Linking Law and New Governance: Examining Gaps,Hybrids, and Integration in Water Policy

Since the 1980s there have been significant shifts from traditional environmental enforcement toward networks, cooperation, and more pluralized forms of governance. The most recent iterations of these new approaches are increasingly characterized as New Environmental Governance (NEG). A range of common characteristics that include collaboration, participation, adaptation, and nonbinding guidelines and agreements define NEG approaches. Despite a growing NEG literature, it is unclear whether and how NEG can be effectively implemented in the same policy domain as traditional hard law. This article empirically explores and theorizes the dynamics of NEG's interaction with conventional law. It proposes a spectrum of eight possible interactions between traditional law and NEG approaches, before evaluating three distinct perspectives, namely, gaps, NEG in the shadow of the law, and integration. It studies these relationships by empirically evaluating three case studies from Australia, New Zealand, and the United States that correspond to these interactions. The article explores the strengths and weaknesses of the three relationships. It finds that a significant barrier to achieving productive cohesion between law and NEG is the worldview of regulators, who eschew NEG collaboration as ineffectual or incompatible with hard law. Recommendations are offered on how to better achieve cohesive implementation between law and NEG.     

Homicidal Ideation and Individuals on the Autism Spectrum

Interest in the relationship between autism and violence has increased in recent years; however, no link has clearly been established between them. Researchers remain curious if autistic people with certain traits (e.g., a history of trauma) are at greater risk of violence than those individuals with autism alone. In this article, we detail two individuals with homicidal ideation (HI) admitted to inpatient psychiatric units who were found to have a diagnosis of autism without language impairment. These cases illustrate the need for mental health providers to consider autism in their differential diagnosis when evaluating an individual with HI. Broadly, we consider how an autistic individual could be susceptible to developing HI and explore treatments specific to autistic individuals that may be helpful in such cases.     

Rational choice attitudinalism?

This essay reviews Epstein, Landes, and Posner’s The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice. Their book systematically asks how the role of ideology varies across the tiers of the federal judicial hierarchy. A major finding is that the impact of ideology increases from the bottom to the top of the judicial hierarchy. Their typical methodology formulates an ex ante measure of judicial ideology such as the political party of the appointing president, and demonstrates that this measure correlates with later judicial behavior, often voting on case dispositions. Along the way, they investigate a multitude of topics, including some quite under‐explored ones. We argue that ELP’s theory is only weakly connected to their empirical practice, for the latter focuses on the role of ideology in judging while the former says almost nothing about that relationship. In fact, though, their empirical practice does embed a theory of law and ideology, but one quite different from that suggested by the book’s rhetoric. In the penultimate section of the essay, we explore this disconnection between ELP’s theory, practice, and interpretation. Its origin (we argue) lies in an extremely thin conceptualization of law. We conclude with the issue posed in ELP’s final chapter, “The Way Forward,” but suggest a rather different path.     

The body-worn camera perspective bias

Objectives

Footage from body-worn cameras (BWCs) is sometimes used to assess the quality of police interventions. This study investigates whether there is a “body-worn camera perspective bias,” in which the point of view provided by the footage influences perception of an intervention.

Methods

Participants with different backgrounds (undergraduate students and police candidates) were randomly allocated to a group that looked at one of two videos showing a fictional police intervention during which lethal force was used against a subject; both videos showed exactly the same intervention, but one had been filmed with a BWC and the other with a surveillance camera installed in a top corner of the room. Participants were then asked to rate the appropriateness of the intervention.

Results

No camera perspective bias was found among university respondents. However a significant camera perspective bias was found among police candidates: respondents’ opinions on the appropriateness of the intervention were significantly different when the film was from the body-worn camera than when it was seen from the surveillance camera. This result may be explained by the finding that viewers of the BWC footage reported that the subject was further from the officer.

Conclusions

Results suggest that the more training individuals have in analyzing police interventions, the more affected they will be by the camera perspective in these interventions. One implication of these results is that the perspective of people assigned and trained to evaluate the appropriateness of an intervention (e.g., members of a committee monitoring police misconduct) might be biased if only video footage from a BWC is presented.

     

Rosemary west: Motives and meanings

Abstract

This article originally appeared in Trouble and Strife (Winter 1996/97, pp 44-52) and is reproduced, by kind permission of the original publishers, as Deborah Cameron's thought-provoking analysis of the Rosemary West case is felt to deserve a wider audience.

In the article, Deborah Cameron reports that feminists were mostly silent about the Rosemary West case in spite of having an analysis of sex crime, because female perpetrators of sexual murder seemingly did not fit that analysis. She argues, however, that female sexual murderers can be understood within a feminist framework. Identifying Rosemary West as one of only a handful of female sexual murderers, Cameron theorises that Rosemary and Fred West, like other sexual murderers, were constructing a form of identity based on sexual transgression and existential transcendence, perhaps as a strategy for dealing with their own history of abuse. What Cameron also provides us with is an explanation for why sexual murderers are overwhelmingly male, an analysis based on an understanding of the context of patriarchy.