naselenie SSSR. 1973]. Now a great deal of information that is important not only to demographers, and that was previously published in part in Vestnik statistiki, general statistical handbooks, and the seven-volume Results of the USSR Census of 1970 [Itogi Vsesoiuznoi perepisi 1970 goda], has appeared within a single set of covers. This is the first such collection since the war.     

Jews’ and Arabs’ Perceptions of Inter-Group and Intra-Group Date Rape

The study examined the influence of three factors on rape responsibility attributions: subjects’ gender, subjects’ ethnicity, and victim and perpetrator’s ethnicity. Participants were 247 undergraduate students in Israel (164 Jews and 83 Arabs). The most revealing findings are connected with the threefold interaction between the factors studied. It was found that Arab males and females, members of the minority ethnic group, tended to assign more responsibility to a victim involved in inter-group relationships, whereas Jewish males and females, members of the dominant majority group, attributed more responsibility to a victim involved in intra-group relationships. More specifically, Arab males attributed more responsibility to an Arab victim raped by a Jew, while Arab females attributed more responsibility to a Jewish victim raped by an Arab. Among Jews, males attributed more responsibility to an Arab victim raped by an Arab, and females attributed more responsibility to a Jewish victim raped by a Jew. Several ways to explain these interactions are suggested.     

与时俱进与政府创新

随着社会经济的发展,政府创新势在必行。通过创新政府理念,发展电子政务,建立学习型政府和富有创造精神的公务员队伍,来推动政府理念、目标、能力、形象的全面创新,不仅是与时俱进的精神内涵和具体要求,也是弘扬与时俱进精神的必然要求。。     

Me Voici,here I Am,Here I Stand,I Can Do No Other

This article offers a Levinasian reading of the case of Airedale N.H.S. Trust v Bland (1993). My contention is that the judicial reasoning that gave rise to the decision that Anthony Bland should die was driven by an ontological imperative I submit from a Levinasian perspective the decision was ethically indefensible because it failed to recognise Anthony Bland as the other. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

'An Unfortunate Coincidence': Jews and Jewishness in Twentieth-century English Judicial Discourse

This paper explores the neglected area of representations of Jews and Jewishness in English legal cases. In considering judicial knowledge of ‘the Jew’, I ask three primary questions. First, how do English judges understand and represent ‘the Jew’ and in relation to what material factors do these understandings and representations change? Second, how do English judges construct racial knowledge, what rhetorical technologies are fashioned and deployed? Third, are the effects of contemporary judicial racializations of Jewishness different in substance from earlier ones? The purpose of this paper is to study the encounter between English judges and ‘the Jew’ in the twentieth century, eschewing a reading that centres ‘antisemitism’ or ‘discrimination’ in favour of one that focuses on the complex and contradictory narratives in these judgments and the kinds of work these narratives do.     

An Examination of the Relationship Between Competency to Stand Trial,Competency to Waive Interrogation Rights,and Psychopathology

This study compared the legal abilities of defendants (N = 212) with current primary psychotic disorders (n = 44), affective disorders (n = 42), substance abuse disorders (n = 54), and no diagnosed major mental illness (n = 72). Defendants with primary psychotic disorders demonstrated more impairment than did other defendants in their understanding of interrogation rights, the nature and object of the proceedings, the possible consequences of proceedings, and their ability to communicate with counsel. Psychosis was of limited value as a predictor however, and high rates of legal impairment were found even in defendants with no diagnosed major mental illness. Sources of within-group variance were examined to further explain this finding. Policy and clinical implications of these results are discussed.