Does Legal Semiotics Cannibalize Jurisprudence?

Does Duncan Kennedy successfully cannibalize jurisprudence? He attempts to do it by demonstrating the inexistence of rightness in legal argumentation. If there is no right legal argument, then there is no right answer in adjudication, adjudication is not a rational enterprise and legal doctrine cannot be said to be a science. It can be shown that skepticism is self-defeating. Duncan Kennedy can avoid self defeat only because he actually believes in a lot of legal arguments. His thesis that judges decide questions of policy without any methodology that distinguishes them from legislators does not hold. Judicial reasoning is subject to constraints that do not affect legislators. It must be based on the sources of law and is limited by rules of procedure. Even when the judges have ‘interstitial’ legislative powers they are, unlike the legislator, bound to fit the system and their decisions are considered in procedure from the perspective of the right answer doctrine. The only work that can convincingly refute the skeptic argument against legal science is the reconstruction of jurisprudence as a scientific enterprise. Such work is beyond the scope of any single paper. The article aims to give some inspirations for such a task.     

侦查指挥构造的法理解析

侦查指挥构造是侦查体制的核心和枢纽,其核心是决策和组织,具有明显的对抗性。刑事侦查指挥构造不仅仅指刑事侦查指挥的范式,还应当包括这种范式下侦查权和指挥管理权的运作方式。在组成体系上,由侦查决策、侦查组织、侦查实施和侦查协调等子系统组成。从结构分析视角而言,侦查指挥关系包括侦查指挥主体、客体和内容三项要素。一个国家侦查指挥模式的型塑与该国特定的政治经济制度、司法传统和社会文化背景等社会大环境是密切相关的。     

Motherhood as the Value of Labour

This article concerns migrant domestic labour. It departs from existing analyses of such labour by examining the place of workers' mobility and workers' intimate life histories in the valorisation of migrant domestic labour. Drawing on insights from the literature on the autonomy of migration and on affective labour, this article argues that migrant domestic workers' status as mobile bodies infused with affective histories of maternal care is critical in the constitution of a market for their labour. This history endows migrant domestic workers' labour with unprecedented value, not least because the worker is expected to exude the affects of motherhood authentically in the home of her employer. The analysis forwarded here demands a new understanding of the operations of global care chains and transnational motherhood.     

Reform of International Monetary System and Construction of Global Monetary Security Mechanism: Connections and Problems

The international monetary system is the basis to establishing a comprehensive global financial safety mechanism. To understand the internal connections between the reform of the international monetary system and the global safety mechanism has important policy implications. The reform of the international monetary system and the construction of the global safety network are inherently related to each other. Risk management and crisis response are the functions of the international monetary system and serve to ensure the safety of the global fi nancial system; liquidity management and international exchange rate coordination are conducive to the maintenance of the stability of the global financial system. International exchange rate coordination, the control of spillover effect of US monetary policies and the reform of governance structures of the international monetary system contribute to global fi nancial safety. However, the reform of the international monetary system and the establishment of the global fi nancial safety mechanism are faced with problems such as Triffin Dilemma, the technical shortcomings of global financial system, the ill coordination of global and regional fi nancial security network and the growing number of political issues involved. In order to build a sound global fi nancial safety system, cooperation should be enhanced in the following fi ve aspects: to promote the reform of the Bretton Woods institutions; to build the global financial safety network; to establish the liquidity management system; to facilitate the construction of the super sovereign currency; and to deepen regional monetary cooperation.     

Why Judicial Control of Price Terms in Consumer Contracts Might Not Always Be the Right Answer – Insights from Behavioural Law and Economics

Regulators everywhere are confronted with the question of how to react to contractual pricing structures that serve to hide rather than reveal the real cost of goods and services and thereby abuse limitations in the cognitive competences of consumers. Given that sellers/service providers systematically make use of insights from behavioural sciences to refine their manipulative pricing techniques, regulators should also integrate scientific findings on human decision making to correct behavioural market failures through more tailored policy choices. A holistic approach regarding similar problems is still missing in the EU and the issue is often disguised behind a discussion on unfair terms control, which does not serve the purpose of finding a lasting solution. The aim of this article is twofold: first, to show the weaknesses of an ex post judicial control of pricing techniques, and second, to discuss policy tools which could counterbalance consumer biases on which the techniques rely.     

Screening for risk of inpatient violence

A screening checklist for assessing the risk of violence at the time of psychiatric hospitalization was developed. Checklist items and a cutoff point for low versus high risk of violence were selected based on a previous study of statistical prediction of violence. Application of the checklist to a new sample of 338 patients admitted to a university-based inpatient unit revealed promising results in identifying patients who later displayed aggressive behavior in the hospital, as indicated by its positive predictive value (59.0%), negative predictive value (70.6%), sensitivity (57.2%), specificity (70.0%), total predictive value (65.4%), and likelihood ratio (1.97). The results suggest the potential value of incorporating actuarial methods in the evaluation of violence risk.Funded in part by Biomedical Research Support Grant Program grant No. SO7-RR05775 from the Division of Research Resources, National Institutes of Health. Portions of this paper were presented at the Biennial Conference of the American Psychology-Law Society/Division 41 of the American Psychological Association, San Diego, CA, March 12–14, 1992. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dale E. McNiel.     

Data on the PCR Turkish population based loci: LDLR, GYPA, HBGG, D7S8, and Gc

Allele and genotype frequencies for the five PCR-based loci were analyzed in 157 unrelated Turkish individuals. The five PCR-based loci included LDLR, GYPA, HBGG, D7S8, and Gc. The results of the chi-square and exact tests showed that the genotype distribution at the LDLR, GYPA, D7S8, and Gc loci did not significantly differ from the Hardy-Weinberg Expectation (HWE). However, the genotype distribution at the HBGG locus did not conform to HWE. Moreover, the genotype frequencies calculated in this study were compared with the published genotype frequencies of US African American and US Caucasian populations. The Turkish population was significantly different at the HBGG locus from the US Caucasian population. However, there were highly significant differences at the LDLR, HBGG, and Gc loci between the Turkish and African American populations.