Regulating Cannabis: A Comparative Exploration of Canadian Legalization

This article explores cannabis regulation in Canada and the United States and examines how recent legalization efforts have manifested differently in each country. Although some of these differences are explained by uncompromising constitutional structures, this comparative exercise examines each system's political choices. While emphasis is placed on the Canadian experience, this article seeks to inform and enhance policy and regulation in both countries in addition to highlighting inherent ethical issues.     

Carbon‐Based Fingerprint Powder as a One‐Step Development and Matrix Application for High‐Resolution Mass Spectrometry Imaging of Latent Fingerprints

Carbon‐based materials are often used as matrices for matrix‐assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI‐MS) and its imaging (MALDI‐MSI). However, researchers have refrained from using carbon‐based fingerprint powder (CFP) as a matrix due to high background and contamination. In this work, the compatibility of CFP is reevaluated with MALDI‐MSI using a high‐resolution mass spectrometer (HRMS) and compared to traditional organic matrices. Relevant fingerprint compounds were easily distinguished from carbon cluster peaks when using HRMS. For fair comparison, half of a fingerprint was dusted with CFP while the other half was dusted with traditional organic matrices. All compounds studied had comparable, or higher, signal‐to‐noise (S/N) ratios when CFP was used as the matrix. Additionally, chemical image qualities closely followed the trend of S/N ratios. CFP proved to be an effective one‐step development and matrix application technique for MALDI‐MSI of latent fingerprints, when carbon cluster peaks are well separated by a HRMS.     

Nature versus Nurture: A Comparison of Russian Law Graduates Destined for State Service and for Private Practice

This article explores the mind‐set of Russian law students on the cusp of graduation. Drawing on a 2016 survey, the analysis finds that, despite having taken different paths to their degrees, the respondents share a confidence in the Russian courts that distinguishes them from Russians without legal education. Within the sample, a natural division is evident between those who plan to go into state service and those who plan to go into private practice. Aspiring state lawyers are more likely to support the policies of the Putin regime, even when they preference politics over the letter of the law. This strongly suggests that the tendency of judges and state lawyers within the criminal justice system to work as a team to ensure convictions is not solely the result of workplace incentives, as had previously been assumed, but is an element of a worldview that these lawyers share that predates their legal education. Aspiring private lawyers, by contrast, are consistently more skeptical of the state. To the extent that they are later coopted by the state, as studies of criminal defense lawyers suggest, such behavior would likely be the result of a desire to endear themselves to investigators and prosecutors in order to ensure further appointments to represent indigent clients.     

The Deserving Worker: Decisions about Workplace Accommodation by Judges and Laypeople

Employment civil rights laws require employers to make reasonable accommodations for certain workers so that they can perform their jobs. The “reasonableness” of an accommodation request should be based largely on the cost of the accommodation relative to the company's resources, but how do people really evaluate such requests? This study examines determinations of the reasonableness of workplace accommodation requests made by trial judges and ordinary people. Using a 2 × 3 × 3 between‐subjects factorial design, we test the effect of worker identity (nursing‐mother worker, transgender worker, and Muslim worker) and cost on determinations of reasonableness. We find that (1) the identity category of the requesting worker impacts determinations of reasonableness by both judges and laypeople, (2) the cost of the accommodation impacts determinations of reasonableness, (3) judges are more likely to think that accommodation requests are reasonable than are laypeople, (4) there is a complicated relationship between accommodation cost and employee identity, and (5) the cost of the requested accommodation mitigates the effect of identity significantly for judges but less so for ordinary citizens. While judges are less influenced by the identity category of the employee‐requestor than are their lay‐counterparts, social status plays a role in determining what constitutes “reasonable accommodation.”     

Sustainability of patent-based competitive advantage in the U.S. communications services industry

Patents have long been assumed to provide firms with competitive advantage, but longitudinal results suggest that some types of patent content provide more enduring advantage than others do. The duration of advantage appeared to wane with time in the highly-dynamic U.S. communications-services industry during a period when technological changes occurred rapidly within it (1998–2012). Results suggest patents integrating technology streams that were different from the technologies of focal-patents’ grants contributed more to sustaining firms’ profit margins during this period than did focal patents that exploited extant technological knowledge. We found that firms who continually pushed their organization’s knowledge envelope outward to incorporate more unknown technologies sustained higher profit margins for a longer duration of time than did firms whose patented inventions were predominantlyincremental—even within difficult settings where competition grew so intense that firms’ average operating margins were deteriorating.     

Associations of Parental and Peer Characteristics with Adolescents’ Social Dominance Orientation

Studies with adults of social dominance orientation (SDO), a preference for inequality among social groups, have found correlations with various prejudices and support for discriminatory practices. This study explores the construct among adolescents at an age when they are beginning to recognize the social groups in their environment, particularly adolescent crowds. The relationship of SDO and perceptions of parents’ responsiveness and demandingness were also investigated. Subjects were in grades 9–12 (N = 516, 53% female, 96% White). Mother’s and father’s responsiveness significantly predicted adolescent’s SDO scores, with greater perceived responsiveness associated with lower SDO. To analyze the multiple crowd memberships of the 76% belonging to more than one crowd, two-step cluster analysis was used to identify patterns, resulting in 8 clusters of distinct, heterogeneous composition. SDO differed significantly among males in different clusters, but not females. The importance of membership was positively associated with SDO among high-status crowds and negatively associated with SDO among the academic and normal crowds. The findings have implications for prejudices that may be developing in adolescence and indicate a need for further research into the social context of SDO and its development.     

The Politics of Environmental Licensing: Energy Projects of the Past and Future in Brazil

How do societies make complex choices about concrete energy alternatives? Can citizens play effective roles in balancing risks and benefits? This article proposes that energy choices can be best understood as the result of a balance of power between state-society coalitions that aim to either block or enable the project. Environmental licensing and financing decisions are two decision points where the coalitions face off—and where energy projects go forward or are stopped. The article demonstrates that environmental licensing has become an unexpectedly stringent process in Brazil, with both formal opportunities and historic practices increasing the influence of blocking coalitions. Yet case studies of the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam and massive new petroleum reserves in the “pre-salt” region show that blocking coalitions emerge inconsistently in the same institutional context, illustrating the hazards of relying on public mobilization for addressing certain kinds of risk situations. An “anticipatory state” may also pre-empt mobilization by proactively responding to the concerns blocking coalitions are likely to raise.     

Interviewing Witnesses: The Effect of Forced Confabulation on Event Memory

After viewing a crime video, participants answered 16 answerable and 6 unanswerable questions. Those in the "voluntary guess" condition had a "don't know" response option; those in the "forced guess" condition did not. One week later the same questions were answered with a "don't know" option. In both experiments, information generated from forced confabulation was less likely remembered than information voluntarily self-generated. Further, when the same answer was given to an unanswerable question both times, the confidence expressed in the answer increased over time in both the forced and the voluntary guess conditions. Pressing eyewitnesses to answer questions, especially questions repeated thrice (Experiment 2), may not be an effective practice because it reliably increases intrusion errors but not correct recall.     

Legal Development and Privatization in Russia: A Case Study

An American attorney and political scientist presents a study focused on managerial efforts to reorganize the corporate structure of a large aviation conglomerate with 14,000 employees. The conversion of properties from state to collective ownership and organizational shifts to a joint-stock company are detailed and analyzed. Managerial strategies to streamline the privatization are traced from corporate documents and procedures designed internally to devise orderly regulations not rooted in parliamentary legislation or presidential decrees. Broader implications are noted in light of possible trends to develop laws at the grassroots level and to establish precedents that may be assimilated. journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: K22, L21, P13, P31.