Judicial Greatness and the Duties of a Judge

This paper addresses the phenomenon of judicial greatness by developing a general concept of greatness and applying it to law. Under the view offered in the paper, greatness (in general, and also in law) is connected to theoretical or methodological diversification. When applied to adjudication, this means that great judges are revered because they successfully make a prima facie case for their novel adjudicative methods. This is not a judicial duty but rather a voluntary (and in some circumstances, morally supererogatory) project. However, once a judge succeeds in making such a prima facie case, he is exempt (to a certain degree) from other judicial duties (including the duty to follow the law). This thesis challenges many theories of judicial duty, which do not allow normative room for supererogatory actions in law. The paper demonstrates these claims by discussing two paradigmatic great judges – Chief Justice Marshall and Justice Holmes.     

The Preferences of al-Kisāʾī (d. 189/805): Grammar and Meaning in a Canonical Reading of the Qur’an

The Qur’an has been transmitted as both a written text and an oral recital. This has led to the development of a reading tradition that permits numerous different vocalisations to be made upon the basic skeletal text of the established ?Uthmānī codex. Ibn al-Jazarī (d. 833/1429) chose ten early readers whom he felt were most representative of this tradition and whose readings are treated as canonical up until this day. One of these, the Kufan linguist al-Kisā?ī (d. 189/805) has been characterised in the literature as more focused on the grammar of the Qur’an than his reader peers. This article explores al-Kisā?ī’s process of ikhtiyār (preference) when deciding between various possible readings. The sample for analysis consists of Kisā?ī’s tafarrudāt, the approximately fifty cases in which his reading differs from the other nine readers. By comparing his reading with the comments of early scholars of Qur’anic linguistics, especially his near-contemporary al-Farrā? (d. 208/822), it is possible to construct a typology of the suspected principal reasons for al-Kisā?ī’s tafarrudāt. Not only are many of these based on grammatical preferences, but they demonstrate a significant degree of consistency. Furthermore, analysis of a cluster of readings with implications for the interpretation of the sharī?a (divine law and moral code) provides evidence for a subtle exegetical dimension to al-Kisā?ī’s work as a reader-grammarian.     

Kant with Freud: Derrida’s Analysis of the Ancient Dream of Self-Punishment

During his 2000–2001 seminar on the death penalty, Jacques Derrida argues that Kant is the most ‘rigorous’ philosophical proponent of the death penalty and, thus, the thinker who poses the most serious objections to the kind of philosophical abolitionism that Derrida is trying to develop in his seminar. For Kant, the death penalty is the logical result of the fundamental principle of criminal law, namely, talionic law or the right of retaliation as a principle of pure, disinterested reason. In this paper, I demonstrate how Derrida attempts to undermine Kant’s defence of the death penalty by demonstrating both its internal contradictions (the tenuous distinction between poena forensis, that is, punishment by a court, and poena naturalis, natural punishment) and its strange affinities with the law of primitive peoples (as understood by Freud in Totem and Taboo). I argue that Derrida’s repeated returns throughout the seminar to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals suggest that Kant’s seemingly rational defence of the death penalty is ultimately motivated by interests that belie the supposed disinterestedness of modern law and by a notion of natural justice that at once subtends and subverts all criminal law.     

Abstraction Beyond a ‘Law of Thought’: On Space,Appropriation and Concrete Abstraction

Given that one of the defining elements of capitalist society is the ubiquity of forms of abstraction through which social relations are mediated, it is not surprising that a generalised ‘reproach of abstraction’ has taken on a critical orthodoxy within social theory and the humanities. Many of these attacks against a pervasive culture of abstraction have an obvious resonance with longstanding critiques of the abstractions inherent in law. This article explores the critique of the power of abstraction that is a central theme in Henri Lefebvre’s depiction of the ‘abstract space’ of contemporary capitalism. In doing so, it will be emphasised that Lefebvre’s work is not primarily concerned with the rejection of abstraction per se, but with understanding the relationships between dominant forms of abstraction and concrete social practices. Of particular interest here is Lefebvre’s reformulation of the concept of concrete abstraction which extends his work beyond a polemical dismissal of the violence of abstraction into broader theoretical debates about the role of the abstract in the reproduction of social relations. Building on this aspect of Lefebvre’s work, I will argue that the concept of concrete abstraction can provide a means of understanding the relationships between the concrete and the abstract in existing juridico-political relations.     

Training in the Strategic Use of Evidence technique: Improving deception detection accuracy of American law enforcement officers

The Strategic Use of Evidence (SUE) approach is a framework for planning and executing suspect interviews with the aim of facilitating judgments of truth and deception. US law enforcement officers (N = 59) either received training in the SUE approach or did not. Each officer interviewed a mock suspect (N = 59) who had either committed a simulated security breach or had completed a benign task. The officers who received SUE training interviewed in line with the training: They questioned the suspect systematically, withheld the evidence and critical case information until after questioning, and relied on statement-evidence inconsistency to detect deceit. Consequently, SUE-trained interviewers achieved a higher deception detection accuracy rate (65%) compared to untrained interviewers (43%).     

University–Industry collaboration in the biopharmaceuticals: the Italian case

We investigate the determinants of University–Industry (U–I) interactions in the biopharmaceuticals in Italy over the period 2004–2010, choosing co-publishing as a proxy of U–I partnerships. We construct a novel dataset of co-published articles, that contains measures of proximities, agglomeration, firms’ and universities’ characteristics. Following a consolidated methodology, we integrate our dataset of effective interactions with the set of all potential interactions, to estimate probabilistic models for the occurrence and the intensity of U–I interactions. Our main findings confirm and extend the predictions of the previous literature: (1) geographical proximity and prior partnership increase the probability and the intensity of co-publication; (2) the proximity of a firm to other biopharmaceutical firms and universities attenuates the relevance of geographical proximity; (3) there exists complementarity between prior partnerships and geographical proximity. A novel result is that firms’ and Universities’ size, firms’ R&D and patents expenditure and the composition of the academic staff as well as quality of academic research exert a significant impact on the intensity of co-publishing.     

Privatization and Organized Crime in Macedonia

The privatization in Macedonia is considered to be the finally found form of establishment of the interrupted evolution of the ownership. Of course, this is from the aspect of introduction and functioning of the state ownership in the socialistic system which denied the title of ownership. From the chosen model of paid privatization, it was expected that the privatization will be carried out lawfully, fairly, justly, relatively fast and transparently. This paper analyses the process of privatization from the aspect of its lawful performance and its fairness as consequential effect. The analysis specifically refers to one of the five segments of the privatization process—the privatization of socially-owned enterprises. Subject to this analysis are the views and opinions of employees and managers, as well as those of the government officials on issues whether the privatization is implemented as a political process and whether privatization is realized as a robbery. The results of the analysis can be summarized twofold: the employees and the politicians see the privatization as a political process and robbery, while the managers deny any connection with politicians and do not consider themselves oligarchs. In the analysis, these results are compared with some objective parameters of privatization: (i) the funds raised from the sale of social capital and (ii) proceedings initiated in front of state and judicial authorities based on suspicions of crime in the privatization process.     

National Parliaments and EU Fiscal Integration

This article analyses the impact of the euro crisis on national parliaments and examines their response to the deepening of EU fiscal integration and the correspondent limitation of their budgetary autonomy. It argues that the sovereign debt crisis has provoked the emergence of new channels of parliamentary involvement in EU economic governance. National parliaments have acquired various rights of approval in the European Semester, strengthened the accountability of national governments, reinforced their scrutiny over budgeting, improved their access to information, and created domestic and supranational avenues for deliberation and political contestation of European integration. In these respects, they have undergone further Europeanisation. While these reforms do not outweigh the centralisation of EU powers, they represent an embryonic step in the parliamentary adaptation to the nascent EU fiscal regime. Yet they are unlikely substantially to influence EMU policy‐making processes, because of the democratic disconnect inherent in the EU's multilevel constitution.     

Opiate treatment in the criminal justice system: a review of <Emphasis Type="Italic">crimesolutions.gov</Emphasis> evidence rated programs

As drug control policy reform trends toward marijuana decriminalization, focus will shift to opiate enforcement which, in turn, accentuates substance abuse treatment. While the national offender reentry movement has effected widespread implementation of programming for co-occurring substance abuse and mental health disorders, the practice of Medicated Assisted Treatment (MAT) is nonstandard throughout the criminal justice system despite its evidence based status. This paper observes MAT delivered within and by the criminal justice system as indicated by evidence rated programs and practices listed in the national criminal justice evidence based registry crimesolutions.gov. Observation of these programs’ treatment orientation, client populations, delivery settings, and operational status inform discussion for additional MAT implementation and program registry augmentation.