Stalking Behaviors Within Domestic Violence

An examination of data from 120 male and female batterers of varied age and marital, educational, and economic status, who attended group treatment for batterers or who were charged with domestic violence from January to February 1996 in a district court setting, produced the following findings: Stalkers tended to live alone, were less likely to be married, not living with children, and used more alcohol than nonstalkers. They also tended to have had a history of prior stalking offenses and of being abused themselves. Factor analysis found three stalking groupings: one in which discrediting was the key, a second revolving around love turning to hate, and a third with violent confrontation with the ex-partner.     

The new chain gang: Corrections in the next century

This article examines the operations and excesses of the correctional chain gang as a group of prisoners working outside a penal facility under armed correctional supervision and wearing chains or other restraining devices to prevent escape. We detail the operations and excesses of earlier chain gangs, identifying variables that contributed to the contemporary phase that emerged in 1995. Predicated on vengeance, retributive justice, and punitiveness, the chain gang represents yet another devolving standard of human decency in correctional policies. Future scenarios are explored.     

The Battle of the Forms—There Is a Purpose

This article provides an alternative approach to the daunting task of teaching business undergraduates a fundamental appreciation of the flexibility of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) and the ability of the UCC to adapt to the needs of commerce by facilitating fair, efficient transactions. Paradoxically, we suggest using one of the most difficult sections of the UCC, Section 2-207, the often discussed "Battle of the Forms," to make UCC concepts and the relationships of those concepts to modern business transactions easier to understand. This alternative approach is also designed to help students appreciate the challenges of establishing rules to assure fair and efficient transactions and how changes in the way transactions occur impact the laws and how the laws impact the changes. This article also presents exercises, questions, and illustrative flowcharts used successfully over several years in undergraduate business law classes. These tools produce an integrated method for presenting UCC Section 2-207. While no sane individual has ever professed a love for UCC study, students and faculty have expressed tolerance and a palpable appreciation for these methods.     

ATP’s impact on accelerating development and commercialization of advanced technology

One of ATP’s legislated mandates is to accelerate industry’s development and commercialization of new technologies. This survey of 28 projects funded in 1991 found that ATP helped cut technology development cycle time by 50% in most cases. Slightly more than half of the interviewees provided quantitative estimates of the economic value of reducing cycle time by a single year. Most interviewees expected the positive impact on cycle time experienced in the applied-research stage to flow through to later stages in the technology development cycle allowing them to enter the marketplace more quickly. Cycle-time improvements in other technology development projects were attributed by the companies to their ATP project. Two types of acceleration were implied: (1) overcoming delays in starting technology development projects, and (2) speeding up performance of research once it is under way. This paper is based on work performed by the author when she was serving as an industry consultant to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The author acknowledges the contributions of Rosalie Ruegg, Richard Spivack, Ernesto Robles, and Gregory Tassey, all of NIST, to the study. In addition, she expresses appreciation to the 28 company representatives who participated in the project interviews.     

Moral Agency and Moral Responsibility in Humanitarian Intervention

This paper sets out a preliminary taxonomy of potential collective moral agents in humanitarian intervention, based on six recent cases involving international organisations. The settings for the cases are Northern Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haiti, Rwanda, and Kosovo. Attributing moral responsibility to a group actor requires first discovering whether its characteristics are enough like an individual moral agent's to support an analogy. Groups in humanitarian intervention that appear to choose between one course of action and another, and have a clear structure of leadership and a capacity to control their collective activities, meet criteria that characterise individual moral agents. If they can also distinguish between policies using the language of morality we can call them collective moral agents, and hence subject to some moral responsibilities.