Incomplete antitrust laws and private actions for damages

Our purpose in this paper is to identify some of the implications that derive from the incompleteness of antitrust laws. Since with regard to certain anticompetitive conduct, the law remains substantially incomplete up to the first relevant court judgment, in terms of policy it is worth concentrating on stand-alone claimants who, not relying on earlier judgments, face very high evidentiary requirements, while generating large positive (information) externalities for potential follow-on claimants. The paper is structured as follows. In Sect. 2, we introduce the notion of incompleteness of the laws and address the process of production of evidence in antitrust lawsuits. Sect. 3 provides a survey of EU national case law and our summary of the results puts emphasis on incomplete laws, evidentiary requirements and stand-alone lawsuits. Sect. 4 presents a framework model to distinguish the decision-making processes for stand-alone and follow-on claimants in the presence of incomplete antitrust laws. In Sect. 5 we introduce a vector autoregressive model that we test with reference to the US antitrust law enforcement regime. Sect. 6 discusses some policy options and concludes the paper.     

Histological diagnosis of myocardial sarcoidosis in a fatal fall from a height

The major issues of medico-legal relevance in fatal falls from a height are the manner of death and the reconstruction of the event. We present a peculiar case of a fatal fall from a height of about 9 m, involving a 27-year-old woman. At the death scene investigation, no suicide notes, housebreaking marks, or signs of fight were found, thus weakening both the suicide and homicide hypotheses. Combining circumstantial, autopsy and toxicology data, the kinematic analysis of the jump/fall, and the histological evidence of a myocardial sarcoidosis involving the left ventricle, we hypothesized that the young woman might have accidentally fallen from the window because of a sudden loss of consciousness related to cardiac disease undiagnosed during life. We believe that our brief report is a good example of the powerful additional information that histological investigations can offer for reconstructing the dynamics of the event in falls from a height and other traumatic fatalities.     

Iniuria Migrandi: Criminalization of Immigrants and the Basic Principles of the Criminal Law

In this paper I am specifically concerned with a normative assessment, from the perspective of a principled criminal law theory, of norms criminalizing illegal immigration. The overarching question I will dwell on is one specifically regarding the way of using criminal law which is implied in the enactment of such kinds of norms. My thesis will essentially be that it constitutes a veritable abuse of criminal law. In two senses at least: first, in the sense that by criminalizing illegal immigration criminal law puts a ban on (certain categories of) persons, rather than on their actions/omissions, in a way in which a principled criminal law should not do; and—second—in the sense that the criminalization of illegal immigrants represents a perversion of the criminal law, being a case in which criminal norms are (unjustifiably) used as means to attain extrapenal aims.     

Violent behavior and the factors associated with the decision to report it: a retrospective study

An ample volume of research evidence supports the conclusion that severe mental illness is correlated with violent behavior. While episodes of violent behavior are included in medical notes, not all episodes of violent behavior are officially reported to the police, even when they are actual crimes. We conducted a retrospective study on the already existing clinical files of four public psychiatric outpatient facilities, based in Southern Italy, in order to assess how many cases of violent behavior are actually reported and which variables are more frequently connected with the decision to report. The data shows that the episodes known to the health services, in number and seriousness, vastly outnumber the complaints actually made towards their patients.     

Varieties of Participation in Public Services: The Who, When, and What of Coproduction

Despite an international resurgence of interest in coproduction, confusion about the concept remains. This article attempts to make sense of the disparate literature and clarify the concept of coproduction in public administration. Based on some definitional distinctions and considerations about who is involved in coproduction, when in the service cycle it occurs, and what is generated in the process, the article offers and develops a typology of coproduction that includes three levels (individual, group, collective) and four phases (commissioning, design, delivery, assessment). The levels, phases, and typology as a whole are illustrated with several examples. The article concludes with a discussion of implications for research and practice.