THE ROLE OF ARREST IN DOMESTIC ASSAULT: THE OMAHA POLICE EXPERIMENT *

This paper reports on a replication of the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment in Omaha, Nebraska. Suspects who were eligible for the experiment were randomly assigned to one of three police dispositions: mediation, separation, or arrest. No differences by disposition were found in prevalence or frequency of repeat offending, using jive measures of recidivism to assess outcome six months after police intervention. A survival analysis, using three of the measures for which dates of failure were available, also produced no differences by disposition     

The Failure of the Spectacle: The Voices Within

This article offers an ethnobiographic analysis of one of the most marginalized populations in contemporary US society: impoverished individuals with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or mania hallucinatory bipolar disorder who are imprisoned, first within their minds, and secondly by the state, what I term “the spectacle.” Punishment for their disease, rather than treatment, forces many of them into constant drift-transition between shelters, seedy motels and the streets: the spectacle’s disposable trash. I argue that to be recognized as a rights-worthy human being within the neoliberal spectacle individuals are required to have the financial, social and cultural resources necessary to actively participate in the labor market and the profit-generating activities of consumption and consumerism. The limited economic resources of the mentally ill keep them from being sufficiently active participants to be viewed as socially worthy. Consequently, they become socially unworthy—the socially dead. The seriously mentally ill experience both spatial and moral dislocation. They are cast out as flawed consumers and failed workers, and more importantly, due to the stigmatization of mental illness, they are disavowed of their humanity, rendering them socially dead.     

CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENT PREDICTORS OF PHYSICAL ASSAULT: A PROSPECTIVE LONGITUDINAL STUDY*

Data gathered over the course of an 18‐year prospective longitudinal study of more than 1,000 New Zealand children was used to examine the contextual, lifestyle, and childhood risk factors associated with young people's exposure to physical assault in late adolescence. Twenty‐three percent of males compared with 14% of females reported an assault between the ages of 16 and 18 years. However, although the prevalence and nature of young people's physical assault experiences differed in gender specific ways, the concurrent and antecedent risk factors that placed males and females at risk of physical assault were similar. The major predictors of physical assault during late adolescence included childhood measures of behavioral disturbance and parental dysfunction, in addition to measures of adolescent participation in a delinquent lifestyle, such as violent offending, status offending, and the misuse of alcohol. These findings support previous research suggesting a strong link between juvenile delinquency and victimization risk, and they contribute to an understanding of the role of gender and childhood experiences in predicting later risk of physical assault.     

The Public Participation Act: A Comprehensive Model Approach to End Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation in the USA

Commentators have documented the disturbing use of the courtroom to silence those who speak out on important issues. Too often, parties resort to meritless lawsuits in response to another's free expression or communication with the government. These lawsuits are called SLAPPs, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. In the USA, they have emerged as a significant threat to the rights of expression and petition guaranteed in the First Amendment to the US Constitution. A majority of the US States have passed 'anti-SLAPP laws', but there is no uniform protection. The model legislation outlined in this paper is intended to guide those who seek uniform, comprehensive protection against SLAPPs.     

论台湾的法律地位兼驳台独理论

根据国际法理论和实践 ,结合台湾问题的历史和现实 ,可以得出结论 :台湾是中国领土的一部分 ;自 1949年新中国成立以来 ,中央政府对于台湾领土享有国家主权 ;台湾当局早已不是中国的合法代表 ,而是一个类似于交战团体的中国地方叛乱政府 ,无权从中国分离而宣布独立 ,中央政府对于台湾当局的交战权是国际法所认可的 ,中央政府有权保留最终以武力手段解决台湾问题 ;任何国家对于台湾的承认只能限于对一国内战中“交战团体”的承认 ,或者根本否认其国际地位 ,并负有不支持台湾当局对抗中国政府的义务 ,严禁干涉中国内政     

The People Against Themselves: Rethinking Popular Constitutionalism

Ackerman, Bruce. 2014 . The Civil Rights Revolution . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Shugerman, Jed Handelsman. 2012 . The People's Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. In the course of reviewing Jed Shugerman's The People's Courts: Pursuing Judicial Independence in America and Bruce Ackerman's The Civil Rights Revolution, we argue for a reassessment of the way that scholars think about popular constitutionalism. In particular, we urge scholars to resist the tendency to create a dichotomy between judicial interpretation of law and a set of nonjudicial venues in which popular constitutionalism supposedly takes place. Popular constitutionalism is temporally and contextually bound, reflected in different forms and forums at different times in US political history and always dependent on the interactions between these institutions. By implication, this suggest that judges, rather than serving as obstacles to popular understandings of law, can and have used various forms of democratic authorization to strike down legislation violating both state and federal constitutions, thus bridging judicial review and popular constitutionalism with explicit support from the citizenry.     

The War Against Terrorism and the Rule of Law

The War Against Terrorism has put into issue two tenets of theAmerican constitutional tradition. The first denies the governmentthe power to imprison anyone unless that person is charged witha crime and swiftly brought to trial. The other requires thegovernment to abide by the Constitution’s restrictionson its power no matter where or against whom it acts. This article,based on the 2005 H.L.A. Hart lecture, examines the SupremeCourt’s first encounter with the Administration’sconduct of the War Against Terrorism and explains how the SupremeCourt’s rulings badly compromised these foundational principles.     

The Case Against Constitutional Reform

Proposals for constitutional reform in the United Kingdom are examined critically. Ideas of 'governance' as posited by various accounts in the literature of politics are compared with the simpler idea of 'government' that is predicated within the reform programme. It is argued that changes in the site of public power, as well as in the reality of its exercise through a range of bodies beyond the traditional state, now provide a much more complex situation than the reform programme acknowledges. The paper calls for the development of a new technology of constitutional control to capture fugitive power. The paper concludes with a brief examination of some newer theories of radical or participatory democracy and their potential to assist in a wider project of constitutional renewal.     

Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation: The British Columbia Experience

In 2001, the province of British Columbia (BC) became the first Canadian jurisdiction to enact anti-SLAPP legislation. While this legislation proved to be short lived, the BC experience around the issue of SLAPPs is instructive for law reformers both in Canada and beyond. In this article, the authors describe the legal and political processes that set the stage for the passage of the 2001 law, and its subsequent repeal. They also provide a detailed analysis and critique of key aspects of the debate surrounding the design of the law, and consider its efficacy in identifying, dismissing and deterring SLAPP lawsuits. They conclude with some observations with respect to the current status of the SLAPP issue in BC.