Fingerprint Comparison and Adversarialism: The Scientific and Historical Evidence

This article suggests that lawyers and courts are largely oblivious to scientific insights regarding the value and limitations of latent fingerprint evidence. It proceeds through a detailed historical analysis of the way fingerprint evidence has been reported and challenged. It compares legal responses with mainstream scientific research. Our analysis shows that fingerprint evidence is routinely equated with categorical proof of identity notwithstanding scientific warnings that such an approach is ‘indefensible’. We find that legal challenges to latent fingerprint evidence have been uniformly focused on adjectival issues (e.g. compliance with enabling legislation), leaving the validity and accuracy of this subjective comparison technique virtually unexamined since its first reception at the very beginning of the twentieth century. Lack of legal engagement with validity, error and scientific research suggest that adversarial procedures have not worked effectively to secure scientifically reliable expert evidence and that legal personnel struggle with elementary scientific reasoning.     

Vernon Bogdanor: Beyond Brexit: Towards a British Constitution

Liverpool Law Review -     

Assessing the Trivialness, Relevance, and Relative Importance of Necessary or Sufficient Conditions in Social Science

Political scientists of all stripes have proposed numerous necessary or sufficient condition hypotheses. For methodologists a question is how can we assess the importance of these necessary conditions. This article addresses three central questions about the importance of necessary of sufficient conditions. The first concerns de “trivialness” of necessary or sufficient conditions. The second is how much a necessary or sufficient condition is “relevant?” The third important question deals with the relative importance of necessary or sufficient conditions: for example, ifX ₁ andX ₂ are necessary or sufficient conditions, is one more important than the other? The article develops measures to assess the importance of necessary or sufficient conditions in three related contexts: (1) Venn diagram, (2) 2×2 tables, and (3) fuzzy sets. Two empirical examples are discussed at length: (1) Skocpol’sStates and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China and (2) Ragin’s (2000) analysis of the cause of IMF riots.     

GAMETE DONORS AND MISTAKEN IDENTITIES: THE IMPORTANCE OF GENETIC AWARENESS AND PROPOSALS FAVORING DONOR IDENTITY DISCLOSURE FOR CHILDREN BORN FROM GAMETE DONATIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

The technological advent of artificial reproduction has resulted in a substantial increase of children born from gamete donation. Studies conducted overseas, particularly in the United Kingdom, have explored the controversy as to whether or not such children have the right to know the identity of their donor parents. This article discusses the consequences of donor disclosure and donor privacy for both the parents and children. Currently, there is a lack of U.S. state legislation on the issue. While studies remain inconclusive, research indicates that counseling for the parties involved and the promulgation of state statutes may be beneficial.     

A "politically robust" experimental design for public policy evaluation, with application to the Mexican universal health insurance program.

We develop an approach to conducting large-scale randomized public policy experiments intended to be more robust to the political interventions that have ruined some or all parts of many similar previous efforts. Our proposed design is insulated from selection bias in some circumstances even if we lose observations; our inferences can still be unbiased even if politics disrupts any two of the three steps in our analytical procedures; and other empirical checks are available to validate the overall design. We illustrate with a design and empirical validation of an evaluation of the Mexican Seguro Popular de Salud (Universal Health Insurance)program we are conducting. Seguro Popular, which is intended to grow to provide medical care, drugs, preventative services, and financial health protection to the 50 million Mexicans without health insurance, is one of the largest health reforms of any country in the last two decades. The evaluation is also large scale, constituting one of the largest policy experiments to date and what may be the largest randomized health policy experiment ever.     

Tests of institutional versus non-institutional models of local public expenditure determination

Are institutional or non-institutional factors more important determinants of local public expenditure decisions? Employing data that allows us to directly identify the entire distribution of voter expenditure demands, we estimate models of deviations of actual expenditures from the expenditure demand of defensible benchmarks — namely, the median voter's expenditure demand and the mean of voters' expenditure demands. Three competing paradigms are employed to specify these models; namely, a non-institutional model, the reform government movement's explanation of how institutions affect local government decisions and a transactions-cost model of this same phenomenon. Predictions from these three competing models differ in many respects. Comparisons of results from estimating models of expenditure deviations are found to be generally more consistent with the non-institutional model than with either of the two institutional models. These results suggest that a competitive local public service market helps limit the ability of governments to tax and spend in excess of the demands of the median or mean voter.