CHILD PROTECTION MEDIATION: THE COOK COUNTY ILLINOIS EXPERIENCE—A JUDGE'S PERSPECTIVE

The Child Protection Mediation Program in Cook County, Illinois is the result of a collaborative effort on the part of the court, its stakeholders, and the attorneys involved in child protection cases. Child protection mediation empowers families and includes parents in many decisions impacting their children. It also helps judges to move children's cases through the legal system more rapidly and in a more efficient and humane manner. This results in children achieving more timely permanency. The program is sustained in part due to frequent outreach to, and input from, the program's consumers. These help to ensure that the program is meeting the diverse needs of the court, the families, and the professionals involved in the cases.     

Bridging the gap between facts and norms: mutual trust,the European Arrest Warrant and the rule of law in an interdisciplinary context

The rule-of-law-backsliding in some Member States has subverted not only one of the EU fundamental values but also trust among national authorities when implementing European Arrest Warrants (EAW). However, when evaluating the execution of EAWs issued by countries experiencing rule-of-law crises, the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) sought to preserve judicial cooperation and imposed a rather “top-down” view on mutual trust among Member States. This approach seemingly disregards the (dis)trust which has emerged in the EU due to rule-of-law-backsliding and fails to acknowledge the psycho-sociological nature of trust. Drawing on the trust literature, the paper offers novel conceptual elements to rethink mutual trust in the EAW framework. Notably, it critically assesses some of the gaps in the CJEU's interpretation of mutual trust and advances suggestions to embed empirical considerations in the conceptualisation of this principle to bridge the gap between trust in practice and in principle.     

I am becoming my mother: (post)diaspora,local entanglements and entangled locals

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the sensory, self-shifting approach of Lorna Goodison’s 1986 poem ‘I am becoming my mother’, and on quantum theory for brief insights into entanglement, this article gazes into the still visualities of family photographs of my own Birmingham childhood (my mother died that same year) to push towards a more entangled conception of (post)diaspora. I use this highly personal entanglement to take issue with three troublingly disentangled ways in which postdiaspora has been imagined in recent academic literature: as the culmination of a teleological movement from migrant to diaspora to post-diaspora; as the slowly weakening pull of diasporic responsibilities and remittances; and as a means to archaise and de-link from ties to a forgetful and irresponsible diaspora. Ultimately, the article pushes towards a more deeply materially and personally entangled version of (post)diaspora.     

Changing expectations:COSMIC in the new world

Twenty years ago, in the olden days, computer software was a specialty niche open only to gurus who were willing to devote years of study to the field. In the last three years the picture has changed. With the advent of comfortable user interfaces, word processors, spreadsheets, and easy-to-use databases, almost every secretary in the country is conversant with computer technology and their bosses are catching on fast. The result is a heightened awareness of computer software. COSMIC, a longestablished, non-profit software distribution facility devoted to technology transfer, is reviewing and revising its operations, trying to meet the expectations of a wider audience.     

Sex Differences in Age Patterns of Delinquent/Criminal Careers: Results from Poisson Latent Class Analyses of the Philadelphia Cohort Study

Applications of latent class analyses to the study of criminal careers have yielded results with implications for criminological theory. Distinct latent classes of individuals within various samples have been identified based upon the similarity of individuals with respect to their rate of offending across the teen and adult years, net of the effects of other regressors. In previous research on samples of males taken from the cities of London and Philadelphia, four and five such categories have been identified respectively, ranging from a group of nonoffenders to a group of chronic offenders. However, the question of whether similar findings hold for females has not been adequately addressed, in part due to the scarcity of longitudinal samples with sizable female populations. Data from the Second Philadelphia Cohort are used to address this and related questions. First, are there latent classes of female offenders? Second, if such categories do exist, how do they compare? Third, how do classes of male and female offenders compare on key measures of criminal careers? Analyses of the samples yield differing numbers of classes for males and females. Gender invariances as well as differences in patterns of offending are also found and are discussed.     

Research on Gender and the Law: Where Are We Going,Where Have We Been?

This article provides an overview of issues related to research on gender and the law. Following a discussion of the ways in which gender and the law interact, we assess the extent to which Law and Human Behavior (LHB) has addressed the issue of gender. Specifically, we present the results of our analysis of the role of gender in articles published in LHB from 1990 through 1996. We discuss the relatively few gender-relevant studies that appeared, as well as comment upon the attention given to gender by research with other primary foci. We then discuss various strategies for conducting gender research and their implications for research on gender and the law. We conclude by introducing the articles in this special issue on gender and the law, commenting on how they add to our accumulated knowledge in this area.