Strafrecht im Wandel

Der Beitrag analysiert die Entwicklung der Strafrechtswissenschaft und der Kriminalpolitik und gibt eine Standortbestimmung des materiellen und formellen Strafrechts sowie des kriminalpolitischen Diskurses heute. Die kritische Bewertung zeigt zugleich Entwicklungslinien für zukünftige Herausforderungen auf.     

Knowledge transfer to emerging markets via consulting projects

In recent years, development agencies (DAs) have focused their activities on consulting projects rather than on financing turnkey projects when assisting emerging markets. The main reason is that the implementation of consulting projects is likely to be connected with an intensive knowledge transfer from developed to emerging markets. Training of local employees and cooperation with local firms are necessary elements to make the transfer effective. The empirical statistics shows training and cooperation to be more frequent in consulting projects financed by DAs as compared to commercial projects. According to theory and experience, training should be included in projects in the least developed host countries, whereas local cooperation should be more frequent, the higher is the development level of the host country. However, DAs do not follow these rules of thumb in a convincing way. A policy implication of the paper is therefore that DAs should better organize and plan the contents of their consulting projects.

Effects on academia-industry collaboration of extending university property rights

Several recent studies show European university scientists contributing far more frequently to company-owned patented inventions than they do to patents owned by universities or by the academic scientists themselves. Recognising the significance of this channel for direct commercialisation of European academic research makes it important to understand its response to current Bayh-Dole inspired reforms of university patenting rights. This paper studies the contribution from university scientists to inventions patented by dedicated biotech firms (DBFs) specialised in drug discovery in Denmark and Sweden, which in this respect share a number of structural and historic characteristics. It examines effects of the Danish Law on University Patenting (LUP) effective January 2000, which transferred to the employer university rights to patents on inventions made by Danish university scientists alone or as participants in collaborative research with industry. Sweden so far has left property rights with academic scientists, as they also were in Denmark prior to the reform. Consequently, comparison of Danish and Swedish research collaboration before and after LUP offers a quasi-controlled experiment, bringing out effects on joint research of university IPR reform. In original data on all 3,640 inventor contributions behind the 1,087 patents filed by Danish and Swedish DBFs 1990–2004, Difference-in-Difference regressions uncover notable LUP-induced effects in the form of significant reductions in contributions from Danish domestic academic inventors, combined with a simultaneous substitutive increase of non-Danish academic inventors. A moderate increase in academic inventions channelled into university owned-patents does appear after LUP. But the larger part of the inventive potential of academia, previously mobilised into company-owned patents, seems to have been rendered inactive as a result of the reform. As a likely explanation of these effects the paper suggests that exploratory research, the typical target of joint university-DBF projects in drug discovery, fits poorly into LUP’s requirement for ex ante allocation of IPR. The Pre-LUP convention of IPR allocated to the industrial partner in return for research funding and publication rights to the academic partner may have offered more effective contracting for this type of research. There are indications that LUP, outside the exploratory agenda of drug discovery, offers a more productive framework for inventions requiring less complicated and uncertain post-discovery R&D.

Zwischen Ordnung und Chaos

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Role of Culture and Context: Ethical Issues in Research with Asian Americans and Immigrants in Intimate Violence

Ethical principles are often presented as universal, immutable rules. However, when conducting research with ethnic minority groups, such as Asian Americans and immigrants, ethical issues need to be placed within a sociocultural context as ethical responses are filtered through the specific value orientations and belief systems of the ethnic group under study. Further, when the group is a marginalized population, power dynamics complicate ethical principles of autonomy. The complexities are further accentuated with sensitive topics such as intimate violence or domestic violence. Consequently, ethical questions about autonomy, informed consent, confidentiality, limits to confidentiality, and protecting participants’ safety and reducing distress need to be at the forefront when planning intimate violence research. An overview of sociocultural context of Western biomedical ethics is presented and specific ethical issues that emerge when conducting intimate violence are discussed.     

Assessing Readiness to Change among Perpetrators of Intimate Partner Violence: Analysis of Two Self-report Measures

Recent interest in the construct of motivation to change among male perpetrators of intimate partner violence (IPV) has led to development of two self-report measures of this construct: the University of Rhode Island Change Assessment for Domestic Violence (URICA-DV; Levesque et al. 2000) and the Safe at Home Inventory (SAH; Begun et al. 2003). We examined the internal structure of these instruments using confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses in a sample of 199 male IPV perpetrators waiting to begin court-mandated batterer intervention programs. Results indicated that the scales had adequate internal consistency. However, using confirmatory factor analyses, the hypothesized structural models of each instrument fit the data poorly. Subsequent models suggested by a series of exploratory factor analyses failed to improve model fit substantially for both scales. For the URICA-DV, a 3-factor model including items from the Precontemplation, Contemplation, and Action subscales fit the data adequately. No acceptable model fit could be found for the SAH. Intercorrelations among similar subscales across the two inventories suggested only a modest degree of intercorrelation (r’s = 0.16–0.52), and a factor structure more dependent on scale of origin than item latent content, suggesting that the scales assess different facets of the readiness to change construct. These results suggest that before the stages of change construct can be fully applied to the IPV area, more research and evaluation are needed on how to accurately assess abuser readiness to change.     

Beschwerdelegitimation vor den Verwaltungsgerichten

Ohne Zusammenfassung