Do Judges Have an Obligation to Enforce the Law?: Moral Responsibility and Judicial-Reasoning

Judicial obligation to enforce the law is typically regarded as both unproblematic and important: unproblematic because there is little reason to doubt that judges have a general, if prima facie, obligation to enforce law, and important because the obligation gives judges significant reason to limit their concern in adjudication to applying the law. I challenge both of these assumptions and argue that norms of political legitimacy, which may be extra-legal, are irretrievably at the basis of responsible judicial reasoning.     

The influence of vehicle model and colour on assessments of speed and culpability: the case for (and against) Computer Generated Exhibits (CGE)

Computer Generated Exhibits (CGE) are frequently deployed in legal contexts under the rubric of demonstrative evidence, i.e. to facilitate juror comprehension. However, a number of legal and academic commentators have suggested that the nature of the computerised moving image could exert undue prejudice on decision makers, e.g. judge and/or jury. The current study aimed to assess the manipulation of vehicle characteristics (make and colour) when a road traffic accident was presented in the format of a computer generated animation (CGA). In experiment 1, two groups of subjects watched two different makes of car, a Range Rover Sport and a Volkswagen Touran in a black-and-white format; no significant differences emerged over vehicle model with regards to vehicle speed or overall responsibility for the accident. Experiment 2 presented the same vehicles to four groups of participants in full colour, with the cars in contrasting red or beige; significant differences emerged with regards to culpability for vehicle make only. The findings could have implications for the format and style of CGE used in legal settings.     

Squaring the circle? Collective and distributive effects of United Nations Security Council reform

Changing the composition and voting system of the Security Council, in an effort to increase the institution’s global legitimacy, is proving to be one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome for the global community of states represented in the United Nations (UN). This paper demonstrates that due to institutional hurdles, it is considerably more difficult today than it was in the early years of the UN to reach a winning coalition in the General Assembly to secure Security Council reform. In addition, the paper analyzes the effects that adapted patterns of voting, as prescribed by recent reform proposals, would have on the distribution of power among UN member states in the Security Council and on the probability that this institution can form a winning coalition, i.e., reach decisions. Our power and decision capacity computations are based on (modified) Penrose-Banzhaf-Coleman measures.     

Ecologies of Unease: Geographic Context and National Economic Evaluations

Assessment of the nation??s economic performance has been repeatedly linked to voters?? decision-making in U.S. presidential elections. Here we inquire as to where those economic evaluations originate. One possibility in the politicized environment of a major campaign is that they are partisan determinations and do not reflect actual economic circumstances. Another possibility is that these judgments arise from close attention to news media, which is presumably highlighting national economic conditions as a facet of campaign coverage. Still a third explanation is that voters derive their national economic evaluations from living out their lives in particular localities which may or may not be experiencing the conditions that affect the nation as a whole. Drawing upon data from the 2008 presidential election, we find that varying local conditions do shape the economic evaluations of political independents. Moreover, unemployment is not the only salient factor, as fuel prices and foreclosures also figured prominently. Local economic factors, what we call geotropic considerations, shape national economic evaluations especially for those who aren??t making these judgments on simple partisan grounds.     

Quantification of Morphine,Codeine, and Thebaine in Home‐Brewed Poppy Seed Tea by LC‐MS/MS

Recently, medical examiners reported two cases of a 21‐year‐old male and 24‐year‐old male with high amounts of morphine in their blood at autopsy. It was suspected that the decedents ingested lethal amounts of morphine from home‐brewed poppy seed tea. No studies to date have investigated opium alkaloid content extracted from poppy seeds by home‐brewing methods. Various poppy seed products were purchased from online sources and extracted with four home‐brewing methods representative of recipes found on drug user forums. Morphine, codeine, and thebaine were quantified in the tea extracts by liquid chromatography‐tandem mass spectrometry using a validated analytical method. Morphine, codeine, and thebaine concentrations from seeds were <1–2788 mg/kg, <1–247.6 mg/kg, and <1–124 mg/kg, respectively. Alkaloid yield varied between extractions, but regardless of extraction conditions, lethal amounts of morphine can be rinsed from poppy seed coats by home‐brewing methods.     

National Representation in International Organizations: The Seat Allocation Model Implicit in the European Union Council and Parliament

What determines the allocation of voting weights to member states in international organizations? What drives the seat and voting weight allocation in the European Parliament (EP) and in the Council of the European Union (EU)? Our objective in this article is to develop a universal logical model and to demonstrate that the resulting equation indeed captures negotiated outcomes on seat and voting weight allocations in EU institutions from their beginning. We predict seat and voting weight allocations for both the EP and the Council of the EU within one general model. Hence, we do not employ actual data on seat allocations or voting weights in either the EP or the Council of the EU, but instead, use logical constraints exclusively, as posed by the following elements: the total number of seats/voting weights ( S ), the number of member states ( N ) and, finally, their respective population size ( P_i ). Only our final model selection among several theoretical options is guided by empirical information. With no post hoc parameters used, our model fits both the Council of the EU and the EP rather well, over a time span of nearly 40 years. Inspired by the 'seat–vote equation' ( Taagepera, 1973 ) for seat allocation in national legislatures, the new 'seat–population equation' calculates the number ( S _i) of EP seats or Council voting weights of member state i as follows:     , where n =(1/log  N − 1/log  S )/(1/log  N − 1/log  P ), P being the total population (as summed over all member states). We posit that this equation is applicable to predict outcomes in practice whenever voting weight or seat allocations in international organizations are allocated on the basis of the population shares of their component entities.