Barry K. Winetrobe 《The Journal of Legislative Studies》2013,19(1):1-13

Parliaments are difficult institutions to market and promote to their publics, partly because of their political nature and their institutional complexity. However, because good promotion requires a good ‘product’, thinking about parliaments in terms of their promotion can also focus attention helpfully on how they are actually structured and operated, thereby contributing to the improvement in their effectiveness, both internally and in relation to the wider polity. The Westminster and Scottish Parliaments can be usefully and conveniently compared and contrasted, both in terms of their parliamentary product, and in its promotion. such a comparative analysis highlights some of the defining characteristics of an effective parliament, such as an underlying vision and purpose, substantive institutional autonomy (especially in relation to the executive), and genuine public engagement. It also emphasises that both the operation and the promotion of a parliament are multi-layered tasks for parliamentarians and parliamentary staff.  相似文献   

    

Arun K. Thiruvengadam  Piyush Joshi 《Regulation & Governance》2012,6(3):327-343

This article addresses regulatory reforms in the Indian telecommunications sector and emphasizes the role of the Indian judiciary. Our claim is that when confronted with a series of disputes relating to the nascent telecom regulatory landscape, the Supreme Court of India sought to make a constructive contribution to both the actual disputes as well as the overall regulatory framework. Our reading of these cases suggests that in the sphere of telecom, the Supreme Court has been less interested in stamping its own authority on issues, and has instead sought to bolster the authority and legitimacy of the recently constituted telecom regulatory institutions. We seek to draw attention to the role of the Indian judiciary as marking an exceptional feature of evolving regulatory systems in the Global South. Conventional wisdom in the regulatory jurisprudence that has evolved in the Global North suggests that judiciaries should have little or no role to play in regulatory systems. We suggest that to overcome the special challenges that regulatory systems in the Global South confront, more established institutions and actors might have to lend credibility and legitimacy to enable nascent regulatory actors to develop over time. At least in the Indian case, this is one way to understand the Indian judiciary's interventionist actions in the sphere of telecom regulation.  相似文献   

    

Anna K. Zimdars 《Journal of law and society》2011,38(4):575-603

Fair entry into the legal profession promotes legal legitimacy and the inclusiveness of the administration of justice. This article asks which individual factors predict success in the competition for entry to the Bar of England and Wales. Using data from 2,178 British aspiring barristers, it finds that university attended and attainment at university and in the BVC were the strongest predictors of gaining pupillage. Ethnic minorities were initially disadvantaged in the competition for pupillages, but this became statistically insignificant when taking into account attainment and type of university. However, those aged 30 and above were still disadvantaged in securing pupillages when controlling for attainment and university. The article highlights the challenges of fair selection into a graduate‐entry legal profession. Entry is reliant on the profile of graduates emerging from the prior education system where ascribed characteristics such as ethnicity, attainment, and university type influence opportunities.  相似文献   

    

Adam K. Matz  Judge Julia H. Adams  Deborah Williamson 《Juvenile & family court journal》2011,62(3):25-42

Though the “old conventional wisdom” explained delay as the product of too few resources and staff, the “new conventional wisdom” posits court efficiency is largely due to the cultural makeup of the court. Adapting the Court Culture Assessment Instrument developed by Dr. Ostrom and colleagues at the National Center for State Courts, this research study examines judicial perceptions of culture in the Kentucky Court of Justice general and family circuit court. Results indicate circuit courts are predominantly autonomous but desire to be more structured (hierarchical). In addition, bivariate analyses showed a significant, but weak, inverse relationship exists between perceptions of a predominantly hierarchical culture orientation and the presence of delay. In other words, judges who perceived their circuit to be predominantly hierarchical in nature were less likely to perceive delay as a problem.  相似文献   

    

Ebenezer K. Tetteh 《The Journal of World Intellectual Property》2011,14(2):202-228

The Trade‐Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) regime agreed by member nations of the World Trade Organization (WTO) provides public‐health‐protecting flexibilities to mitigate the negative externalities of diminished medicines access from cross‐country harmonization of patent protection. This article analyses the expected benefits from invoking TRIPS flexibilities taking into account the real social costs and constraints of doing so. It highlights the concept of fair following and discusses why the optimal public policy leans towards free‐riding by low‐income countries only. It compares the welfare effects of alternative models of fair following: selective use of TRIPS flexibilities and the bilateral dependence solution. Faced with externally imposed political and macroeconomic constraints, the article argues why the bilateral dependence solution offers an alternative means of creating a high‐volume low‐price purchasing process that is expected to improve access to both on‐patent and off‐patent medicines. It notes that there is no easy, costless set of policy choices for low‐income nations to follow. Even a policy choice of accepting bilateral trade deals (and using the bilateral dependence solution as a safety valve) may damage social identity trust (with fellow low‐income nations) and collective bargaining leverage; and unravel the aggregation of “implementation experiences” needed for reforming the TRIPS regime.  相似文献   

    

Na Cheng  R. Chandramouli  K.P. Subbalakshmi 《Digital Investigation》2011,8(1):78-88

Text is still the most prevalent Internet media type. Examples of this include popular social networking applications such as Twitter, Craigslist, Facebook, etc. Other web applications such as e-mail, blog, chat rooms, etc. are also mostly text based. A question we address in this paper that deals with text based Internet forensics is the following: given a short text document, can we identify if the author is a man or a woman? This question is motivated by recent events where people faked their gender on the Internet. Note that this is different from the authorship attribution problem.In this paper we investigate author gender identification for short length, multi-genre, content-free text, such as the ones found in many Internet applications. Fundamental questions we ask are: do men and women inherently use different classes of language styles? If this is true, what are good linguistic features that indicate gender? Based on research in human psychology, we propose 545 psycho-linguistic and gender-preferential cues along with stylometric features to build the feature space for this identification problem. Note that identifying the correct set of features that indicate gender is an open research problem. Three machine learning algorithms (support vector machine, Bayesian logistic regression and AdaBoost decision tree) are then designed for gender identification based on the proposed features. Extensive experiments on large text corpora (Reuters Corpus Volume 1 newsgroup data and Enron e-mail data) indicate an accuracy up to 85.1% in identifying the gender. Experiments also indicate that function words, word-based features and structural features are significant gender discriminators.  相似文献   

Further Dissecting the Black Box of Citizen Participation: When Does Citizen Involvement Lead to Good Outcomes?     

Kaifeng Yang  Sanjay K. Pandey 《Public administration review》2011,71(6):880-892

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PETR KRATOCHVÍL  PETRA CIBULKOV  MICHAL BENÍK 《Journal of common market studies》2011,49(2):391-412

This article explores the EU's ability to frame the public debates about its external policies. The article begins by broadening the current discussions about the three aspects of actorness – legitimacy, attractiveness and recognition – by introducing the EU's framing power as a fourth aspect of actorness. Then it proceeds to an empirical analysis of framing, which is based on a discourse analysis of the news coverage of Ukraine (2002–07) in print media in the three biggest EU Member States (United Kingdom, Germany and France).  相似文献   

    

Gregory McLaughlin Ph.D.  Igor K. Lednev Ph.D. 《Journal of forensic sciences》2015,60(3):595-604

The spectroscopic identification of body fluids in situ is a major objective in forensic science. This approach offers the confirmatory, nondestructive, rapid, and on‐scene identification of various body fluids. Although Raman spectroscopy has shown tremendous promise toward this goal in prior proof‐of‐concept experiments, a significant challenge which still remains is substrate interference. Here, an approach for detecting semen stains in situ on various substrates using Raman spectroscopy is explored. Simulated semen evidence was prepared on skin, glass, and various fabrics. Raman data were accumulated from stains without any pretreatment using a common confocal mapping spectrometer using 785 nm laser excitation. The results demonstrate that the spectroscopic interferences encountered by substrates can be reduced and eliminated using a combination of existing subtraction techniques and chemometric models. Heterogeneous substrates proved most challenging, however, automatic subtraction treatment, and location of fluid hotspots was able to elucidate a clear spectroscopic signature of semen in every instance.  相似文献   

    

Jamie K. Pringle Ph.D.  John P. Cassella Ph.D.  John R. Jervis Ph.D.  Anna Williams Ph.D.  Peter Cross M.Sc.  Nigel J. Cassidy Ph.D. 《Journal of forensic sciences》2015,60(4):1052-1060

In homicide investigations, it is critically important that postmortem interval and postburial interval (PBI) of buried victims are determined accurately. However, clandestine graves can be difficult to locate; and the detection rates for a variety of search methods (ranging from simple ground probing through to remote imaging and near‐surface geophysics) can be very low. In this study, simulated graves of homicide victims were emplaced in three sites with contrasting soil types, bedrock, and depositional environments. The long‐term monthly in situ monitoring of grave soil water revealed rapid increases in conductivity up to 2 years after burial, with the longest study evidencing declining values to background levels after 4.25 years. Results were corrected for site temperatures and rainfall to produce generic models of fluid conductivity as a function of time. The research suggests soilwater conductivity can give reliable PBI estimates for clandestine burials and therefore be used as a grave detection method.  相似文献