European Editors of Economics Journals—A General Discussion

In a final inquiry at the end of the Conference on Editorial Policies the three editors, Bruno S. Frey (Kyklos), Manfred J. Holler (Homo oeconomicus), and Jürgen G. Backhaus (European Journal of Law and Economics), were asked to comment on their editorial policies. They answered by explaining the challenges they were or still are confronted with, which strategies they have already developed to go on and of course what they have learnt from the deliberations at this conference. In their statements they referred to their preceding paper presentations, and the contributions by Wolfgang Bergsdorf, who is the chief editor of Die Politische Meinung, and Peter Senn.     

Interviewing Preschoolers: Comparisons Of Yes/No and Wh- Questions

This study investigated the influence of question format on preschool-aged children's errors, their response accuracy, and their tendency to say I don't know when given non-misleading questions in a neutral, unbiased context. Children (3 to 5 years old) participated in a craft-making session that included a staged accident with two experimenters differing in gender and appearance; the environment also had several distinctive features. One week later children were interviewed about actions, participants, and environment; questions were yes/no format with the veridical response yes (yes questions), yes/no format with the veridical response no (no questions), and specific wh- format questions. Question format substantially influenced children's responses: they were most likely to make errors if asked no questions, and were unlikely to answer either yes/no question with I don't know. In contrast, children spontaneously and frequently said I don't know to wh- questions about content they did not recall (environment), but not about content that was well recalled (actions). Implications of question format for reliability of eyewitness testimony by preschoolers are discussed.     

Contracts,promises and meaning the question of intent

Conclusion In this article, I have argued against an intentionalistic theory of promises, such as the theory of Searle, and of others inspired by him. Such a theory leads to a one sided approach, and is unable to account for all the phenomena that count as promises. I have argued that in contract law both the promissor and the promissee play a role of importance, but also that the influence of their intentions is rather limited. I have then extrapolated my argument to extralegal promises.In the last section, I have offered some conjectures as to what may have contributed to the intentionalistic aspect of Searle's theory. My last conjecture was that the ambiguity of the word meaning may play a role. Let me end, in all modesty, by offering a suggestion that might help English philosophers in solving the problems of linguistics, and their translators in interpreting their solutions: the introduction of the word speaning for speaker's meaning!     

Offenders' choice of target: Findings from victim surveys

This paper argues that victimological research on risks can contribute to the study of offender decision-making. It examines some of the problems in conventional approaches to the topic and discusses strengths and weaknesses of surveys of victimization as an additional source of information. It presents and discusses a conceptual framework for examining target selection, the key elements of which are proximity, yield, and accessibility. It presents a worked example in the shape of findings on burglary from the British Crime Survey.     

Social justice and legal justice

The main aim of this paper is to challenge the validity of the distinction between legal justice and social justice. It is argued that what we usually call legal justice is either an application of the more fundamental notion of social justice to legal rules and decisions or is not a matter of justice at all. In other words, the only correct uses of the notion of legal justice are derivative from the notion of social justice and, hence, the alleged conflicts between criteria of social and legal justice result from the confusion about the proper relationship between these two concepts. Two views about the social justice/legal justice dichotomy are of particular importance and will provide the focus for the argument: this dichotomy is sometimes identified with a classical distinction between distributive and commutative justice and sometimes with the distinction between substantive and procedural justice.     

Expanding coupled shock fronts of urban decay and criminal behavior: How U.S. cities are becoming “hollowed out”

This work attempts to formalize an emerging paradigm in criminology, examining the structural consequences of feedback between community physical decay and behavioral pathologies caused by the social disintegration resulting from that decay. Adaptation of a standard reaction/diffusion approach produces a model of radially expanding coupled traveling-wave shock fronts of interrelated contagious physical decay and criminal activity. The standard threshold theorem associated with the model equations suggests that currently advocated triage policies, which recommend the virtual abandonment of bad communities behind the expanding front, will fail spectacularly. The model suggests that, just as the hollowing-out process has a complex, synergistic and dynamic structure, so, too, must interventions be interactive and mutually reinforcing, adaptively, targeted at communities in all stages of the phenomenon.     

Appeals to community and crime prevention

This paper considers the growing appeals to the idea of community in criminal justice policy and the involvement of actual communities in criminal justice initiatives. It draws on a completed two year research study of a number of community-based crime prevention initiatives in the South East of England. The paper considers the nature of community to which appeals are made in criminal justice discourse and policies, the contribution of community to the practices of social order and the nature of community representation and participation in crime prevention initiatives. It is argued that appeals to community in crime prevention, and crime control more generally, embody shifts in what constitutes the legitimate responsibilities of individuals, collectivities and the state. This has a number of implications, the first of which is a redrawing of the cost of policing and security services. Additionally, there is an associated shift in blame for failure. Finally, actual community involvement in crime control gives rise to new structures and forms of local governance that evoke key questions about the regulation of social relations, the nature of conflict resolution, citizenship, democracy and social justice.     

Precedent Externality, Network Effect, and the Possible Inefficiency of the Evolution of Laws

Using the traditional scenario of tort conflict as an example, I argue that the marginal precautionary costs of injurers and victims are not constant, as was assumed by most previous researchers. The precedent of a liability rule has some natural externality on the precaution technology, and hence marginal cost, faced by future agents involved in torts. The adoption of legal rules therefore has a network effect, meaning that the present prevalent adoption of one rule increases the probability of its future adoption. Treating the dynamic evolution of legal rules as a random process, we are able to apply an established result in the literature of network economies to conclude the path-dependence, non-predictability, and potential inefficiency concerning the final legal rule to which the dynamics converge.     

Trade Secrets, Firm-Specific Human Capital, and Optimal Contracting

Trade secrets are innovations jointly produced by firms and employees that are generally not protected by patents. They are commonly protected within the framework of labor contracts, where an obligation of confidentiality is imposed upon the employee. Specifically this obligation applies to the employee even after he has left the employer for a period of time determined in the contract, known as a cooling off period. Often employees are prohibited not only from revealing trade secrets, but also from utilizing their specific human capital developed at the original place of employment in competitor firms during this period. Their specific human capital is in effect inseparable from the trade secret. Failure to protect the trade secret will result in its revelation and its becoming public and hence worthless for the innovator. The inability of an employee to reveal trade secrets and utilize his specific human capital after leaving his place of employment imposes costs and losses upon him. Some form of compensation will be paid for these contingent losses within the employment contract. Employers know that the longer the cooling off period imposed upon employees, the greater employees must be compensated for this in the contract. Longer cooling off periods thus cost the employer more, but also enable him to earn greater rents from the innovation itself. In this paper profit-maximizing periods of trade secret protection are derived, based on these two countervailing factors, and comparative statics exercises are performed. How the selection of profit-maximizing periods of trade secret protection when the incidence of resignation is itself affected by contract parameters and incentives is explored.     

Forfeiture and money laundering laws in the United States

Today Europe is faced increasingly with the phenomenon of organized crime, creating problems similar to those the United States faced as early as a decade ago. American forfeiture and money laundering laws provide the state with sweeping powers for use in its efforts to combat organized crime. Although study of these instruments might inspire European lawmakers to adopt similar ones, the instruments themselves carry a societal price tag that cannot be ignored. Classical principles limiting the reach of the criminal law (and the powers of its enforcement apparatus) and in a broader sense the liberal concept of the fragmentary nature of the criminal law have largely been abandoned by lawmakers in the area of organized crime. Thus, modern American forfeiture and money laundering laws have lowered the standards of protection against state intrusion into citizens' basic rights despite the lack of sufficient empirical proof that their investigative and punitive powers are efficient in skimming profits and deterring further crime.     

Social sciences and the evolving concept of corruption

The term corruptio appears in many languages, but behind it lie several contrasting strands of thought and language. Current political usages of corruptio--emphasizing bribery, which in turn is just one of several families of ideas to which the term has variously been attached--date from the late 18th or early 19th century, have been strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon legal thought, and may be traced to Roman roots. But French lexicographers developed a richer and more diverse vocabulary to encompass the crimes of civil servants and judges in addition to those of the people who sought to influence them. Religion, and in particular offices within the Church, also strongly influenced the ideas and vocabulary of corruption. Ultimately, corruptio can be said to have Biblical origins and a core meaning centered around injustice. The complexity and richness of the idea of corruption, as viewed from that perspective, in often lost in the narrower and more technical usages that dominate contemporary debate and analysis.     

Preferential Selection Independent of Race and Gender: Effects on Self-Evaluations and Newcomer Information-Seeking Behaviors

The current study investigated the effects of an experimentally imposed program of preferential selection on beneficiary self-evaluations and newcomer information-seeking behavior. One hundred-twenty undergraduates were randomly assigned to a classification condition (in which they were informed that they tended to think in either an analytical or abstract manner) and collaborated on a task in groups of three. A fourth participant was introduced into each of these 40 extant groups under either a condition of preferential selection or not. Preferentially selected newcomers were shown to have more positive self-evaluations than their nonpreferentially selected counterparts. The presence or absence of a similar (in terms of thinking style) incumbent moderated the effect of being preferentially selected on the use of specific information-seeking behaviors.     

Selective incapacitation and the Philadelphia cohort data

The University of Pennsylvania study of delinquency in a Philadelphia birth cohort has been described byNewsweek as perhaps the most influential piece of criminal justice research in the last decade (March 23, 1981). Many have construed the findings as showing that, if imprisonment were focused on the minority of offenders with especially bad prognoses, the rate of crime could be reduced substantially. But others have taken the opposite view that the cohort data, far from endorsing such a selective incapacitation strategy, might actually provide strong evidence that such an approach is futile. Through some further analyses of the Philadelphia data, we attempt to clarify their policy implications.     

The statistical prediction of violent behavior

Considerable attention in the popular and professional literature has focused on the relative costs and benefits of using public protectionist versus civil libertarian models of social control. In this article, we develop statistical analogs of these models to predict violent behavior among samples of defendants found incompetent to stand trial in New York State. The societal and personal costs (errors of prediction) of each model are compared and their implications for clinical practice and social policy are discussed.This research was supported in part by PHS Grant MH 20367 from the NIMH Center for Studies of Crime and Delinquency. The assistance of Thomas Arvanites in data analysis and the comments of Monroe Lefkowitz and Mary Evans Melick on earlier drafts of this paper are gratefully acknowledged.     

The thin line between legitimate and criminal enterprises: subsidy frauds in the European Community

This paper describes and analyses a large fraud against the financial interests of the European Community (EC). On the basis of this case and our interviews with officials in five EC countries, we highlight structural impediments to the control of such frauds, draw parallels with other research on organisational crime and suggest that the distinction between organised crime and white-collar crime be abandoned in favour of an enterprise model of crime. We conclude by pointing out that legal changes and strict controls alone cannot substantially reduce the huge potential for EC frauds, especially in view of the abolition of EC's internal borders in 1993. Antifraud policies must also address the underlying structural factors.     

Human and fundamental rights: What are they about?

Conclusion Human rights, distrusted by Bentham, through emergence ofGesellshaft, have sometimes been identified with rights of market men and gradually on an ad hoc basis and so have been given a relational or relativist character for that reason. Such a view ignores the test of humanness or the tele of human rights surviving any political association and the need for full development of human personality as an autonomous being inherent in full respect for all as moral persons. This disposes of the view of human rights in terms of rules of a game, or of connection between human rights and human action, or of the standard of the prudent man or, finally, of the ideology of the rising bourgeoisie. Equally, that very test of humanness disposes of criticisms of the human rights theory based on a concern for implementation of rights, on concentric circles based on the specific and concrete, on the impossibility of liking the billions, on the distinction between negative, positive and administrative rights, on the condition of being able to make valid claims and thereby denying human rights to the deprived millions in poor countries, on the social justice model, on the potential for violence and conflict and, finally, on the vagueness or subjectivity of human rights. An eclectic synthesis not between good and evil nor between right and wrong but between the extremes of the views presented in such critical explanations e.g. between the New Right and the New Left and between Hobbes and Rousseau) is what is needed in order to present a workable theory of human rights in the modern-day world.     

Estimating the numbers of prison terms in criminal careers from one-step probabilities of recidivism

A method of using estimates of one-step probabilities of recidivism, i.e., conditional probabilities of individuals returning to prison for the jth time given release for the (j-1)st time, to estimate the numbers of prison terms expected to be accumulated by the individuals, is presented. The method is illustrated by calculating the expected numbers of prison terms separately for racial and gender groups in a large data base of Western Australian prisoners. The recidivism probabilities for these data were estimated by fitting Weibull mixture models to the (possibly censored) times to recidivate. The probabilities increase strongly asj increases from 1 to 6, then level off. Large differences between them are due to racial and gender group and these are reflected in the differing expected prison career durations for these groups. The effect of interventions which might lower recidivism is discussed in the light of the method as applied to these estimates.     

Juror decision making in the capital penalty trial

Two factors thought to influence jurors' penalty decisions in capital trials—the nature of the crime committed and the defense's portrayal of the convicted offender's character—were examined. Mock jurors were death-qualified and exposed to one of twelve simulated penalty trials. Each trial was comprised of one of three capital crimes and one of four defense strategies. Jurors were least punitive in robbery-murder conditions and most punitive in multiple murder conditions. A conceptual argument against capital punishment was the most effective defense; a mental illness defense was the least effective. Penalty decisions were mediated by three attributional variables: (a) juror perceptions of the defendant's volition, (b) juror perceptions of the defendant's future dangerousness, and (c) juror perceptions of the relative competency of the opposing attorneys.This article is based on the author's dissertation which received an Honorable Mention in the 1985 SPSSI Dissertation Prize competition. The research was made possible by grants from the University of California, Santa Cruz and Division 41 of the American Psychological Association. The author is indebted to Craig Haney, Elliot Aronson, and Dane Archer for their valuable suggestions and support.     

Reducing Maltreated Children's Reluctance to Answer Hypothetical Oath-Taking Competency Questions

Before allowing child witnesses to testify, courts routinely require children to describe what would happen to them if they lied. However, young children often refuse to reason hypothetically if they view the premises as implausible or undesirable, and might be more willing to discuss the consequences of lying if they are asked about another child rather than themselves. On the other hand, children might view themselves as invulnerable to punishment, and therefore believe that whereas other children will be punished for lying, they will not be. In this study, 64 maltreated 5- and 6-year-old children were asked to describe the consequences of lying to three professionals (a judge, a social worker, and a doctor). Participants in the self condition were asked what would happen to them if they lied, whereas participants in the other condition were asked to describe what would happen to a story child if he or she lied. Asking children about other children increased responsiveness, and did not reveal perceptions of invulnerability. The results suggest that young children's understanding that they will be punished for lying may make them reluctant to discuss the consequences of lying, leading to underestimation of their oath-taking competency.     

Sex @ the End of the Twentieth Century: Some Re-marks on a Minor Jurisprudence

This article offers a re-reading of Goodrichs essay, Law in the Courts of Love. My contention here is that the idiom of love that Goodrich provides us with in this essay cannot address the complexity of sexuality and sexual politics that inhabit our contemporary technoscientific culture. In so doing, I will juxtapose his essay with Laven Berlant and Michael Warners essay, Public Sex. This article will be divided into three sections. In the first section, I will evaluate and review Goodrichs genealogical approach to law and the image of justice that arises out of his approach. The second section will be a re-reading of Goodrichs Law in the Courts of Love through feminist and technoscientific discourses. Its aim is to problematise and re-think not only the idiom of feminine justice that Goodrich offers, but also to question the presuppositions upon which his work is based, primary presuppositions surrounding issues of privacy, sexuality and sexuated rights. Finally, in the third section I will conclude by suggesting that the re-figuration of justice necessitates a re-figuration of the relationship that law has with time and space.