Court Management of AIDS Disputes: A Sociolegal Analysis

Historically, disease scares reveal contradictions in the social order. We postulate that courts focus on depoliticizing social tensions revealed by AIDS, legitimating the routines of dominant parties in the AIDS sociolegal network. At the same time, courts deviate from their normal practices try upholding the claims of subordinate parties in this network, particularly people living with AIDS (PWAs) and their allies. Our analysis of 36 AlDS-related court rulings, published during the formative years of AIDS litigation in the United States, supports the notion that courts operate as "double-edged" institutions. To explain the duality of judicial decision making, we concentrate on the powers of social and cultural factors rather than on the doctrinal judgments of the courts. We trace how relational attributes, evident in contestants' characteristics (e.g., plaintiff/defendant, status differentials) and the nature of claims (i.e., restrictive/expansive), combine to account for wins for dominant parties and how other combinations of these attributes define wins for subordinate parties. We also show how judges combine specific interpretational attributes in the text of their rulings (e.g., use of divisive AIDS metaphors, deference to medical authority) to justify wins. We consolidate these findings to discuss how PWAs and their allies might use the courts to their advantage and point out the ways in which the changing epidemiology of AIDS in the United States limits the use of courts.     

Literatur

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Y-STR analysis on DNA mixture samples—Results of a collaborative project of the ENFSI DNA Working Group

The ENFSI (European Network of Forensic Science Institutes) DNA Working Group undertook a collaborative project on Y-STR typing of DNA mixture samples that were centrally prepared and thoroughly tested prior to the shipment. Four commercial Y-STR typing kits (Y-Filer, Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA; Argus Y Nonaplex, Biotype, Dresden, Germany; Powerplex Y, Promega, Madison, WI, USA; and DYSplex-3, SERAC, Bad Homburg, Germany) were used for the amplification of the mixture samples. The results of the study showed a striking inter-laboratory difference of kit performance as determined from the peak heights of the obtained Y-STR genotypes. Variation in quantity and quality of the shipped DNA can be excluded as reason for the observed differences because both samples and shipping conditions were found to be reproducible in an earlier study. The results suggest that in some cases a laboratory-specific optimization process is indicated to reach a comparable sensitivity for the analysis of minute amounts of DNA.     

Class, Capital and Crisis: A Return to Fundamentals

The financial crisis that currently threatens the stability of global capitalism is the latest in a long line of similar episodes stretching back some 200 years. While many orthodox economists explain the crisis in terms of the failure of the proper operation of the market mechanism, radical accounts see crisis as an aspect of the constitution of capital and of the process of the accumulation of capital itself. This article explores the extent to which Marx's understanding of accumulation and crisis can provide the basis for a general theory of capitalist crisis. It concludes that the growing and chronic separation between financial (fictitious) accumulation and productive accumulation is the key to understanding the latest crisis of capital expressed as a global credit crunch. Furthermore, Marx opens the door to the development of an overtly 'political' theory of crisis stressing the 'capitalist use of crisis' as a means for the violent reassertion of the fundamental class relation.     

Unions in Restructured States: Laborism in Australia and Economic Liberalism in the United Kingdom

There have been major reforms in the public sector in both Australia and the United Kingdom from the 1980s onwards. In each case, governments restructured their state sectors. These initiatives brought about not only widely acknowledged changes in organisation but also changes in the labour process and class relations as well as differing prospects for state sector trade unions.     

Survival analysis: A survey

This paper is a survey of statistical methods used to analyze the length of time until a specified event occurs. These models have often been used to analyze the survival times (i.e., time until death) of medical patients, and so the term survival analysis is natural. In criminology, the main application of these models has been to analyze the time until recidivism, but many other applications are possible. The paper summarizes the statistical literature on survival analysis, and describes its applications in criminology. The methods are illustrated by an application to the prediction of time until recidivism for a sample of North Carolina prison releasees.     

Allele frequency distribution for 21 autosomal STR loci in Bhutan

We studied the allele frequency distribution of 21 autosomal STR loci contained in the AmpFlSTR^® Identifiler™ (Applied Biosystems), the Powerplex^®16 (Promega) and the FFFL (Promega) multiplex PCR kits among 936 individuals from the Royal Kingdom of Bhutan. As such these are the first published autosomal DNA results from this country.