Secrets,strangers, and order-making in rural Sierra Leone

This paper explores the Poro, a male secret society in rural Sierra Leone, and how it conditions access to security and justice. It critiques dichotomies between state and non-state and substantiates the networked quality of order-making as dispersed among a multitude of actors who intertwine disparate rationalities and registers of authority. The secret nature of the Poro, the ‘sons of the soil’, and the ‘stranger’ are explored as central figures. Poro membership is essential to the production of social and physical boundaries between insiders and outsiders of a community. By conditioning access to local positions of power and decision-making about how resources are to be distributed, the Poro also conditions access to security and justice. The networked quality of order-making becomes particularly noticeable when the police engages in Poro affairs, which accentuates the multitude of registers of authorities that are combined and assembled as the Poro and the police interact.     

Deficiencies in the Development of European Criminal Law

Criminal law is beginning to outgrow the shoes which were fitted to it by European law. It is seeking to come of age, to play the role in European law previously reserved to commercial law, private law, employment law, and public law in the broadest sense. Economic knowledge and legal-political organisational interests have long grouped around 'European criminal law'; a still vaguely determined object. A desire also exists to make criminal law justiciable in Europe. Thus, the ranks of the contributions to European criminal law are swelling, European associations of lawyers are developing, legal practitioners are launching appeals3 and winning influence within European institutions. These institutions themselves are beginning to accept and to use criminal law as a political option. This article aims to (I) reflect upon the contents of this development, (II) to clarify their tendencies, and (III) to examine the contents of these premised tendencies, in order to (IV) furnish a critical evaluation.     

Evaluation of the correlation between time corpses spent in in-ground graves and findings at exhumation

To determine how long pathological findings persist after burial and which factors play a role in decomposition of a corpse, we evaluated all bodies exhumed under the auspices of the Institute of Legal Medicine at the Hannover Medical School between 1978 and 1997. A total of 87 exhumations (54 men, 33 women) were performed in this period. The time bodies remained buried varied between 5 days and 16.8 years (mean 1.5 years, median 2.3 months). Fifty-six percent of the bodies were exhumed after at most 3 months, 10% remained buried for greater than 3 years. Pathomorphological changes of the soft tissues and the internal organs remained evident after several months, in some cases after several years of burial. Overall, it was possible to evaluate internal organs after 5 years of burial. Bodies became mostly decomposed after approximately 8 years at the earliest, although it was still possible to evaluate some soft tissue remnants after 16.8 years. In stepwise logistic regression, both the length of time the body was buried (p < 0.00005) and the time of year (p < 0.0019) clearly affected the rate of physical change. The variables of sex (p = 0.33), age (p = 0.61) and changes in the integrity of the body before burial (trauma, autopsy before burial; p = 0.15) did not influence the physical state of the body after exhumation. Our data show that much information may be gained from an exhumation even after significant time has passed since burial.     

An unusual case of double death

The report presents the case of an alleged double homicide or a homicide followed by suicide of a couple, in which the court-ordered autopsy of both victims revealed that the homicide had been committed by the husband immediately before he died himself from cardiac failure. The article gives a short summary of the pathophysiological relations between emotional tension (stress) and physical strain and the effects on the cardiovascular system. The case report describes a homicide by strangulation immediately followed by the perpetuator's death from a natural cause.     

Brazil and the Paris Agreement: REDD+ as an instrument of Brazil’s Nationally Determined Contribution compliance

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - The Paris Agreement on climate change recognises the central role of forests in achieving the well-below 2&nbsp;°C...