Waiver of the psychotherapist-patient privilege: implications for child custody litigation

The psychotherapist-patient privilege, rooted in both common and statutory law, is predicated upon the public policy goal of protecting the reasonable expectation of privacy of individuals seeking psychotherapy. The privilege is not absolute, however. State and federal courts are far from uniform in determining how and when the privilege should be waived, in whole or in part, through implication, inadvertence or the affirmative action of the parties. In the family law context, the law that has evolved around the exercise of this privilege is even more complex as the needs of children add another wrinkle to the goal of balancing the imperative of confidentiality with the need for useful information that may be provided.     

On Power and Responsibility

The article focuses on Lukes' treatment of the relation between power and responsibility. By attempting to draw a sharp distinction between power and structural constraint, I argue, Lukes unnecessarily excludes from his analysis a wide range of significant and inegalitarian social constraints on freedom. The article defends a more structural approach to the study of power, one that employs democratic evaluative standards. Power relations are more or less legitimate, by this view, depending on the extent to which they enable the people they affect to help shape and reshape them. Contra Lukes' claim that structural approaches are incapable of accounting for the relationship between power and responsibility, I argue that they are fully compatible with theories of political responsibility. Even if no identifiable agent or agents can be held morally responsible for creating a given relation of domination, those actors whose actions helped produce that relationship are obligated to attempt to understand and to change it.     

A Policy for the Retention and Extended Examination of Organs at Autopsy*

Abstract: Recent organ retention scandals and law suits have created a focus on the practice of saving postmortem tissues for extended examination or research purposes. The New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator (OMI) established a policy to notify families about organ retention and the subsequent disposition of the tissue. The OMI examined the success of this policy in regards to the retention of brains for extended examination by analyzing data abstracted from verbal consent forms from 2003 to 2006. During this time, 715 cases were identified as needing an extended examination of the brain. The percentages of brains saved in any given year, as a percent of the total number of autopsies performed that year, were: 2003 6.5%, 2004 10.4%, and 2005 11.8%. The disposition was cremation in 79% of cases, release with the body after a determined period of time in 14%, and cut fresh in 4%. In conclusion, the instigation of a policy on the verbal notification of the next of kin when organs are retained can be successfully implemented.     

Extreme Concern: Regulating 'Dangerous Pictures' in the United Kingdom

This article begins with an exploration of section 5 of the recent Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008, otherwise known as the 'Dangerous Pictures Act' which outlaws the possession of 'extreme images', and the Rapid Evidence Assessment belatedly used to justify the legislation. We then examine the claims of the growth, dissemination, and widespread availability of material which 'glories in sexual violence' and its putative 'effects'. This current crisis over the meanings of pornography highlights the rhetorical function of the conceptual discourse of 'pornographication', its links to problematic figurations of the consumer or viewer of explicit materials, and how the identification of 'extreme' pornography has given voice to a range of anxieties about media spectacularization of the body. We end by arguing that opposition to the legislation is not just a matter of protecting personal freedoms or refusing to recognize the existence of harms; instead, we propose that academics will need to question the very parameters on which the impulses to legislate are based.     

Genotyping of DNA samples under adverse conditions of Low Copy Number—LCN (formolisados tissue samples and embedded in paraffin)

This paper aims to describe and evaluate a protocol for extraction of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) in formalinized tissues and embedded in paraffin for forensics genetic analysis. In outline the method is the removal of paraffin with an organic solvent in 0.3–0.5 mg of the sample of the tissue under study, followed by removal of formaldehyde, rehydration and soon after the extraction of genomic DNA. The extraction is achieved through the stages of cellular lysis, enzymatic digestion of proteins and DNA precipitation in ethanol medium. With the research we can conclude that even when the DNA is present in small quantities in conditions of extreme difficulties in its extraction, as formalinized tissues and embedded in paraffin, the technique of optimizing the extraction of DNA used both to organic extraction as Chelex, for use in the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), and possible the investigation of different samples of human tissue, biological samples, or was obtained under the conditions tested, a DNA with good quality and concentration. The samples were amplified for the mini-STRs loci using the product marketed in multilocus, using a methodology recommended by the supplier and validated for analysis of forensic DNA. Commercial kit was used MiniFiler from Applied Biosystems. The DNA fragments amplified by PCR showed that the extracted DNA had good amplification.     

Scientific Research on the Efficiency of Public Expenditures: How and Where is it Going?

ABSTRACT

Recent scientific research has advanced the measurement of the relative performance of organizations and the efficiency of public spending, based on analyzes of the services offered and results achieved. However, from the methodological point of view, there are several methods to analyze the performance and efficiency of spending in the private and public sectors. In this sense, the present study performs a systematic bibliometric review to analyze all scientific publications on the efficiency of public spending published in the last 20 years. The results show that most cost-efficiency analyzes have been limited to education and health expenditures and have used quantitative analysis, mainly through the application of data-involution analysis. The present review is a first step in mapping scientific publications on efficiency in public spending, which will support researchers and managers to make public spending more efficient.     

Researching Fact Checking: Present Limitations and Future Opportunities

The fact checking field has grown tremendously in the past decade, as has academic interest in the practice, with dozens of studies testing the effectiveness of corrections. However, research on fact checking is not yet optimised to help fact checkers address the global challenges of mis- and disinformation. In this paper, we review the literature on fact checking’s effects and identify two key gaps. First, we discuss the limited diversity and external validity of existing studies, which have overwhelmingly been conducted in Western countries and under artificial, experimental conditions. Second, we argue that research has narrowly focussed on the short-term, corrective effects of individual fact checks, largely ignoring the multiple ways fact checkers conceive of their impact. Thus, research has overlooked the cultural and systemic changes that fact checkers pursue. We conclude by highlighting opportunities for further research and for improving communication between academics and fact checkers.     

Bureaucracy, managerial disorganization, and administrative breakdown in criminal justice agencies

This article presents a novel way to explain managerial collapse in criminal justice agencies by analyzing traditional organizational perspectives. While recognizing the advances of human relations and contingency management theories, most criminal justice agencies in the twenty-first century remain hierarchical Weberian organizations characterized by mechanistic and formalistic operations, with specialized tasks and division of labor that create a narrow range of duties. Along with Weber, Fayol, and more recently, DiIulio and Wilson have argued that managerial quality determines organizational performance. This article extends that focus by using the theoretical perspective called managerial disorganization and administrative breakdown, hypothesizing that management is responsible for well-functioning and/or dysfunctional organizations. Through a series of examples from case studies where criminal justice agencies have failed, the article concludes that agencies experiencing administrative breakdown and managerial disorganization are not implementing their basic mission and inappropriately utilizing the organizational principles of division of labor, unity of command, span of control, accountability, hierarchy of authority, and communication.