The last frontier: enforcing foreign judgments against offshore trusts after Pattni v Ali

A review of recent case law outlining the approach to enforcingforeign judgments in some common law jurisdictions. The cases,which were all decided over the last three years, in or on appealfrom, the Isle of Man, Jersey and the Cayman Islands, dealtwith orders for the transfer of shareholdings in companies incorporatedin the respective jurisdictions. It is the raison d'etre ofthe offshore trusts industry in each of those jurisdictionsthat they have each sought to put in place, some later thanothers, legislative packages which advertise certainty aboutthe circumstances in which foreign judgments will or will notbe enforced.     

Déjà vu All Over Again: Investigating Temporal Continuity of Adolescent Victimization

An important theoretical issue in the study of criminal victimization focuses on state dependence or the extent to which prior victimization causally affects subsequent victimization. Framing this issue are two conceptual arguments that posit divergent predictions regarding the impact of past victimization. While “victim labeling” suggests that the experience of prior victimization increases victimization in the future, “victim rationality” suggests that past victimization decreases subsequent victimization. To date there has been little longitudinal research that explicitly evaluates these competing viewpoints. In response, the current study uses panel data from a sample of adolescents to assess the merit of these opposing theoretical frameworks. Against this theoretical backdrop, it is shown that prevailing strategies for the analysis of panel data—random-effects and fixed-effects—produce erroneous results that add confusion to the debate regarding the nature of state dependence processes in criminal victimization. Drawing from advances in econometrics, two estimators that can overcome the problems that plague more traditional panel data models are used to provide a test of the competing victimization perspectives. Results from those analyses suggest support for the thesis that past victimization increases subsequent victimization, but the magnitude of this positive relationship is more modest than is indicated by analytic models that have been utilized in prior longitudinal victimization research.

The Organisation of Hate

In this paper, it is argued that we need to understand the role of ‘hate’ in the organisation of bodies and spaces before we ask the question of the limits of ‘hate crime’ as a legal category. Rather than assuming hate is a psychological disposition - that it comes from within a psyche and then moves out to others - the paper suggests that hate works to align individual and collective bodies through the very intensity of its attachments. Such alignments are unstable precisely given the fact that hate does not reside in a subject, object or body; the instability of hate is what makes it so powerful in generating the effects that it does. Furthermore, although hate does not reside positively in a subject, body or sign, this does not mean that hate does have effects that are structural and mediated. This paper shows that hate becomes attached or ‘stuck’ to particular bodies, often through violence, force and harm. The paper dramatizes its arguments by a reflection on racism as hate crime, looking at the circulation of figures of hate in discourses of nationhood, from both extreme right wing and mainstream political parties. It also considers the part of what hate is doing can precisely be understood in terms of the affect it has on the bodies of those designated as the hated, an affective life that is crucial to the injustice of hate crime. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

External Pressures and Internal Dynamics in the Institutionalization of Performance-Based Budgeting: An Endless Process?

The well-known practice of performance-based budgeting (PBB) is a relevant component of the New Public Management (NPM) reform agenda and has become widespread, with varying approaches and results across countries. However, its variation within specific countries has remained largely unexplored. This study analyzes three organizations operating within the same context—three ministries in Italy—to contribute to a new understanding of PBB variation by illustrating why the same PBB practice can or cannot be implemented and internalized similarly across these organizations and thus become (or not) fully institutionalized. The study adopts and enriches the institutional approach by extending beyond isomorphic convergence toward PBB and explaining practice variation, linking the interactions between external pressures and internal dynamics at the organizational level to PBB institutionalization. The empirical analysis shows how a lack of alignment between external pressures and internal dynamics contributes to an unfinished and apparently endless process of institutionalization.     

An assessment of sexual health risk behaviors among female youth in juvenile detention

This study investigated the association between risky sexual behavior and drug use among female youth sentenced to a regional juvenile detention center. Preincarceration behavioral health risk data were collected from a modified version of the Youth Risk Behaviors Surveillance Survey completed by respondents. Almost all of the 105 participants had been detained before their current sentence, more than half of them were sexually active before the age of 13, and 70% had smoked marijuana or drank alcohol by age 14. A regression analysis was conducted to determine if preincarceration sexual health risk behaviors were significant enough to predict continued risk behaviors related to pregnancy, disease prevention, and substance use. Findings indicate that youth detention-based prevention programs should emphasize sexual and drug-risk reduction strategies as a means to reduce risky behaviors for this population.     

The Effect of Unions and Organized Civil Society on Social Policy: Pension and Health Reforms in Argentina and Brazil, 1988–2008

This article shows how modified European power resources theories can be applied to Latin America to explain differences in the depth of policy reforms. It innovates on previous work on Latin American social policy by particularly examining the effect of unions and other civil society groups on the process of structural reforms (or lack thereof) in the health and pension sectors in Argentina and Brazil. Through a most similar system design, this analysis shows that the strength and support (or opposition) of organized civil society groups is a crucial condition to account for the enactment (or failure) of a given broad policy reform.     

Quality Management in Public-Sector Organizations: Evidence from Six EU Countries

Although there is considerable evidence for the hypothesis that an efficient use of management techniques is the key to a good public service delivery, a lot of studies come to the conclusion that there is only partial, reluctant implementation or even a general lack of the use of such techniques by public managers. This paper examines the determinants for the use of quality management techniques in public sector organizations from six EU countries. It turns out that especially more organizational autonomy and result control appear to be of importance while, surprisingly, the combination of these variables leads to negative results.