Perspective and procedural justice: Attorney and litigant evaluations of court procedures

A comparison of the procedural justice judgments of attorneys and those of lay people judging the same procedures offers an opportunity to generate new information on what factors affect judgments of fairness. In a survey of reactions to conventional and innovative procedures in a United States district court, attorneys and lay people involved in tort and contract cases were asked to judge the overall fairness of court procedures and the fairness of specific procedures used in arbitration hearings. The respondents were also asked for their judgments concerning the favorability of the procedure's outcome, the opportunity to have the case heard and decided by an impartial third party, and their side's control over what happened in the case, all of which are factors found in previous studies to affect procedural fairness judgments. The results showed that, while attorneys gave higher overall fairness ratings than did litigants, the difference was not affected by the procedure assigned to the case. In addition, attorneys and litigants appeared to use the same standards to evaluate the fairness of procedures, although they disagreed about where the procedures they experienced fell on these dimensions. The theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.     

The Power of Collaboration

When I was a high chool student,an ssociation of entrepreneurs teamed up with the University of Aveiro,in Aveiro,Portugal,to start courses that would give students specific skills to deal with foreign markets and negotiate with people from different cultures.     

Science,society and the sea of fertility: new reproductive technologies in Japanese popular culture

Since the late twentieth century, assisted reproductive technologies have brought new challenges to our understanding of the family and gender relations. There are ever-widening gaps between medical practice, legal regulation and everyday understandings and practices. Some recent popular cultural texts in Japan have explored the issues raised by non-commercial surrogate motherhood. The background to these texts is a series of controversies concerning surrogacy and the use of assisted reproductive technologies and wider societal anxieties about family, reproduction and population management. In this article, I will focus on two novels by a medical practitioner and popular novelist who writes under the pseudonym Kaidō Takeru – Gene Waltz (Kaidō 2008) and Madonna Verde (Kaidō 2010) – and the associated film (ōtani 2011) and television series (NHK 2011). The fact that it was the national broadcaster Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) that dramatised Madonna Verde suggests that the discussion of these issues was thought to have wide social and cultural resonance. I will place these texts in their social and cultural context with reference to medical, legal and popular discourses on new reproductive technologies in contemporary Japan. These new reproductive technologies have the potential to force a rethinking of masculinity, femininity, parenthood, family and gender relations. The popular texts also, however, draw on pre-existing ways of thinking about masculinity, femininity, marriage, reproduction and the relationships among science, ‘nature’ and society.