Approaches to Reduce Conflict when Insuring the Environmental Cleanup of Closed Military Bases Intended for Redevelopment

Base Realignment and Closure (“BRAC”) of military bases has occurred in waves over the last few decades. Many of these properties were operational through World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam conflict, and into the modern Cold War. As part of the United States military's transfer of these properties to the local municipalities, which includes significant funds to cleanup remaining chemicals of concern, contract terms of the transfer typically require insurance policies that have the intention of mitigating the risk of additional future cleanup costs. As a result, numerous BRAC sites have established contracts with environmental consultants who have provided guaranteed fixed price contracts for cleanup of the site. To mitigate additional future cleanup costs, the environmental contractor is required to purchase a stop loss or cost cap insurance policy for their guaranteed fixed price contract to share the risk that there will be cost overruns in the cleanup of the known pollution. The redeveloper is required to purchase Premises Pollution or Environmental Liability insurance to share the risk that any newly discovered contamination will not result in additional cleanup costs for the redeveloper. This paper will discuss some of the recent lessons learned regarding (1) the terms of the initial cleanup transfer agreement, (2) efforts for project scoping/set-up, and (3) subsequent implementation dynamics of the relationships between the US Military, local municipality, redeveloper, and environmental contractor.     

Criminology and animality: stupidity and the anthropological machine

Although a relatively small, yet growing group of scholars have been lamenting the exclusion of nonhuman animals from the scope of criminology for over thirty years now, animals have been historically present in criminological theorizing, legal practices, and research. However, this presence has not been of the form advocated for by scholars who variously identify themselves as non-speciesist criminologists, green criminologists, or ecological criminologists, who have been arguing largely for recognition of harms perpetrated against animals, or ‘zoological crime’. Instead, the longer history of animals in criminology is as offenders or as prototypes of criminality. In this article, we are concerned with the production – vis-à-vis the anthropological machine – of the ‘stupid’ animal and subhuman within criminology and criminal justice. Guided by the political philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, we trace the animal through criminological thought from the premodern period to Lombroso to contemporary criminological scholarship illustrating how the animal has been (ab)used to shore up the classifications between humans, between humans and animals, and the intelligent and the stupid. We also examine how historically through criminal trials of animals and the feebleminded, criminal justice has played an active role in buttressing these classifications and acting on these classifications to produce bare life, that is, life without form or value.     

Public wage differentials and the treatment of occupational differences

Past research demonstrates that the estimated size of the federal government earnings differential shrinks substantially with the addition of detailed occupational controls. Possible explanations for this reduction are: controlling for the differing sectoral distributions of common occupations, and controlling for detailed occupations unique to each sector. While occupational detail does not eliminate the federal differential, more than two‐thirds of the reduction in the federal differential comes from controlling for unique occupations and, moreover, this is equivalent to excluding all observations in unique occupations. This finding is contrasted with that for the local sector in which the differing distribution of common occupations largely explains the pattern of the differential. © 2004 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

对绑架罪若干问题的探讨

绑架罪属侵犯复杂客体类犯罪，其客观形式表现多样，容易与相近罪名混淆，本文主要从绑架罪的认定、在司法实践中的运用(主要突出与相似罪名的比较)等方面加以探讨，以切实保护公民的合法权利。     

Minimizing the Effects of Temporal Aggregation on Event Data Analysis

Event data remains one of the best means for evaluating reciprocity and triangularity in international politics. One difficulty with using this type of data has been its susceptibility to the statistical effects of temporal aggregation. This article examines the concept of the natural interval in event data analysis, specifies how a user-selected aggregation interval affects measured stimulus–response behavior, and proposes a method for calculating a minimum threshold for the natural interval. The article then examines how such a minimum threshold reduces the impact of misspecification on perceived relationships for the Amazon River Basin and the Jordan River Basin.