Multiple suicidal gunshots to the head

We report two cases of suicide by multiple gunshots to the head. The first victim (of two shots) fired the first shot, which was observed, into his mouth, leading to damage to the left optic nerve and frontal lobe. The man still was able to drive his car home, where he shot himself in his right temple. He died 2 days later. The second victim (of three shots) was a 58-year-old man who was found dead on his bed. Reconstruction of the case disclosed that the first shot had passed through his tongue and slightly damaged the second cervical vertebral body. He then shot himself in his right temple, leading to damage of the temporal lobe. Finally, he shot himself in his left temple, resulting in destruction of the pons. In the first case, an amateurishly modified 8-mm blank revolver firing 6.35-mm- (.25)-caliber ammunition was used; in the second case, a rifle firing 5.6-mm (.22)-caliber ammunition with a reduced charge was used. In both cases, low-energy transfer to brain tissue by the initial bullets was due to low bullet energy or due to the bullets' missing the brain or vital centers.     

Unusual results due to transfused blood.

During a murder enquiry, the forensic science investigation used PGM and EAP blood grouping systems and detected a mixture of blood on the deceased's jacket. The blood groups matched those of the deceased and accused. The results of DNA analysis, however, proved that only a single source of DNA, matching the deceased, was present. Supplementary information relating to the transfusion of the individual whilst still wearing his clothing led the authors to conclude that a mixture of transfused blood and the individual's own blood had effused from his body via a stab wound, and onto his clothing.     

Levinas,Israel and the Call to Conscience

This article argues that Gillian Rose’s critique of Levinas’s marriage of political commentary to his thinking on ethics is misplaced in that it fails to identify the nature and essence of his project. I demonstrate that Rose’s complaint rests upon Levinas’s refusal to contextualise his ethics, which she perceives as a betrayal of modernist philosophy. I reject this analysis and demonstrate how clearly it misses the mark when she takes Levinas to task for his supposed ‚exoneration’ of Israel. Levinas’s position on Israel is, on an initial superficial reading, ambivalent but within that ambivalence he has clearly identified the gap that exists between Israel as a political entity and Israel as a spiritual community. It is precisely the very diremption, to which Rose takes such exception, that opens up the possibility of calling the state of Israel to moral accountability.     

Homicide-suicide by a single gunshot to the head

Apart from typical suicides, there are sometimes unusual deaths from gunshots to the head. The presented case is a double death from the autopsy material of the Institute of Legal Medicine in Berlin. The report deals with a murder-suicide of a man, who killed himself and his 2-year-old daughter by a single gunshot. After having administered a tranquilizer to the child, he held her head to his own and fired a contact shot to his right temple so that the bullet passed through both heads.     

Hart's Jurisprodence: Its relation to Philosophy

The essay concerns the way jurisprudence adapts to the challanges set by contemporary philosophy concentarting upon the case of Hart"s legal theory. Hart produced one paradigm of linking philosphical considerations to jurisprudential analyses. He seemed to believe that the investigation of legal phenomena must itself raise and answer the underlying philosophical questions (only occasionally relying on philosophical sources). Although Hart was well aware of the rising new philosophy of his time, he sought to elaborate an autonomus conceptual framework for philosophical jurisprudence. The essay often takes Wittgenstein as an example for elucaidating Hart"s relation to philosophy (although critizing those who believe that Hart"s is a key figure in the jurisprudential reception of Wittgenstein"s later philosophy). The essayjustifies Hart"s claim to gain theoretical autonomy but points to three mistakes in that prespect. (1) He sometimes misconcieved his philodophical sources owing to the fact that he refrained from analyzing them. (2) Hart justified some of his crucial claims by a combination of arguments that is not entirely consistent. (3) His standpoint often raised philosophical issues but sometimes failed to make an identifiable point upon them. The essay concludes that Hart was right in thinking that the time had come to reconsider the conditions of making theories about law but he couild not justify his assumption that the reconsideration would lead to certain kind of comprehensive theory of law.     

Supreme Court denies leave to appeal in medical marijuana charter challenge

As previously reported in this publication, in January 2002 the Ontario Court of Appeal denied Jim Wakeford's claim that Canada's laws prohibiting marijuana possession and cultivation infringe his constitutional rights to liberty and security of the person. On 22 November 2002 the Supreme Court of Canada announced that it would not hear his appeal from that decision.     

车文博先生对心理学"三史"研究的开拓性贡献

车文博先生在吸收借鉴、扬弃超越他人的研究视域和编篡原则的基础上,持之以恒地大胆探索,出版了数本(套)在国内外心理学界产生重大影响的鸿篇巨制。车文博先生关于心理学三史的创新性研究,实现了从心理学知识史到认识史、从心理学学科史到思想史、从单一文化心理学史到多元文化心理学比较思想史的整体性跨跃,体现了先生作为理论心理学家、心理学史家和心理哲学家的治学理念和学术风范,三史研究具有里程碑式的意义。     

Tentative injuries to exposed skin in a homicide case.

A 28-year-old man stabbed both his wife and his 3-year-old son to death, before unsuccessfully attempting to commit suicide. The incident occurred against a background of marital conflict. The child's body exhibited six tentative wounds to the skin in the area of the heart, with no corresponding defects in the overlying clothing, a pattern normally seen only in suicide. Their presence can be explained by the fact that this can be considered an extended suicide, the father's motivation for the killing being comparable to that for true suicide. However, wounds of this nature can be produced in such cases only if the victim is severely limited in his ability to defend himself, here due to the superior physical strength of the father.     

论保险法上解除权与民法上撤销权之竞合

投保人违反保险合同告知义务时,保险人的合同解除权与撤销权可能发生竞合。对此,有两种解决方案：一为排除说,二为选择说。前者以保险法上解除权排除民法上撤销权,后者允许两种权利并存由保险人选择行使。选择说会导致保险合同关系长期不稳定,置投保人于完全被动而纵容保险人粗放承保,故不足采。从立法目的、构成要件和法律效果上分析,保险法上的解除权可以看作民法的特别规定,排除说较为可采。     

车文博先生对无意识心理学研究的理论贡献

本文既在专题水平上探讨车文博教授关于无意识心理学思想的系统论述,并尝试揭示其理论意义,又希望通过这个专题研究,揭示车文博教授文以载道的学术人格和治学理念,从而为我们学习、领会、研究车文博教授博大精深的心理学思想提供一个方法论的范型。     

隐私权的经济分析

隐私本质上是私人信息,隐私权是个人控制其私人信息的权利。无论隐私是否涉及到个人名誉,从对隐私的成本——收益分析来看,在权利的初始配置的意义上,都应当将控制私人信息的权利配置给信息生产者而形成隐私权。隐私权不能仅仅囿于人格权的范畴,而应该向其财产权性质方面着力发挥。将私人信息的权利配置给个人,个人就能够控制其私人信息从而形成对其私人信息的财产权,进而实现对隐私权更为切实的保护之目的。     

莱奥纳多·达·芬奇的观察方式辨析——从E．H．贡布里希对莱奥纳多《绘画论》的质疑谈起

英国著名艺术史家贡布里希在他的论文<莱奥纳多论绘画科学>中对莱奥纳多·达·芬奇的<绘画论>进行了分析,认为莱奥纳多并不像数百年来多数学者认为的那样有着"惊人的观察力".其实,贡布里希在文中举例证明莱奥纳多在绘画方面的一些观点是不切实际的,莱奥纳多对自然的观察力是不可否认的.     

Strong Rights and Disobedience: From Here to Integrity

In Taking Rights Seriously Dworkin claimed that people had strong rights to disobey the law so that the government would be wrong to punish anyone who exercised them. This claim raises fundamental questions about the source of obligation and the limits of legitimacy. These questions of political theory have been given surprisingly little attention by him or his critics. I examine whether strong rights make any sense and conclude that his political theory cannot even generate the minimal prima facie obligation necessary to justify coercion, and hence, law. My solution is to interpret justice in the same way as law. Dworkin resists what I call Justice as Integrity because of concerns about ethical relativism. By considering his more recent works on objectivity and moral truth, I attempt to show that Dworkin's aversion to Moral Constructivism is based on an undue fear of the uncertainty of social practices and an undue faith in the certainty of empirical observation. By reconstructing the interpretive derivations of justice I offer a method to make the idea of obligation, strong rights, and hence, law as integrity, more viable.     

Death Due to Complications of Anhidrotic Ectodermal Dysplasia

Ectodermal dysplasia comprises a group of disorders affecting ectodermal tissues. Severity depends on the genetic aberration; hyperpyrexia secondary to absence of sweat glands is a common complication. Treatment is supportive. This case report describes a 1‐month, 27‐day‐old male infant with a diagnosis of X‐linked recessive anhidrotic ectodermal dysplasia. On the day of his death, his mother swaddled him in a blanket and placed him on the couch at 5:30 am. When she picked him up at 8:00 am, he was unresponsive. At the emergency department, his rectal temperature was 40°C. Postmortem blood culture was positive for group B streptococcus, a possible etiology for fever. It is vital to teach parents that close monitoring of children with ectodermal dysplasia is necessary, as an increase in body temperature can become life threatening.     

Wrapped to death. Unusual autoerotic death

Despite the large population of New Orleans, including many homosexual and transsexuals, there have been relatively few cases of autoerotic deaths. The case reported here is an interesting one as it includes a bizarre form of autoerotic behavior from the standpoint of the method used. There have been no deaths reported in the literature in which the victim died as a result of jeopardizing himself by enclosing his body into plastic with an airway out of his "cocoon" in the form of a snorkel tube. He was engaged in masturbation when he apparently lost his mouth piece or airway. He attempted to use a knife to cut himself out.     

Family Group Conferencing Comes to the U.S.: A Comparison with Victim-Offender Mediation

A boy hesitantly appears in the doorway to a meeting room. A large man wearing a name tag greets him thoughtfully and points out where he should sit in the horseshoe of chairs in the room. The boy crosses the room, picks his name tag up off the chair, puts it on crookedly, and sits down. On his face apprehension alternates with bravado. As his mother and sister, done with hanging their coats, enter the room the boy begins to fidget quietly. The large man greets them and points out their places in the horseshoe of chairs; they find their name tags on their chairs and sit down on either side of the boy. Other people that the boy and his family are close to appear in the doorway, are greeted, and move to their seats farther down the arch of the horseshoe: his grandfather and cousin, his basketball coach, his school social worker, an elderly neighbor, and a member of his mother's church. Their faces, and those of his mother and sister, betray various emotions; grim calm, hopefulness, solemnity, foreboding, sadness, and quiet interest. When they are seated, the chairs on one side of the horseshoe arch are full. The investigating officer enters, and sits at the apex of the arch. When they are all seated, the large man leaves the room and comes back with a group of people who have been waiting in a nearby room. The boy's victim enters the room first; she is a small, white-haired woman who shakes a little as she crosses the room and sits in a chair directly across the horseshoe from the boy. The boy glances quickly at her and then looks down and away to avoid her eyes. On her face, anxiety is swiftly replaced by surprise, relief, and then anger as she openly studies the boy across from her. Her daughter, a middleaged woman, sits down on one side of her, and her teenaged grandson takes his place on the other side of the victim. The older woman's minister, two elderly women neighbors, and a middle-aged male friend find their name tags on chairs further down the horseshoe's arch. When they sit down they fill the last vacancies in the horseshoe of chairs. The large man who greeted them all takes his place on a chair at the open end of the horseshoe. He is the conference coordinator and the only one with whom every person present has spoken about this meeting. He smiles quietly, looks around the circle of faces, clears his throat, and begins the family group conference.     

A Tribute to Murray A. Straus

This article offers a brief tribute to the father of the field of family violence, Murray A. Straus, Ph.D. Murray spent the bulk of his career at the University of New Hampshire, where he studied partner violence, corporal punishment, developed the Conflict Tactics Scales, and mentored thousands of students, post-doctoral research fellows, and colleagues alike. His productivity and the significant impact that he had on the field and the public at large, in addition to his warmth and good humor, are noted here.     

富国强兵之路的可贵探索——冯桂芬《校邠庐抗议》读后

冯桂芬是中国近代史上开风气之先的思想家之一，《校■庐抗议》一书是他的代表作。书中对改革清朝弊政，采取西学，以达富国强兵之路，做了可贵的探索。本文除对这两个方面做了较为深刻的分析外，还指出了冯桂芬的思想对于洋务派、维新派都有着重要的影响，他所提出的学习西方的目的在于“驾而上之”，其立脚点在于自强。这是很有借鉴意义的。     

耳纹相关问题研究

在法庭科学界,耳纹是一个新兴的研究课题,引起了欧洲、北美诸多法庭科学专家的极大兴趣。耳纹痕迹研究的三项阶段性成果：第一,耳纹痕迹显现提取问题的研究,包括耳纹痕迹的显现方法、显现效果与遗留时间的关系、显现效果与遗留客体的关系以及提取方法等具体问题;第二,耳纹认定人身问题的研究,在小范围耳纹样本实验研究的基础上,讨论了耳纹认定人身的科学性,并且提出耳纹认定人身的步骤、方法及认定标准;第三,根据现场遗留耳纹痕迹推定遗留人身高的研究,通过实验统计分析,试图找到一个公式,根据现场发现的耳纹痕迹遗留高度推定嫌疑人身高。