The Legacy of the Maastricht-Urteil and the Pluralist Movement

Abstract:  The Maastricht-Urteil of the German Constitutional Court of October 1993 has left a deep mark on EU law. Although some may consider it as part of legal history, the decision has never been overruled, and the ideas behind it are very much alive. This article tries to examine the legacy of that decision. From a practical point of view, the article focuses on the following issues: the current situation in Germany; the influence on other constitutional or supreme courts and on constitutional reforms in some Member States; the influence on the European Court of Justice and on the Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe. Regarding theory, three sections of the article discuss a number of widespread ' idées reçues ' contained in the Maastricht-Urteil on notions such as the state, constituent power ( pouvoir constituant ), and democracy. The next section presents the movement of legal pluralism as an attempt to come to terms with the Maastricht-Urteil and its legacy. It criticises the radical versions of legal pluralism in view of the damage they may cause to essential dimensions of the rule of law. The final section reflects on the real motives behind the Maastricht-Urteil and its legacy, and on possible future developments.     

Cluster analysis of a forensic population with antisocial personality disorder regarding PCL-R scores: differentiation of two patterns of criminal profiles

Fifty six cases of a forensic population were submitted to a cluster analysis to observe the aglomerative behavior in relation to the total scores of the items comprising the PCL-R Psychopathy Checklist Revised [R.D. Hare, Manual for the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, Multi-Health System, Toronto, 1991]. The analysis indicated two independent types of antisocial personality disorders, not identified in the PCL-R in its standardized form, one of them being strongly associated with criminal conduct and the other with psychopathic personality. Such clusters were stable when the analysis was replicated with other hierarchical algorithms, and also, they were independently extracted via the k-means method without having previously fixed the value for k. One of the clusters concentrated the PCL-R highest scores, indicating that it is the prototypical psychopathic character determinant.     

Requirements Engineering Technology Transfer: An Experience Report

This paper is an experience report on an initiative to incorporate requirements engineering practices into the development process of two large corporations. The project was framed by a government program to foster collaboration between academia, industry, and government agencies. Its expected result—proposals for cooperative work—is in itself a major challenge, since it was not decided from the beginning what aspect of requirements engineering would be covered by the proposals.We describe the cooperation process followed by the project partners, three universities, and two companies, the difficulties found therein, and compare our experience with other reports on the issue of adoption of requirements engineering into the mainstream practice.     

Types of coproduction and differential effects on organizational performance: Evidence from the New York City school system

A growing body of literature explores the process of coproduction by citizens and government employees in providing goods and services, yet research that attempts to link coproduction to organizational performance offers contradictory findings. It is possible that these conflicting results are a consequence of trying to compare distinct categories of coproduction. This study identifies types of coproduction, classified by which organizational tasks citizens can influence during stages of policy design and implementation, and tests whether these types have different effects on student proficiency in Mathematics and English Language Arts using data from New York City schools between 2007 and 2009. This study then tests the degree to which different types of coproduction moderate the negative effect of environmental turbulence on performance. Results confirm that types of coproduction have varying effects on organizational performance and can reduce, and even eliminate, the negative effect of a turbulent environment on student outcomes.     

Human Rights,Personal Responsibility,and Human Dignity: What Are Our Moral Duties to Promote the Universal Realization of Human Rights?

According to the orthodox or humanist conception of human rights, individuals have a moral duty to promote the universal realization of human rights. However, advocates of this account express the implications of this duty in extremely vague terms. What does it mean when we say that we must promote human rights satisfaction? Does it mean that we must devote a considerable amount of our time and resources to this task? Does it mean, instead, that we must make occasional donations to charities working to advance human rights realization? In this essay, I argue that this duty can only be constructed as imperfect. This means that it confers agent-relative discretion on us to decide when, how, and to what extent to advance the human rights of others. It also means that it is neither correlative with rights nor enforceable. As I will explain, the main reason for this is that any attempt to construct it as a perfect duty would infringe the dignity of the potential duty bearers and thereby undermine the very values that human rights practice aspires to serve. Finally, I will conclude by providing some guidelines for those who wish to comply with their imperfect duties to improve the situation of those whose human rights are in peril.     

Attitude-dependent altruism, turnout and voting

This paper presents a goal-oriented model of political participation based on two psychological assumptions. The first is that people are more altruistic towards individuals that agree with them and the second is that people’s well-being rises when other people share their personal opinions. The act of voting is then a source of vicarious utility because it raises the well-being of individuals that agree with the voter. Substantial equilibrium turnout emerges with nontrivial voting costs and modest altruism. The model can explain higher turnout in close elections as well as votes for third-party candidates with no prospect of victory. For certain parameters, these third party candidates lose votes to more popular candidates, a phenomenon often called strategic voting. For other parameters, the model predicts “vote-stealing” where the addition of a third candidate robs a viable major candidate of electoral support.     

A study on the false positive rate of Stegdetect

In this paper we analyse Stegdetect, one of the well-known image steganalysis tools, to study its false positive rate. In doing so, we process more than 40,000 images randomly downloaded from the Internet using Google images, together with 25,000 images from the ASIRRA (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) public corpus. The aim of this study is to help digital forensic analysts, aiming to study a large number of image files during an investigation, to better understand the capabilities and the limitations of steganalysis tools like Stegdetect. The results obtained show that the rate of false positives generated by Stegdetect depends highly on the chosen sensitivity value, and it is generally quite high. This should support the forensic expert to have better interpretation in their results, and taking the false positive rates into consideration. Additionally, we have provided a detailed statistical analysis for the obtained results to study the difference in detection between selected groups, close groups and different groups of images. This method can be applied to any steganalysis tool, which gives the analyst a better understanding of the detection results, especially when he has no prior information about the false positive rate of the tool.