SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC INSTABILITY IN COSTA RICA: PRE-CONDITIONS FOR MILITARIZATION?

Controversy continues to surround the issue of militarization in Costa Rica. On one side, claims are made that external forces such as the Reagan administration or other foreign powers have created the recent period of social and economic instability in order to militarize Costa Rica and extend military influence in Central America. On the other hand, it has been argued that some of these external agents are simply offering aid to their Costa Rican friends during a period of social and economic instability. Similar contentions suggest that Costa Rica is only protecting itself from its neighbor to the north, Nicaragua, or that the present move toward militarization is only the professionalization of the police force. This paper examines some of the conditions that promote militarization in Costa Rica and explores moral, economic, and political issues related to the militarization of a country that has pursued a "no army" policy for almost forty years.     

A NEW DEFENSE POLICY FOR COSTA RICA: CONSTRUCTING REALITY AND THE POLICY AGENDA

This paper examine5 the policymaking progress in Costa Rica, specifically the creation of a new item for the governmental agenda. This new agenda challenges the traditional Itno army" policy of Costa Kica. Following a brief historical overview of the traditional policy, the paper considers the role of specific factors that promote structural conduciveness for the new "defense" policy and the attendant transformation of political symbols and definitions. The impact of the definitional and organizational changes on the implementation stage of policy is explored. This article suggests the importance of studying the role of hegemony in the construction and transformation of political and cultural definitions, an explication of deci- sionmaking as well as nondecisionmaking processes, and the influence of external and internal threats on nation-state dependency.     

Heroin policy and deficit models

This paper critically assesses Left Realist approaches to understanding heroin use and to formulating policies with which to deal with heroin use as a social problem. It criticises the epistemological foundation of Left Realism, querying especially its prioritizing of inner city residents' experiences. Dorn and South's Left Realist account of heroin use and their formulation of an appropriate policy are then argued to have fundamental weaknesses as a result of their Left Realist assumptions. The paper then attempts to indicate some alternative paradigms for interpreting drug use, developing especially a focus on theorizing demand, and suggests alternative policy directions which emerge from this. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** AW502012 00003     

Moral theories of torts: Their scope and limits: Part I

One approach to legal theory is to provide some sort of rational reconstruction of all or of a large body of the common law. For philosophers of law this has usually meant trying to rationalize a body of law under one or another principle of justice. This paper explores the efforts of the leading tort theorists to provide a moral basis — for the law of torts. The paper is divided into two parts. In the first part I consider and reject the view that tort law is best understood as falling either within the ambit of the principle of retributive justice, a comprehensive theory of moral responsibility, or an ideal of fairness inherent in the idea that one should impose on others only those risks others impose on one. The second part of the paper distinguishes among various conceptions of corrective or compensatory justice and considers arguments — including previous arguments by the author himself — to the effect that tort law is best understood as rooted in principles of corrective justice. This paper argues that although the use of principles of justice may render defensible many (but by no means all) of the claims to repair and to liability recognized in torts, it cannot explain why we have adopted a tort system as the approach to vindicating those claims. Some other principle — probably not one of justice — is needed to explain why it is that the victims claims to repair is satisfied by having his losses shifted to his injurer — rather than through some other means of doing so. The paper concludes that the law of torts cannot be understood — in the sense of being given a rational reconstruction — under any one principle of morality.     

Health care expenditures in nine industrialized countries, 1960-76

This article reports the findings of a study developed to compare health care costs in the United States with those of eight other industrially advanced countries over the period 1960-76. All of the countries studied were found to share with the United States the problem of increased health care spending that has outpaced inflation in other sectors of the economy and continues to consume a growing share of national resources. The American growth rate in these expenditures has, in fact, been lower than that of all other coutries. Though U.S. health care expenditures have traditionally been relatively high when measured as a share of gross national product, Canada outspent the United States in this respect during the 1960's. In most recent years, West Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden have devoted a larger share of GNP to health care than has the United States.