Political Self‐control and European Constitution: The Assumption of National Political Loyalty to European Obligations as the Solution to the Lex Posterior Problem of EC Law in the National Legal Orders

Current understandings of the constitutional effectiveness of EC law emphasise the European Court of Justice's (ECJ's) claims of supremacy and direct effect, and the acceptance of those claims by the national courts. However, the lex posterior problem of EC law in the national legal order—the problem whereby the application of European obligations in the national legal order could be legislated away by subsequent contrary national legislation—has been addressed not by national courts' acceptance of Costa but by national courts' assumption that national legislatures do not intend to legislate contrary to prior European obligations, often developed from separately established national doctrines which assume legislative fidelity to treaty obligations. As such, the solution to the lex posterior problem of EC law in the national legal orders rests on these national legal doctrines combined with pervasive national legislative self‐restraint. Political self‐control in the Member States supports the European legal order.     

Beyond the census. Reconstructing Dutch women's labour market participation in agriculture in the Netherlands,ca. 1830–1910

Many historians have pointed out for various countries that nineteenth-century national censuses do not accurately reflect women's economic activity. This was no different for the Dutch national censuses. In this article, we argue that under-recording was especially severe in agriculture, and that this problem increased towards the end of the century. The rise in under-recording was partly due to an increased irregularity of women's work on farms, but it also reflected changing living standards and ideologies, in which work was increasingly defined as undesirable for women. In relative terms, agriculture did become less important to men and women alike because of mechanization and industrialization. Nevertheless, agriculture continued to employ many women, especially married women and daughters working on their husbands' and fathers' farms. By offering additional source material and methods for estimating women's labour force participation in agriculture on a regional level, such as relating their occupational status to their husbands', and estimating the number of days worked, we aim to offer an enhanced methodology for gauging the work of women in agriculture, which may be applied to future research.     

Control de motivación de fallos en la corte de estrasburgo

Strasbourg Court's case-law, point out the framework for the duty to give reasons, avoiding theoretic constructions. In this way, don't review the domestic statutes either the finds of national authorities.     

G-map's application of the Good Lives Model to adolescent males who sexually harm: A case study

Abstract

The Good Lives Model (GLM) is a strengths-based approach that conceptualises sexually harmful behaviour as an individual's inappropriate means to meet their core personal and social needs. It promotes managing potential risk through acknowledging the individual's needs, goals and aspirations and working towards meeting these in safe and positive ways. As a specialist organisation working with adolescents who sexually harm, G-map has adapted the GLM for its client group and employs it as a framework for problem formulation and intervention planning. Using a single case-study design, this paper illustrates how the GLM can be used as a framework for therapeutic practice. The case study involves an adolescent male who sexually assaulted an adult female. G-map's experience of the clinical utility and strengths of the Good Lives Model are discussed, alongside an acknowledgement that the dearth of outcome research relating to this model is a limitation.     

Human Rights in the Council of Europe and the EU: Towards ‘Individual’, ‘Constitutional’ or ‘Institutional’ Justice?

Abstract: The European Convention on Human Rights, promulgated by the Council of Europe in 1950, is widely regarded as the world's most successful experiment in the trans‐national judicial protection of human rights. The EU's much more recent judicial and political interest in human rights has also been widely welcomed. Yet, while the crisis currently afflicting the Convention system has not gone unnoticed, the same cannot equally be said of the difficulties presented by the increasing interpenetration of the two systems. Amongst the few who have shown some interest in these problems, the dominant view is that good will and common sense will provide adequate solutions. We disagree. Instead, we detect a gathering crisis which, unless properly analysed and effectively tackled, will only deepen as the EU's interest in human rights develops further. In our view, the problem is essentially conceptual and that, ultimately, it boils down to a much‐neglected question, simple to state but not so easy to answer: is the trans‐national protection of human rights in Europe a matter of ‘individual’, ‘constitutional’ or ‘institutional’ justice?     

Policies and practices of fertility control under the state socialism

The socialist state run modernization produced low fertility throughout Eastern Europe. Fertility rates started falling soon after the end of the Second World War quickly reaching below replacement levels in many areas. This article examines the state responses to the falling fertility as well as birth control practices that individuals relied on in order to maintain small families. After outlining some common features of population policies under the state socialism, the article focuses on family planning policies in Yugoslavia. It is argued that liberal population policy and uninterrupted liberal abortion legislation in Yugoslavia, resulted, among other reasons, from the communist leadership's commitment to national and gender equality, respectively. It is further argued that gender hierarchy within the marriage and family remained almost untouched by the socialist project of women's emancipation and that these hierarchical gender relations shaped birth control practices in specific ways.     

The family planning service and the pill in Geneva (1965–1980): a step towards women's emancipation?

In 1965, a family planning service was created in Geneva which aimed at spreading information on contraception. This article focuses on the attitude of the centre vis-à-vis the new contraceptive methods, especially the pill, and puts it in perspective with other voices, such as those of feminists. In order to address the question of women's emancipation, it relies on the archives of the family planning centre and of the Women's Liberation Movement of Geneva. The centre's pedagogical discourse about contraception focuses on stable couples and a rational attitude towards reproduction and family planning. It reflects the dominance of medical theories in the field of sexuality in Geneva during this period. The author suggests that the centre's approach to contraception contributed to the diffusion of a new contraceptive norm by combining contraceptive information with messages concerning the proper type of relationship, the state of mind and even the feelings with which contraception should be associated. The sources, however, also suggest a gap between the messages delivered and actual uses made of the centre. While maintaining a conservative and normative discourse, the family planning service nevertheless gave women the possibility to increase their autonomy.     

Making the Case for Evaluation Partnerships in Child Protection Mediation Programs: Insights from a Case Study

Many jurisdictions have instituted child protection mediation programs (CPM) for the purposes of reducing the length of children's stays in out‐of‐home care and decreasing court system burden, and numerous studies have shown promising results. However, important implementation and sustainability problems persist. This article presents a case study's findings and retrospectively interprets underlying reasons for challenges the program faced in implementation. Study implications call for a more structured planning process, including early partnership with experienced court‐based evaluators to develop successful marketing and recruitment strategies that may encourage stakeholder endorsement and foster sustainability.     

Automated administrative decision-making under the influence of the GDPR – Early reflections and upcoming challenges

This article examines the intersection of the GDPR and selected due process requirements in the context of automated administrative decision-making. It finds that the safeguards for decisions based solely on automated data processing provided by the GDPR coincide with or serve a comparable function to traditional administrative due process elements such as the duty to give reasons, the duty of care principle, and the right to a hearing. The automation of decision-making by public authorities across the EU will therefore be regulated by an overlap of national administrative procedures and the GDPR. This overlap, however, leads to a paradoxical problem: on the one hand, the GDPR is an inflexible legal instrument aimed at setting out in detail the rights of data subjects and the obligations of data controllers, and it does not offer national legislators much room to align its terms with national administrative procedures. On the other, the GDPR's broad language makes it susceptible to interpretations embedded in the elaborated practices of the national administrations. The unclear relationship between national administrative procedures and the GDPR may undermine its main purpose – to establish an equal level of protection in all EU Member States through its ‘consistent and homogenous application’. After outlining the main challenges in this regard, the article concludes with a call for further research and regulatory frameworks adjustments aimed at developing a better governance regime for automated administrative decision-making that would allow for embracing technological progress while keeping threats to individual rights in check.     

Statewide Assessment of Response to Domestic Violence in Louisiana

The Louisiana statewide assessment of domestic violence attitudes and services was a cooperative effort between the Louisiana Community Policing Institute and the Criminal Justice Program at the University of Louisiana, Monroe. The research project included both surveys and focus groups from Louisiana's eight law enforcement planning districts. Results indicate that the response to domestic violence in Louisiana is generally inadequate. Furthermore, problems exist with respect to the definition of domestic violence among agencies. Finally, four basic barriers to successful intervention were identified, including lack of resources, lack of education and training, victims' lack of confidence in the system, and lack of a coordinated response to the problem. Recommendations are presented for overcoming these obstacles.     

Encryption: A 21st Century National Security Dilemma

As the 21st century approaches, encryption is presenting a national security dilemma in the US. While the use of strong encryption for computerized data is essential in protecting our nation, widespread, unregulated encryption poses serious problems on two levels: encryption could inhibit the government's ability to enforce the law as well as gather foreign intelligence. As a result, the government has established export controls on encryption products and proposed a 'key recovery' system designed to enable law enforcement officers to access encrypted data in the course of lawful investigations. The export controls have been ineffective and counterproductive policy and are arguably unconstitutional under the First Amendment. However, export controls are the only viable solution to the intelligence gathering problem and will need to survive these political and legal attacks or our national security could be jeopardized. Key recovery will be difficult and costly to implement and has come under attack by civil liberties' groups. Nevertheless, a cost-effective compromise on key recovery is necessary to meet the needs of law enforcement. Such a system, if it mirrored current electronic surveillance law, would effectively balance individual privacy rights and governmental interests and thus should survive constitutional scrutiny. Congress and President Clinton ought to enact key recovery legislation soon before the use of encryption becomes commonplace. A failure to act intelligently and effectively on this critical, cutting-edge issue could compromise our nation's future.     

Bringing Back the States: A Congressional Perspective on the Fall of Slavery in America

In the aftermath of America's Civil War, national lawmakers who chronicled the fall of slavery described the North as a terrain of states whose representatives assembled in Congress, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–77) and Alexander Stephens’s A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–70). Beginning in the early 1900s, scholars who helped establish the field of American constitutional history redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in Henry Wilson's The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (1872–1877) and Alexander Stephens's A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States (1868–1870), a first generation of scholars writing during the Progressive Era redescribed the national government as the voice of the Northern people and the foe of the states, as evidenced in William A. Dunning's Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (1898), John W. Burgess's The Civil War and the Constitution (1901–1906), and James G. Randall's Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (1926). Although a second generation of scholars uncovered traces of the lawmakers' perspective of states, new efforts in the wake of the civil rights movement to understand the internal workings of political parties and the contributions of ordinary Americans kept the study of national lawmakers and their states on the margins of inquiry, as evidenced in leading revisionist histories of Reconstruction, including Harold Hyman's A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (1973), Michael Les Benedict's A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (1974a), and Eric Foner's Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution (1988). Today, the terrain of Northern states remains in the backdrop, as illustrated in recent studies featuring the wartime national government, including James Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012) and Mark E. Neely, Jr.'s Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (2011), as well as studies of the mechanisms of constitutional change during Reconstruction, including relevant sections of Bruce Ackerman's We the People II: Transformations (1998) and Akhil Reed Amar's America's Constitution: A Biography (2005). This review essay argues that incorporating the states back into this century‐old framework will open new lines of inquiry and provide a more complete account of federalism's role in the fall of slavery. In particular, a return to the archives suggests that in the uncertain context of mid‐nineteenth‐century America, slavery's leading opponents in Congress saw the Constitution's federal logic not simply as an obstacle, but as a crucial tool with which to mobilize collective action and accommodate wartime opposition at a time when no one could say for sure what would remain of the United States.     

Law Students on Interdisciplinary,Problem‐Solving Teams: An Empirical Evaluation of Educational Outcomes at the University Of Denver's Resource Center for Separating and Divorcing Families

Models of lawyering in separation and divorce disputes are evolving to emphasize interdisciplinary collaboration, problem solving, alternative dispute resolution, and changes in legal education that reflect these changes in practice. At the University of Denver's Resource Center for Separating and Divorcing Families (Center), supervised law and mental health graduate students worked as a team to provide assessment and service planning, mediation, therapy, and agreement drafting to parents. Evaluation results showed client satisfaction, and that students acquired new knowledge, skills, and values in line with a collaborative, problem‐solving orientation. Strengths and weaknesses of the model are considered.     

Yea or Nay: Do Legislators Benefit by Voting Against Their Party?

This article asks whether legislators are able to reap electoral benefits from opposing their party on one or more high‐profile issues. Using data from a national survey in which citizens are asked their own positions on seven high‐profile issues voted on by the U.S. Senate, as well as how they believe their state's two senators have voted on these issues, I find that senators generally do not benefit from voting against their party. Specifically, when a senator deviates from her party, the vast majority of out‐partisans nonetheless persist in believing that the senator voted with her party anyhow; and while the small minority of out‐partisans who are aware of her deviation are indeed more likely to approve of and vote for such a senator, there are simply too few of these correctly informed citizens for it to make a meaningful difference for the senator's overall support.     

G. A. Cohen's Conception of Law: A Critique*

This note will challenge G. A. Cohen's view of the interaction between legal systems and economic structures; such interaction raises the so-called problem of legality, which Cohen sets out to solve in the eighth chapter of Karl Marx's Theory of History (Cohen 1978, 216–47). In the course of this note, we shall interrogate the presumed rigor of Cohen's theory of base/superstructure relations, to which his understanding of law is central. His approach will not be simply destroyed, but will be resituated in a network of problems that can highlight a certain fissure between his aspirations and his performance.     

Children's right to be educated for tolerance: minority rights and inclusion

States do not make a genuine commitment to peace where children's right to be educated for tolerance is denied. Education for tolerance is considered a central aim of education, as set out in Article 29 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Hence, states are obliged under the convention to create conditions conducive to such an education. Such conditions undoubtedly include providing an opportunity in an educational setting for some level of interaction between children of different backgrounds (while still maintaining whatever educational programmes are deemed necessary for the preservation of the culture of various minority groups). To eliminate the opportunity for any level of educational integration between children from the dominant group and from various national minority groups or other identifiable groups (such as disabled and non-disabled children, citizen and immigrant or child refugee groups) is to infringe upon children's fundamental human right to free association. Such an association is necessary for children's positive mental and spiritual development. The courts have unfortunately been inconsistent in protecting the right to a tolerant educational setting since they often regard children's education rights as subsumed under parental liberty rights.     

加强我国食品安全工作的思考

本文对《食品安全法》实施以来全国食品安全形势进行分析,指出当前我国食品安全存在的主要问题,提出了加强食品安全工作的五项具体措施：大力开展食品安全宣传教育活动;加紧制定完善各级各类食品安全标准并切实贯彻执行;完善食品安全监管系统,强化对食品安全的全程监督;建立食品安全风险监测、评估、预警制度;加强对食品安全源头监管。     

The Logic of Time in Law and Legal Expert Systems*

Abstract. Research on an expert system regarding unemployment insurance law has pointed to the difficulties of explicitly representing temporal relations. The question has been addressed in the artificial intelligence literature with respect to planning systems and linguistic analysis. The approaches adopted do not appear to be directly transposable to legal discourse. The problem seems so far to have escaped notice amongst researchers attempting to develop legal expert systems. The paper explores in a preliminary way how lawyers use temporal concepts. It is submitted that “legal time” only partly overlaps with real time. A sketch of a formalization of temporal relations in law, following J. F. Allen's approach, is presented.