A STUDY OF CLIENT SATISFACTION WITH FAMILY COURT COUNSELLING IN CASES INVOLVING DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

The Family Court of Australia provides conciliation counselling to couples who are involved in disputes regarding their children following separation. In situations where domestic violence has occurred, the appropriateness of providing counselling to such couples has been seriously questioned This study examines the experience of clients attending counselling at the family court. Two groups of clients are studied—one group who reports domestic violence as a significant issue and a comparison group who does not report domestic violence. The results indicate that the two groups do not differ in their expressed level of satisfaction with the counselling they have received and that both groups consider counselling to have been helpful in resolving their issues. The preliminary results of this study have implications for the provision of postseparation counselling/mediation to couples when domestic violence has occurred.     

ibn Kenyatta,poems for an imperiled world

Scott Lash and John Urry, THE END OF ORGANIZED CAPITALISM (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987)

Michael E. Porter, THE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OF NATIONS (New York: The Free Press, 1990)

Alice Teichova, Maurice Lévy‐Leboyer and Helga Nussbaum, eds., MULTINATIONAL ENTERPRISE IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989)     

Determinants and directions for Chinese weapons imports

This article assesses and presents the determinants and directions of Chinese acquisitions of weapons and weapons technology from abroad, focusing on major conventional weapons and their relevant technologies. Following a brief development of historical themes which continue to affect Chinese military‐related imports today, the study considers the principal contemporary domestic and international determinants which contribute to shaping Chinese arms import policies, and the type of foreign arms acquisitions likely to result from those policies. In analysing past and current security policies, weapons development policies, foreign weapons procurement policies, the study reaches four main conclusions. First, a wide range of problems — including prohibitive cost, political and bureaucratic infighting, absorptive capacities, managerial and administrative roadblocks, and supplier controls — stand in the way of a Chinese military modernization strategy based on foreign procurement. Second, with the exception of Sino‐Soviet cooperation in the 1950s, Chinese arms and arms technology acquisitions from abroad have consistently been relatively modest, sporadic, and problematic. Even in the case of current transfers from such suppliers as Israel and Russia, it is unclear the extent to which these countries are willing to part with significant amounts of top‐of‐the‐line systems and technologies. Third, the impact upon international security of the improvement of Chinese military capability through the acquisition of foreign weapons and technology is not likely to manifest itself in violent military disruptiveness, but rather in the nuanced and steady expansion of Chinese power and influence in parts of East Asia around China's periphery. Fourth, the military capabilities of China's arms clients will probably not be significantly improved through the acquisition of foreign weapons and weapons technologies by China. In sum, Chinese military modernization through arms and technology imports will continue to be a slow and painful process.     

Sex and Capacity: The Management of Monsters?

The first consideration by a civil court of the test of capacity to engage in sexual relations – X City Council v MB, NB and MAB – is as recent as 2005. This article places this and subsequent cases in the historical context of the way in which the law has constructed the sexuality of persons with intellectual impairment. The article argues that, beginning with a series of rape cases in the mid to late nineteenth century, which recognised the concept of consent given through the expression of animal instincts, the law has accepted and deployed a model of intellectual impairment which understands expressions of sexuality in terms of an increasingly unstable opposition between vulnerability and danger, understood as the presence or absence of instinct, and as indicating an underlying ‘monstrosity’. The article argues that the historical continuity apparent in the modern case law is unfortunate and should be rectified.     

Susan Gellman has it right

Michael Tonry, Sentencing Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, 240pp.     

A psychometric comparison of internet and non-internet sex offenders from a community treatment sample

Abstract

This paper compares psychometric test assessments of 39 men convicted of internet sex offences with 39 convicted of contact offences against a specific victim. Higher rates of socially desirable responding were identified in the internet group, as well as higher rates of emotional loneliness and under assertiveness, although the latter two findings were not statistically significant. This group also achieved lower scores measuring external locus of control, which might reflect their generally higher levels of education and employment (identified from research carried out in tandem with this work). The internet group achieved lower scores on sexualized attitudes towards children, emotional congruence with children and empathy distortions with regard to victims of child abuse. Hence, although they exhibited the kinds of general personality problems exhibited by other sex offenders, they did not support attitudes that explicitly endorse or condone the sexual abuse of children. This paper presents some hypotheses about these results and identifies further research necessary to develop understanding about this new kind of sexually abusive behaviour.     

The Journey to Comprehensibility: Court Forms as the First Barrier to Accessing Justice

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - The article explores the comprehensibility of court forms by providing a quantitative overview...     

A unified model of settlement and trial expenditures: The Priest–Klein model extended

Settlement and trial expenditures are crucially interrelated. The literature on settlement, however, takes no account of models of trial. In this paper, we develop a unified model of settlement and trial expenditures. We do this by discarding the usual assumption of settlement models that trial costs are constant across cases. Instead, we follow the literature on trial by permitting trial costs to vary with the legal merit of the plaintiff's case. Our approach can be used to extend standard models of settlement such as the well-known Priest–Klein model as well as models based on asymmetric information. As a demonstration, we extend the Priest–Klein model and generally overturn that model's canonical results. In particular, we show that even in a fully symmetric model, predicted win rates at trial can deviate substantially from 50 percent. Furthermore, win rates will vary in response to legal reforms that shift the decision standard.