THE BEHAVIOUR OF LEGISLATORS AND BUREAUCRATS AND POLICING EXPENDITURES: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK AND SOME EMPIRICAL RESULTS*

Abstract: This paper is concerned with an analysis of legislation, public administration and government expenditure decisions on policing activities. These three dimensions of government can be used as mechanisms of social control. Whether they are or not is an empirical question that has to be determined in each case. It is shown that there are no strict relationships between the three dimensions of government activity: separate decision-making is undertaken for each of the three dimensions. It is indicated that there are eight possible combinations of the three dimensions, assuming that the three dimensions of government activity are bivariate and discrete. The empirical analysis relates to the state of Queensland and it is concluded that Queensland can be described as a case consisting of authoritarian legislation, public administration contrary to the rule of law, and low policing expenditures.     

US Patent and Trademark Office refuses registration of flavour trade mark

In a case of first impression, the Trademark Trial and AppealBoard of the US Patent and Trademark Office has held that theflavour orange is not registrable for use with quick-dissolvingantidepressant tablets and pills.     

The Ends of Innocence: Age as a Mode of Inquiry in Sociolegal Studies

This article considers two recent books in the history of childhood, youth, and the law: Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent and Stephen Robertson, Crimes Against Children . It argues that these works mark the emergence of age as a category of analysis in sociolegal studies. It calls for further investigations in the legal history of childhood and youth, outlines several areas of interest, and suggests that attention to age will alter how scholars look at the law by complicating key concepts such as innocence, authority, and citizenship. Studies of age and the law could benefit from cross-cultural and transnational approaches.     

State crimes and state harms: a tale of two definitional frameworks

Criminologists have long debated the issue of how to define crime, and hence, the scope of criminological inquiry. For years, some critical criminologists have argued for expanded definitions of crime that include harmful behaviors of the state that may not be officially defined as criminal. Other critical criminologists have argued that existing legal frameworks may be used to study varieties of state crime, and that defining the harmful actions of the state as criminal is important to help mobilize public support for their control. In this paper, we first trace the historical development of these two perspectives, and then offer a tentative solution to the seeming tension between these two perspectives.     

Global custody of endowment funds

This article explores the law relating to the global custodianship of funds, notably as managed for endowed charities such as universities and independent schools. Is global custody based on the legal concept of bailment or of trusts? Just how secure are the legal underpinnings of this financial mechanism? The conclusions are that the legal foundations to the concepts of custodianship, and especially on a global level with the appointment of sub-custodians, is surprisingly uncertain and confused in English Law, providing rather less reassurance to charity trustees concerning the security of the financial assets for which they are accountable than they might reasonably have expected.     

Making Sense of COMPSTAT: A Theory-Based Analysis of Organizational Change in Three Police Departments

COMPSTAT, the latest innovation in American policing, has been widely heralded as a management and technological system whose elements work together to transform police organizations radically. Skeptical observers suggest that COMPSTAT merely reinforces existing structures and practices. However, in trying to assess how much COMPSTAT has altered police organizations, research has failed to provide a broader theoretical basis for explaining how COMPSTAT operates and for understanding the implications of this reform. This article compares two different perspectives on organizations—technical/rational and institutional—to COMPSTAT's adoption and operation in three municipal police departments. Based on fieldwork, our analysis suggests that relative to technical considerations for changing each organization to improve its effectiveness, all three sites adopted COMPSTAT in response to strong institutional pressures to appear progressive and successful. Furthermore, institutional theory better explained the nature of the changes we observed under COMPSTAT than the technical/rational model. The greatest collective emphasis was on those COMPSTAT elements that were most likely to confer legitimacy, and on implementing them in ways that would minimize disruption to existing organizational routines. COMPSTAT was less successful when trying to provide a basis for rigorously assessing organizational performance, and when trying to change those structures and routines widely accepted as being "appropriate." We posit that it will take profound changes in the technical and institutional environments of American police agencies for police departments to restructure in the ways anticipated by a technically efficient COMPSTAT.