Ritual and Rhythm in Electoral Systems: A Comparative Legal Account

Ritual and Rhythm in Electoral Systems: A Comparative Legal Account. By Graeme Orr (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), pp.xiv + 223. £70.00 (cloth).     

Parent-Child Agreement on Parent-to-Child Maltreatment

Parent-child agreement on child maltreatment was examined in a multigenerational study. Questionnaires on perpetrated and experienced child maltreatment were completed by 138 parent-child pairs. Multi-level analyses were conducted to explore whether parents and children agreed about levels of parent-to-child maltreatment (convergence), and to examine whether parents and children reported equal levels of child maltreatment (absolute differences). Direct and moderating effects of age and gender were examined as potential factors explaining differences between parent and child report. The associations between parent- and child-reported maltreatment were significant for all subtypes, but the strength of the associations was low to moderate. Moreover, children reported more parent-to-child neglect than parents did. Older participants reported more experienced maltreatment than younger participants, without evidence for differences in actual exposure. These findings support the value of multi-informant assessment of child maltreatment to improve accuracy, but also reveal the divergent perspectives of parents and children on child maltreatment.     

THE APPLICABILITY OF ENVIRONMENTAL EXCEPTIONS OF THE GATT TO CHINA’S WTO-PLUS OBLIGATIONS — WTO PANEL AND APPELLATE BODY RULINGS ON THE CHINESE EXPORT RESTRICTIONS OF RARE EARTHS,TUNGSTEN AND MOLYBDENUM

On March 26, 2014, a panel, established by the WTO Dispute Settlement Body, circulated its final report regarding the China — Rare Earths case to WTO Members. This dispute concerns China’s export restrictions on rare earths, tungsten, and molybdenum. In its report, the panel agreed with the findings of another dispute, the China — Raw Materials case. It concluded that the environmental exceptions under Article XX GATT 1994 cannot be applied to China’s actions. This conclusion is reconfirmed in the latest appellate body’s report of China — Rare Earths on August 7, 2014. Therefore, China was not able to justify the violation of their WTO-plus obligation to eliminate all export duties, contained in paragraph 11.3 of China’s Accession Protocol. As a consequence of the panel’s decision, it seems impossible for China to justify trade barriers with environmental interests and to invoke any exceptions. Such findings are subject to a fundamental controversy within the WTO multilateral trade system, trying to solve the tensions between environmental protection and trade liberalization. This essay examines the general applicability of environmental exceptions by analyzing the panel’s and appellate body’s approaches to the China — Rare Earths case and their findings, in connection with the purpose of sustainable development as prescribed by the preamble of the WTO Agreement. It has to be examined whether the non-application of the WTO environmental exceptions complies with Article 31 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and is consistent with the balance between the different values pursued by the WTO. This article argues that Article XX GATT 1994 should be applicable to China’s WTO-plus obligation specified in paragraph 11.3 of its Accession Protocol as far as environmental interests are concerned.     

STR data for the 15 AmpFlSTR identifiler loci in the Western Romanian population

Allele frequencies for the 15 tetranucleotide short tandem repeat loci contained in the AmpFlSTR Identifiler kit were obtained from a population sample of 219 unrelated individuals born in the western part of Romania.     

Laws and Universality,Laws and History

The article begins by examining two arguments used by Derrida in work published in 1967. The first claims against Lévi-Strauss that an empirical pattern of events cannot be injected into or superimposed onto an historical pattern claiming universality, for then there can be no disconfirmation of what is said. (This argument is used against Marxian history by some who write in the wake of Existentialism, Paul Roubiczek for instance.) The second claims against Foucault that he does not distinguish between reason as part of thinking and language and reason as an empirical historical structure capable of modification along time. The article then discusses the use of very similar if not identical arguments in Derrida’s much more recent work on laws, Force of law. The intelligibility, the interpretability, of laws and their history comes after the laws, not before, and is thus not fully universalisable.     

Civil Asset Forfeiture Laws and Equitable Sharing Activity by the Police

Research Summary

For several decades, critics have argued that civil forfeiture laws create incentives for law enforcement to increase departmental revenue by “policing for profit.” By using data on federal equitable sharing payments to nearly 600 local law enforcement agencies between 2000 and 2012, we examine the relationship between the characteristics of state forfeiture laws and equitable sharing payments to local agencies. Our results indicate that agencies in states with state laws that are more restrictive or less rewarding to police collect more in federal equitable sharing. This finding supports the critics’ argument that police behavior in regard to forfeiture activities is influenced by the financial rewards and burdens involved.

Policy Implications

Our results reveal that the findings of investigative journalism and case study research, that is, that police forfeiture activities are influenced by financial rewards, may be more generalizable to law enforcement than previously thought. Despite recent state‐level reforms, federal equitable sharing and most state forfeiture laws provide limited due process protections and have minimal accountability or reporting requirements. Concerns about the impact of civil forfeiture practices on perceptions of procedural justice and police legitimacy are discussed, and possible policy reforms are reviewed.     

Public-Sector Reform: Employment Security and Quality of Decision Making in the Australian Taxation Office

This article examines the impact of structural reforms and industrial relations changes on the employment security and decision behaviors of middle-level managers in the Australian Taxation Office (ATO). This article is based on an empirical study using focus group and survey data that investigated how structural change and public-sector reforms substantially altered the employment environment. This research reveals that the ATO environment can be characterized by low morale, risk aversion, fear, and distrust brought about, in part, by employment insecurity. Where middle managers perceived organizational threats to their employment security, they engaged in self-protective “survivor” behaviors even when no such threats to their employment security existed. The article concludes that a substantial number of middle-level managers, survivors of years of restructuring, downsizing, and organizational change, were unlikely to display high-quality decision-making behaviors.     

Policy Change and Industry Associability: The Australian Mining Sector

In this paper we use evidence from the recent trajectories of mining industry associations in the Australian federation to argue for the significance of institutional explanations for the formation and maintenance of interest groups. We argue that the recent lack of consultation by the Commonwealth government with the Minerals Council of Australia over resources rent taxation proposals reflected a weakness that resulted from the shifting basis of associability stemming from institutional changes.