The Three Faces of Defeasibility in the Law

Abstract. In this paper we will analyse the issue of defeasibility in the law, taking into account research carried out in philosophy, artificial intelligence and legal theory. We will adopt a very general idea of legal defeasibility, in which we will include all different ways in which certain legal conclusions may need to be abandoned, though no mistake was made in deriving them. We will argue that defeasibility in the law involves three different aspects, which we will call inference‐based defeasibility, process‐based defeasibility, and theory‐based defeasibility. Only the integration of these three perspectives allows us to provide a satisfactory account of the role of defeasibility in legal reasoning.     

The statistical prediction of violent behavior

Considerable attention in the popular and professional literature has focused on the relative costs and benefits of using public protectionist versus civil libertarian models of social control. In this article, we develop statistical analogs of these models to predict violent behavior among samples of defendants found incompetent to stand trial in New York State. The societal and personal costs (errors of prediction) of each model are compared and their implications for clinical practice and social policy are discussed.This research was supported in part by PHS Grant MH 20367 from the NIMH Center for Studies of Crime and Delinquency. The assistance of Thomas Arvanites in data analysis and the comments of Monroe Lefkowitz and Mary Evans Melick on earlier drafts of this paper are gratefully acknowledged.     

Regulating drinking through alcohol taxation and minimum unit pricing: A historical perspective on alcohol pricing interventions

Discourse on alcohol policy in several countries has recently become dominated by discussions of pricing. In Britain, proposals for a minimum unit price for alcoholic drinks are frequently depicted as radical and new. However, other means of legally intervening in alcohol pricing have long been used to shape consumption habits. Key to recognizing this historical lineage is a conceptualization of taxation as partly a form of regulation. This article builds upon findings from a wider historical study of alcohol excise duties in England and Wales to develop an empirically‐based typology of the main forms of government interventions in alcohol pricing. By connecting some instances of alcohol excise taxation to government attempts to shape behavior, this typology enables advances in understanding of the relationship between taxation and regulation. In so doing, the article also provides an original historical perspective on an ongoing policy debate. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd     

Evaluating collaborative institutions by segregation and homophily in policy networks

Many policy systems are experimenting with collaborative institutions to manage complex policy problems in the face of persistent conflict and scientific uncertainty. Policy networks are central to the theory of why collaborative institutions are effective. While many policy systems naturally become segregated, fragmented, or siloed due to homophily, collaborative institutions are hypothesized to create more integrated systems of organizational collaboration. Collaborative institutions may, therefore, be evaluated by the extent to which they reduce the tendency toward homophily and increase the integration of policy networks. This paper evaluates three collaborative institutions in regional land-use planning and specifies a theory of the program from two prominent frameworks: Institutional Collective Action and the Advocacy Coalition Framework. Results show that three forms of homophily are at work, and that in some cases, collaborative institutions successfully reduce the tendency toward network segregation.