Crime Reporting Decisions and the Costs of Crime

The paper develops a model of crime reporting based on an economic approach. It identifies the principal costs and benefits of reporting from the victim’s perspective, taking account of insurance provision and the risk of intimidation by an offender. It shows how a victim might use backward induction to infer a rational reporting strategy. The recording of crime by the police is a process that relies on victim reports, and is thus influenced by the reporting decisions made by victims. The paper uses empirical evidence from the British Crime Survey and from the International Crime Victims Survey to explore the hypotheses generated by the model. It finds support for the suggestion that the propensity to report a crime increases with the size of the loss entailed. The paper also explores the implications of the findings for the estimation of the costs of crime. Reporting and intimidation costs are generally excluded from bottom-up estimates of costs, an omission that may be quite serious in the context of offences such as domestic violence.     

English- and Spanish-speaking women's use of violence

This study analyzes variables related to the context and consequences of women's use of violence as well as a wide range of violent behaviors used and experienced by court-ordered English- and Spanish-speaking women. Data were derived from intake assessments of 125 court-ordered women over 24 months. Almost all of the women reported a history of abuse perpetrated by their partners. Women committed significantly fewer violent acts against their partners than their partners committed against them. Differences between English- and Spanish-speaking women's victimization, use of violence, and help seeking were largely similar, however, important differences emerged.     

Suicide by blasting caps: a case study of rare cranial trauma

Suicide is a deliberate act of ending one's life. Suicide by use of any explosive device, when not involved in a terrorist act, is quite rare in occurrence when compared with other methods routinely utilized. In this paper, we present to the medicolegal community a case of an adult male who committed suicide with blasting caps and the subsequent extensive damage to the cranial hard tissue. Although the cause and manner of death were relatively straightforward, consultation with forensic anthropologists was requested for an anthropological trauma assessment of the highly fragmented skull. After the skull was cleaned and reconstructed, the analysis revealed similarities between blasting cap trauma to the head and high velocity gunshot trauma to the head. Therefore, in a case where some evidence may have been removed or destroyed, forensic analysis involving trauma of this magnitude could result in a misinterpretation of the true mechanism responsible for the osseous damage. In this case, cooperation among the law enforcement agency, coroner's investigators, the forensic pathologist, and forensic anthropologists provided a comprehensive death case analysis.     

Research with minors in Greece and the EU Directive on clinical trials

This article describes the legal rules for research with minors in Greece in relation to the EU Directive on clinical trials and the Greek Code of Medical Ethics.     

Reflective Judgement and Prudential Rationality: A Contribution to an Inclusive Practical Application of Law

Hannah Arendt has developed a theory of the importance of judgment of taste for political manners, founded on the Kantian aesthetic theory. Nowadays this theory is considered a current theoretical reference for establishing a political way to reconcile the demands of the radicalization of deliberative democracy with the need for political inclusion (Iris Marion Young, Seyla Benhabib). Albena Azmanova in her The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment proposes an inclusive political rhetoric. The political theory founded on judgment is based on Kant’s philosophy; it was developed by Arendt and has greatly influenced the current debate, as an alternative theory in which the moral basis of law can be more sensitive to human contexts; a universalist theory more adequate for dealing with the tragic dimension of human life. The theory of political judgment uses the concepts of reflective judgment and ‘enlarged thought’ as its main concepts. As a starting point, a theory like this considers the singular judgments of justice that each person makes. The background, therefore, is not a rational foundation of principles, but the capacity of rational beings to make judgments. This post-metaphysical theory of law, based on a theory of judgment, is a critique of legal positivism, but presents itself as an alternative to the idealistic theory of law. But this theoretical project has received some criticism related to the adequacy of Arendt’s rereading of Kantian philosophy and her attempt to approximate Kant’s reflective judgment to the Aristotelian concept of phronêsis. Some critics, such as Bryan Garsten, believe that Kant’s rhetoric of public reason diminished and displaced the prudential faculty of judgment that Arendt is to be interested in reviving. Arendt’s attempt to find a theory of judgment in Kant’s aesthetic theory is not successful, in Garsten’s view. Our purpose is to show that a critical theory of judicial judgment is not only possible, but necessary; Arendt’s theory of judgment offers an important contribution to a critical theory of judicial judgment, particularly one devoted to the construction of a legal theory that prioritizes a politics of social inclusion. This theory proposes a critical approach to the project of the procedural conception of democracy, since it can mask social exclusion. An adequate understanding of judicial argumentation cannot forget that it happens in a rhetorical context: it is not only important what a discourse says, but how it says it. The radicalization of deliberative democracy supposes a revision of the ways judicial deliberation is thought: not by reference to universal or at least general principles, but taking into consideration what is ‘critically relevant’, with a view to remedying social injustice (following Azmanova).

     

The Influence of Emotional Labor and Emotional Intelligence on Job Performance: Does Ownership Type Matter? A Comparison of Public and Private Organizations in China

ABSTRACT

Given the limited knowledge about the effect of contextual factors of organizational ownership types on emotional labor, this research addresses two main questions: (1) whether emotional labor varies among organizations with different ownership types; and (2) whether emotional labor and emotional intelligence relate to job performance in different ways in public and private organizations. This paper examines the research questions with 306 self-report questionnaires from the public sector, domestic privately-owned enterprises and foreign-invested firms in China. Significant differences were found in the emotional labor reported in public and private organizations. Overall, emotional labor was found to have a significant effect on in-role performance, and emotional intelligence moderated the link between emotional labor and job performance in public organizations, but not in private organizations.     

Can a leopard change its spots? Strategic behavior versus professional role conception during Ukraine's 2014 court chair elections

Do judges respond to institutional and strategic incentives or do they strictly follow dominant professional role conceptions? This article weighs in by exploring whether an ideational shift toward judicial empowerment and independence can germinate from institutional reforms. Ukraine's 2014 Euromaidan revolution and the comprehensive judicial reform adopted in its wake provide a test of the competing theoretical accounts. A judicial lustration law sacked all incumbent court chairs, who had been appointed by the executive, and gave Ukrainian judges the right to elect new chairs via secret ballot. I analyze this radical step toward judicial self-government using an original data set with individual- and court-level data. The key finding is that less than a fifth of Ukrainian judges embraced their newly granted agency and elected a new chair for their court, whereas the overwhelming majority followed dominant professional norms of deference and reelected the sacked court chairs. This finding holds for all rungs of the judicial hierarchy and for all regions of Ukraine. Even protégés of ousted president Yanukovych won the secret ballot vote by their peers more often than they lost it. Beyond Ukraine, these results suggest that empowering individual judges in the highly hierarchical structure of a civil law judiciary is unlikely to lead to a judicial behavior shift, at least in the short run.     

Asphyxia Homicides in Finland, 1983–2012

Finland has one of the highest homicide rates in Western Europe, and almost every tenth homicide is caused by asphyxiation. Reliable statistics, a strict legislation, and an exceptionally high medico-legal autopsy rate formed a base for a nationwide analysis of asphyxia homicides (n = 383) during 30 years. The cases were identified through multiple records, and all the forensic pathology case files were studied in detail. In more than one out of five cases, there were indications of staging, and the homicide was revealed first at autopsy in close to one in ten cases. The vast majority of the homicides took place in private locations and involved persons known to each other. Every third victim was an intimate partner, and every tenth a child. Almost half of the victims died from manual strangulation, one in three from ligature strangulation. Smothering, choking, neck compression with a firm object, and thoracic compression were more rare methods. Drownings were excluded from this study material. Of all the victims, 7% had no observable external injuries. Petechiae were recorded in approximately in 61%, laryngohyoid fractures in 47%, and vocal cord hemorrhages in 16% of the cases. Every tenth female victim had genital injuries. Toxicological analyses were performed in close to all of the cases, and almost three out of four victims tested positive for blood alcohol. The various aspects of the demographics and autopsy findings covered in this study contribute reliable and accurate data to further strengthen the spectrum of observable medico-legal characteristics of asphyxia homicides.