In the shadow of the constitutional council: The ‘juridicisation’ of the legislative process in France

This study examines, first, why and how the French Parliament was ‘juridicised’, that, is, gradually placed under the tutelage of the Constitutional Council, and, secondly, the influence of past Council jurisprudence and the threat of future censure on the legislation of the 1986 parliamentary sessions. This influence is greater than has been heretofore acknowledged ‐ indeed, one simply cannot assess the legislative process without understanding the role, direct and indirect, of the Council. Assessment of the legislative effects of Council control of legislation shows that the controversy surrounding the legitimacy of judicial review in France, and the extent to which the Council functions as a gouvernement des juges, is understandable and probably permanent.     

Spatial practice

Henri Lefebvre. The Production of Space (trans. Donald Nicholoson‐Smith). Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, Pb. & Cloth.     

In search of homunculus politicus

This paper addresses the question: What is the political analog to Homo economicus, familiar from economics. Difficulties arise indefining what community objectives are motivations for political man.     

The law and politics of transnational rights protection: Trusteeship,effectiveness, de-delegation

International trustee courts embody a specific form of delegation, in which state principals confer on such courts the authority to interpret and apply treaties agreed by the states in order to realize specific values and interests. Human rights courts help states resolve commitment and enforcement problems that are inherent in human rights treaties. This study seeks to answer the question, what happens when states parties seek to reduce or eliminate the authority of a human rights court? To answer these questions, the article assesses six human rights treaty regimes: the Council of Europe; the Organization of American States; the African Union; the Economic Community of West African States; the East African Community; and the Southern African Development Community. The article identifies four types of de-delegation possible with respect to international human rights courts and assesses the extent to which states have sought to de-delegate from them. With one exception (the SADC Tribunal), the regimes examined here have so far successfully withstood the challenge of de-delegation.     

Transcending the Means Principle

A robust, if not absolute, prohibition on treating people merely as a means seems to sit at the core of common sense deontological morality. But the principle prohibiting such treatment, the ‘means principle’ (MP), has been notoriously hard to defend: both the subjective, intention-focused and the objective, causal-role-focused interpretations of what it means to use someone as a means face potent objections. In this paper, my goal is not to defend the MP, but to articulate and defend a new principle, which I call the Restricting Claims Principle (RCP), that explains why a person’s causal role is morally significant. The RCP broadens the basic frame of relevant considerations from the MP’s concern with the dyadic relationship between agent and patient to a global balance of patient-claims on an agent. It distinguishes two kinds of patient-claims that weigh in that balance: restricting and non-restricting. In most cases, these can be distinguished as follows: Restricting claims, if respected as rights, would restrict an agent from doing what she could otherwise permissibly do if the claimant (or his property) were absent; non-restricting claims, if respected as rights, would not in that way restrict an agent. Only restricting claims press to make others worse off than if the claimant were absent. The RCP holds that restricting claims must therefore be substantially weaker than non-restricting ones. The claims of those who would be used as a means are non-restricting, while the claims of those who would be harmed as a side effect are restricting. Thus the RCP can account for the same cases (mostly) as the MP, without having to rely on the MP to do so.     

Early adult psychological consequences for males of adolescent pregnancy and its resolution

Using data front 2522 young men who were first surveyed as 7th-grade students in Houston, Texas in 1971, we examined the psychological consequences in early adulthood of having a girlfriend become pregnant in adolescence. By age 21, 15% of the young men were involved in a nonmarital pregnancy. Rates were higher for blacks (24%) than for whites (12%) or Hispanics (16%). Among whites, most adolescent pregnancies were ended by abortion (58%). Adolescent pregnancies to blacks most often resulted in single parenthood (56%). Hispanics tended to have the child, and marry or live together (55%). Consistent with the life course perspective, young men involved in adolescent pregnancies were more psychologically distressed as young adults than those who did not have a girlfriend become pregnant in adolescence. The greater distress in adulthood is not simply a function of accelerated role transitions, because men whose girlfriends had abortions are also distressed, and those who let their girlfriends assume major parenting responsibility are no less distressed than those who became fathers and married or lived with their girlfriends. Subgroup comparisons revealed that psychological distress levels of young black men were not influenced by adolescent pregnancy.This paper was presented at the North Central Sociological Association meetings, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 1988, and reflects equal authorship. This research was supported by a grant (APR000940-02) to Dr. Robbins by the Adolescent Family Life Program, Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs, Office of Population Affairs. The data were collected under a grant (R01DA02497) to Howard B. Kaplan by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.Graduate student in sociology at The University of Kentucky where she recently completed a master's thesis on adolescent fatherhood.Completed doctorate in sociology at the University of Michigan in 1984. This research is part of a larger study of the psychosocial causes, resolution, and consequences of adolescent pregnancy.