Child Maltreatment in Diverse Households: Challenges to Law, Theory, and Practice

In the United Kingdom relatively little attention has been paid to 'race' and racism and the role of cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity in care proceedings. This paper will look at the background, law, and guidance on diversity in this field and explore the impact of notions of diversity in evidence before the courts. It will look at their relevance in allegations of 'significant harm' to children and failures of parenting, and the coverage of diverse backgrounds in expert reports and parents' statements. It will argue that while there is no evidence that the threshold criteria for a care order require reassessing, there is room for considerable improvement in attention to issues of diversity in evidence and in the experiences of parents attending court. The paper will explore the implications of the studies for theorizing law and the duties of the state and look at notions such as cultural relativism and concepts imported from cultural anthropology for determining culturally acceptable parenting. It will highlight problems with these approaches and demonstrate why 'paradigms of intersectionality' is a more useful and robust approach.     

The Criminal Justice Approach: Case Examples

The article presents a special form of a European comparative synopsis. For this case examples have been chosen ranging from administrative or minor (criminal) offences to increasingly serious offences and offenders. In this way it can be comparatively demonstrated how the criminal justice systems studied handle specific cases and whether they do so in a similar or different way.     

The Continuing Relevance of Ars Poetica to Legal Scholarship and the Modern Lawyer

In this late modern era within which the basic values of life have been reordered (driven by globalisation, the corporate agenda and mass communication technologies), the individual has effectively been reduced to a mere abstraction. It might be argued that the rational, moral and humanistic concept of freedom has, to a great extent, been compromised by a consequent crisis within the intelligentsia. These groups, in particular the gatekeepers of a classical liberal approach to legal scholarship, are caught between the twin evils of increased unreflective populism and pragmatism evident within many law schools and modern legal institutions. Although a contested term, defenders of the ‘socio-legal’ tradition, who place the humanities at the heart of legal research and education, are obliged to restate with increased determination the utility of the liberal arts and literature to the law profession and wider legal community. In a normative environment, law and narrative are inextricably linked and narrative poetry is not only invaluable to explaining the origins and location of the legal tradition, but also elicits a mode of understanding which transcends the boundaries of narrowlydefined legal hermeneutics—which often only addresses issues of an operational nature. French novelist Flaubert claimed “chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d’un poète” (Flaubert in Madame bovary (trans: Wall, G.), Penguin Classics, London, 1960: 269), paraphrased by American civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, as “inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet” (Lukas in Big trouble: a murder in a small western town sets off a struggle for the soul of America, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997: 323). In an age of disenchantment, this paper explores the poetic form as an important medium within which to understand the nature and function of law in a society of differentiated individuals.     

Neonaticides in Hamburg, Germany, from 1998 to 2008

In the analyzed period from 1998 to 2008, the autopsies performed at the Hamburg Institute of Legal Medicine included 13 cases in which an investigation for neonaticide had been initiated by the public prosecutor. The killed neonates showed a nearly equal distribution between both sexes. The most common method of neonaticide was suffocation. Most of the perpetrators were young, unmarried primipara with an average educational background. Almost all of them were suffering under psychological stress and had negated their pregnancy. In most cases, birth and neonaticide happened alone in their flat, and there was no medical attendance in any case. In the cases brought to court the women were charged with manslaughter (Section 212 German Criminal Code) and those found guilty were always granted a mitigated sentence pursuant to Section 213 Criminal Code.     

STAR METRICS and the Science of Science Policy

STAR METRICS is a data platform that is being voluntarily and collaboratively developed by U.S. federal science agencies and research institutions to describe investments in science and their results. It initially emerged as a result of reporting requirements associated with the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; it has developed in response to a recognized need to begin to systematically document federal investments in science and their immediate and long‐term results. The eventual goal is to draw information from existing data on scientific and economic activities as well as from research institutions' and federal science agencies' systems to provide data that can be used for a more scientific analysis of science investments and their outcomes.