Disproportionate and Discriminatory: Reviewing the Evidence on Police Stop and Search

Eight years after the Lawrence Inquiry, the question of police powers to stop and search people in public places remains at the forefront of debate about police community relations. Police are empowered to stop and search citizens under a wide range of legislative acts and the power is employed daily across Britain. Far from laying the debate to rest, the Lawrence Inquiry prompted new research studies and fresh theories to explain the official statistics. We argue that the statistics show that the use of the powers against black people is disproportionate and that this is an indication of unlawful racial discrimination. If stop and search powers cannot be effectively regulated – and it seems that they cannot – then their continued use is unjustified and should be curtailed.     

Vicarious Trauma in Judges: The Personal Challenge of Dispensing Justice

Symptoms of vicarious trauma, coping strategies, and prevention suggestions were investigated with 105 judges. Participants completed a self‐report measure developed for this study. The majority of judges (63%) reported one or more symptoms that they identified as work‐related vicarious trauma experiences. Female judges reported more symptoms, as did judges with seven or more years of experience. In addition, female judges were more likely to report internalizing difficulties, while judges with more experience reported higher levels of externalizing/hostility symptoms. Coping and prevention strategies were multi‐domain (i.e., personal, professional, and societal) and underscored the need for greater awareness and support for judges.     

Church,State, Resistance1

This article problematizes a separation of Church and State that is nevertheless identified as constitutive of politics. Democracy has come to manifest a tension between the ‘autonomy’ of the political and a ‘heteronomy’ that, exceeding rationalist or social contractarian accounts of our co‐existence, is here presented as an irreducible affect of our being together. Autonomy, it is argued, resists heteronomy through all representations of democracy; yet, by contrast, heteronomy resists autonomy, and does so with the force of this affect. So if civil religion is impossible – and if we know only too well where its realizations lead: by default, to republican celebration, or by excess, to fascism – then we must take up again, and from scratch, the question of the affect according to which we co‐exist.     

Time to play Catch-Up

‘Catch Us If You Can!!!’ is the improbable nameof an Italian weblog managed by Lorenzo Litta and mastermindedby veteran IP expert Stefano Sandri. Although it is rarely possibleto measure what a blog achieves, it is usually quite feasibleto identify what it tries to do. In this instance the bloggers’objective is to raise their readers’ sensitivity towardsintellectual property rights issues and to create a greaterawareness of the parameters of protection and permitted usein a culture which places a