High‐Resolution Melting (HRM) of Hypervariable Mitochondrial DNA Regions for Forensic Science

Forensic strategies commonly are proceeding by analysis of short tandem repeats (STRs); however, new additional strategies have been proposed for forensic science. Thus, this article standardized the high‐resolution melting (HRM) of DNA for forensic analyzes. For HRM, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from eight individuals were extracted from mucosa swabs by DNAzol reagent, samples were amplified by PCR and submitted to HRM analysis to identify differences in hypervariable (HV) regions I and II. To confirm HRM, all PCR products were DNA sequencing. The data suggest that is possible discriminate DNA from different samples by HRM curves. Also, uncommon dual‐dissociation was identified in a single PCR product, increasing HRM analyzes by evaluation of melting peaks. Thus, HRM is accurate and useful to screening small differences in HVI and HVII regions from mtDNA and increase the efficiency of laboratory routines based on forensic genetics.     

The Impact of Municipality Mergers on Political Participation

The citizen assembly of the Swiss canton Glarus in 2006 decided to radically reduce the historical number of communes from 25 to three. Studies show that the financial and economic consequences are surprisingly small. This paper analyzes the effects on citizens' vote participation as an indicator of their political involvement. Using the difference-in-difference and the synthetic control methods, we empirically show that vote participation dropped significantly, also compared to neighboring cantons and the rest of Switzerland.     

Faith in the Court: Religious Out‐Groups and the Perceived Legitimacy of Judicial Decisions

The question of whether judges’ personal characteristics and values bias their decision making has long been debated, yet far less attention has been given to how personal characteristics affect public perceptions of bias in their decision making. Even genuinely objective judges may be perceived as procedurally biased by the public. We hypothesize that membership in a religious out‐group will elicit stronger public perceptions of biased decision making. Using a survey experiment that varies a judge's religious orientation and ruling in a hypothetical Establishment Clause case, we find strong evidence that judges’ religious characteristics affect the perceived legitimacy of their decisions. Identifying a judge as an atheist (a religious out‐group) decreases trust in the court, while identifying the judge as a committed Christian has no bearing on legitimacy. These results are even stronger among respondents who report attending church more often. Thus, we argue that perceptions of bias are conditioned on judges’ in‐group/out‐group status.     

Ambiguities of Witnessing: Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth Commission, Mark Sanders

As a contribution to the burgeoning literature on transitionaljustice and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission(TRC), Ambiguities of Witnessing is an idiosyncratic production.The uninitiated reader should not be put off by the deconstructionisttheoretical indulgences of the opening chapters, as perseveranceis rewarded with perceptive interpretations of such key issuesas the TRC's discourse of forgiveness and its unresolved problematicof reparations. Mark     

Handbook of International Law

Netherlands International Law Review -     

Collateral Damage: The Impact of Mortgage Debt on U.S. Savings

This article contributes to the literature on saving by empirically investigating the determinants of the saving rate in the United States, with a special focus on the role of mortgage debt. Using data from 1987 to 2013, we find that mortgage payments have a substantial negative impact on both personal and private saving rates in the United States. An increase of 10 percentage points in mortgage payments leads to a 9.1-percentage-point drop in the personal saving rate and a 12.4-percentage-point drop in the private saving rate. In addition, including mortgage debt as an explanatory variable leads to significant changes in the impact of other variables, which further reinforces our claim that mortgage debt is important for the analysis of the saving rate. Comparing mortgage payments with nonmortgage consumer debt payments, we find that mortgage payments have a larger impact on the private saving rate whereas nonmortgage consumer debt payments have a larger impact on the personal saving rate. We also find a partial but robust crowding-out effect of public saving rate on the two saving rates. Our results have implications for monetary policy and government policies that encourage mortgage borrowing.     

A pluralist and pragmatist critique of food regime’s genealogy: varieties of social orders in Brazilian agriculture

ABSTRACT

The food regime approach occupies a privileged place in the sociology of agriculture and food. However, it is criticized for its structural, universalist and homogenizing bias. From a dialogue between institutionalism and pragmatism, this contribution discusses an alternative framework constructed from the ‘social order’ concept, which defines the existence of different arrangements of practices related to socio-technical and institutional apparatuses. Both the critique of the ‘regime’ narrative and the new proposition are associated to a reinterpretation of Brazil’s agricultural trajectory. Contrasting with the overemphasized export-oriented plantation/agribusiness image that prevails in the majority of analysis about Brazilian insertion in globalized agri-food regime, this paper explores the heterogeneity of production and consumption practices, arguing for the coexistence of multiple and contradictory ordering processes.