Intimate partner violence among pregnant and parenting Latina adolescents

The purpose of this study was to examine the nature and extent of mutual violence among a sample of pregnant and parenting Latina adolescent females and their partners. The sample consisted of 73 Latina adolescent females between the ages of 14 and 20 who were referred to a community-based organization for case management, education, and psychosocial support for pregnant and parenting adolescents. They completed the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS-2) as part of a pretest to evaluate this intervention program. A small number (12 out of 73; 16%) reported no use of aggressive conflict tactics. Eighty-four percent (61 out of 73) of the study respondents reported using at least one form of minor psychological aggression and 62% (45 out of 73) reported using at least one form of minor physical assault over the past 6 months. Mutuality of conflict was high, especially in cases of minor assault by partner. There was no difference in severity or chronicity of conflict between those who were pregnant and those who were not. Female respondents reported that they and their partners engaged in comparable levels of sexual coercion. Discussion of the context of psychological, physical, and sexual aggression in adolescent relationships suggests alternative approaches to prevention of intimate partner violence among adolescents.     

Of Mandarins,Legal Consciousness,and the Cultural Turn in US Legal History: Robert W. Gordon. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57–125

This article traces the impact of Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” on scholars writing at the intersection of law and history. While Gordon's central claim about the constitutive character of the law has come to serve as a working assumption in the field, the case he made for the intellectual history of doctrine as articulated by legal mandarins has proven less influential in the twenty‐five years since the article was published. Instead, legal historians have focused their attention on the interaction between official and lay forms of law‐making with a decided emphasis on popular legal consciousness. For precisely this reason, the time may be ripe for reconsideration of mandarin materials, not only for what they have to tell us about the dynamics of cultural change, but also as sources of insight into basic puzzles of the human condition that have tended across time to be expressed in and through legal forms.     

Trick or truth? The British ANF proposal, west Germany and US nonproliferation policy, 1964-68

The deployment and control of nuclear weapons in Europe was a major aspect of Cold War diplomacy. The Multilateral Force (MLF) is a prime example. First proposed in 1960, the MLF attempted to reconcile European demands for collective alliance control within the broader framework of US nonproliferation policy. The MLF was opposed by both Britain and France, who feared the proposal would lead to a nuclear armed West Germany. To counter the MLF, the Wilson government advanced an alternate scheme - the Atlantic Nuclear Force (ANF). This article examines British objectives in advancing the ANF. It contends that the ANF was not a cynical attempt to frustrate the MLF, as suggested by previous commentators, but embodied a serious attempt by the Labour government to implement a nonproliferation regime.     

Constraints on sustainable development in Ethiopia: Is there a future for improved wood-stoves?

A fundamental component of resource conservation in Ethiopian development programmes is sought in part through the dissemination of improved stoves. However, as an evaluation of a range of stove programmes reveals, the absence of applied research by government and non-governmental organizations together with fundamental constraints arising out of the wider development context is resulting in programmes that are poorly targeted, inflexibly implemented and largely unable to meet the energy needs of poor rural and urban households. Despite these problems, donors continue to fund such projects, in large part because project evaluations are not made public, because of a policy lacuna, and ultimately because development thinking appears locked into finding a quick technology fix for what are essentially long-term, intractable sociopolitical processes and problems.