Ulysses Contracts in Medicine

Ulysses contracts are a method by which one person binds himself by agreeing to be bound by others. In medicine such contracts have primarily been discussed as ways of treating people with episodic mental illnesses, where the features of the illness are such that they now judge that they will refuse treatment at the time it is needed. Enforcing Ulysses contracts in these circumstances would require medical professionals to override the express refusal of the patient at the time treatment is required, something that is generally problematic both ethically and legally. In this paper I will argue that despite appearances Ulysses contracts can make it the case that treating a patient in such circumstances is an instance of treating him with his consent, although safeguards are needed to ensure that this is the case. Given the potential benefits to patients I further argue that modified Ulysses contracts should be made legally enforceable.     

2008年上半年香港大事记

2008年上半年．可说香港走过一段并不平坦的路，现就政治、法律、经济、社会民生等方面作一回顾。     

Remapping Islamic Terrorism in Algeria

Between 1988 and 2000, thousands of lives were taken in Algeria at the hands of a violence that sought justification in religion—Islam. While these events can be understood as the direct consequence of decolonization and the bloody Algerian War that lasted eight years, it is important to note that the rise of terrorist violence in Algeria has had consequences beyond its national boundaries. For instance, renowned historian Benjamin Stora has argued that the treatment of Islam in contemporary France appears to have been shaped by the long and bloody conflict that resulted in Algeria obtaining its independence. As Stora points out, “the War with Algeria continues through the struggle against Islam, which today is masked as a fight against Islamic ‘fundamentalism’—a word that is curiously borrowed from vocabulary that is specific to Christianity. The observance of a France that is rooted in the purity of a mythical identity, endlessly threatened, is what legitimizes, a priori, all violence, all measures of ‘war’ in a defense against the ‘invaders.’”     

论我国海洋倾废管理中的激励问题

海洋倾废管理是海洋环境管理的重要组成部分.本文从激励角度入手,基于激励手段在海洋倾废管理中的缺失来讨论目前海洋倾废管理所面临的问题,并进一步探究如何利用经济激励手段及教育激励手段改善海洋倾废管理主体监督执法动力不足、效率低下的现状,以促使海洋倾废管理对象在消除抵触情绪的同时采取有益于减少海洋倾废的源头控制行为.     

Trust in the clouds

The “cloud” is not new, and its roots go back to the original plans for computing from the 1950s. Now that computing is moving back to the original cloud-based models that were envisioned more than 60 years ago, with it, consumers are realizing the increases in security and safety that accompany the move to centralized servers. Yet the perception of “trust” in this context is often still formed by views that people have from their use of computers over the past two decades, which is localized in nature (“if I can see it, I can control it”). This view is based on perception more than fact. Our paper discusses different views of trust in other contexts (such as banking and travel) and concludes that users of cloud computing should recast their view of trust in a similar way that consumers of banking and travel have changed their perceptions of trust in the last 100 years.     

Policing terrorism in India

Policing terrorism in India is fraught with difficulty. India is a large, heterogeneous democracy that is surrounded by countries experiencing their own intense problems with terrorism. The legal structure, inherited from the colonial past, is struggling to cope with the demands placed upon it by a country of 1.1 billion. India is a federation and this also complicates the structures needed for counter-terrorism. Despite the democratic framework, policing in India is largely an inheritance from the non-democratic colonial past—a past that paid scant regard to the doctrine of separation of powers. Given these problems, India’s performance in policing terrorism has been mixed. We should not look for any early resolution of the problem of terrorism, either through preventive investigation or political amelioration of the issues that contribute to terrorism. But for all of that, India has done well to adhere to its basic democratic norms in the face of what is, by Western standards, a major terrorism problem.     

The Journalist in the Courtroom

"Proceedings in all courts shall be open to the public." Such is the content of Article 157 of the Constitution of the USSR. The principle that judicial proceedings are to be open to the public—a principle that is contained in the nation's highest legislative act—is of enormous practical significance. The fact that judicial proceedings are open to the public is a guarantee that procedural norms are scrupulously observed in the process of examining the materials of a case, thereby substantially reducing the probability of judicial error. It goes without saying that the further improvement of social oversight over the work of law enforcement agencies is a necessary condition to the democratization of public life. What is more, the openness of judicial proceedings to public scrutiny is a powerful means for the legal education of citizens and of forming a truly socialist legal conscience.     

Law in Culture

Abstract. The relationship of law and culture has long been a concern of legal anthropology and sociology of law. But it is recognised today as a central issue in many different kinds of juristic inquiries. All these recent invocations of the concept of culture indicate or imply problems at the boundaries of established thought about either the nature of law or the values that law is thought to express or reflect. The consequence is that legal theory must, it seems, now systematically take account of the notion of culture. The present paper asks how this might best be done. I argue that a concept of culture, as such, is of limited utility for legal theory because the term “culture” embraces a too indefinite and disparate range of phenomena. But legal theory needs conceptual resources to consider at a general level the relations of law and culture. This paper suggests that these resources should include, above all, a rigorous distinguishing of different abstract types of community. Legal theory requires a sociologically‐informed concept of community. What is encompassed by the vague idea of culture is actually the content of different types of social relations of community and the networks (combinations) in which they exist.     

Sexual variation in bucco-lingual dimensions in Turkish dentition

Sexual differences in the human skeleton have been well studied in many populations. Odontometric analysis of the human sexual variation has been less investigated and mostly derived from the dentition of extinct populations. Turkey is situated in a unique location where populations from different regions mixed with each other and created a rich gene pool. One might anticipate that modern Turkish population is composed of genes from the Balkans, Caucasus, Middle East, Iran and further as well as from ancient Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Asiatic Turks. It is clear that contemporary Turks are a mixture of these extant and extinct people and ideal to consider it a representative study population. The purpose of this study is to analyze dental dimensions and sexual variation in living Turks and develop forensic techniques to identify human remains from the teeth when any other technique is not available or not reliable. The study is composed of Ankara University dental students (50 male and 50 female casts, average age of 21 years). Bucco-lingual breadths from 14 teeth (I1 through M2 of the maxilla and mandible) are taken from the left side and analyzed using the discriminant function statistics. An intraobserver error test did not indicate any statistically significant difference between any two measurements. Results of the study revealed that males exceeded females significantly (P<0.001) in dimensions. Coefficient of variation was most obvious in I1s and I2s of both jaws in both sexes. Stepwise discriminant function statistics suggested that upper C, and lower C and M2 are the most contributory teeth to the function. Additional formulae were calculated for situation in which only one or a fragmented jaw is available for identification. Overall accuracy of sex diagnosis ranged from 73 to 77%. In conclusion this research supports earlier studies that sexual dimorphism is population specific. While dental difference between the sexes in several human populations has been found highly dimorphic, it was not found so in Turks and accuracy of classification remained low at about 77%. The difficulty or the lack of dimorphism comes from male subjects.     

日本国家赔偿特别领域要论

国会立法的内容被法院认定违反宪法时 ,属于国家赔偿法上的违法 ;立法不作为时 ,法院承认国会有广泛的立法裁量权 ,但也认为存在违法性不作为的情形。因行政权限不行使发生损害时 ,成立国家的赔偿责任 ,但受到国民法益的性质、违反的义务的性质、注意义务的基准等因素的影响。关于非权力作用 ,理论与判例均未形成一致认识 ,但在学校事故事件、行政指导及信息提供等方面 ,已有适用国家赔偿法的倾向。     

Brevity in Pānini

Conclusion In the preceding we have argued that brevity in the form of Generalizing Brevity is an important theoretical principle underlying Panini's grammar. It applies blindly at the metalevel, when the grammar is being chosen. Generalization is a concern at one remove: A device for the metalanguage is only chosen such that its use in accord with the maximum brevity leads to some generalization. Many potential brevity increasing devices are not chosen for this reason. But at the metalanguage level brevity is paramount. To prove this we have shown that Panini maximizes brevity in many cases at the cost of other possible theoretical principles. We have also shown that many features of the grammar flow from the brevity criterion. We have concluded that logical organization, generality, and other aspects of explanation largely follow from brevity and that this can be regarded as a substantial aspect of the explanatory power of the theory behind the grammar. Generalization should follow on the heels of maximum brevity. And, considering Panini's domain of data this is a perfectly reasonable expectation.I would like to thank Paul Kiparsky for his many valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The author is of course responsible for remaining errors.     

Blaming the victim: Belief in control or belief in justice?

The attribution of responsibility to victims of bad fate (“blaming the victim”) is discussed under the perspective of Just World Theory (Lerner, 1980) and the Defensive Attribution Hypothesis (Walster, 1966; Shaver, 1970). Whereas Just World Theory suggests that the belief in a just world is the decisive motive of increased attributions of responsibility, the Defensive Attribution Hypothesis assumes that these attributions are motivated by the need to believe in internal locus of control. Research evidence shows both motives as conceptually linked and empirically correlated. The central question is whether belief in a just world and belief in internal control are facets of the same latent variable or empirically distinguishable constructs, and whether they contribute independently to attributions of responsibility and blame to victims of misfortune. Results of a questionnaire study assessing opinions about cancer and cancer victims are reported. There is evidence from factor analyses that the two motives are indeed distinguishable constructs. The correlation patterns and the results of multiple regression analyses show that both motives are meaningfully related to attributions of responsibility. Moreover, it is suggested that belief in a just world is not a homogeneous construct. Belief in immanent justice according to which present misfortune is seen as a consequence of prior faults and sins is differentiated from belief in ultimate justice according to which one can be sure that present misfortune will be compensated in the long run. Whereas belief in immanent justice is the most important predictor for attributions of responsibility, the suggested emotional consequences of such attributions, like belief in invulnerability or confidence in coping, can be predicted by belief in internal control and belief in ultimate justice. Finally, suggestions are made to extend Just World Theory to clarify the function of justice motives in the person's search for meaning in his or her life.     

Occurrence of myocarditis in sudden death in children.

This study suggests that the prevalence of "silent" myocarditis may be higher in the pediatric population than is generally suspected and may contribute to a significant number of sudden and unexpected deaths in children, particularly those older than one year of age. The incidence of histologic myocarditis in children dying a violent death is similar to that reported as an incidental finding in adults.     

Significance of anastomoses in the lung in microembolism

The importance is demonstrated of anastomoses between the pulmonary artery and the bronchial artery as well as of the arteriovenous anastomoses that arise from these in microembolism. In cases of air embolism, microembolism in the lungs is seldom. Therefore, there must be particular circumstances that make it possible for little air bubbles to pass the anastomoses from the pulmonary artery via the bronchial artery and the arteriovenous anastomoses into the bronchial vein. The pressure in the bronchial artery must decrease. Under these conditions, blood is shunted from the pulmonary artery to the bronchial artery and little air bubbles can pass via the above-mentioned anastomoses into the pulmonary vein.     

Reason in Law

Abstract. The problem of the relationship between "reason" and "law" has two different meanings depending on whether the first or the second of the two terms is considered to be the most important one. These two different meanings are revealed in the expressions "law of reason" and "legal reason," respectively. In the first expression, "reason" is meant in its strong sense, that is, the faculty of grasping the essence of things, while in the second, "reason" is meant in a weak sense, the ability to reason (calculate, infer, discuss). "Law of reason" and "legal reason" correspond to two different moments of the legal universe, the creation and, respectively, the application of law. Strong reason is that which discovers the rules to be obeyed, while weak reason is that which applies rules to an actual case. The first is legislating reason, while the second is judging reason. The main topic of the debate from the Greeks to Kant was that of legislating reason. Nowadays, instead, scholars in the field are interested in judging reason. Historicism and positivism mark the end of faith in the existence of rules which are objectively just, and which may be recognized by human reason. By now we have learned to do without the eternal truths in the knowledge of the world. However painful it may be, we are forced to resign ourselves to do without evident truths in ethics, as well.     

西方中世纪的神学法治理念

当日尔曼人用粗陋的习惯和蒙昧的意识取代了罗马人的法制和法治观念的时候,基督教教会却一直保存这一文明规则和观念。在教会抑制王权的斗争中,基督教神学不仅重申着法律的理性、正义和权威的思想,而且从中衍生出法律神圣、权力服从法律、法律至上等理念。这些理念,最终经阿奎那而演绎成了系统的神学法治学说。     

论清代的继子孙责任——以顺天府宝坻县刑房档为线索

从宝坻县衙档案中的继书和案件看,清代继子孙对家庭的责任包括两大类:一类是对已故尊直系亲属的,一类是对在世家属的。前者包括主持已故亲属的丧葬和祭祀仪式,后者包括对尊亲属的赡养。通过个案分析发现,家业传承与"父债子还"是相联系的,承继是指整个家庭的所有内容向下辈移交;因此,继父母考察继子孙能否承继,不是就事论事,而是综合地考察继子孙的行为。只要继子孙有影响家业承继的不良行为,就可能导致废继,由此,我们认为,清代子孙的这些责任是综合的、整体的。     

Medicaid rationing in Oregon: political wolf in a philosopher's sheepskin

Although the details of the proposal have shifted since it was first described, the Oregon Medicaid waiver has had one consistent feature: it will reduce benefits to AFDC mothers and children who are currently covered by Medicaid in that state, in the hopes of increasing coverage for other individuals who are now uninsured. Because of the adverse consequences for the AFDC population, there should be strong evidence supporting the purported benefits of the proposal before proceeding with the waiver. One of the most intriguing aspects of the waiver proposal is the claim that the money currently being spent on AFDC beneficiaries could be redistributed to expand coverage to a substantial number of the uninsured. The concept is that far more people could receive the most valuable services if those now being served gave up their coverage of the least valuable services. Other purported benefits of the waiver include enhanced citizen participation in decisionmaking, cost-savings, and improved payment levels and delivery arrangements. Remarkably, this analysis of the proposal reveals that the waiver is likely to achieve none of its stated objectives, and instead will have adverse consequences not identified by its proponents. What the proposal would do is to insulate politicians from visible responsibility for limiting benefits for AFDC children and adults. Finally, the proposal undermines 25 years of Medicaid as an entitlement program. As such, it would establish as a social ethic the principle that the poor can be relegated to inadequate care. Such an extreme measure is not justified by the fiscal situation in Oregon, which is not extraordinarily poor or overtaxed, and does not have a particularly generous or unusually expensive Medicaid program.     

“生活世界”中的心理学

实现真正的“人”的心理学需要在心理学研究中树立“生活世界”的理念,从自然科学的主导态度转向生活世界的视域。生活世界是人们对现实的直接在场,是实现人的现实意义及价值的最根本的世界。生活世界的心理学价值在于强调忠实于心理现象的重要性,将研究对象定位为真正是对人的研究,把人真正当作“人”;研究在现实生活中真实体验和活动着的人的心理并进行纯粹的描述和意义理解。     

Revisiting the decline in remarriage in early-modern Europe: The case of Rheims in France

There is no lack of surveys showing that from a high rate of breastfeeding in the industrializing world of the early 20th century, after World War II the incidence declined to a nadir around 1960. For instance only a third of the infants in the US were given their own mothers' milk. The suckling of the new born is clearly not a natural instinct but needs to be taught and supported. Even if quantitative data is hard to come by for earlier centuries, there still is ample evidence that many mothers followed a tradition of not breastfeeding themselves, especially in the early 18th century. The reasons for this are partly economical, centered on the mother's heavy workload in non-industrial and energy-poor societies. But there are also cultural background factors behind the use of wet-nurses and artificial nourishment, where medical, religious and sexual ideas blend into a persuasive set of motives imprinting in women that breastfeeding is undesirable. The sending of urban babies to wet-nurses in the countryside was in part motivated by the tough epidemic climate in the cities. Modern anthropological research shows how cultural and economic motives can be doubly effective by reinforcing each other. The paper hypothesizes that for Western Europe where we have the richest historical records there may have been a breastfeeding pattern with more extensive breastfeeding in the northern parts of the continent and more use of wet-nurses and artificial nourishment in the Catholic southern parts, and that this may be rooted in long-lasting cultural factors. In addition there may have a number of places (Iceland, the Fennoscandian Arctic) where women had difficulty breastfeeding consistently because of an especially heavy workload in a tough environment, and where this developed into normative behaviour.