The behavior of the expanding point .25 ACP ammunition in the human body

We examined six cases (four homicides, two suicides) involving gunshot wounds with .25 ACP ammunition. The nature of these cases is described in this article.     

Regulatory regimes and accountability

This research considers accountability issues for new forms of regulation that shift the emphasis from prescribing actions to regulating systems or regulating for results. Shortfalls at various levels of accountability are identified from experiences with these regimes in the regulation of building and fire safety, food safety and nuclear power plant safety. These experiences illustrate how accountability shortfalls can undermine regulatory performance and introduce a potential for subtle forms of regulatory capture. These concerns underscore the importance of finding the right fit between regulatory circumstances and the design of regulatory regimes.     

The problem with English(es) and linguistic (in)justice. Addressing the limits of liberal egalitarian accounts of language

Van Parijs’s Linguistic Justice for Europe and the World furthers a nascent examination of multilingualism within political philosophy, drawing on continental European contexts where multilingualism is the norm. Van Parijs argues, in effect for linguistic cosmopolitanism via English as the current world language, and this seems ostensibly to be a considerable improvement on ‘the untrammeled public monolingualism’ of Anglo-American political theory. However, Van Parijs’s account is flawed in four key respects. First, there is the fundamental problem of his reductionist account of language – by which language is viewed only in terms of its communicative uses and reach and not in relation to its symbolic and identity functions. Second is his simplistic advocacy of English as a global lingua franca, which ignores issues of power and inequality, along with related delimited access to high-status English language varieties. Third are the inherent limitations associated with his advocacy of linguistic territoriality, which recognizes state-sanctioned languages but little else, thus failing to mitigate existing linguistic hierarchies. Finally, the wider argument for English as a global lingua franca is inevitably underpinned by a monolithic/hegemonic view of English itself. This monolithic conception of English stands in contradistinction, not only to the actual plethora of Englishes in the world today, but also, more importantly, to their widely varying status and use in furthering cross-communication and related notions of social and economic mobility. The latter thus fatally undermines Van Parijs’s central argument linking social and economic mobility ineluctably to access to English.     

Capacity building and the (re)production of intellectual property rights

There is little settled or uncontested about the trips agreement and the global governance of intellectual property rights (iprs). This suggests that the provision of training and technical assistance to build capacity is itself part of the reproduction of the dominant (trips constituted) view of iprs and is therefore a political project rather than merely technical provision. On one side many developing countries' elites and governments are keen to join the international trading community and see the need to adopt the increasingly universalised rules of the system as part of this process. On the other hand, there are vocal constituencies less supportive of an unqualified adoption of trips‐related standards of legal protection for iprs. Given the continuing importance of legal structures to underpin and constitute markets (and this is most especially the case in markets for knowledge and information), the processes by which the trips solution to the question of knowledge ownership is being globalised through technical training needs to be understood and analysed.     

Book reviews

Ephraim Maisel, The Foreign Office and Foreign Policy 1991–1926 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press 1994), £35. ISBN 1–898723–04–4.

Timothy P. Maga, The World of Jimmy Carter: U.S. Foreign Policy 1977–1981 (West Haven, CT: University of New Haven Press, 1994). 189 pp. ISBN 0–936385–23–0.

Michael Leifer, Dictionary of the Modern Politics of South‐East Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), xii + 271pp. £45. ISBN 0–415–04219–4.

Christopher C. Harmon and David Tucker (eds.), Statecraft and Power: Essays in Honor of Harold W. Rood (Lanham and London: University Press of America with the National Institute for Public Policy, 1994), 284pp ISBN 0–8191–8718–6.