Ethical criteria for procuring and distributing organs for transplantation

This article provides an ethical analysis and assessment of various actual and proposed policies of organ procurement and distribution in light of moral principles already embedded in U.S. institutions, laws, policies, and practices. Evaluating different methods of acquisition of human body parts--donation (express and presumed), sales, abandonment, and expropriation--the author argues for laws and policies, including required request, to maintain and facilitate express donation of organs by individuals and their families. Such laws and policies need adequate time for a determination of their effectiveness before society moves to other major alternatives, such as a market. In organ allocation and distribution, which have close moral connections with organ procurement, the author defends the judgment of the federal Task Force on Organ Transplantation that the community should have dispositional authority over donated organs, that professionals should be viewed as trustees and stewards of donated organs, and that the public should be heavily involved in the formation of policies of allocation and distribution. Concentrating on policies being developed in the United Network for Organ Sharing, the author examines the point system for cadaveric kidneys, the access of foreign nationals to organs donated in the U.S., and the multiple listings of patients seeking transplants. He concludes by identifying two major problems of equitable access to donated organs that will have to be addressed by social institutions other than UNOS: access to the waiting list for donated organs and the role of ability to pay in extrarenal transplants.     

美国K类签证对中国立法的启迪

美国K类签证,又称外籍公民入境与美国公民结婚的一种签证。由于K类签证拒签率较低,对申请人的语言要求不高,已经成为美国公民的外籍配偶合法移民的重要途径。鉴于越来越多的发展中国家公民试图通过涉外婚姻而达到移居发达国家的目的,因此出入境管理部门及普通百姓了解K类签证的申请程序,有助于中国研究制定相应的立法对策。     

Executions and Apologies: The U.S., International Law and Right to Consular Notification

Following the execution of two German nationals in the United States in 2001, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found the U.S. in violation of international law stating that foreign nationals must be notified of their right to contact their embassy. When they learned of this right ten years after their arrest, they were barred from raising the claim; and after exhausting available avenues in American courts, the German consulate took the case to the International Court of Justice. The U.S. executed the two men while the case was still before the ICJ, in spite of its request to stay the execution and German objections that “violations of Article 36 followed by death sentences and executions cannot be remedied by apologies or the distribution of leaflets”. This paper discusses the importance of consular notification to the fairness of prosecutions. Cases reviewed indicate the U.S. still frequently does not provide notification and is at times oblivious to the ICJ's ruling. The paper discusses reasons the U.S. should honor notification, including reciprocity for Americans traveling abroad and the larger development of international law. A final section provides several mechanisms for bringing U.S. practices into compliance that could be easily implemented. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Skeletal Indicators of Stress: A Component of the Biocultural Profile of Undocumented Migrants in Southern Arizona,

The ability of forensic anthropologists in the United States to distinguish the remains of foreign nationals from those of American citizens may be crucial to the identification process. This study adds new criteria for identifying Hispanic foreign nationals in southern Arizona to those previously outlined by Birkby et al. (J Forensic Sci 53, 2008, 29) in the “cultural profile.” Skeletal indicators of nonspecific stress were evaluated in undocumented border crossers (UBCs) at the Pima County Office of the Medical Examiner and in documented American samples. Odds ratios show significant associations between UBC status and the presence of porotic hyperostosis and enamel hypoplasias, which are, respectively, 7.9 and 3 times more prevalent among UBCs. These findings are consistent with disparities in access to adequate nutrition and health care during childhood. In conjunction with context and other biocultural factors, the presence of these conditions should prompt practitioners to consider that unidentified remains may represent foreign nationals.     

Barriers and Bridges for Successful Environmental Technology Transfer

Governmental policy, social factors, individual behavior, and technology play critical roles in improving the environment. The Department of Defense is not immune to these factors as its actions have, and will continue, to impact its operational environments.This research analyzes the technological aspect of improving environmental conditions. Of particular interest, are the barriers encountered when laboratories transfer environmental technology to an end-user, and the bridges used to mitigate these barriers. A case study methodology is utilized analyzing five environmental technology transfers within the U.S. Air Force.Several key barriers and bridges are specific to the transfer of environmental technologies. They include environmental regulatory agency oversight, difficulty in clearly defining the end-user, and the need to demonstrate technologies to potential end-users. However, many barriers and bridges encountered in the environmental technology transfer, are also encountered in the transfer of other technologies. Based on these findings, recommendations are provided for improving the environmental technology transfer process.     

Why are some foreign-born workers more entrepreneurial than others?

Foreign-born workers have made significant and substantial contributions to economic productivity and new firm creation in the United States. This paper identifies predictors of entrepreneurial participation among foreign-born workers, combining nationally representative survey datasets covering the U.S. resident, college-educated workforce with country-of-origin macro statistics from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Immigrants who come to the U.S. after earning university degrees abroad are more likely to own businesses than other college-educated, U.S. resident workers. However, much of their higher rate of business ownership can be attributed to differences in demographic characteristics, such as years of postgraduate work experience and marital status. By contrast, science and engineering-based business ownership is most common among immigrants who came to the U.S. to pursue higher education. Furthermore, after controlling for differences in human capital, U.S.-trained adult immigrants have higher propensity to own businesses than other foreign-born workers and native U.S. citizens, overall. U.S.-trained immigrants’ higher probability of business ownership is not explained by differences in human capital or other demographic characteristics, but does seem partly attributable to differences across foreign-born workers’ countries-of-origin. Specifically, adult immigrants and foreign temporary residents from countries that offer entrepreneurs lower levels of cultural support are more likely to start and own U.S. businesses.     

Transformation: the Progression of Immigration Petitions for Transgender Spouses

U.S. citizens who marry foreign nationals may petition for their spouses so that the couple can reside permanently together in the United States. The guidelines set forth in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Adjudicator's Field Manual provide guidance to immigration officials for determining whether to grant or deny spousal petitions. Previously, the Adjudicator's Field Manual imposed a requirement that transgender individuals undergo costly and dangerous sex reassignment surgery in order to qualify as married for the purposes of a spousal petition. However, revisions to the Adjudicator's Field Manual issued in April 2012 provide transgender binational couples the opportunity to remain together in the United States without forcing one partner to undergo sex reassignment surgery. Given the history of discrimination against transgender individuals under U.S. immigration law, these revisions are a significant step in equality for transgender couples. Although these revisions provide many transgender binational couples with a means to remain together in the United States, this Note proposes that, to continue on the path toward equality for transgender couples, special guidelines should not be applied to marriages involving transgender partners if their marriage is deemed a valid heterosexual marriage in the state where solemnized. The goals of U.S. immigration law and compliance with the federal definition of marriage can be achieved without implementing individualized guidelines for transgender binational couples.

Key Points for the Family Court Community:
• Transgender spouses of a binational couple should not be subjected to additional guidelines when submitting spousal petitions that, if granted, would afford the couple the opportunity to reside together in the United States
• Transgender individuals should not be subjected to disparate treatment solely because the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services seeks to enforce discriminatory provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act
• A marriage should be recognized by immigration law if it is a valid marriage under the law of the state where the marriage was celebrated
• In order to achieve U.S. immigration law's mission of family unification, nontraditional couples should be afforded the same opportunity to remain together in the United States without additional scrutiny

     

New Approaches to Technology Transfer from Publicly Funded Research

The conventional wisdom is that American universities transfer technologies more rapidly and more effectively than their European counterparts. While this appears to be true, it is important to note that there are substantial cultural, legal, and regulatory differences between the two regions, and even within Europe. We believe that European universities can enhance their effectiveness in technology transfer if this function is given more visibility and prestige, enhanced public support, and formal procedures are implemented to facilitate benchmarking. In this paper, we examine some of the differences in university technology transfer in Europe and the U.S., and discuss these new approaches, which have recently been fully supported by the European Commission.     

刑事被害人国家补偿制度价值取向研究

正当性是制度赖以发挥积极社会效用的基础,科学确定价值取向是制度赢得正当性评价的前提。确定价值取向,需要综合衡量制度所涉各方主体的利益需求。被害人补偿制度的价值取向具有独特的内涵,它不仅需要合乎刑事司法的价值目标,而且也需要保持与环境的协调,实现内部利益关系的和谐。我国被害人补偿制度应当充分体现"调谐国家与国民关系"、"均衡刑事相对人人权保障"和"促进社会主义和谐社会建设"等价值需求。     

Violent crimes in native and foreign national offenders

Although the foreign national population in Spanish prisons has doubled during the past decade from 22% to 44%, few studies have investigated the contribution of foreign nationals to criminality and their risk profiles compared to natives. The present paper compared rates of violent conviction in 917 native and 657 foreign national male offenders, and explored differences in risk factors for violence between groups using logistic regression, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis, and positive and negative predictive values (PPV and NPV, respectively). Natives and foreign nationals showed no significant differences in the rate of violent conviction (19.6% vs. 17.2%, respectively). However, when multivariate models were developed to predict violence in the samples using logistic regression, between-group differences in the risk profiles of violent and non-violent offenders were found. Implications of the findings for research, public policy and risk management were explored.     

美国企业并购中涉税影响的评介

合理的企业并购战略既重新配置经济中存量资源,促进经济发展,还是企业经营迈向成功的契机。随着我国海内外并购活动的日趋活跃,税收已经成为影响企业并购形式、交易成本等方面的重要因素,但并未引起国内学者的重视。本文主要依据美国《国内税收法典》、《1986年税收改革法案》,简要综述国外学者对美国企业并购中涉税问题的研究成果,阐明税收因素对美国企业并购的重要影响,为我国企业并购提供借鉴,也为国内并购交易的税收法规研究提供新的思路。     

Policy Issues for R&D Investment in a Knowledge-Based Economy

The Internet Revolution induced an unbalanced perspective on future economic growth strategies. Because information technology (IT) largely constitutes an infrastructure upon which other economic activity is based, its economic role is to facilitate the productivity of investment in a wide range of products and services that meet final demand. Other economies around the world can and are investing in the same infrastructure, so the efficiency advantages now being realized by the U.S. economy will be fleeting unless U.S. R&D efforts produce a new and broad range of innovative products and services that take advantage of this infrastructure. A deep and diverse technology-based manufacturing sector must be a core objective of a national R&D strategy. United States manufacturing contributes $1.5 trillion to GDP, employs 20 million workers, accounts for more than 70% of industrial R&D, and constitutes the main source of technology for the larger service sector. While knowledge-based services are the largest source of economic growth for the U.S. economy, their long-term performance is highly dependent on synergies with a domestic manufacturing sector. These synergies will be even more important in the future because services are increasingly exposed to foreign competition. Knowledge-based services can be supplied from anywhere in the world—as long as these foreign sources can rapidly access and assimilate the necessary technology components. This caveat is the critical point for economic growth policy. Considerable research supports the argument that hardware and software components are most efficiently supplied to services by a manufacturing sector that is geographically close and institutionally integrated with the service applications. Policy debates have raged for decades over the nature and magnitude of underinvestment in manufacturing R&D. The need to resolve the relevant policy issues has increased, as industry is funding less of the long-term, high-risk research that creates the technology platforms supporting new industries and future economic growth. Unfortunately, only about a third of U.S. manufacturing is high-tech by conventional definitions. Some of the remaining industries develop technologies internally, but most purchase a large proportion of their technology from the high-tech sector. Because a technology acquisition strategy can be more easily imitated by foreign competitors, traditional industries are much more susceptible to exchange rate variations, global economic cycles, and secular shifts in foreign competition. Thus, with global technological capabilities relentlessly increasing, the long-term prospects for the moderate and low R&D-intensive portions of U.S. manufacturing are not good. This paper presents a conceptual framework and available data as inputs for the analysis of Federal R&D investment strategies. Such strategies must recognize the full range of public and private technology assets constituting a national innovation system. A developed and efficient innovation system has characteristics making imitation by foreign competitors difficult and thereby enables sustained competitive advantage.     

Foreign patents for the technology transfer from laboratories of U.S. federal agencies

The Journal of Technology Transfer - This paper documents the importance of foreign patents for the technology transfer of inventions created in the laboratories of the U.S. federal agencies....     

Information flow from Japan to U.S. researchers in applied and basic energy research fields

A recent study conducted by Pacific Northwest Laboratory (PNL) evaluated technical information transfer from Japan to the United States. This evaluation was part of a larger assessment of international monitoring of energy technology development conducted for the U.S. Department of Energy. For this study, U.S. researchers in each of ten selected technical fields were identified and interviewed to obtain their perceptions of information transfer from Japan. Results from these interviews indicated that, although there are major differences among the technical fields, U.S. researchers generally consider information transfer from Japan to the U.S. to be inadequate. Researchers particularly noted the difficulties they have attending conferences in Japan or visiting Japanese research facilities. In contrast, Japanese researchers attend all major conferences and frequently visit laboratories in the U.S. Researchers recommended several steps to improve technology transfer from Japan, including improving the screening and translation of technical material published in Japan, promoting binational seminars and workshops, and encouraging laboratory visits and exchanges of research personnel.     

Adapting to the foreign technological challenge

United States technology is increasingly viewed as providing the backbone and where-withal to arrest the nation's economic slide and to restore the accustomed U.S. leadership position in international trade. This view stems from demonstrated U.S. preeminence in technology, the importance of technology in economic growth, and the ascendance of technology in foreign affairs and international trade today. But, undue preoccupation with the domestic technology base represents at best a suboptimum strategy in the face of a continuing decline in the national investment in R&D. In view of the incipient shifting of the world technological balance overseas, comparable attention needs to be focused on foreign technological developments, and their potential for import and adaptation to help fuel technological innovation at home. A more balanced mix of foreign and domestic technological ingredients in the U.S. socioeconomic cauldron promises to be more attuned to the reality of scarce domestic resources and the changing world environment.     

美国对外国国家的送达制度

美国《外国主权豁免法》明确规定了对外国国家的送达程序,以区别于《联邦民事诉讼法》中的送达程序。这些特殊的送达规则以及送达实践强调被送达的外国国家实际接收和接受送达的效果,更加注重程序公正,在某种程度上给予外国国家更多的正当程序保障,增强审判程序和判决的可接受性,减少或避免国家豁免诉讼可能带来的政治风险。中国应对在美国法院被诉时,应当充分利用美国《外国主权豁免法》中的送达规则和实践,更好地维护我国的尊严和主权。     

伤害外国人的国家责任有关问题研究

一国的国民在他国受到损害,需要向东道国寻求损害赔偿,首先要解决东道国的国家责任问题。国家行为对外国人造成损害与私人行为对外国人造成损害,其行为的可归责性是不同的。要判断东道国对外国人的行为是否违反其国际法上的义务,不能单纯依据东道国国内法的规定,还应该从国际法的层面来考察。在私人行为造成损害的情况下,只要东道国没有"运用相当注意",它就要承担损害赔偿责任,但这种责任是有限的。一国的国民在外国遭到损害时,个人(包括法人)利益与国家利益之间的密切关系是国家代为提出外交求偿的基础。     

Representing Immigrants: The Role of Lawyers in Immigration Bond Hearings

Do immigration lawyers matter, and if so, how? Drawing on a rich source of audio recording data, this study addresses these questions in the context of U.S. immigration bond hearings—a critical stage in the removal process for noncitizens who have been apprehended by U.S. immigration officials. First, my regression analysis using a matched sample of legally represented and unrepresented detainees shows that represented detainees have significantly higher odds of being granted bond. Second, I explore whether legal representation affects judicial efficiency and find no evidence of such a relationship. Third, I examine procedural and substantive differences between represented and unrepresented hearings. My analysis shows no differences in the judges' procedural behaviors, but significant differences in the detainees' level and type of courtroom advocacy. Represented detainees are more likely to submit documents, to present affirmative arguments for release, and to offer legally relevant arguments. Surprisingly, however, I find no evidence that these activities explain the positive effect of legal representation on hearing outcomes. These findings underscore the need to investigate not only what lawyers do in the courtroom, but also less quantifiable factors such as the quality of their advocacy, the nature of their relationship to other courtroom actors, and the potential signaling function of their presence in the courtroom.     

The Global Magnitsky Act

This article discusses the U.S. Global Magnitsky Act, which was passed in 2016 and which provides a mechanism for the U.S. government to sanction foreign individuals and entities that are involved in human rights abuses and large scale corruption. It also discusses the opportunities that the Act provides for civil society organizations to influence the designation process and the additional due diligence measures that businesses should take in order to ensure compliance with the Act.     

Different Houses: The Distribution of Earmarks in the U.S. House and Senate

Nearly all studies of pork‐barrel politics in the U.S. Congress focus on the House, biasing our conception of how politics influences federal spending and skewing our attention toward factors that are active in the House. This article highlights differences between the Senate and House in how pork is allocated. We identify four important differences between the House and Senate, generate hypotheses regarding how each difference should influence the distribution of pork projects, and test these hypotheses using data from earmarks in the Appropriations bills passed by the two chambers for fiscal year 2008. The results support three of our four hypotheses, suggesting that senators are driven by different motivations than House members. These results imply that theoretical accounts of pork‐barrel spending need to account for these interchamber differences. Our findings also highlight how studies of legislative behavior, more generally, need to account for important differences in legislative structure and organization.