Should I help my neighbor? Self-interest,altruism and economic analyses of rescue laws

This article shows that the economic analyses of rescue laws developed in the ‘70s are the outcome of a long-term process that began at the end of the 1950s with the passing of the first legislations intended to promote and control rescue behaviour (the so-called “good Samaritan” legislations, acts or statutes) and that finally results in the economic models of rescue developed by Landes and Posner (The Journal of Legal Studies, 7(1):83–128, 1978a; The American Economic Review, 68(2):417–421, 1978b). The article investigates the context that made the occurrence of the economic analysis of rescue law possible and the controversies that it fueled in both the legal and economic fields. It also highlights the influence of the economic analysis of altruism on this particular field of law and economics.     

Me,myself and I: the sociology of policing male rape,the gaze of the ‘Other’

In this paper, the bodies of male rape victims as the ‘other’ are problematized. The social and cultural constructions of male rape within a policing context are examined since the police play a major role in impeding the progress of male rape cases. The author draws on police data, generated from interviews and qualitative questionnaires with the police, to illustrate the problems with policing male rape in England, UK. While the author provides empirical data, sociological, cultural, and post-structural theoretical frameworks largely inform it. It is argued that the bodies of male rape victims are positioned in inferior positions, whereby their bodies are metaphorically and symbolically marked as ‘abnormal’, ‘deviant’, and the ‘other’. Through social and power relations, their bodies are tainted, which reinforces gender and social norms.     

'The story of Abraham,Isaac and Jacob" or "am I my brother's keeper?"

Presented is a case report of a violent sexual assault where the DNA profile obtained from an item of evidence was compared to a suspect's profile. The profiles did not match, but the sharing of such a large number of alleles raised the suspicion that perhaps the real perpetrator was a blood relative of the suspect. The investigators requested a sample from the suspect's brother, and a match was defined. In an era of technological breakthroughs in the field of forensic DNA analysis, the importance of the scientist's attention to the evidence presented in each case is stressed.     

人治司法,I服了YOU!

I服了YOU!这句话先送给大师老 谋子。 I服了YOU！这句话再送给陕西的 一些法官们。 早在上世纪90年代初,张艺谋把 电影《秋菊打官司》的背景弄在陕西,让 秋菊操了陕西口音,俺还看不出玄妙; 后来,陕西发生了"麻旦旦处女嫖娼 案"、"受害人在法院喝农药自杀案"、 "枪下留人案"、"夫妻家中看黄碟被抓 案"等等让全国瞪大眼睛的非凡案子, 俺好歹咂摸出一点味道了:如今,见了 《中国青年报》著名的《冰点》栏目3月 31日刊发了近万字的《十年磨一案》, 俺终于对那布满窑洞的陕西刮目相看 了,对那里的一些法官说一句:I服了 YOU!I五体投地般服了YOU！     

“Because You’re Mine, I Walk the Line”? Marriage, Spousal Criminality, and Criminal Offending Over the Life Course

Objectives

This study is an analysis of the relationship between marriage and crime in a high-risk sample of Dutch men and women. Marriages are classified as to whether the spouse had been convicted of a crime prior to the marriage, in order to ascertain if one??s criminal career after marriage unfolds differently depending on the criminal history of one??s spouse.

Methods

Data are from the Criminal Career and Life-Course Study, a random sample of all individuals convicted of a criminal offense in the Netherlands in 1977 (N?=?4,615). Lifetime criminal histories for all subjects are constructed from age 12 to calendar year 2003. Official marriage records are also consulted, and the criminal history of all spouses are similarly constructed. Fixed-effects Poisson models are estimated to quantify the relationship between marriage, spousal criminality, and conviction frequency, controlling for age, parenthood, prior conviction, and prior incarceration.

Results

Among men, marriage reduces the frequency of criminal conviction, but only if the marriage is to a non-convicted spouse. Marriage to a convicted spouse, on the other hand, is indistinguishable from singlehood??it neither discourages nor promotes criminal behavior. Among women, marriage has a crime-reducing effect, regardless of the criminal history of the spouse. A set of preliminary follow-up analyses suggests further that men with more extensive criminal histories, and with more stable marriages, benefit in a more pronounced way from marriage to a non-convicted spouse. However, even unstable marriages to non-convicted spouses appear to reduce conviction frequency while they last.

Conclusions

Marriage is indeed a salient transition in the criminal career, but there are important differences depending on the characteristics of the offender (gender, criminal history), the characteristics of the spouse (criminal history), and the characteristics of the marriage (duration). The authors conclude that while marriage matters, it does not necessarily mean the end of a criminal career, and that processes of both partner selection and partner influence deserve close attention by marriage-crime researchers. Qualifications of the study??s findings include the use of conviction data from official sources, the use of a sample of men and women who were all convicted of a crime at some point in their lives, the study of legal marriage in the Netherlands, and the inability to measure potential mechanisms for the observed marriage effects.     

Partying,Cruising, and Hanging in the Streets: Gangs,Routine Activities,and Delinquency and Violence in Chicago, 1959–1962

Objectives

Examine relationships between routine activities, character contests in the form of “signifying,” and general delinquency and fighting in a street gang context.

Methods

Samejima’s (Estimation of latent ability using a response pattern of graded scores. Psychometrika monograph supplement 17. Psychometric Society, Richmond, VA, Retrieved 10 Aug 2011, from http://www.psychometrika.org/journal/online/MN17.pdf, 1969) graded response models and multilevel ordinal logistic regression models are estimated using data from Short and Strodtbeck (Group process and gang delinquency. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1965) study of street gangs in Chicago, 1959–1962. The primary sample consists of 490 boys representing 10 black gangs, 4 white gangs, 9 black lower-class groups, 4 white lower-class groups, 2 black middle-class groups, and 2 white middle-class groups.

Results

Unstructured and unsupervised socializing with peers significantly increased the likelihood of delinquency among the boys and explained a significant portion of the group-level gang effect. In addition, the more time the boys spent hanging in the streets and attending parties, the more likely they were to participate in signifying, which, in turn, increased their risk of fighting.

Conclusions

Findings provide evidence that gangs contribute to delinquency partly through their effect on the routine activities of members. Findings also suggest that signifying is an important mechanism by which unstructured and unsupervised socializing with peers leads to violence.     

Habermas,Feminism, and Law: Beyond Equality and Difference?*

In this paper, I argue that Habermas' proceduralist model of law can be put to feminist ends in at least two significant ways. First, in presenting an alternative to the liberal and welfare models of laws, the proceduralist model offers feminism a way out of the equality/difference dilemma. Both these attempts to secure women's equality by emphasising women's sameness to men or their difference from men have placed the onus on women to either find a way of integrating themselves into existing institutions or to confront the so‐called question of women's difference. The proceduralist model renders this dilemma irrelevant. Instead, it proceeds from the fact of sexual difference; a fact that produces competing and conflicting needs and interests that require interpretation by both men and women. This, I argue, marks a change in the very way we conceptualise the so‐called problem of women's difference, insofar as the question is no longer framed in these terms. Second, I argue that this deliberative process over the interpretation of conflicting interests affects a fundamental shift in the nature of legal institutions themselves, insofar as law is no longer a vehicle for promoting male interests.     

‘I Would Prefer Not To’: Giorgio Agamben, Bartleby and the Potentiality of the Law

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben suggests that Herman’s Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ offers the ‘strongest objection against the principle of sovereignty’. Bartleby, a legal scribe who does not write, is best known for the formula with which he responds to all his employer’s requests, ‘I would prefer not to.’ This paper examines this formula, asking what it would mean to ‘prefer not to’ when the law is in question. By reading Melville’s story alongside Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and Walter Benjamin’s theses on history, it suggests that Bartleby’s interest, for Agamben, lies in his challenge to dominant conceptions of the relation between potentiality and actuality, which, he believes, are rendered indistinct in sovereignty. By reflecting critically on Agamben’s depiction of Bartleby as a ‘new Messiah’, this paper examines Agamben’s understanding of what it would mean to fulfil the law, and what form of political task this would entail.     

Should I stay,or should I go? self-legitimacy of attorneys in an authoritarian state

Crime, Law and Social Change - In non-democracies, lawyers face various constraints ranging from the absence of acquittals or violations of their clients’ rights to threats and criminal...     

‘No,buddy, I will not speak to the press – I am working!’: criminal justice and the interprofessional dynamics of communication production in the Chilean Public Prosecutorial Office

This article analyses the interprofessional dynamics of communication production in the criminal justice system. Through 26 in-depth interviews, we investigate the production of media information on prosecutorial work in Chile, tracking the relationships between internal communication agents, prosecutors, and external legal journalists. Previous scholarship has shown the success of police organizations in defining the content of crime communication based on asymmetrical power relations with the media. By contrast, our study reveals that legal journalists can bypass attempts to control the flow of information from the prosecutorial office and impose extra-organizational goals. Lawyers regularly dismiss the work of journalists, particularly those working as strategic communication advisors with prosecutors, but the asymmetrical relationship between the criminal justice agency and the media plays in favour of external legal journalists. Our article considers several explanations for this configuration, including interprofessional values, transactional relationships between journalists and prosecutors, and local legal culture.     

“‘I have done it and I have got to die’: Coroners' inquests of abortion deaths in Rhode Island, 1876–1938.”

This article offers an analysis of abortion deaths among white working-class women in Providence County based on thirty-three coroners records from 1876 to 1938. Most women were single and in their twenties: they chose abortion either because their lover was married, or they were too ashamed of their premarital sexual activity to confront their parents. Married women, on the other hand, did so primarily due to economic factors, extramarital affairs, or a strong desire for no more children. In seeking abortions, single women depended on lovers while married women relied on sisters or sisters-in-law. In investigating the deaths resulting from these abortions, coroners called husbands, but not lovers, before the inquests and sought out antemortem statements. Yet only 39% of cases had dying declarations: either doctors refused to participate in interrogating women on their death beds, or women refused to identify abortionists. Of the abortion providers identified, 45% were physicians. Working-class status did not prevent these women, and later their families, from securing expensive medical care from doctors. Both inquests and newspaper coverage in Providence County differ from studies by other scholars who find these venues used as mechanisms to embarrass women and warn single women of urban threats, and to target midwives over physicians. The evidence points to analogous handling of doctors and laypeople, and of married and single women. No intimate details of women's lives were exposed and newspapers did not use sensationalized headlines to draw attention to the illegal activity of abortion. Coroner inquests asked questions necessary to investigate death from a criminal activity, not to take a moral stance on female sexuality.     

“I was a homo thug,now I'm just homo”: Gay gang members’ desistance and persistence

In a growing body of research, the methods of and motivations for gang desistance are being investigated, spurred in part by concerns about the long-term negative effects of gang membership. Despite recent calls for scholarship that is more inclusive of LGBTQ populations and attentive to issues of sexual identity, however, most gang research remains overwhelmingly heteronormative. In this study, I use in-depth interviews with 48 self-identified gay male gang members to explore how and why they have desisted from or persisted in their gangs, as well as explore how desistance or persistence has affected their self-perceptions, lives, and activities. Because not all have left their gangs, I examine the markers in young men's narratives that signal shifts away from—but sometimes also toward—their gangs, as well as their zigzagging paths out of gang involvement. As gang structure and composition hold importance for their members’ experiences, I use a comparative approach by contrasting men in predominantly straight gangs with those in gay gangs. Set within a heterosexist cultural context, the structure of the gang combines with individual shifts in identity to encourage pathways out of straight gangs and pathways into continued involvement with gay gangs.     

Self‐control,peer relations,and delinquency

This paper addresses gender-specific treatment in juvenile justice processing, an important topic in view of new funding opportunities to develop female-specific programs. This topic is controversial and includes many unresolved issues. To provide context, we relate this study to lessons from the initiative to address disproportionate minority confinement: that it is impossible to understand confinement without understanding the process by which youths are confined, that structural and demographic traits facilitate the process, and that benevolent interventions can have unintended negative consequences. We present empirical findings that juvenile justice cases are “gendered,” but that court treatment of those cases shows more gender similarities than differences. In contrast, interviews with officials suggest large gender gaps in opportunities for services, and indicate some gender biases. Bias and disparity also are themes among delinquent and “at-risk” girls who participated in focus groups; in addition, girls expressed preferences for treatment comparable to that given to boys. Finally, we evaluate what has been advocated as female-specific programming and recommend how best to proceed.     

Asian Criminology – Challenges, Opportunities, and Directions

Despite considerable advances in the field of criminology in Asia over the past few decades, the pace of growth has been quite slow compared with the rapid development of the field in North America and Europe. This paper discusses key features of the Asian context as they are related to the development of criminology in Asia. The paper examines the major challenges that Asia’s diverse culture, legal traditions, crimes, and crime control pose for development of criminology in Asia. It also discusses the opportunities afforded by the Asian context. The paper proposes general strategies in response to the challenges. The author suggests the importance of moving towards a unified paradigm of Asian Criminology. The Asian Journal of Criminology aims to play an instrumental role in this process of advancing Asian criminology.     

Power and inheritance: Male domination,property, and family in eastern Europe, 1500–1900

A widespread inheritance pattern in eastern and southeastern Europe was based on equally partible male inheritance and excluded women from inheritance and dowry. The western transition zone to the other predominant European inheritance systems coincided with the Hajnal line, which divides the distribution of European marriage patterns in historical times. New evidence is added to the historical depth of the cultural–historical transition zone already postulated by Mitterauer. Since the early Middle Ages, this zone also marked the border region of two basic European agrarian systems: the western Grundherrschafts system, which led to the intervention of landlords into inheritance patterns and family structures of the serfs and the non-interventionist tributary systems, which left inheritance practices based on customary laws untouched until the second half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The above-mentioned inheritance pattern, which was also widespread in Asia, allocated a huge amount of power to the agnatic core of the family and was part of a patriarchal system shaped by patrilineality, patrilocality, low age at marriage, complex family forms, and fragmentation of the soil when demographic transition set in.