The State of Nature and Laws of Seinfeld: Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That

Seinfeld (1989–1998) and it’s co-creator’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–present), are each considered groundbreaking television. Critics regard their humor and intellectual comedy as Twain-like and creative. While both shows have been criticized for their character’s indifference and apolitical attitude, the programs resonate with those in society who more subtly consider law and politics. This project argues that Seinfeld and Curb present a unique theory of justice. These two shows constitute a common and current image of what is just in society. While critics have argued that Seinfeld and Curb are not shows about nothing, I argue that these comedians offer us a legal philosophy. For those who view these characters as merely “self-absorbed, superficial, and immature,” I posit that they represent the obscure area between what John Locke termed “the state of nature” and what legal scholars call “legal culture.” I propose that these sitcoms demonstrate a way of speaking about law that provides a constitutive theory of law and justice.     

Social Justice in Love Relationships: Recent Developments

In all societies, people are concerned with justice. “What’s fair is fair!” “She deserves better.” “It’s just not right.” “He can’t get away with that!” “It’s illegal.” “It’s unethical!” “It’s immoral” are fairly common laments. In the 11th century, St. Anselm of Canterbury (Anselem of Canterbury: The major works, 1998) argued that the will possesses two competing inclinations: an affection for what is to a person’s own advantage and an affection for justice; the first inclination is stronger, but the second matters, too. Equity theory, too, posits that in personal relationships, two concerns stand out: firstly, how rewarding are people’s societal, family, and work relationships? Secondly, how fair and equitable are those relationships? According to equity theory, people feel most comfortable when they are getting exactly what they deserve from their relationships—no more and certainly no less. In this article, we will begin by describing the classic equity paradigm and the supporting research. We will then recount the great debate that arose in the wake of the assertion that even in close, loving, intimate relationships, fairness matters. We will end by describing what scientists have learned in the past 35 years about the competing claims of altruism, reward, and fairness in love relationships.     

Measuring Government Favouritism Objectively: The Case of Romanian Public Construction Sector

Government favouritism in the allocation of public funds raises costs for any society in which corruption prevails. Particularistic transactions can be identified in three different situations: uncompetitive awards of public contracts when there is only one “competitive” tender, when public money is spent on contracts supplied by politically connected firms, and a situation of capture in which one private contractor obtains a disproportionate share of contracts issued by some public agency. This present research has tested for the relevance of those three types of particularistic transactions that signal government favouritism as they apply to the Romanian construction sector for the period from 2007-2013, and to do so has made use of original public procurement databases. Furthermore, it will be proposed here that the “kickback”—a percentage of particularistic awarded values—can be used as a measurement of corruption. Even conservatively estimated, kickbacks account for much of the cost borne by any society that fails to eradicate corruption. For our purposes here, amounts of kickbacks at county level have been controlled against criminal convictions for corruption at county level. As a result, data analysis provides strong evidence that kickbacks based on particularistic allocation of public funds are indeed relevant in the measurement of corruption, and the steps used to evaluate kickbacks can be used just as well for other countries.     

Pressing for Sentence? An Examination of the New Zealand Crown Prosecutor’s Role in Sentencing

Prosecutors are among the most powerful actors in any criminal justice system. Their exercise of discretion, however, has not been subjected to the same level of public and empirical scrutiny as other parts of the criminal justice system. To deepen understanding, I empirically explore for the first time the form, function and limits of the New Zealand Crown Prosecutor’s role at the sentencing stage of the criminal justice process. Semi-structured interviews of a non-representative sample of ten Crown Prosecutors are analysed using Hawkins’ framework of “surround”, “field” and “frame”. Findings suggest that whilst New Zealand’s regime shares history, principles, and structural features with English and Australian regimes, it goes further to permit Crown Prosecutors a more assertive role in sentencing. In the ‘surround’, populist and managerial pressures create frustration, strain, and concern. Changes to funding models suggest the potential for unjust sentencing outcomes has increased. The “surround” also intrudes upon and transforms decision-making “frames”. The opinions and presence of stakeholders influences decisions and practices at office and individual levels. Justice may be reactive, forward-looking, or negotiated depending on the particular mix of individuals involved – something accentuated by the regime’s privatised and decentralised form. Findings also suggest that Crown Prosecutors “frame” their role in occupational terms. The lack of interest of universities, professional bodies, and law and policy-makers in offering or requiring prosecutorial training before entry to the role is influential. This renders decision-making more susceptible to pressures in the “surround” and “field”, and increases variation in decision-making “frames”.     

The politics of race and juvenile justice: The “due process revolution” and the conservative reaction

Through the prism of race, this article analyzes the social structural and political context of juvenile justice law reforms over the past half century. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Supreme Court imposed national legal and equality norms on recalcitrant southern states that still adhered to a segregated Jim Crow legal regime, and these norms provided the impetus for the Supreme Court's juvenile court “due process” decisions in the 1960s. The article then analyzes sociological, criminological, racial factors, media coverage, and political dynamics of the 1970s and 1980s that contributed to the “get tough” legislative reformulation of juvenile justice policies in the 1990s. During this period, conservative Republican politicians pursued a “southern strategy,” used crime as a code word for race for electoral advantage, and advocated “get tough” policies, which led to punitive changes in juvenile justice laws and practices and have had a disproportionate impact on racial minorities.     

Social Justice and Individual Ethics*

Abstract. If one is committed to a “Rawlsian” conception of justice, is one not also necessarily committed to a “Christian” personal ethics? MOE explicitly, if one believes that social justice requires the maximinning of material conditions, should one not use one's time and resources as well as one can in order to assist the poorest? The paper offers a very partial answer to these questions by arguing for the following two claims: (1) Contrary to what is implied by some egalitarian critics of Rawls, the idea of a well-ordered society does not require maximin-guided choices at the individual level, and hence leaves room for legitimate incentive payments. (2) Despite Rawls's own neglect of this fact, a limited form of patriotism does constitute an individual “natural duty” following from a commitment to maximin social justice.     

The Criminal Justice System Creates Incentives for False Convictions

Abstract

The American criminal justice system creates incentives for false conviction. For example, many public crime labs are funded in part per conviction. We show that the number of false convictions per year in the American criminal justice system should be considered “high.” We examine the incentives of police, forensic scientists, prosecutors, and public defenders in the U.S. Police, prosecutors, and forensic scientists often have an incentive to garner convictions with little incentive to convict the right person. These incentives create what economists call a “multitask problem” that seems to be resulting in a needlessly high rate of false convictions. Public defenders lack the resources and incentives needed to provide a vigorous defense for their clients. Corrective measures are discussed, along with a call for more research.     

Two Types of Justice Reasoning About Good Fortune and Misfortune: A Replication and Beyond

While research into justice reasoning has progressed extensively, the findings and implications have been mainly limited to Western cultures. This study investigated the relationship between immanent and ultimate justice reasoning about others’ misfortune and good fortune in Japanese participants. The effects of goal focus and religiosity, which previously have been found to foster justice reasoning, were also tested. Participants were randomly assigned to one condition of a 2 (goal focus: long term or short term) × 2 (target person’s moral value: respected or thief) × 2 (type of luck: misfortune or good fortune) design. For immanent justice reasoning, the results revealed that a “bad” person’s misfortune was attributed to their past misdeeds, while a “good” person’s good fortune was attributed to their past good deeds. Regarding ultimate justice reasoning, it was found that a good person’s misfortune was connected more to future compensation than their good fortune, whereas a bad person’s misfortune was not reasoned about using ultimate justice. There was no significant effect of religiosity or goal focus on justice reasoning, which is inconsistent with the findings of previous studies. The necessity of directly examining cultural differences is discussed in relation to extending and strengthening the theory of justice reasoning.     

Clicking Away Your Speech Rights: The Enforceability of Gagwrap Licenses

Abstract

Software companies would like to be able to control what their customers and reviewers can say about them and their software. To this end, many include in their license agreements “DeWitt” or “gagwrap” clauses which purport to prevent written reviews or disclosure of benchmark test results involving the software without the manufacturer's consent. While the courts have recognized the enforceability of software licenses to protect manufacturers, they have so far not addressed the enforceability of gagwrap clauses. This article examines gagwrap clauses and examines them in a public policy framework arising from contract and First Amendment jurisprudence. It proposes a test for the enforceability of the clauses that leaves in place many agreements not to speak but renders gagwrap clauses suspect on public policy grounds.     

Distributive Justice Antecedents of Race and Gender Disparities in First-Year College Performance

Public education is a sphere of society in which distributive justice with respect to the allocation of opportunities to learn can have profound and lasting effects on students’ educational outcomes. We frame our study in the distributive justice literature, and define just outcomes specifically from a meritocratic and strict egalitarian perspectives in order to investigate how assignment to academic tracks and the availability of opportunities to learn during high school are associated with students’ academic achievement during college. We examine the role of “just” placement into high school academic tracks, “just” access to high-quality teachers, and “just” assignment of secondary schools’ resources in high school, in relation to college freshmen’s grade point averages (GPA). We utilize longitudinal data from a unique dataset with over 15,000 students who spent their academic careers in North Carolina public secondary schools and then attended North Carolina public universities. Our results suggest that “unjust” assignment of students to certain high schools, access to high-quality teachers, and assignment to learn in specific academic tracks result in long-lasting consequences that are reflected in freshman college GPA. Importantly, findings also show that the direction and magnitude of the relationship between distributional injustice at schools and college performance is moderated by students’ own gender and race. Race and gender interact with the high schools’ institutional contexts operationalized by tracking practices, teacher quality, and by school racial and socioeconomic composition. Results show that similar settings do not affect all students in the same ways.     

How Chinese e-public feel and think about corruption: A case study of Audit Storm (Shenji fengbao – – Part I)

Corruption is pervasive, rampant, enduring, and above all else a tolerated and taken for granted social problem in China. Still, corruption is a major concern for the political leaders, general public and foreign observers. Foreigners complained about the corruption cost of doing business in China. Students took to the street and peasants staged violent protest against government corruption. The consensus is that corruption challenges CPC's legitimacy and threatens China's stability.A systematic review of literature uncovers no investigation on the Chinese people's reception and reaction to the corruption, in the net. This is a first attempt to do so.This is a research into the “feelings” and “thinking” of Chinese internet users (e-public) on (anti)corruption in China. Specially, it tries to document and analyze the comments – reaction of the e-public to news articles on various aspects of “Audit Storm” in June–July of 2004.     

In the light of equity and science: scientific expertise and climate justice after Paris

The Paris Agreement is built on a tension between the common goal of limiting warming to 1.5 °C and the differentiation that follows from the principle of equity. Scientific expertise is commonly seen as providing important means to overcome this tension, for example in the Agreement’s “global stocktake”, which is said to be undertaken “in the light of equity and the best available science”. This raises the question of how scholarly communities best can contribute to deliberations on equitable differentiation in the effort required to meet common temperature goals. To discuss this question, the paper looks to the literature within Science and Technology Studies on the role of science in policymaking, where disagreement exists over the merits of “heating up” controversies through politicization, versus “cooling down” issues by seeking consensus. It assesses two cases in which scientific expertise has engaged with questions of equitable effort-sharing in international climate politics: The “Bali Box” of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, and the “Civil Society Equity Review” undertaken prior to COP21 in Paris. Based on a comparison of the two cases, it is argued that scientific contributions should not shy away from highlighting conflicts in values and interests, and that “heating up” discussions about climate justice may be a valuable contribution to overcoming the tensions of the Paris Agreement.     

How Chinese e-public feel and think about corruption: A case study of Audit Storm (Shenji fengbao – 审计风暴 – Part II)

Corruption is pervasive, rampant, enduring, and above all else a tolerated and taken for granted social problem in China. Still, corruption is a major concern for the political leaders, general public and foreign observers. Foreigners complained about the corruption cost of doing business in China. Students took to the street and peasants staged violent protest against government corruption. The consensus is that corruption challenges CPC's legitimacy and threatens China's stability.A systematic review of the literature uncovers no investigation on the Chinese people's reception and reaction to the corruption, on the internet. This is a first attempt to do so.This is a research into the “feelings” and “thinking” of Chinese internet users (e-public) on (anti)corruption in China. Specially, it tries to document and analyze the comments–reaction of the e-public to news articles on various aspects of “Audit Storm” in June–July 2004.     

THE HEDGEHOG DILEMMA IN THE COURT-MEDIA RELATIONSHIP IN CHINA

This paper explains why Schopenhauer＇s ＂Hedgehog Dilemma＂ may be the most apposite metaphor for the relationship between the courts and the media. Whatever they get from each other, the media＇s role representing the public and the court＇s role representing justice are both essential to modern democracy. Therefore, their relationship has attracted attention, not just in legal and media professions, but also in public and government debate. In the last two decades, China ＇s highest court has issued judicial interpretations and guidelines to regulate the activities of the media and the court, which has brought the topic to a new level of discussion. As a drafter of these official documents, the author will comment on development in this field and their interaction with values inherent to democracy.     

Learning Pain: Poetry in Emotion

This paper asks the question; is a poetic response to law and suffering legitimate? It reflects upon Robert Duncan's poem Persephone and imagines the (dis)connections between law, literature and poetry. It muses upon the “Trauma” of the poem and the “wound” considered in the context of both public and private law and considers the politics of sentimentality, dominant within the political agenda of the 21st century. The article uses the poem as a lens which reveals that the law fails to address the question of suffering as the wound of the poem is used by the poet as a pedagogical argument to teach us about loss.

     

Boundary Work: Transcendence and Authoriality in Religious and Secular Law

The semiotic investigation of the divine or transcendent authoriality of religious law involves, in the context of discussions concerning the propriety or impropriety of the influence of religion in “secular” political and legal systems, preliminary boundary work to discern the meanings of “religion”, “secular”, and “belief.” Jeremy Waldron’s account of the propriety of religion in “secular” politics, mirroring but reversing John Rawls’ account of religion’s impropriety in that context, can be contrasted with neo-Calvinist (and other) conceptions of pluralism and the inevitability of fundamental “beliefs” in all political and legal thought. In the latter perspectives, religious believers are neither unique in their appeal to transcendent values, nor relegated to advancing theocracy (because pluralism is conceived as a religious value rather than religion’s opposite). A workable alternative to the conventional discourse of religious influence in politics and law is therefore evident.     

Doing Justice to Foucault: Legal Theory and the Later Ethics

This article provides a critical evaluation of Ben Golder’s and Peter Fitzpatrick’s recent Foucault’s Law, which it characterizes as a decisive intervention into both legal theory and Foucault scholarship. It argues in favour of Golder’s and Fitzpatrick’s effort to affirm the multiplicity of Foucault’s work, rather than treat that work as either unified by a consistent position or broken into a series of relatively stable periods. But it also argues against Golder’s and Fitzpatrick’s analysis of Foucault’s understanding of the law through a conceptual framework borrowed from Derrida, and especially Derrida’s distinction between law and justice. It shows how this approach to reading Foucault effectively transforms some of his more powerful criticisms of the law into defences of justice. In place of this interpretation, the second half of this paper initiates a reading of Foucault’s later work on ethics and the self in the ancient world. It develops the theme of an ethics, or a way of life, that takes shape at a distance from politics on the one side and law on the other.     

Presidential rhetoric on cybercrime: links to terrorism?

Abstract

Presidents often give speeches about crime issues as a way to convince the public that there are significant problems for which an easy solution can be found. Studies have shown that presidential rhetoric on crime not only influences the public’s perception of the problem, but also the perception of the best solution. More recent research has demonstrated that presidents sometimes draw on the public’s fear of crime as a way to further affect the public’s perception of crime. In other words, presidents link crime with the public’s anxiety about other fearful events as a way to further impact the public’s perception of a problem (and thus further their agenda). This study examines presidential rhetoric on cybercrime to determine if executives link cybercrime with other issues such as national security. The findings provide credibility to both Cavelty’s threat frames approach as well as assertions made regarding the politics of fear.     

The Prisoner's Perspective: A Needed View in Policy Formulation

The need for soliciting attitudes of convicted adult criminals towards the public system of criminal justice remains a neglected area of study. To the exclusion of the “prisoner's perspective”, criminological thought has relied extensively and, at times, exclusively on traditional criminological sources, public opinion polls and simulation studies, for relevant information regarding the criminal justice system. This paper seeks to break the cabal of silence by contending that the “prisoner's perspective” must be a requisite in any effort directed at making better decisions. The relationship between attitudes and behaviour, the sense of participation, the implementation of sound business practices, and the adherence to democratic principles are offered as possible rationales for the acceptance of the “prisoner's perspective”. It certainly cannot be suggested that the majority of ills confronting the criminal justice system are due to the non-recognition of the prisoner; however, unilateral and archaic policy construction and continued bypassing of the “prisoner's perspective” can serve only to harden the apparent resentment and contempt for a criminal justice system predicated on brass-bound policy ideals.