Toward Improved Legal Service Delivery: A Look at Four Mechanisms

A legal service delivery system intended to facilitate the providing of services by private practitioners should, to be complete, include among its functions three that are of special importance. First, it should diagnose legal problems. Second, it should make available to a person with a legal problem the information needed for informed selection of a lawyer. And third, it should, when necessary, help the prospective client to make the initial contact with a lawyer. Lawyer advertising, specialty certification, lawyer directories, and lawyer referral services perform some of these functions, but no one mechanism performs all three adequately. A system combining the lawyer directory with an expanded lawyer referral service might do so and thus might be a more complete answer to the problem of delivery of legal services.     

Experiments in the combustibility of the human body

This paper provides possible explanations for two previously misunderstood circumstances surrounding cases of so-called "spontaneous human combustion"--the nearly complete cremation of human bone, and the failure of such fires to spread to nearby combustibles. Two experiments were conducted. The first involved the cremation of "healthy" and "osteoporotic" human bone and observing the resulting fragmentation and color change. Osteoporotic elements consistently displayed more discoloration and a greater degree of fragmentation than healthy ones. The second experiment involved the combustion of a sample of human tissue and observation of the flame height and burning area in order to calculate the effective heat of combustion. The resulting heat was 17kJ/g indicating a fire that is unlikely to spread. These results, which are among the first obtained for human samples, lend further support and credence to previous scientific explanations for "spontaneous human combustion."     

When trust matters—a multilevel analysis of the effect of generalized trust on political participation in 25 European democracies

Generalized social trust has been argued to have positive effects for both individuals and society, but despite solid theoretical arguments in favour of different contextual effects, the empirical evidence remains scant. We here examine whether and how the effect of generalized trust on the propensity to become politically active is moderated by the level of generalized trust in society. We inspect two different causal mechanisms: The rainmaker effect, which entails that the effect of generalized trust is weaker at the individual level when there is a high level of generalized trust in society; and the sunmaker effect, which entails that the effect of generalized trust is strengthened by a high level of generalized trust in society. We examine the links for three forms of political participation: voting, institutionalized participation, and non-institutionalized participation. The data come from the fourth round of the European Social Survey from 2008 [European Social Survey. (2008 European Social Survey. (2008). Data file edition 4.0. Norwegian Social Science Data Services, Norway – Data Archive and distributor of ESS data. [Google Scholar]). Data file edition 4.0. Norwegian Social Science Data Services, Norway—Data Archive and distributor of ESS data], and we include 47,489 respondents in 25 democratic countries. The results from a series of multilevel logistic regressions suggest that the effect of generalized trust varies depending on the level of generalized trust in the surrounding community but the causal mechanisms differ for different kinds of political participation.