Two Concepts of the Margin of Appreciation

The doctrine of the margin of appreciation that the EuropeanCourt of Human Rights has developed in its case law has givenrise to considerable criticism. In this article I draw a distinctionbetween two different ways in which the Court has used the doctrine.The first one is in cases where the Court has to decide whethera particular interference with a Convention freedom is justified.In answering that question, the Court often uses the label ‘marginof appreciation’ without drawing on a substantive theoryof rights that can justify the conclusion reached. The seconduse appears in cases where the Court refrains explicitly fromemploying a substantive test of human rights review on the basisthat there is no consensus among Contracting States on the legalissue before it. My aim is to highlight the principles thatcan be used to justify each use of the doctrine, by locatinghuman rights within broader issues in moral and political philosophy.Particular emphasis is placed on the distinction between reason-blockingand interest-based theories of rights as well as on the natureof the duties of the European Court, as a matter of internationalhuman rights law.     

Prisoners’ Positive Illusions of Their Post-Release Success

Prisoners' forecasts of post-release success may have implications for how they respond to imprisonment, release, and parole decisions. We examined sentenced US and UK prisoners' forecasts of recidivism, and how well UK prisoners believed they would fare compared to the average other prisoner. In both samples, forecasts of recidivism were unrealistically optimistic when compared to official statistics on recidivism. UK prisoners also demonstrated a self-enhancement bias by forecasting that they were less likely to re-offend than other prisoners. Prisoners' forecasts of recidivism were predicted by only a few of the pre-prison, in-prison, and post-prison factors that have been shown to be associated with actual recidivism. We discuss the implications of these findings and propose avenues for future research.     

Some principles of Pānini's grammargrammar

The following principles are seen to operate in the rules Pānini provides for Sanskrit grammar.

1. The obvious principle that the introduction of affixes and augments which condition sound replacements necessarily precede the latter.
2. Bracketing, whereby an operation whose condition is internal relative to a condition causing another operation applies prior to the latter.
3. The derivational prehistory of a form is pertinent to the operations which apply to it.
4. Blocking: a rule R₂ is said to block an R₁ if, in a given domain, R₁ tentatively applies (and would apply in the absence of R₂) wherever R₂ can apply, while R₂ would be vacuous if R₁ applied.
5. Limited blocking, which obtains where R₁ and R₂ overlap but also have independent domains of application.

These principles account for correct derivations in cases where post-Paninian grammarians invoked rule order: where two rules conflict, that one takes precedence which is stated later in the grammar. This principle is not generally tenable, since some derivations require that a rule stated previously in the grammar take precedence. Hence, the grammarians who invoke such rule ordering in cases of conflict must admit that only a knowledge of the correct results to be obtained by applying the rules allows one to correctly apply the rules in the first place. It is argued that Pānini avoided this weakness.