Dr. Death? Professionalism,Virtue, and U.S. Physician Participation in the Death Penalty

In the United States at present, the death penalty is a possible sentence in 31 out of 50 states, as well as within the military and for federal cases. In the U.S., numbers of executions are declining, in part due to moratoriums in place and challenges to execution by lethal injection. Participation by physicians in lethal injection executions has been steadfastly viewed by professional medical organizations as contrary to their ethical standards. However, physicians have participated in lethal injection executions, and the morality of the death penalty itself is a matter of intense social and political debate. Medical ethics commentators and professional organizations have typically held that the prohibition on physician participation in the death penalty is independent of the ethical status of the death penalty itself. This article argues that this view is untenable, and that it is tied to a view of professional role virtue that is similarly untenable. At the same time, it argues that, given the morally uncertain status of the death penalty, it is plausible that virtuous physicians may either refuse or choose to participate in some aspects of the death penalty.     

Breaking the silence. Family ties and social networks of the deaf. A case study of East Flanders,Belgium, 1750–1950

In this article the social networks and family ties of a pre-industrial (married and/or died between 1770 and 1850) and industrial (married and/or died between 1850 and 1950) cohort of deaf men and women are compared to each other and to a cohort of non-disabled siblings. The aim is to assess the extent to which the deaf participated in a full-fledged manner in family and social life and to evaluate the ways in which their social networks changed as a result of nineteenth-century industrialisation processes. The extent of social integration is deduced from the profile of the witnesses registered in marriage and death certificates. In the absence of personal testimonies of social experiences, demographic sources are invaluable for providing a glimpse of the everyday social life of ordinary people in the past. In combination with historical records identifying disabled individuals, this research is a first attempt to study the social opportunities of an up-until-now often forgotten, but nevertheless integral part of society: the disabled. Based on the analysis of the witnesses, this article argues that in the course of the nineteenth century deaf individuals became less embedded in their social environment and their relationship with their family weakened. The minority of married deaf persons, however, expressed a much higher connectedness with family.     

Beyond the census. Reconstructing Dutch women's labour market participation in agriculture in the Netherlands,ca. 1830–1910

Many historians have pointed out for various countries that nineteenth-century national censuses do not accurately reflect women's economic activity. This was no different for the Dutch national censuses. In this article, we argue that under-recording was especially severe in agriculture, and that this problem increased towards the end of the century. The rise in under-recording was partly due to an increased irregularity of women's work on farms, but it also reflected changing living standards and ideologies, in which work was increasingly defined as undesirable for women. In relative terms, agriculture did become less important to men and women alike because of mechanization and industrialization. Nevertheless, agriculture continued to employ many women, especially married women and daughters working on their husbands' and fathers' farms. By offering additional source material and methods for estimating women's labour force participation in agriculture on a regional level, such as relating their occupational status to their husbands', and estimating the number of days worked, we aim to offer an enhanced methodology for gauging the work of women in agriculture, which may be applied to future research.     

America’s unreported economy: measuring the size, growth and determinants of income tax evasion in the U.S.

This study empirically investigates the extent of noncompliance with the tax code and examines the determinants of federal income tax evasion in the U.S. Employing a refined version of Feige’s (Staff Papers, International Monetary Fund 33(4):768–881, 1986, 1989) General Currency Ratio (GCR) model to estimate a time series of unreported income as our measure of tax evasion, we find that 18–23% of total reportable income may not properly be reported to the IRS. This gives rise to a 2009 “tax gap” in the range of $390–$390–540 billion. As regards the determinants of tax noncompliance, we find that federal income tax evasion is an increasing function of the average effective federal income tax rate, the unemployment rate, the nominal interest rate, and per capita real GDP, and a decreasing function of the IRS audit rate. Despite important refinements of the traditional currency ratio approach for estimating the aggregate size and growth of unreported economies, we conclude that the sensitivity of the results to different benchmarks, imperfect data sources and alternative specifying assumptions precludes obtaining results of sufficient accuracy and reliability to serve as effective policy guides.     

Introduction: Structure or strategy? Essays on family,demography, and labor from the Dutch N.W. Posthumus Institute

The concept of ‘family strategies’ has yielded much valuable research when used in the classic ‘quantitative’ and ‘anthropological’ approaches to the history of family life. Its continued use as a research concept requires, however, that significantly more attention be paid to the relationships between families as social units and their individual members, to the great variety of families and households, and to the different motives that guided families in charging strategies. These questions are brought to the forefront when the history of the family is investigated cross-culturally and comparatively, as the articles of this Special Issue, written by researchers of the Dutch N. W. Posthumus Institute, seek to do.     

Has Legal Realism Damaged the Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court?

Does understanding how U.S. Supreme Court justices actually decide cases undermine the institutional legitimacy of the nation's highest court? To the extent that ordinary people recognize that the justices are deciding legal disputes on the basis of their own ideological biases and preferences (legal realism and the attitudinal model), the belief that the justices merely “apply” the law (mechanical jurisprudence and the myth of legality) is difficult to sustain. Although it is easy to see how the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, the most unaccountable of all American political institutions, is nurtured by the view that judicial decisionmaking is discretionless and mechanical, the sources of institutional legitimacy under legal realism are less obvious. Here, we demonstrate, using a nationally representative sample, that the American people understand judicial decisionmaking in realistic terms, that they extend legitimacy to the Supreme Court, and they do so under the belief that judges exercise their discretion in a principled and sincere fashion. Belief in mechanical jurisprudence is therefore not a necessary underpinning of judicial legitimacy; belief in legal realism is not incompatible with legitimacy.