Rewriting the future? Biomedical advances and legal dilemmas

Developments in medical science have sparked public debate about the legal and ethical implications of new technologies. Within these debates a number of distinct discourses are evident, including discourses about the positive and negative implications of technological advances, the influence of globalisation on regulatory choice, and the challenges of articulating common values in a pluralistic society. This article argues that an understanding of these discourses is an essential part of understanding the nature of contemporary regulatory dilemmas.     

Destructive Competition or Competition Destroyed? Regulatory Theory and the History of Irish Road Transportation Legislation

The principal aim of our study is to contribute to the debate over whether regulation is enacted in the interest of consumers, producers, political agents, or some combination of these. We examine the legislative debates and subsequent regulatory bills surrounding road transportation regulation in Ireland in light of the three dominant theories which purport to explain the existence of regulation: the public interest theory and the so-called Chicago and Virginia theories. A unique feature of our study is an attempt to integrate specific rhetorical concepts used in the public policy debates into the theoretical analysis of regulation. One noteworthy conclusion of our study is that theories of economic processes affect the shaping and results of public policy.     

Which bank? A guardian model for regulation of embryonic stem cell research in Australia

In late 2005 the Legislation Review: Prohibition of Human Cloning Act 2002 (Cth) and the Research Involving Human Embryos Act 2002 (Cth) recommended the establishment of an Australian stem cell bank. This article aims to address a lack of discussion of issues surrounding stem cell banking by suggesting possible answers to the questions of whether Australia should establish a stem cell bank and what its underlying philosophy and functions should be. Answers are developed through an analysis of regulatory, scientific and intellectual property issues relating to embryonic stem cell research in the United Kingdom, United States and Australia. This includes a detailed analysis of the United Kingdom Stem Cell Bank. It is argued that a "guardian" model stem cell bank should be established in Australia. This bank would aim to promote the maximum public benefit from human embryonic stem cell research by providing careful regulatory oversight and addressing ethical issues, while also facilitating research by addressing practical scientific concerns and intellectual property issues.     

Policy processes and police reform: Examining similarities and differences between Scotland and the Netherlands

During 2013 the national governments of both the Netherlands and Scotland have introduced radical reforms which have replaced largely autonomous regional police forces with a national police service. Despite these structural similarities, however, there are important differences in the underlying processes which have shaped these reforms and the broader narratives about policing which have informed public and policy discourses.The purpose of this paper is to understand the underlying dynamics of these police reforms. Following an overview of concepts drawn from the public policy literature regarding policy change, the paper describes in detail the structural changes to policing that have occurred in both countries. These structural changes relate not just to the spatial re-organization of policing but also to the structure of police governance and accountability. The focus then shifts to disentangling key aspects of the decision-making processes which led to the reforms drawing on Kingdon's analysis of policy change and policy formation. The paper concludes with a broader discussion of the similarities and differences in police reform in the two countries, highlighting important issues regarding the significance of political context, debates around localism and policing, and narratives regarding a normative vision of the police role.     

“Bending” Evidence for a Cause: Scholar‐Advocacy Bias in Family Law

There are a number of salient public policy issues in the family law field that have invoked impassioned policy debates on a recurrent basis. In the absence of a body of research to address these critical concerns, advocates under the guise of social science scholarship have exacerbated the confusion and controversy by construing the scant available research evidence to justify their own ends, without regard to the relevance, quality, utility, and limitations of the studies. This is one of two articles on this problem that we have named “scholar‐advocacy bias.” In this article, we discuss the difference between truth in social science and truth in law. We identify common ways in which social science researchers and reviewers of research—wittingly or unwittingly—can become advocates for ideological positions and social policies at the expense of being balanced reporters of research evidence as illustrated by recent debates about overnight parenting of infants and toddlers. We also consider how adherence to established scientific principles and methods prevents the misuse of research in this way.     

Introduction

The eruption of the "culture wars" in 1989 pushed U.S. arts policy to the forefront of the public agenda, leading to extreme political scrutiny of and controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and its funding activities. As the premier national-level public agency charged with supporting the arts in the United States, the NEA stood at the heart of debates on related arts policy. With an empirical focus on the NEA in the 1990s, we delineate and examine the broader effects and implications of the surrounding debates and related policy outcomes. In general, in keeping with the conservative political agenda of the 1990s in the United States, the result was the development of policies ostensibly aimed at promoting access to the arts that demoted concerns over artistic excellence, along with direct attacks on the NEA's overall administrative philosophy and decision-making practices. Employing insights from critical theory and reflexive sociology, we analyze the dramatic organizational shifts and programmatic restructuring initiated by the NEA in response to this situation and its ultimate effect on the relationships between art, artist, and audience in U.S. arts policy and society today.     

正义原则与现代中国公共政策的道德基础

现代中国正经历着一系列重大且影响深远的公共政策变革,学界对这种变革的道德基础究竟是什么存在很大争议。本文认为,现代中国公共政策变革的道德基础是正义原则,我们可以在这一原则的框架内构建具有中国特色的公共政策理论。     

Can Audience Development Promote Social Diversity in German Public Arts Institutions?

Despite generous public funding, arts institutions in Germany are primarily serving a small, educated section of the German population. This article presents findings from arts participation surveys, research from an empirical study on “Intercultural Audience Development” in public theaters and museums, and an analysis of cultural policy debates to reveal the role of audience development in overcoming the social imbalance of audiences in German cultural institutions. Research findings suggest that traditional concepts of audience development do not lead to sustainable changes in the social structure of the audience. More substantial institutional changes are necessary, supported by new cultural policies.     

Cohabitation and Comparative Method

The paper intervenes in current policy debates on unmarried cohabitation and comparative law debates on methodology. It adopts a culturally alert, discursive methodology of comparison to study regulation of unmarried cohabitation under the common law and civil law as well as the effect of an entrenched right to equality protecting against marital status discrimination. It identifies not different legislative solutions to a common problem, but distinct discourses of family law regulation. Yet the approaches are less radically opposed than is often thought. Discursive comparison tends to highlight dominant voices at the expense of minority ones, wrongly characterising minority views as foreign to a tradition. Discursive comparison should not confine itself to a synchronic view of present legal debates; a richer diachronic approach will also attend to views within a legal tradition's past.     

The states "race" with the federal government for stem cell research

This article presents an innovative study of the effect of individual states and private institutes in pushing forward stem cell research despite a federal ban on creating new stem cell lines. The author analyzes the impact of state legislation, proposing that states are reacting to federal policy by serving as laboratories for what is traditionally federally funded biomedical research.     

Stem cell technologies: regulation, patents and problems

Human embryonic stem cell research promises to deliver in the future a whole range of therapeutic treatments, but currently governments in different jurisdictions must try to regulate this burgeoning area. Part of the problem has been, and continues to be, polarised community opinion on the use of human embryonic stem cells for research. This article compares the approaches of the Australian, United Kingdom and United States governments in regulating human embryonic stem cell research. To date, these governments have approached the issue through implementing legislation or policy to control research. Similarly, the three jurisdictions have viewed the patentability of human embryonic stem cell technologies in their own ways with different policies being adopted by the three patent offices. This article examines these different approaches and discusses the inevitable concerns that have been raised due to the lack of a universal approach in relation to the regulation of research; the patenting of stem cell technologies; and the effects patents granted are having on further human embryonic stem cell research.     

Cloning and stem cell research: a critical overview of the present legislative regime in Australia and the way forward

The application of stem cell research in biomedical science has recently sparked debates similar to the calls nearly 25 years ago for a ban involving recombinant DNA. This article critically examines the present legislative framework in Australia governing stem cell research and cloning, after briefly seeking a clear understanding of what these procedures involve, as well as suggesting an ethical paradigm within which these issues can be approached. The deficiencies in the proposed legislative framework are also highlighted. Australia has a duty to future generations to pursue the benefits unlocked by this type of research and it is hoped that the next two years will lead to more insights regarding the potential of such research and hence a revision of the present legal impediments.     

Lengthening the stem: allowing federally funded researchers to derive human pluripotent stem cells from embryos

Recent developments in fetal tissue research and stem cell research have led to dramatic breakthroughs in the search for cures for Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, and a host of neurological disorders. Because this research involves fetal tissue and stem cells from human embryos, many complicated ethical and legal implications surround it. This Note explores the history of fetal tissue research and stem cell research, examines the surrounding ethical and legal issues, looks at the current state of federal law, and concludes that Congress should allow federally funded researchers to derive stem cells from discarded human embryos obtained from in vitro fertilization clinics.     

The search for truth and freedom: ethical issues surrounding human cloning and stem cell research

The reality of cloning and stem cell research has provoked wonder, fear and anger. These developments have the potential fundamentally to alter humanity. But how well informed is the range of views being expressed? Is progress being threatened by understandable but uninformed fears? Or are scientists rushing toward an ethical abyss, so concerned with what they can do that they never stop to ask what they should do? This article identifies some of the fears and hopes surrounding cloning and stem cell research. It aims to provoke ethical debate in evaluating such research.     

Seeking Sperm: Accounts of Lesbian Couples' Reproductive Decision-Making and Understandings of the Needs of the Child

Same-sex couples and their children have been the subject ofsignificant international attention over recent years, includingdebates about planned parenthood in the context of same-sexrelationships (Donovan, 2000; Dempsey, 2004; Luttichau, 2004;Vonk, 2004; Ryan-Flood, 2005). Drawing on a qualitative studyof lesbian parent families in the UK, this article contributesfurther to these debates through a discussion of respondents’accounts of their reproductive decision-making. I discuss thesocio-legal discourses around the legitimacy of the lesbianparent family created by donor insemination and examine howrespondents react to these discourses. I identify an overarchingpreoccupation within these accounts which is concerned withaddressing the needs of children. The dominant notions of howbest to meet children’s needs established in contemporaryUK family policy pose considerable tensions for the lesbianparent family. In seeking to resolve these tensions, parentsin my study reinterpret and develop different understandingsof how best to meet these needs. Their accounts reveal the complexityof the considerable efforts of families raising children infamily forms that fall outside the normative order to addressthe needs of the child, and the disjunctions between everydayunderstandings of children’s needs and those constructedthrough policy and family law.     

Legal Aid in the Eye of a Storm: Rationing, Contracting, and a New Institutionalism

This article discusses possible rationales underlying a legal aid system through an articulation of theories of distribution in the legal services market, considers the idea of prioritization and planning or, in the political vernacular, rationing of public funding, and addresses the impact of economic and social theories of the professions on legal aid structures. Finally, the emerging concepts of 'new-institutionalism' and 'new public management' are introduced to indicate the organizational and sociological complexity of reforming the legal services market. Each of these threads illustrate competing values and institutional influence on publicly funded legal services. Bureaucratic rules mix with professional and economic incentives to articulate entitlement to public money in a predominantly private forum. Drawing on research in the field of rationing health care, sociological and economic work on legal services, and organizational theories, it will be demonstrated that conceptual, policy, and research tools need to play closer attention to this competition of values.     

Semiconductor chips, genes, and stem cells: new wine for new bottles?

This Article analogizes early semiconductor technology and its surrounding economics with isolated genes, stem cells, and related bioproducts, and their surrounding economics, to make the case for sui generis (of its own class) intellectual property protection for isolated bioproducts. Just as early semiconductors failed to meet the patent social bargain requiring novelty and non-obviousness in the 1980s, isolated genes and stem cells currently fail to meet the patent bargain requirements of non-obviousness and eligible subject matter that entitle them to traditional intellectual property protection. Like early semiconductor chip designs, nevertheless, the high cost of upstream bioproduct research and development, coupled with the need to sustain continued economic growth of the biotechnology industry, mandates that Congress provide some level of exclusive rights to ensure continued funding for this research. Sui generis intellectual property protection for isolated bioproducts would preserve the incentive to continue innovation in the field. As illustrated by the semiconductor industry, however, such sui generis protection for this technology must include limitations that address the need to provide an appropriate level of public access to facilitate downstream product development and enrich the public domain.     

Sexual offenders’ treatment experience: a qualitative and quantitative investigation

Abstract

This research investigates the where and when of sexual assaults to determine what types of sexual crimes are committed at different time and place classifications. Exhaustive CHAID (chi-squared automatic interaction detection) analyses are conducted, examining factors associated with crimes that were committed indoors or outdoors, in private or public places, during the day or at night, and during the week or on the weekend. These methods are applied to a sample of 361 sexual crime events committed by 72 serial sex offenders. The results are strikingly different dependent on which spatial or temporal aspect of the crime is examined, which implies the complexity of sexual crime events and their situational components. This research brings to light possible policy implications with respect to situational crime prevention.     

Sex Trafficking and Moral Harm: Politicised Understandings and Depictions of the Trafficked Experience

This paper explores notions of harm in sex work discourse, highlighting the extent to which essentialist ideas of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ sex have pervaded trafficking policy. In a comparative examination of Australian Parliamentary Inquiries and United States congressional hearings leading to the establishment of anti-trafficking policy, we identify the stories that have influenced legislators, and established a narrative of trafficking heavily dependent upon assumptions of the inherent harm of sex work. This narrative constructs a hierarchy of victimisation, which denies alternative discourses of why women migrate for sex work. We argue that it is not sexual commerce that is harmful, but pathological, systemic inequalities and entrenched disadvantage that are harmful. A narrow narrative of trafficking fails to adequately depict this complexity of the trafficked experience.     

The Pull of the Policy Audience

Much research in the sociology of law seeks to play a role informing policymakers about the effects of particular policy initiatives and to participate in debates about how to use law as an instrument of public policy. The paper examines the origins of policy studies in legal realism and describes the way contemporary law and society scholars selectively appropriate aspects of the realist heritage while ignoring others. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which those scholars separate policy from politics and operate as if policy focused research were not itself political. The paper traces the pull of the policy audience and the separation of policy from politics through a close examination of several widely respected examples of sociolegal scholarship. In addition, an effort is made to assess the impact that the desire to speak to the powerful has had in shaping what constitutes acceptable scientific practice and in shaping the domain of study. The paper concludes by arguing that the sociology of law would benefit from an effort to interrogate the basic premises which inform policy debate and that such an interrogation itself requires greater distance from the policy audience.