The interlingual interpreter — Cypher or intelligent participant?

Conclusion The final question that arises here is whether interpreters' behaviour—in adding a word here or deleting a word there, as in the examples given above — actually justifies the suspicion of legal participants that they are not being told literally what the witness is saying. Interpreters argue that a literal rendering may confuse or mislead. Legal figures accuse interpreters of using their own words.Legal etiquette frequently precludes interpreters from identifying cultural or linguistic factors that are generating miscommunication, such as in the example given above of designating a particular winter. The mechanical, non-participatory role ascribed to interpreters in the lega setting further leads the legal professionals to denigrate the standing of the individuals performing language-switching. Failure to treat interpreters as participants, e.g. by supplying them with all documentation, including photographic material, leads to inaccuracies. The mechanical view of interpreters frequently precludes them from participating at their own initiative, either to request clarification of unclear material or to provide clarification where speakers' referents are based on different worlds of knowledge. I suggest that it is high time that the legal profession re-examined its attitudes towards foreign-language interpreters, and towards their product — interlingual interpretation.     

Surety Wives in the House of Lords: Time forSolicitors to `Get Real'?Royal Bank of Scotland plc v. Etridge (No. 2) [2001] 4 All E.R. 449

This note considers the recent House of Lordsdecision in Royal Bank of Scotland plc. v.Etridge (No. 2). It concerns the familiarscenario of a wife jointly mortgaging (orproviding a guarantee for a mortgage of) thefamily home in order to secure financialsupport for a business run by her husband. Ina landmark judgement, Lord Nicholls set out newand specific procedures to be followed bylenders and solicitors who are providingindependent advice, in order to counter anyargument by the wife that the charge should beset aside because her signature on the lender'scharge has been obtained by the undue influenceof her husband. This note considers the impactof the decision upon the parties involved insuch transactions. Special consideration isgiven to the surety wife and her chances ofdefending possession proceedings brought bylenders in the post Etridge era.     

THE INTERNAL AND EXTERNAL VALIDITY OF THE REGRESSION DISCONTINUITY DESIGN: A META‐ANALYSIS OF 15 WITHIN‐STUDY COMPARISONS

Theory predicts that regression discontinuity (RD) provides valid causal inference at the cutoff score that determines treatment assignment. One purpose of this paper is to test RD's internal validity across 15 studies. Each of them assesses the correspondence between causal estimates from an RD study and a randomized control trial (RCT) when the estimates are made at the same cutoff point where they should not differ asymptotically. However, statistical error, imperfect design implementation, and a plethora of different possible analysis options, mean that they might nonetheless differ. We test whether they do, assuming that the bias potential is greater with RDs than RCTs. A second purpose of this paper is to investigate the external validity of RD by exploring how the size of the bias estimates varies across the 15 studies, for they differ in their settings, interventions, analyses, and implementation details. Both Bayesian and frequentist meta‐analysis methods show that the RD bias is below 0.01 standard deviations on average, indicating RD's high internal validity. When the study‐specific estimates are shrunken to capitalize on the information the other studies provide, all the RD causal estimates fall within 0.07 standard deviations of their RCT counterparts, now indicating high external validity. With unshrunken estimates, the mean RD bias is still essentially zero, but the distribution of RD bias estimates is less tight, especially with smaller samples and when parametric RD analyses are used.     

UNICEF, syphilis and the state: negotiating female citizenship in the post-Second World War world

Few charitable organizations have achieved the status of global recognition enjoyed by UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, which embodies the international effort to provide for needy children the world over. Created because of its synchronicity with the United Nations' stated purpose—to maintain peace in the world—UNICEF launched its operations in 1946. Its founding, early operations and eventual restructuring reveal a great deal about concurrent political and economic events, but also provide keen insight into international ideas about who qualified for full citizenship in the post-war world. The consequences of UNICEF's policies, procedures and practices posed challenges to notions of citizenship for both women and children. It challenged citizenship not by questioning sex-specific gender roles, but by judiciously adhering to the United Nations' promise to create equality for men and women alike. UNICEF found itself in the unique position to be able to globalize definitions of what constituted full citizenship in any nation, due to its rapid expansion throughout the world. Through its programs, especially those related to health care, it not only challenged these roles in the West, but began over several decades to complicate the definition of citizenship as it became a forceful presence in Asia and Africa throughout the 1970s.     

Energy policy under austerity localism: what role for local authorities?

In the UK, local authorities (LAs) have been placed at the forefront of domestic energy-reduction strategies as the responsible actors for coordinating policy in this sector. Yet, there has been little research regarding the role of LAs in this policy agenda, and their abilities to bring together stakeholders in the successful design and implementation of strategies to reduce energy demands. The paper aims to fill this gap by highlighting the relevance and importance of the energy policy sphere to local government studies, building on the idea of resilient LAs within the context of tensions between the localism agenda and the actual implementation of energy efficiency polices. This is achieved through multiple rounds of semi-structured interviews with LA officers. Our findings reveal that LAs, operating under a localism agenda, lack the freedoms and resources from central government to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders, resorting to short-term policies.