Gender, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS: the what, the why, and the how

The focus of Geeta Rao Gupta's plenary presentation of 12 July 2000 at the XIII International AIDS Conference is on the what, why, and how of gender, sexuality, and HIV/AIDS. Dr Rao Gupta discusses the factors associated with women's vulnerability to HIV; and the ways in which unequal power balance in gender relations increases not only women's, but also men's, vulnerability to HIV-despite, or rather because of, their greater power. She then addresses the question of how one is to overcome the seemingly insurmountable barriers of gender and sexual inequality. How can we change the cultural norms that create damaging, even fatal, gender disparities and roles? According to Dr Rao Gupta, an important first step is to recognize, understand, and publicly discuss the ways in which the power imbalance in gender and sexuality fuels the epidemic. She provides examples of sensitive, transformative, and empowering approaches to gender and sexuality and concludes that, in the final analysis, reducing the imbalance in power between women and men requires policies that are designed to empower women--policies that aim to decrease the gender gap in education, improve women's access to economic resources, increase women's political participation, and protect women from violence.     

PTSD,Endophenotypes, the RDoC,and the DSM-5

The search for endophenotypes that stand between genetics and disease has been applied to the diagnostic entity of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Advances are being made in understanding the pathway to disorder in PTSD in terms of brain regions, neuronal networks, stress-related systems (e.g., the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis), and their underlying genetic and neurogenetic bases. The latter are affected by gene–environmental interactions and epigenetic effects, and the environment and context reciprocally interrelate with them, as well. Therefore, a primary focus on (neuro)pathophysiological intermediates in the disease pathway, as appears emphasized in the research domain criteria (RDoC) approach to etiology of psychiatric disorder, and to which the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 (DSM-5) subscribes, might detract from a more inclusive biopsychosocial approach that would be more applicable in the case of PTSD. The paper undertakes a comprehensive review of the recent literature in the areas of endophenotypes, neurogenetics, epigenetics, neural networks, HPA axis, neuronal networks, pathways, the PTSD five-factor model, allostasis, and the RDoC criteria for psychiatric diagnosis, and then returns to the topic of endophenotypes. Neuronal networks constitute one integrating area that could help in arriving at an appropriate model of PTSD endophenotype. Pathway analysis provides a rich field for discerning individual differences in PTSD development, more so than the static approach of using DSM-5 symptom criteria. A model of endophenotypes is presented, which considers these factors in relation to PTSD. The paper concludes with implications for the DSM-5, for practice and for court, especially that it would be premature to seek individual biomarkers of PTSD given the current state of knowledge, even if it is burgeoning.     

The good, the bad, the ugly, and the Colombian peace plan

Among the many wars thatColombia is fighting, there are two that itis definitely losing – those forgovernment legitimacy and against poverty.Although the country has always shown anearly infinite capacity to turn itselfaround, its traditionally praised democracyshows fresh signs of erosion that lookalmost impossible to reverse. With solidinstitutions no longer standing, theguerrillas, the paramilitary, the corruptjustice system, and the drug producerscontinue to thrive like perennial weeds.Massacres, bombings, kidnappings and thedestruction of infrastructure continue toproduce a devastating effect on theColombian psyche. The good, the bad and theugly mix together in a pitiable realismbetween civil society and state. Theoutcome is poverty, dissatisfaction, andlack of legitimacy and hope.     

Immigration,Association, and the Family

In this paper I provide a philosophical analysis of family-based immigration. This type of immigration is of great importance, yet has received relatively little attention from philosophers and others doing normative work on immigration. As family-based immigration poses significant challenges for those seeking a comprehensive normative account of the limits of discretion that states should have in setting their own immigration policies, it is a topic that must be dealt with if we are to have a comprehensive account. In what follows I use the idea of freedom of association to show what is distinctive about family-based immigration and why it ought to have a privileged place in our discussion of the topic. I further show why this style of argument neither allows states to limit nearly all immigration nor requires them to have almost no limits on immigration. I conclude by showing that all states must allow some degree of family-based immigration, and that this is a duty owed not to ‘outsiders’ seeking to enter, but rather to current citizens.     

Judges,Conflict, and the Past

Drawing upon interviews with senior judicial figures in Northern Ireland, South Africa and elsewhere, this article considers the role of the judiciary in a political conflict. Using the socio‐legal literature on judicial performance and audience as well as transitional justice scholarship, the article argues that judges in Northern Ireland ‘performed’ to a number of ‘imagined’ audiences including Parliament, ‘the public', and their judicial peers – all of which shaped their view of the judicial role. In light of ongoing efforts to deal with the past in the jurisdiction, and the experiences of other transitional societies, the article argues that the judiciary can and should engage in a mature, reflexive and, where appropriate, self‐critical examination of the good and bad of their own institutional history during the conflict. It also argues that such a review of judicial performance requires an external audience in order to encourage the judiciary to see truth beyond the limits of legalism.     

Doing,Allowing, and the State

The doing/allowing distinction plays an important role in our thinking about a number of legal issues, such as the need for criminal process protections, prohibitions on torture, the permissibility of the death penalty and so on. These are areas where, at least initially, there seem to be distinctions between harms that the state inflicts and harms that it merely allows. In this paper I will argue for the importance of the doing/allowing distinction as applied to state action. Sunstein, Holmes, Vermeule and others have presented influential arguments for the claim that where the state is concerned the doing/allowing distinction has no moral significance, even if it does elsewhere. I show that these arguments can be resisted. In doing so, I defend some important distinctions and principles that help us understand the state’s role in protecting people from harm.     

Core Values, the Magistracy, and the Auld Report

In this article I shall first examine the core values underlying criminal justice about which there is some consensus. I then briefly review the current arrangements and decision making processes in magistrates courts in England and Wales before relating the core values to those arrangements and processes. This leads me to certain conclusions about the magistracy that I contrast with Auld's conclusions and recommendations.     

The Defense Lawyer,the Accused,and the Procurator

As the matter is generally conceived, it is the accused who needs a defense attorney. Of course, it is he who needs a lawyer above all. But lawyers for the defense are no less essential to the Soviet state in its administration of justice. The administration of justice, the prosecution, and the defense are three functions, clearly differentiated from each other, that are implemented respectively by the court, the procuracy, and the institution of advocates. Together, they are called upon to assure the smooth functioning of the mechanism of struggle against crime.     

Psychology,law, and the black community

Summary The present paper presented key applications of psychology and the law to the black community, embracing both civil and criminal law and legislation. The breadth of its focus preluded a more in-depth treatment of other areas relevant to black people which include issues related to psychiatric emergencies and involuntary hospitalization, child custody, and right-to-treatment litigation in prison and mental health facilities. In focusing attention on these applications and areas for activity, hopefully, I have not presented an unrealistic depiction of a responsive, socially sensitive, legal system capable and willing to exercise its powerful tools in the interest of the black community. To the contrary, there is considerable literature that identifies the historic role of the legal system in the enactments of laws to institutionalize and cement slavery, its failure to aggressively protect constitutional and civil rights of blacks, in imposing penalties differentially to blacks and whites in the criminal justice system, and more recently, conspiracies of law enforcement officials to deprive blacks of basic civil rights (Bell, 1975; Burns, 1973; Higgenbotham, 1973). The legal system, rather than being an effective instrument for justice and positive social changes, has often been a major source of racism. Thus, any meaningful attempts by lawyers or behavioral scientists in the interest of black people cannot ignore the racism that is embedded in the fabric of the legal profession and the behavioral sciences. Particular aspects of the law with significant social-psychological dimensions are: the cultural inertia, the archaicness of the law due to its roots in English common-law, historic and contemporary racism, conservatism associated with the principle of stare decisis, judicial elitism, and the substitution of administrative and judicial discretion for overt racism. Thus, in order for the legal system, or the field of psychology, to be reponsive to the needs of blacks and other oppressed groups, they must eradicate racism and injustice in their own ranks.Traditionally law has functioned as the hand maiden of the propertied class in our society. So it was to be expected that lawyers in the legislative halls, lawyers on the bench and lawyers in the executive branch of government would combine their talents to perpetuate by law this peculiarly American doctrine of racism predicated upon a claimed color inferiority.     

Constitutions,Constitutionalism, and the European Union

The institutional reforms of the EU, coupled with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, have fuelled the debate about a European Constitution. This paper begins by examining the nature of constitutions and constitutionalism. The focus then turns to the EU itself. It is argued that the Community has indeed been transformed into a constitutional legal order, and that the arguments to the contrary are not convincing. This does not however mean that the EU has, or should have, a European Constitution cognisable as such which draws together the constitutional articles of the Treaties, together with the constitutional principles articulated by the European Court of Justice. The difficulties with this strategy are examined in detail, and the conclusion is that we should not at present pursue this course. It would be better to draw on the valuable work done by the European University Institute in its recent study in order to simplify and consolidate the Treaties.     

Freedom, Law, and the Colonial Project

In this essay I develop a Marxist-informed anticolonialist position, and from this position I assess the role of law in the early Canadian settler-state. I claim that the flexibility of law is a measure of its restitutive and exploitative facets, such facets that operate dialectically as a means of moderating between the settler-state’s liberal democratic ideals (e.g. individual freedom and enfranchisement) and its capitalist imperatives (e.g. privatization of land, expansion, and profit). Law plays an integral role in this context because, by performing this moderating function, it stabilizes the socio-economic order of the emergent settler-state. In the second half of this essay, I enrich my theoretical analysis by examining the variable legal subjectivity of early Ukrainian immigrants to Canada. This historical perspective allows me to illuminate the intricacies of the logic that informs law’s flexibility, and to show how the liberal democratic principle of freedom was—and continues to be—both extolled and compromised by the law’s moderating function.     

Policy, Politics, and the Criminal Courts

This case study of criminal process in a middle-sized western city in the United States employs quantitative data, interviews, and library research to explore the politics of criminal process and its impact on the operative policies of the criminal courts from I964 through 1980. The research reveals significant policy change but a very elusive relationship between politics and policy. Judges and prosecutors preserve a significant measure of autonomy for dealing with the bulk of their caseload by giving up much of their independence in those cases that are inescapably politicized. Both judges and prosecutors use this partial political insulation to advance their own versions of criminological wisdom. On the other hand, they are constrained by the prevailing ethos and by institutional limitations to operate well within conventional definitions of crime and criminality—even when those conventional views run counter to their own practical experience.     

Technology,change, and the management accountant

Before technology transfer can take place there must be a climate for change. An understanding of the change process is necessary if the transfer of new accounting technology is to be successful and if the design and implementation of it can be carried out in such a way as to create a fit within a particular organizational culture and environment. This article provides some insight into organizational change, change in management-accounting technologies, and the contributions of accountants to innovation in technology organizations.     

Punishing the Awkward, the Stupid, the Weak, and the Selfish: The Culpability of Negligence

Negligence is a problematic basis for being morally blamed and punished for having caused some harm, because in such cases there is no choice to cause or allow—or risk causing or allowing—such harm to occur. The standard theories as to why inadvertent risk creation can be blameworthy despite the lack of culpable choice are that in such cases there is blame for: (1) an unexercised capacity to have adverted to the risk; (2) a defect in character explaining why one did not advert to the risk; (3) culpably acquiring or failing to rid oneself of these defects of character at some earlier time; (4) flawed use of those practical reasoning capacities that make one the person one is; or (5) chosen violation of per se rules about known precautions. Although each of these five theories can justify blame in some cases of negligence, none can justify blame in all cases intuitively thought to be cases of negligence, nor can any of these five theories show why inadvertent creation of an unreasonable risk, pure and simple, can be blameworthy.     

Choice,Discrimination, and the Motherhood Penalty

Recent studies have documented substantial penalties associated with motherhood and suggest that discrimination plays an important role in producing them. In this article, I argue that the degree to which motherhood is conceptualized as a choice affects the penalties associated with making this choice. Two methods are employed to evaluate this argument. The first method is an analysis of state differences in the wage penalties for motherhood, in which hierarchical linear modeling is used with data from the 1988–2004 Current Population Survey. The second method is a hiring experiment in a highly controlled setting. The wage analysis shows that, net of the usual individual and state‐level factors that affect wages, mothers are penalized more in states where motherhood is perceived to be a woman's choice. The hiring experiment distinguishes between productivity‐based and discrimination‐based explanations for the penalty and provides strong evidence for a causal relationship between perceptions of choice and discrimination against mothers.     

Law,the State,and the Dialectics of State Crime

Drawing on material from a study of civil society and state crime in six countries, this article reflects on two themes from Chambliss’s work: the debate between state-centred and more pluralistic views of law, and the “dialectical” approach to the analysis of state crime. It argues for a more pluralistic approach to law than Chambliss and Seidman adopted in Law Order and Power, along with a broader approach to the definition of state crime as a form of deviant behaviour. Case studies from the civil society research illustrate how the strategies adopted by organizations challenging state practices can be understood in terms of an interplay between different forms of law. With some qualifications, we support Chambliss’s dialectical approach, and attempt to clarify just what the term “dialectical” means. Finally we bring together the two strands of the argument to propose an approach to state crime founded on “dialectical legal pluralism”.     

External shocks,economic reforms,and the foreign trade behavior of the Soviet Union,China, and Hungary, 1970–1987

This article examines the external shocks and subsequent adjustment processes in the Soviet Union, China, and Hungary during 1974–76, 1979–81, and 1984–87. It compares the experiences of the three socialist countries with regard to external shocks to those of inward-and outward-oriented groups of newly industrializing countries (NICs). In contrast to the NICs, terms of trade effects were of secondary magnitude to export demand effects of external shocks in the three socialist countries during the first two periods. The oil-exporting Soviet Union had beneficial terms of trade effects during the first two periods, with unfavorable effects coming only in the third period. The adjustment responses to the external shocks varied greatly in the Soviet Union from the other two reform-oriented socialist countries and from both groups of NICs. It is interesting to note that the types of responses in the Soviet Union were quite opposite to that one observes for market economies. However, reform-oriented China and Hungary seemed to have response patterns similar to those of market economies, though China's response was similar to the outward-oriented NICs, while Hungary's was similar to the inward-oriented NICs.