Interpreting the Threshold Criteria under section 31(2) of the Children Act 1989 – the House of Lords decision in Re B1

The casenote considers the decision in Re B which confirms the threshold criteria in establishing the likelihood of future harm under section 31(2) of the Children Act 1989 and clarifies the civil standard of proof.     

Surveillance and International Terrorism Intelligence Exchange: Balancing the Interests of National Security and Individual Liberty

Using the revelations Edward Snowden passed over to the press regarding the actions of the U.S.’s National Security Agency and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters and their use of the Prism project, this article examines the law surrounding intelligence gathering in the U.S. and UK. Underpinning the analysis is the legal principle of proportionality as applied to balancing the interests of national security and individual liberties. After examining intelligence exchange procedures, which for the UK is through negotiated agreements between national security agencies and through the European Union’s policing agency, Europol, the main part of the article discusses legal challenges that have been made regarding surveillance and the use of anti-terror laws on citizens and the rationale behind the judicial decisions made in both the U.S. and UK jurisdictions. The argument forwarded is that there is a requirement for wide preventative powers being granted to counter-terrorism agencies and that the interests of national security and individual liberty are inclusive and, as shown by the cases covered in this article, we should rely on the judiciary to perform their function in applying proportionality to each case on its own merits.     

Shaved for battle—skinheads target America's youth

I explore whether newspapers that represent regions experiencing "local casualties," that is, fatalities from an international violent event, give greater coverage to the incident. Research suggests that local casualties influence domestic politics, yet scholars have given little attention to either the influence of local casualties on reporting or the impact of international events on local press coverage. I examine the effect of local casualties on local media by analyzing the frequency of newspaper coverage of the October 2000 terrorist bombing of the USS Cole. Using a variety­ of techniques, including random effects logit and repeat failure hazard analysis, I find that newspapers from areas that experienced casualties from the Cole attack were more likely to report on the bombing, even when controlling for paper-specific and temporal effects. Driven by community casualties, variation in local media atten­tion to an international news story may help to explain why the effects of international events on individual attitudes and domestic political effects vary geographically, a necessary condition for institutional arguments for the democratic peace.     

Parental Monitoring, Parental Warmth, and Minority Youths’ Academic Outcomes: Exploring the Integrative Model of Parenting

Guided by the integrative model of parenting, the present study investigated the relationship between parental monitoring and racial/ethnic minority adolescents’ school engagement and academic motivation as a function of parental warmth, and explored whether these associations varied for boys and girls. Participants (60 % female) were 208 sixth through eighth grade students (63 % African American, 19 % Latino, 18 % Multiracial) from an urban middle school in the Midwestern United States. Youth completed an in-school survey with items on parenting (parental monitoring, mothers’/fathers’ warmth), cognitive engagement (school self-esteem), behavioral engagement (school trouble), and academic motivation (intrinsic motivation). As hypothesized, mothers’ warmth enhanced the association between parental monitoring and youths’ engagement and motivation. No gender differences in these associations emerged. Fathers’ warmth strengthened the negative association between parental monitoring and school trouble, and this association was stronger for boys. Implications regarding the importance of sustaining a high level of monitoring within the context of warm parent–adolescent relationships to best support academic outcomes among minority youth are discussed.     

Communitarianism as a Blind Alley? A Reply to Lacey and Frazer

This article seeks to challenge the interpretation of communitarianism offered by Lacey and Frazer (Politics, Vol. 14 No.2). By developing a theory of community it is possible to overcome the problems which they highlight, and to demonstrate that communitarianism, properly understood, is a philosophy which can frame much useful debate in political theory.     

Faculty Entrepreneurs and Research Productivity

In this paper, we analyze the research productivity of faculty entrepreneurs at 15 research institutes using a novel database combining faculty characteristics, licensing information, and journal publication records. We address two related research questions. First, are faculty entrepreneurs more productive researchers (“star scientists”) compared to their colleagues? Second, does the productivity of faculty entrepreneurs change after they found a firm? We find that faculty entrepreneurs in general are more productive researchers than control groups. We use multiple performance criteria in our analysis: differences in mean publication rate, skewness of publication rate, and impact of publications (journal citation rate). These findings bring together previous work on star scientists by Zucker, Darby, and Brewer [Zucker, L. G., Darby M. R., &; Brewer M. B. (1998). The American Economic Review, 88, 290–306.] and tacit knowledge among university entrepreneurs by Shane [Shane, S. (2002). Management Science, 48, 122–137.] and Lowe [Lowe, R. A. (2001). In G. Libecap (Ed.) Entrepreneurial Inputs and Outcomes. Amsterdam: JAI Press, Lowe, R.A. (2006). Journal of Technology Transfer, 31(4), 412–429]. Finally, we find that faculty entrepreneurs’ productivity not only is greater than their peers but also does not decrease following the formation of a firm.