The Gottfredson-Hirschi critiques revisited: reconciling self-control theory, criminal careers, and career criminals

Revisiting Gottfredson and Hirschi's critiques of criminal career research, the current study views low self-control as being analogous to criminal propensity and examines its predictive validity of career criminality among 723 incarcerated delinquent youths. Four key findings emerged. Compared to noncareer offenders, career criminals had significantly lower levels of self-control. Second, youths scoring one standard deviation above the mean on the Self-Control Scale had an odds ratio of 5.36 of becoming a career criminal. Third, self-control predicted career criminal membership with receiver operator characteristic-area under the curve sensitivity accuracies between 74% and 87%, suggesting that self-control is a potentially useful screening device for chronic criminality. Fourth, low self-control was overwhelmingly the strongest predictor of career criminality and far exceeded the impact of age, race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, mental illness, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnosis, and trauma experience. Further integration between self-control and criminal career research is urged.     

Law, Space, and Place: Reframing Comparative Law and Legal Anthropology

In her book Mapping Marriage Law in Spanish Gitano Communities (2006) , Susan Drummond challenges the disciplinary perspectives of comparative law and legal anthropology in her study of Gitano marriage practices. By reframing the way in which the "local" or "locale" is viewed—through an ethnographic study of Gitanos—she displaces the traditional boundaries ascribed to comparative law, with its focus on taxonomy and structure, and with legal anthropology's approach to culture. Her study not only elucidates how national and transnational law intersect, but highlights the complex interconnections between local law and the larger systems of law that attempt to regulate it. This detailed interdisciplinary depiction of the spatial and temporal dimensions of law demonstrates the importance of taking account of scale, projection, and representation that requires both comparative law and legal anthropology to rethink the nature of space and place and their relationship with law from both their macro- and microperspectives.     

Luhmann: Law,Justice, and Time

Time is central to Luhmann’s writings on social systems. Social systems, as systems of meaning, operate within three dimensions: factual, social and temporal. Each of these dimensions entails selections of actualities from potentialities (or contingencies) within horizons. Whilst the factual dimension involves selections based on distinguishing ‘this’ from ‘something else’, and the social distinguishes between alter and ego (asking with respect to any meaning whether another experiences it as I do), the temporal dimension operates with the primary distinction of before and after. In the temporal dimension, everything is ‘ordered only according to the when and not to the who/what/where/how of experience and action’ (Luhmann in Social systems. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1995, p. 78). In this paper, we explore the connection between the temporal dimension of meaning within the legal system and its connection to justice. We begin by setting out succinctly the role played by justice within the legal system, as presented by Luhmann, particularly in his book Law as a social system (2004). From this beginning, we move on to consider the relationship between law, justice and time, taking two examples. The first is the temporality of judicial decisions. The second concerns the relationship between the temporal meaning of law’s own operations, and the presumption of innocence.     

Law and Market Economy: The Triadic Linking of Law,Economics, and Semiotics

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique -     

土地法、动产法到信息法的社会历史变迁

人类社会的发展已经由农业社会、工业社会进入到信息社会。早期的人类在狩猎经济的方式下生存,没有私有财产,也没有所有权。农业社会的基础经济资源是土地,与之相适应,土地法成为最早的经济资源配置法则。工业社会的基础经济资源是机器,于是动产法取代了土地法的核心地位。信息是信息社会最重要的经济资源,信息法必将成为一个独立而完善的法律部门。     

IT and Law,and Law Schools

If 'computing and law' as a discipline is to push forward and develop, it will do so best within the context of the law school rather than as a joint enterprise between law and other disciplines. It is in the law school that the understanding of the nature of law is at its height. Yet there are problems here-law schools have a strained relationship with technology and their concept of the breadth of 'legal scholarship' can be limited by conventional (or ideologically-biased) views of law and an undergraduate-oriented view of the law school's purpose. There are also problems arising from the nature of communications between lawyers and computer scientists. In this article, I highlight these problems and also argue for a more developed and extended view of legal scholarship which will be able to incorporate study and research of the impact of the computer upon legal society as well as the legal control of the unwanted elements arising from these new technologies. Most writings on IT and the law school concentrate upon its use as an educational tool. My interest here is not so much in this side of things, but in the research culture of the law school. Whilst there is sometimes a view that the linkage of law school and IT is purely related to the use of technology in legal education, the remit is wider and includes the understanding of the link between substantive law and the context of the new computerized world and also the impact of the computer in the practice of law. This latter aspect is becoming increasingly important with the Woolf reforms and computerization of the procedural elements of law, but also in substantive law: for example, administrative systems are becoming more and more mediated by technology, and administrative law must be reviewed and re-worked in this context.     

The Boycott of the Law and the Law of the Boycott: Law, Labour, and Politics in British Columbia

This article uses a critical theoryllegal mobilization perspective to study the 1987–92 trade union boycott of the British Columbia labour law. The problems encountered establishing a total boycott–one that would eschew all contact with the state–and the subsequent modification of the parameters of the boycott through a selective reliance on the law offer an important case from which to learn more about the role of law and legal rights in highly regulated organizations and how collectives mobilize the law. The author argues that legal rights are important to unions because of their ability to mediate the complexity of labour relations through a decentralization of authority. At the same time, mobilization of the law for this purpose accentuates localized identities and unequal resources that operate in tension with a boycott ethos, necessitating a deliberative politics to legitimize the law. By exploring the tension between these two forms of mobilization around law–one to reduce complexity, another to legitimize broad collective norms–the author analyzes and draws some conclusions about the reproduction of social unionism in British Columbia.     

Reforming the United Kingdom Constitution: Law,Convention, Soft Law

The Governance of Britain Green Paper continues the programme of constitutional reform begun in 1997, and appears to reinforce the juridification of the UK's constitution. Nevertheless, several key reforms will be implemented not by legislation, but by creating new conventions. This article argues that such ‘declared’ conventions are best understood as a form of constitutional ‘soft law’, which attempt to influence constitutional behaviour rather than generating binding norms. Applying a regulatory analysis, it then argues that the case for a soft, rather than hard law approach to constitutional reform is weaker than its widespread use in the UK suggests. Finally, the article challenges the thesis that the political constitution is being replaced by a legal constitution, arguing that the government's attitude to constitutional reform still exhibits basic characteristics of political constitutionalism. Moreover, there is more to contemporary constitutional developments than a bipolar contest between political and legal constitutionalism.     

Geographical Connections: Law,Islands, and Remoteness

Liverpool Law Review - The paper introduces a special issue dedicated to cross-disciplinary research on insular condition and insularity. Situated at the crossroads of legal and geographical...     

Foucault, Law, and Power: A Reassessment

After raising doubts about Foucault's approach to law-power, in the light of various acts of religion-inspired violence on and after 11 September 2001, a case is made against this approach, based on the charge that Foucault ties law far too tightly to what he calls negative power. He makes law part of juridico-sovereignty power, a form of power he regards as outmoded, with an outmoded commitment to sovereignty and the state. It is argued that in attempting to separate law from what he sees as the positive power of modern governmentality, Foucault never understands law's role as a part of a crucial balance - between political power, military power, the social, the cultural, the legal, and the economic - a balance that tries to achieve both individual freedom and the security to enjoy that freedom. An alternative way of understanding law, and of understanding sovereignty and the state - the state under the rule of law - is presented as a much better route to an appreciation of law's part in the balance.     

Seeing Law: The Comic,Icon and the Image in Law and Justice

This special issue examines how the comic and the icon prefigure forms of legality that are different to modern law. There is a primal seeing of law unmediated by reading, writing or possibly thinking. This introduction identifies the primacy of the eye, the emergence of visual jurisprudence and the transformations of law as a paper-based material practice to a digitally enabled activity.