The Supremacy of Techno-Governance: Privatization of Digital Content and Consumer Protection in the Globalized Information Society

The article aims to describe the role of technology and contractin regulating access to digital content deregulating intellectualproperty law monopoly. In particular it argues that the anti-circumventionprovisions for technological protection measures and digitalrights management systems enacted in the United States and inEurope compromise the consumer’s capacity to exerciselegitimate rights, such as the private use exemption, by givingcontent owners extralegal protection for their works. It alsoanalyses how these acts have caused an inappropriate delegationof governmental decision making to a non-governmental entitywith a consequent privatization of the government’s rolein protecting intellectual property and in setting technicalstandards for digital infrastructure and interoperability.     

Quality assurance testing of an explosives trace analysis laboratory--further improvements

The Forensic Explosives Laboratory (FEL) operates within the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) which is part of the UK Government Ministry of Defence (MOD). The FEL provides support and advice to the Home Office and UK police forces on matters relating to the criminal misuse of explosives. During 1989 the FEL established a weekly quality assurance testing regime in its explosives trace analysis laboratory. The purpose of the regime is to prevent the accumulation of explosives traces within the laboratory at levels that could, if other precautions failed, result in the contamination of samples and controls. Designated areas within the laboratory are swabbed using cotton wool swabs moistened with ethanol water mixture, in equal amounts. The swabs are then extracted, cleaned up and analyzed using Gas Chromatographs with Thermal Energy Analyzer detectors. This paper follows on from a previous published paper describing the regime and summarizing subsequent results from approximately 6 years of tests. Lessons learned and improvements made over the period are also discussed. Monitoring samples taken from surfaces within the trace laboratories and trace vehicle examination bay have, with few exceptions, revealed only low levels of contamination, predominantly of RDX. Analysis of the control swabs, processed alongside the monitoring swabs, has demonstrated that in this environment the risk of forensic sample contamination, assuming all the relevant anti-contamination procedures have been followed, is so small that it is considered to be negligible. The monitoring regime has also been valuable in assessing the process of continuous improvement, allowing sources of contamination transfer into the trace areas to be identified and eliminated.     

Historicising Criminalisation: Conceptual and Empirical Issues

This paper charts a renaissance in scholarly analysis of criminalisation, and suggests that we do not have the conceptual tools or empirical knowledge to make the claims about 'overcriminalisation' which motivate much of this scholarship. My argument gives further shape to projects under the umbrella of criminalisation, setting out some of the conceptual issues to be resolved before we can work towards an adequate interpretive, and normative, vision of how criminal law has been and might be used. The paper elaborates a number of projects in 'criminalisation scholarship', and suggests there is a failure adequately to distinguish the different senses of 'criminalisation' in the literature, or the varying methods which might be applied within historical, interpretive, analytic and normative studies of criminalisation. In conclusion, the paper argues for a certain genre of criminalisation scholarship, and for a multi-disciplinary criminalisation research agenda informed by history, sociology and political science as much as by law, criminology and philosophy.     

Co-occurring psychiatric and substance use disorders among male detainees in Italy

This paper presents data on the prevalence of co-occurring substance use and psychiatric disorders among newly imprisoned males in Italy. Interviewers conducted semi-structured clinical interviews with n = 302 male detainees seven days after their admission to the prison of Perugia from August 2005 through July 2006. Over half of male detainees (54.3%) had either a substance use disorder or another psychiatric disorder. One of every five detainees (20.9%) had comorbid substance use and psychiatric disorders. Compared to detainees with psychiatric disorder only, substance use disorder only, or no disorder, detainees with comorbid substance use and psychiatric disorders were significantly more likely to have severe impairment in the areas of employment, substance abuse, family and social functioning, and psychiatric symptoms. Findings underscore the need for careful diagnostic screening at intake, access to treatment during detention, and an effective transition to services at the time of release.     

Witness to Rape: The Limits and Potential of International War Crimes Trials for Victims of Wartime Sexual Violence

¹Despite the proliferation of trauma and memory research inrecent years, we know very little about the contribution oftransitional justice mechanisms to psychological healing andsocietal reconciliation in the aftermath of genocide, armedconflict and politicized violence. Many scholars in this areahave argued that the disclosure of traumatic experiences isbeneficial to the psychological recovery process for survivorsof gross human rights violations. This article critically examinesthis therapeutic assumption within a transitional justice paradigm.The article explores the potentials and limitations of internationalwar crimes trials for victims of wartime sexual violence, focusingspecifically on the International Criminal Tribunal for theformer Yugoslavia (ICTY). The article provides a theoreticalframework for analyzing the significance of testimony at internationalwar crimes trials and raises some critical questions relatedto the psychological impact of trials. It is argued that dueto the sheer diversity and heterogeneity of wartime rape victims,the experience of giving testimony is likely to be mixed: whilesome victims may suffer under the constraints of legal process,under the right circumstances, war crimes trials may help othersto make sense of their suffering.     

Ideology and the Economy: Capital Issues Controls,Inflation and the Menzies Government, 1950–51

The Defence Preparations Act 1951 was conceived as a solution to an ideological as much as the constitutional dilemma the Menzies government faced as a result of the inflationary crisis of 1950–51. Drawing on Cabinet Notebooks, we argue that the government used the Act to facilitate peacetime access to capital issues controls under the defence powers, but also to reassure its supporters and the public that turning to direct economic controls was not a vindication of the “socialism” it promised on election to stand against. While the Act enabled the government to convince the High Court that imposing anti‐inflationary controls was linked to defence preparations, it was also a way for it to maintain ideological coherence as it sought to breach a principal tenet of its political philosophy.     

Lost Horizons: Rereading and Reclaiming Victorian Women Writers

"The girls of today cannot see themselves in Miss Yonge and that is their chief demand from literature" -Edith Sichel, Monthly Review, May 1901 The depths to which the reputation of popular conservative Victorian novelist, Charlotte Yonge, had sunk by the end of the nineteenth century are reflected in Oscar Wilde's reaction to being told a condemned man was reading one of Yonge's novels: "My heart was turned by the eyes of the doomed man, but if he reads The Heir of Redclyffe it's perhaps as well to let the law take its course" (Ellman 202).