Peircean Semeiotic and Legal Practices: Rudimentary and “Rhetorical” Considerations

Too often C. S. Peirce’s theory of signs is used simply as a classificatory scheme rather than primarily as a heuristic framework (that is, a framework designed and modified primarily for the purpose of goading and guiding inquiry in any field in which signifying processes or practices are present). Such deployment of his semeiotic betrays the letter no less than the spirit of Peirce’s writings on signs. In this essay, the author accordingly presents Peirce’s sign theory as a heuristic framework, attending to some of the most important ways that it might serve to facilitate a semeiotic investigation of our legal practices. He pays close attention to the ways the topics of history, formalism, reductionism, and generality become, from a Peircean perspective, salient features of legal studies.

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Diasporan students social entrepreneurship intention: The moderating role of institutional support

The daunting global challenges saddling polities and governments alike have resultantly created a situation whereby governments and corporate civil society have inadvertently reneged on delivering public good and services to citizens. In ensuring and strengthening a public–private actor synergy, with particular emphasis on leveraging acquired knowledge and skills of diaspora‐based students, social entrepreneurship activities could be harnessed to provide sustainable remedies to social challenges such as unemployment, famine amongst others by utilizing social entrepreneurship as a tool. Using the theory of planned behaviour as a theoretical framework, the study elicited data from 322 respondents to empirically investigate determinants of social entrepreneurship intentions of Ghanaian students, with the moderating role of institutional support. Study results revealed that sense of social responsibility and service learning have significant relationship with social entrepreneurship intention. However, social volunteering experience had no significant relationship. Moreover, whereas attitude to social entrepreneurship intention demonstrated a positive relationship, institutional support as a moderator was also revealed to influence the relationship between attitude and social entrepreneurship intention. From the study findings, we discourse on the implications for social entrepreneurship in Ghana to policy makers and stakeholders.     

Mixing business with politics: Does corporate social responsibility end where lobbying transparency begins?

Scholars increasingly have argued that the future effectiveness and legitimacy of firms' corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities are dependent on more transparent forms of lobbying to ensure firms' policy positions are aligned with their CSR commitments. Very little empirical work, however, has systematically analyzed firms' lobbying disclosures or examined how these firms coordinate their lobbying and CSR activities. We address these empirical questions by analyzing the CSR reports of 150 corporations from Germany, the UK and the US over an 18-year period and by conducting interviews with the CSR managers of these firms. We find that corporations have become more transparent about their public policy advocacy over time, thus acknowledging that lobbying is a CSR issue. For most firms, however, this commitment to transparency appears to be largely ceremonial. Few firms disclose the specific policy positions they advocate or sufficiently coordinate the work of their lobbying and CSR units to foster greater alignment of these activities. These modest changes in lobbying transparency appear to be driven by legitimacy concerns and, in a few instances, by governance gaps firms perceive to be relevant to their future business interests.     

Ethyl glucuronide: unusual distribution between head hair and pubic hair

Ethyl glucuronide (EtG) is a minor metabolite of ethanol that can be detected in hair. In some specific situations, head hair can be missing, and therefore, alternative anatomical locations of hair are of interest. In this study, paired hair specimens (head hair and pubic hair) from eight social drinkers were analyzed for EtG. Each sample was decontaminated by two dichloromethane bathes (5 ml) for 2 min. After cutting into small pieces, about 50 mg of hair was incubated in 2 ml water in the presence of 10 ng of EtG-d5, used as internal standard and submitted to ultra-sonication for 2 h. The aqueous phase was extracted by SPE using Oasis MAX columns. The hair extract was separated on an ACQUITY BEH HILIC column using a gradient of acetonitrile and formate buffer. Detection was based on two daughter ions: transitions m/z 221-85 and 75 and m/z 226-75 for EtG and the IS, respectively. This laboratory is using a positive cut-off at 50 pg/mg. All eight head hair specimens were negative for EtG at a limit of quantitation fixed at 10 pg/mg. Surprisingly, EtG was identified at high concentrations in pubic hair, in the range 12-1370 pg/mg. It appears, therefore, that it is not possible to document the drinking status of a subject by simply switching from head hair to pubic hair.     

What Workers Want Depends: Legal Knowledge and the Desire for Workplace Change among Day Laborers

In this article, we identify legal knowledge as a key difference between workers who desire workplace change and those who do not. Based on surveys with 121 day laborers, we find that not all day laborers are equally dissatisfied with their jobs, despite uniformly difficult working conditions. Some day laborers do not want to make any real changes to the day labor industry, while others desire a range of industry changes, from higher wages to greater government regulation and unionization. A key difference between these workers is their knowledge of employment law: Those who know the law are more likely to desire workplace change.     

A review of experimental design in forensic taphonomy: moving towards forensic realism

Forensic taphonomy as a discipline requires standardization to satisfy Daubert criteria for scientific data to be admissible in court. In response, there has been a shift towards quantification of methodology and estimating the postmortem interval. Despite these advances, there are still biases and limitations within the discipline not explicitly addressed in the early stages of experimental design nor in final published works. In this article, unresolved debates with respect to the conductance and reporting of forensic taphonomic research are reviewed, beginning with the nature of experimental cadavers, human or animal analogues and their body size, and second, the forensic realism of experimental setups, specifically with respect to caging, clothing and number of carcases. Pigs, albeit imperfect, are a good model to gain a general idea of the trends that may be seen in humans in subsequent validation studies in facilities where human donors are available. To date, there is no consensus among taphonomists on the extent of the effect that body mass has on decomposition progression. More research is required with both human cadavers and non-human analogues that builds on our current knowledge of forensic taphonomy to answer these nagging questions. This will enable the discipline to make the reliable assumption that pigs and donor decomposition data can be applied to homicide cases. A suite of experimental design aspects is suggested to ensure systematic and standardized data collection across different biogeoclimatic circumstances to identify and quantify the effects of potential confounding variables. Such studies in multiple, varied biogeographic circumstances with standardized protocols, equipment and carrion will facilitate independent global validation of patterns. These factors are reviewed to show the need for adjustments in experimental design to ensure relevance and applicability of data within locally realistic forensic situations. The initiation of a global decomposition data network for forensic taphonomists is recommended.

Key points

• Pigs are a valuable, albeit imperfect, proxy for human decomposition studies.
• There are few or conflicting data on effects of carcase size, carrion ecology, exclusion cages and scavengers.
• We recommend single, clothed, uncaged carcases for baseline research to reflect regionally specific forensic casework.

     

'Mad Cows' and Eurocrats—Community Responses to the BSE Crisis

Abstract: The initial Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy crisis, that is until the imposition of the EU-wide ban on UK beef exports on 27 March 1996, and the failure of the institutions of the EU and Member States to react effectively and efficiently to this developing crisis, brought to light some of the faults in the food safety and animal health part of the EU's system of governance. Responding to criticisms and recommendations made in the aftermath of the initial crisis, particularly by the European Parliament, the EU has embarked on a process of reforming the administrative landscape in this area. This has included the setting-up of a new regulatory agency, the European Food Safety Agency, and a commitment to the more effective use of scientific information. It is submitted that this could lead to the development of new information-based scientific networks that inform and direct EU governance, networks which should contain the European Food Safety Agency at their centre.     

Exploring the Subnational Dimension of Income Inequality: An Analysis of the Relationship Between Inequality and Electoral Turnout in the Developed Countries

This paper offers an exploratory analysis of the subnational dimension of income inequality, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study. The paper undertakes two basic tasks. First, it describes the results of calculations on household-level income data that produce indicators of intra- and inter-household inequality for 191 regions in 12 developed countries for the late 1980s and early 1990s, and for 149 regions in 8 countries for the mid-1990s. Second, the paper demonstrates the value of regional analysis by reexamining the relationship between electoral turnout and income inequality, an important substantive issue which has heretofore been explored almost entirely at the national or individual level but upon which regional-level analysis can shed valuable light.