Enough Arguments About Models of Development

A krai-level organization for the Our Home Is Russia movement has recently been established in Krasnodar Krai. This event undoubtedly had major political importance, and not just at the level of the Kuban. It also gave me serious cause to consider what lies ahead for us in the near future and whether, perhaps, the time has come when we can realistically hope to escape all the misfortunes we know so well. I joined the new movement and even agreed to head the krai organization, but not by any means out of a "call of duty." I am convinced that this is not simply another "provincial branch" of yet another capital-city party. The realities of recent years have shown that none of the pocket-sized and even smaller parties can solve the problems that face us as citizens of our country. People are waiting for things to happen. They are waiting for speculative arguments over this or that model of social development to be replaced by the creation of a normal human life.     

On Mimicry and the Psychology of the Belief in a Just World: Imitating the Behaviors of Others Reduces the Blaming of Innocent Victims

Innocent victims of crime are often blamed for what happened to them. In this article, we examine the hypothesis that victim blaming can be significantly reduced when people mimic the behavior of the victim or even a person unrelated to the crime. Participants watched a person on a video after which we assessed the extent of their spontaneous mimicry reactions (Study 1) or participants were instructed to mimic or not to mimic the movements of this person (Study 2). Then, they were informed about a rape and criminal assault and judged the degree to which they thought the victims were responsible for the crime. One of the crimes happened to the same person as the person they previously did or did not mimic. The other crime happened to a person unrelated to the mimicry situation. Results of both studies revealed that previously mimicking the victim or an unrelated person reduced the degree to which victims were being blamed.     

POWER IN THE AMERICAN ECONOMY: A REVIEW AND COMMENTARY

The two books I have been reviewing have made a number of points about the nature of power in the American economy. Our economic society is dominated by large institutional actors. Supporting this reality are layers of traditional reasons, some of which are myth-like. These institutions are not necessarily as efficient or as innovative as these traditional beliefs inform us, and they coalesce to form an interconnected whole that operates to serve institutional interests first. In the process, large business corporations come to see natural persons as roles. This perception at once increases the individual's mobility and her irrelevance. Many of us are leading meaningless lives as we serve the objectives of others in our work. Overall, the large American business corporation has brought a new form of social organization that substantially truncates us as natural, whole persons. In the process, these organizations are challenging the family as a dominant form of organization in our society. Rights in our society accrue to the actor with productive capacity. Through the use of political power, market research, and advertising, we can discern a type of power that subtly conditions us to believe that this reorganization of our environment is proper and right. As we pursue our own “free will,” therefore, we actually submit to the objectives of the large business corporation. Generally speaking, Adams, Brock, and Coleman agree on this fundamental point: the dignity of individual purpose and meaning that we share and that define us as human beings is thwarted by a set of institutional arrangements that have fundamentally reoriented our society to serve the institutions' own objectives of profit and growth. Why is this important? It seems that in social systems, like mechanical systems, something is lost when mass is increased. As our important institutions become larger, what is lost is a kind of knowledge about our own environment and how it works. In the place of this first-hand knowledge, we come to rely on second-hand knowledge provided by social-science experts. Without this first-hand knowledge, we lose the confidence that we have the ability to see for ourselves what has meaning and to bring about desired changes in our lives. With the loss of confidence, we lose power, a form of power that each of us is told from childhood that we, by nature, should have. Our individual wills and perceptions atrophy without use. We come to believe that our place in the social order is inevitable and natural. In short, the individual, the source of both knowledge and political rights, has become secondary to the will and strength of large private and public institutions. How can natural, individual actors regain–or perhaps realize for the first time –power in their own lives? In reaching for an answer to this question, I believe Adams, Brock, and Coleman have overlooked some essential features of our modern political economy.     

Intoxication and the Act/Control/Agency Requirement

Doug Husak has argued, persuasively I think, that there is no literal ??act requirement?? in Anglo-American law. I begin by reviewing Husak??s reasons for rejecting the act requirement, and provide additional reasons to think he is right to do so. But Husak??s alternative, the ??control condition??, I argue, is inadequate. The control requirement is falsified by the widespread practice of holding extremely intoxicated offenders liable for criminal conduct they engage in even if they lack control over their conduct at the time of the offense, and even if they are acting involuntarily. I provide examples from Canadian, US and German law to flesh out our legal practices with respect to intoxicated offenders. I then argue that, at least with respect to one class of intoxicated offenders?Cthose known as ??grand schemers??, who plan their criminal offending prior to rendering themselves incapable of voluntary control over their conduct?Cwe are morally justified in imposing liability. I then propose an alternative to both the act and control requirements: what I call the ??agency requirement??. I argue that our law does and should impose liability for conduct that is expressive of or constitutive of the defendant??s practically rational agency. Adopting an agency view allows us to expand our focus from just the moment of the offense to temporally extended instances of agency, such as is involved in planned offending by grand schemers.     

It Is Important to Understand Our Strengths and Weaknesses

[From the editors of Zhurnalist:] The magical metamorphoses of our journalism could happen only in fairy tales. First, it transformed itself from a handmaiden of the Party into a "fourth estate," literally overnight, then reduced itself to a conveyer belt. Clearly there has been much change in us. So what are these changes, what caused them, and what might their consequences be for us and for society?     

Age differences in eyewitness testimony

This study examined age differences in eyewitness testimony. Children, three and six years of age, and adults interacted with an unfamiliar man for 5 minutes. Four or five days later, the witnesses answered objective and suggestive questions, recalled what happened, and tried to identify the confederate from a target-present photo line-up. The adults and 6-year-olds did not differ in their ability to answer objective questions or identify the confederate, but 6-year-olds were more suggestible than adults and recalled less about the event. Compared to the older age groups, the 3-year-olds answered fewer objective questions correctly, recalled little about what happened, and identified the confederate less frequently. In addition, they were the most suggestible. The experiment extends our knowledge of children's ability to provide accurate eyewitness reports to a very young age group and to a situation in which participants are not merely bystander witnesses but instead directly interact with the confederate.     

A reflection on 30 years of complementary collaboration

This article, invited by the editors, provides us with an opportunity to reflect on a scholarly collaboration of more than 30 years. Looking backwards, we believe our success has come in part from the different backgrounds that we bring to our collaboration. It also comes from the fact that neither of us at the time we met was comfortable with the scholarly models that we were intellectually programmed to pursue in our individual careers. We discuss not only what our collaboration has produced, but also the pragmatic and serendipitous elements that have gone into working out and defining our research approach, and how that approach has changed in relation to the shifting scholarly context and related changes in the global political economy, our own ambitions, and opportunities and obstacles that have at times shifted our focus. Our individual and collective career trajectories also say something about the scholarly fields in which we have operated.     

商事关系法律调整之研究——类型化路径与法体系分工

商事关系乃全部商法的基石概念。商法的研究不能回避商事关系的概念、构成及其法律调整机制。从主体类型化角度可将商事关系区分为四类:商主体与商主体之闻以营利为目的的商事关系;商主体与作为监管者的非商主体之间与营利相关的商事关系;商主体与作为消费者的非商主体之间基于商主体的营利目的而形成的商事关系以及非商主体与非商主体之间偶尔为之的营利性行为形成的商事关系。四此,商事关系可以界定为主体双方或一方基于营利性目的而形成的社会关系。营利性目的是衡量是否构成商事关系的本质,至于是否发生于平等主体之间,是否发生于持续营业之中,均非商事关系本质内涵。商事关系可以由商法调整但却不必都由商法调整,甚至可能根本不由法律调整。从主体类型化的角度理解商事关系的构成,不仅有助于商法理论知识的进化,也有助于我们撩开商法的面纱,现实地对待关于商法调整对象的困惑和商法法典化的神话。     

什么是法学研究——民法学习的一点体会

研究生学习阶段的学习目标最为重要的是什么呢 ?我认为就是“研究” ,就是要把法律的概念、原则甚至体系拿来研讨 ,区别它的科学与谬误、正义与非正义 ,因此 ,这个阶段的学习不是当收音机 ,不只是接收他人的观点 ,而是要自主分析、积极讨论 ,提出自己的观点 ,其核心就是“研究”。     

Framing the Choice Between Cash and the Courthouse: Experiences With the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund

In this article I report the results of a quantitative and qualitative empirical study of how those who were injured or lost a family member in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks evaluated the tradeoff between a cash payment—available through the Victim Compensation Fund—and the pursuit of litigation. Responses make it clear that potential plaintiffs saw much more at stake than monetary compensation and that the choice to forego litigation required the sacrifice of important nonmonetary, civic values: obtaining and publicizing information about what happened, prompting public findings of accountability for those responsible, and participating in the process of ensuring that there would be responsive change to what was learned about how the attacks and deaths happened. The results shed light on the framing component of the transformation of disputes, and in particular on how potential litigants see the decision to sue, or not, as a decision as much or more about how they understand their relationship to their community and their responsibilities as a citizen as how they evaluate monetary considerations.     

Law,Learning, Technology: Reiving Ower the Borders

Serious consideration of our students' learning requires us to engage with the theoretical constructs of other disciplines, some of which have much to tell us about how we teach law, how we might teach it more effectively; how our students learn and what they understand as learning. This interdisciplinary understanding is an essential component in the dialectic between theory and praxis of teaching and learning, and the law. If this is true for what might be termed more traditional learning methods, it is even more the case for computerbased educational interventions. In computer-based learning, the management of learning on many levels becomes critical to educational success, and the understanding and application of interdisciplinary theory plays an important role in the design and development of materials and in the learning events themselves.     

Abetting a Crime

I focus on the set of problems that arise in identifying both the actus reus and (to an even greater extent) the mens rea needed by an abettor before she should be criminally liable for complicity in a crime. No consensus on these issues has emerged in positive law; commentators are enormously dissatisfied with the decisions courts have reached; and critics disagree radically about what reforms should be implemented to rectify this state of affairs. I explicitly deny that I will be able to solve these problems, although I hope at least to identify a central source of the confusion. In my view, the problem results largely from conceptualizing the liability of abettors as derivative. This diagnosis helps us to understand why the problem is likely to remain insoluble in positive law. If the test of an adequate theory consists primarily in its ability to produce results that conform to our moral intuitions about how particular cases should be resolved, no approach that can be implemented in the real world will prove wholly satisfactory. I advance a hypothesis about why failure is inevitable and what should be done in light of this predicament. Legal realities compel us to adopt a position that is suboptimal from a moral point of view.     

Local Self-Government in Russia: An Unrealized Project

It so happened that, in 1989, A. Migranian and I initiated a long discussion over whether we, like many other countries, are fated to go through a period of authoritarian government during the transition to a modern market economy. It has also transpired that some people (as a rule from the ranks of the most radical democrats) who at the time refused even to pose the question of a "firm hand" and who saw no difference between pointing out the possibility of authoritarianism and calling for its introduction now cannot even imagine further progressive development of our homeland without such a "firm hand" and are placing all their hopes in this (guided, of course, by an enlightened head).     

JOURNEY FROM SUCCESS TO SIGNIFICANCE

One of the most important journeys that we can take as individuals is the journey from success to significance. Success is what we become and what we achieve when we value ourselves. Significance, however, is what we become and what we achieve when we value others. In this article, based on remarks by Judge David W. Young at the May 2007 “Summit on Unified Family Courts,” Judge Young invites us on a journey, first described by John Maxwell in The Journey from Success to Significance. Judge Young further explores what the journey from success to significance entails and reminds us that any success we have will leave the world with us while our significance will continue to live on in future generations through our service to children, families, and others.     

Legal Judgment as Self-Mastery

Many legal theorists see legal judgment as a largely professional or technical task. This is not how law sees itself. When looked at from the perspective of the engaged judge, law requires from us that we arrive at a certain internal governance of our thoughts and emotions. Legal scholarship and legal procedure tell us that law creates true reasons that override other, personal, reasons, even those of the utmost importance to us. A philosophical understanding of law requires a distinct argument that explains how such overriding reasons can be associated with the law and how there can be a personal duty to adapt our reasoning when we make authoritative legal judgments in order to change the lives of others. The philosophy of law needs to explain how legal judgment can be a form of self-mastery.     

Evaluating prediction of technology transfer success: An interim evaluation of the dutch sensor technology program

Technology Foundation STW, a grant organization in the Netherlands, selects research proposals from universities on the basis of their scientific quality and their utilization potential. The proposals are in the field of applied science. STW also assists the research groups in the four years after the grant by bringing together the researchers and the potential users in half-day meeti gs twice a year at the university concerned. STW seeks methods to relate the differences in the research outcomes (“evaluation after”) to the differences in assessment rankings (“evaluation before”). This study will focus on the evaluation of a sensor technology program managed by STW as a subset of the larger set of all research projects funded by STW. We go back to the most basic and simple definition of utilization of outcome, namely whether the research results were or were not used by parties outside the university. This simple basis gives surprisingly positive results. First, it does indeed seem that for STW as a whole, the assessment beforehand is a predictor of the chance that the results will be used later. But this does not seem to be true as far as the subset of sensor technology projects is concerned. These findings can help us obtain more insight into what our selection process does and into what determines the success rate in terms of utilization six years after the research has ended.     

The Nature and Basis of Human Dignity

Abstract. We argue that all human beings have a special type of dignity which is the basis for (1) the obligation all of us have not to kill them, (2) the obligation to take their well‐being into account when we act, and (3) even the obligation to treat them as we would have them treat us, and indeed, that all human beings are equal in fundamental dignity. We give reasons to oppose the position that only some human beings, because of their possession of certain characteristics in addition to their humanity (for example, an immediately exercisable capacity for self‐consciousness, or for rational deliberation), have full moral worth. What distinguishes human beings from other animals, what makes human beings persons rather than things, is their rational nature, and human beings are rational creatures by virtue of possessing natural capacities for conceptual thought, deliberation, and free choice, that is, the natural capacity to shape their own lives.     

Reform at a Half Year from Readiness,or What Exactly "Independence in the Resolution of Questions of Local Significance" Is Going to Mean

The heat of the discussion on the coming municipal reform has reached a high point. Evidence of this can be found, in particular, in what happened in the Kaliningrad State Council. Unfortunately, the time until the start of the active phase of the reform—on January 1, 2006—is growing smaller and smaller, while the number of questions that need to be resolved is not diminishing, and is even increasing. On July 8, the State Duma is to consider a law concerning the date for the beginning of the reform. And from all indications, the deputies will not be hurrying it.