How Do the Laws of Probability Constrain Legislative and Judicial Efforts to Stop Racial Profiling?

Faced with pending legislation and litigation, numerous jurisdictionshave begun programs to monitor a range of traffic stop outcomes,focusing on variation by race or ethnicity. Existing programs,however, ignore the unequal outcomes that motivate oppositionto racial profiling. Statistical relationships limit the abilityof public policy to equalize the various outcomes, even if officersdo not engage in racial profiling to "any extent or degree."This article demonstrates relationships among five outcomesthat are or should be considered when policy on racial profilingis formulated: search rates, find rates, thoroughness of search,rates of detention of the innocent, and rates of apprehensionof the guilty. Once decisions are made as to how to balancedesires for equality of each of these outcomes, problems remainthat are common to statistical assessments of pattern- or practice-of-discriminationclaims.     

Can We Talk? What We Have Learned About How to Have Productive Conflicts About Family Policy and Family Law

How we handle professional conflicts affects our capacity to help others in conflict. Two AFCC dialogues, one about domestic violence, the other about shared parenting, illustrate the challenges of taking on professional differences. The former resulted in considerable consensus. The latter involved a frank exchange of differences but little overall consensus. It was, however, an important beginning of a critical conversation. Other issues calling out for constructive conflict engagement, include the crisis in providing access to justice for family litigants who cannot afford legal representation. Professional groups must move beyond defending their own self interests to addressing this crisis.     

“Can’t Stop,Won’t Stop”: Self-Control,Risky Lifestyles,and Repeat Victimization

Objectives

Drawing from lifestyle-routine activity and self-control perspectives, the causal mechanisms responsible for repeat victimization are explored. Specifically, the present study investigates: (1) the extent to which self-control influences the changes victims make to their risky lifestyles following victimization, and (2) whether the failure to make such changes predicts repeat victimization.

Methods

Two waves of panel data from the Gang Resistance Education and Training program are used (N = 1,370) and direct measures of change to various risky lifestyles are included. Two-stage maximum likelihood models are estimated to explore the effects of self-control and changes in risky lifestyles on repeat victimization for a subsample of victims (n = 521).

Results

Self-control significantly influences whether victims make changes to their risky lifestyles post-victimization, and these changes in risky lifestyles determine whether victims are repeatedly victimized. These changes in risky lifestyles are also found to fully mediate the effects of self-control on repeat victimization.

Conclusions

Findings suggest that future research should continue to measure directly the intervening mechanisms between self-control and negative life outcomes, and to conceptualize lifestyles-routine activities as dynamic processes.     

“I Don’t Want to Go Back to That Town:” Incarcerated Mothers and Their Return Home to Rural Communities

The increased representation of women in prisons and its consequences has been constructed as an urban, inner-city problem. Lost in this conversation, is the acknowledgement of how the limited socioeconomic opportunities, spatial isolation, and stigma which characterize rural America, lead to the vulnerabilities that mark the lives of rural women (Pruitt in Utah Law Rev 2:421–488, 2007). Through the lens of the Vulnerability Conceptual Model, this study explores the ways that community context shapes women’s experiences of mothering, the effect of incarceration on their children, and plans for returning home. Results of the study contribute to the limited research dedicated to rural women, usually obscured by society’s dominant urban perspective.     

Arbitration and Incentives: How to Preclude the Chilling Effect?

We seek to establish a mechanism for an arbitrator, as a set of rules used to control parties' incentives. We assume that the arbitrator is allowed to commit himself to a decision rule ex ante. The results show that the parties' messages reveal their private information if the costs of lie are high enough and if the decision rule is random. The decision rule described can apply to conventional arbitration and to final-offer arbitration.     

“‘I have done it and I have got to die’: Coroners' inquests of abortion deaths in Rhode Island, 1876–1938.”

This article offers an analysis of abortion deaths among white working-class women in Providence County based on thirty-three coroners records from 1876 to 1938. Most women were single and in their twenties: they chose abortion either because their lover was married, or they were too ashamed of their premarital sexual activity to confront their parents. Married women, on the other hand, did so primarily due to economic factors, extramarital affairs, or a strong desire for no more children. In seeking abortions, single women depended on lovers while married women relied on sisters or sisters-in-law. In investigating the deaths resulting from these abortions, coroners called husbands, but not lovers, before the inquests and sought out antemortem statements. Yet only 39% of cases had dying declarations: either doctors refused to participate in interrogating women on their death beds, or women refused to identify abortionists. Of the abortion providers identified, 45% were physicians. Working-class status did not prevent these women, and later their families, from securing expensive medical care from doctors. Both inquests and newspaper coverage in Providence County differ from studies by other scholars who find these venues used as mechanisms to embarrass women and warn single women of urban threats, and to target midwives over physicians. The evidence points to analogous handling of doctors and laypeople, and of married and single women. No intimate details of women's lives were exposed and newspapers did not use sensationalized headlines to draw attention to the illegal activity of abortion. Coroner inquests asked questions necessary to investigate death from a criminal activity, not to take a moral stance on female sexuality.     

How to Cautiously Uncover the “Black Box” of Machine Learning Models for Legislative Scholars

Machine learning models, especially ensemble and tree-based approaches, offer great promise to legislative scholars. However, they are heavily underutilized outside of narrow applications to text and networks. We believe this is because they are difficult to interpret: while the models are extremely flexible, they have been criticized as “black box” techniques due to their difficulty in visualizing the effect of predictors on the outcome of interest. In order to make these models more useful for legislative scholars, we introduce a framework integrating machine learning models with traditional parametric approaches. We then review three interpretative plotting strategies that scholars can use to bring a substantive interpretation to their machine learning models. For each, we explain the plotting strategy, when to use it, and how to interpret it. We then put these plots in action by revisiting two recent articles from Legislative Studies Quarterly.     

“I Had a Confidence Epiphany!”: Obstacles to Combating Post-Identification Confidence Inflation

Research shows that eyewitnesses often become more confident with their selections from a lineup over time, a problem labeled "confidence inflation." Wells et al. (1998) Law and Human Behavior, 22, 603-647 suggested that eyewitnesses provide a confidence statement immediately following their selection to capture an unadulterated measure of confidence. Three experiments tested the effectiveness of introducing such a statement to combat the effects of confidence inflation on mock-juror judgments. All experiments provided evidence that the attributions participants formed about the eyewitness' confidence inflation differentially impacted their judgments. Although mock-jurors generally discredited eyewitnesses who showed confidence inflation and sometimes lowered probability of guilt ratings for the defendant, a clear exception occurred when mock-jurors attributed the inflation to an epiphany. Use of post-identification confidence statements to decrease the impact of confidence inflation in the courtroom may be insufficient.     

How mock jurors’ cognitive processing and defendants’ immigrant status and ethnicity relate to decisions in capital trials

Journal of Experimental Criminology - This study examined how defendants’ immigrant status and ethnicity interact with evidence strength and mock jurors’ cognitive processing traits to...     

Who do I turn to? Resolving complaints by mental health consumers and carers

The current Australian system for handling complaints by mental health consumers and carers against service providers is complex and difficult to navigate. Complaints may be made to a range of people and organisations, including the relevant mental health service, community or official visitors, Health Services Commissioners, Chief Psychiatrists, Public Advocates, Ombudsmen and Members of Parliament. This Legal Issues column provides an overview of the law relating to complaints handling by community or official visitors, health service commissions and offices of the Chief Psychiatrist. It argues that while health service commissions may provide the best current avenue for complaints, there is a need for independent, centralised complaints bodies in Australian jurisdictions with similar powers to that of the Mental Welfare Commission for Scotland.     

How to Define Legislative Turnover? The Incidence of Measures of Renewal and Levels of Analysis

This article analyses different standard measures of legislative turnover. Two main concerns are discussed: (1) the very definition of turnover: incoming MPs versus first-term MPs; and (2) the level of analysis: the whole chamber versus political groups. To illustrate this discussion, turnover in the French lower chamber, the Assemblée Nationale, is studied. It is shown that the choice of a particular measure is not trivial since empirical results are affected by the definition adopted. If the distinction between incoming and first-term MPs does not greatly modify results, the choice of the level of analysis leads to contradictory results. It is shown that the very logic of electoral contests leads to renewal mostly among those who lost previous elections, while incumbent majorities that lose elections hardly experience renewal. As both these phenomena coexist for every single election, aggregate measures of turnover do not account for these contradictory tendencies and tend to concentrate on alternation rather than turnover.     

How Do Cause Lawyers Decide When and Where to Litigate on behalf of Their Cause?

In this article, we begin to respond to the deceptively simple question: How do cause lawyers decide when and where to litigate on behalf of their cause? We consider the choice of location and timing faced by cause lawyers when more than one jurisdiction evinces a suitable legal environment for pursuing litigation on their cause. To consider this choice, we use evidence from the timing and actions of cause lawyers in the marriage equality cases in the United States from January 1990 through December 2004. And, we show the value in utilizing methods that are relatively novel in cause lawyering research—statistical models—to consider the apparent commonalities, beyond a suitable legal environment, across locations and time periods that might prompt cause lawyers into action.     

‘I Can’t’: Capacity to Marry and the Question of Sex

To some extent the nature of the marriage contract has always been ‘about’ sex. Yet it is only in recent years that sex has become an explicit aspect of the legal test of capacity to marry. This paper explores how that test has been developed by the courts since the late 19th century. Through an examination of the case law it traces the nature of the relationship between sex and the capacity to marry; explores how capacity to consent to sexual relations has become a prominent strand within capacity to marry; and asks whether one effect of that prominence has been to marginalise the necessity for an individual to understand certain other important aspects of the marriage contract when assessing his or her capacity to marry.     

“Sealfie”, “Phoque you” and “Animism”: The Canadian Inuit Answer to the United-States Anti-sealing Activism

A corpus made by online Canadian newspaper articles, coming from the archives of CBC News, Vice Canada and Huffington Post Canada, and related multimedia contents such us audio interviews, videos and especially links to images and comments shared on Twitter, allows us to reconstruct the debate on the seal hunt that involved Canadian media in 2014. In specific, we propose an interpretation of the pro-sealing discourse by Canadian Inuit and Newfoundlanders as an ironic and incisive answer to the serious United States animal rights activists discourse, explaining how these two different points of view on animals come from a different experience of the environment and a different conception of nature. The image of the seal became the friction point between Western naturalism against Inuit animism: a multinaturalist (Descola in Beyond nature and culture, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2013) clash in the North America post-colonial situation. A clash solved by people as Tanya Tagaq and other Inuit artists that belong to these two different semiospheres (Lotman in Universe of the mind. A semiotic theory of culture. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1990) and thanks to their border placement can allow a dialog between Inuit and North American cultures traducing aesthetic forms, values and meanings. To study the structures of meaning at the base of this clash and iconoclash (Latour, in Weibel, Latour (eds) Iconoclash. Beyond the image-wars in science, religion and art, pp 14–37, ZKM and MIT Press, Boston, 2002) on the artic seal between opposite cultures, it has been necessary to use the socio-semiotic approach (Greimas and Courtés in Semiotics and language: an analytical dictionary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982, Marrone in Corpi sociali. Processi comunicativi e semiotica del testo, Einaudi, Torino, 2001) with the help of semiotics of culture tools (Lotman in Universe of the mind. A semiotic theory of culture. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, Culture and explosion. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2009].     

“Here,It’s Like You Don’t Have to Leave the Classroom to Solve a Problem”: How Restorative Justice in Schools Contributes to Students’ Individual and Collective Sense of Coherence

Social Justice Research - Students face innumerable stressors, in and outside of schools. Some schools are better able to support students to thrive, individually and collectively, in the midst of...     

Introduction to “Environmental Justice”

Justice issues have been prominent in the environmental debate since its beginning in the second half of the twentieth century. This is not surprising, because environmental crises highlight our conceptions of justice, challenging us to consider their adequacy as well as their implications. Does current justice theory accurately describe the issues raised by environmental threats, especially about the justice for future generations? What are the implications of perceptions of justice or injustice for responses to environmental problems, up to and including social protest? For the most part, environmental social sciences have not been at the forefront of these debates, despite some very important contributions. The goal of the present issue is, therefore, to bring together researchers in the field of environmental psychology and justice research and to provide a forum for current research in the field of environmental justice. This introduction gives a short overview of past, present, and emerging findings and questions.