RATE OF OFFENDING IN JUVENILE CAREERS: FINDINGS OF CONSTANCY AND CHANGE IN LAMBDA *

This study examines changes in the rate of offending in a sample of 8,834 males whose official juvenile law-violating careers included 26,650 offense episodes between ages 8 and 17 The rate of offending of active offenders (i.e., lambda) varied substantially as a function of age, increasing monotonically with age. Lambda, however, was not related to the age at first offense. In fact, the average lambda was amazingly constant at each individual age level regardless of the age at which offending began or desisted. Results are discussed in the light of age-crime curves known from other data sets and from the perspective of developmental changes in the rate of offending as youths grow older.     

Justice,Fairness, and World Ownership

It is a central tenet of most contemporarytheories of justice that the badly-off have aright to some of the resources of the well-off.In this paper, I take as my starting point twoprinciples of justice, to wit, the principle ofsufficiency, whereby individuals have a rightto the material resources they need in order tolead a decent life, and the principle ofautonomy, whereby once everybody has such alife, individuals should be allowed to pursuetheir conception of the good, and to enjoy thefruits of their labour in pursuit of suchconception. I also endorse the value offairness, whereby the right person orinstitution makes the decision as to whether tobring about justice.I show that justice and fairness can besatisfied only if we all enjoy a combination ofprivate and collective rights over the world.In making that case, I shall argue that the setof ownership rights I advocate differs fromreadily available conceptions of restrictedprivate ownership in two important respects.First, it is such that in some circumstances,two individuals or more can have control rightsover the same property at the same time, not,as is standardly the case in legal systems, bycontracting with one another (through gifts andjoint purchase), but simply on grounds ofjustice. Second, it allows that, if necessary,property-owners be expropriated from theirproperty without compensation.     

Having the cake and eating it too: efficient penalty clauses in Common and Civil contract law

In this paper we examine one of the areas where there is a marked difference between Civil and Common contract law, that of the enforcement of liquidated damages and more particularly of penalty clauses. Common law judges are quite reluctant to enforce liquidated damages, especially if they believe that they include penalty clauses which are not enforceable. On the contrary, in almost all European contract laws liquidated damages are readily enforced, as are penalty clauses when they are not manifestly excessive. Although most law and economics scholars have criticized Common law courts for the non-enforcement of penalty clauses, there is a sizable minority of scholars who have defended the Common law “non-enforcement” policy on the ground that penalty clauses are inefficient because they hinder efficient breach. However, and despite the merits of the arguments advanced by advocates of the non-enforcement of penalty clauses, we believe that Common law’s rejection of penalty clauses is inefficient. We further show that the Civil law solution to the problem is not only comparatively more efficient, but that it can also appease the worries of those scholars who are afraid that efficient breaches will be deterred. The solution that Civil law systems give to the problem manages to enforce the parties’ wishes and to avoid deterring efficient breaches. However, we point out that in order for the Civil law systems to take advantage of this superiority, the interpretation of their Civil Codes should be guided by economic analysis and the respect to the wishes of the contracting parties.     

Spatial variation of refractive index in a pane of float glass.

In the statistical interpretation of forensic glass evidence it is standard practice to make the assumption of homogeneity of the refractive index (RI) of the source glass, or of localized homogeneity. However, the work of Locke and Hayes showed that, for toughened windscreen glass, this assumption might not be true. This work is well cited, but there appears to have been little follow-on published research. Furthermore, the toughening process is something known to affect the refractive index, and is a process that float glass does not undergo. Float glass is a major component of casework in New Zealand and for that reason it would be interesting to know whether the findings of Locke and Hayes apply when dealing with float glass. In this paper we describe an experiment similar to that of Locke and Hayes, systematically examining the variation of RI in a pane of float window glass. It was found that, although there were no systematic differences in refractive index, there were observable differences across the pane.     

Uncovered bones on the Baltic Sea beach--human or animal?]

Report of an unusual finding of bones on the shore of the Baltic Sea. Although the morphological findings appeared similar to a human foot skeleton, a quick identification as sea dog bone was possible.