Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
The Law of Energy for Sustainable Development , edited by Adrian J. Bradbrook, Rosemary Lyster, Richard Ottinger and Wang Xi , published by Cambridge University Press, 2005, 630pp, £75.00, hardback.
Fresh Water and International Economic Law , edited by Edith Brown Weiss, Laurence Boisson de Chazournes and Nathalie Bernasconi-Osterwalder , published by Oxford University Press, 2005, 506pp, £70.00, hardback.
Handbook of Global Environmental Politics , edited by Peter Dauvergne , published by Edward Elgar, 2005, 560pp, £125.00, hardback.
Emerging Forces in Environmental Governance , edited by Norichika Kanie and Peter M. Haas , published by United Nations University Press, 2004, 320pp, US$36.00, paperback.
Economic Globalization and Compliance with International Environmental Agreements edited by Alexandre Kiss, Dinah Shelton and Kanami Ishibashi , published by Kluwer Law International, 2003, 352pp, £85.00, hardback.
German Environmental Law for Practitioners , edited by Horst Schlemminger and Claus-Peter Martens , 2nd edition, published by Kluwer Law International, 2004, 833pp, £119.25, hardback.
The International Climate Change Regime: A Guide to Rules, Institutions and Procedures , Farhana Yamin and Joanna Depledge , published by Cambridge University Press, 2004, 730pp, £40.00, paperback.     

Forensic Science

Scientific evidence is often more reliable than other types of evidence commonly used in criminal trials – i.e., eyewitness identifications, confessions, and informant testimony. Nevertheless, despite its obvious value, forensic science has not always merited the term "science." Three developments in the 1990s focused attention on its shortcomings: the advent of DNA profiling, the Supreme Court's "junk science" decision, and a number of wellpublicized crime laboratory scandals. In light of these developments, and in order to take full advantage of the power of forensic science to aid in the search for truth, a number of reforms are needed: Crime laboratories should be accredited, lab procedures should be standardized, and basic research needs to be conducted on many commonly used techniques. Court procedures also require improvement: Defense experts should be more readily available to indigent defendants, and more comprehensive pretrial disclosure of the substance of expert testimony should be provided.     

Training prison inmates as paralegals: An experimental project

A program to train inmates as paralegals was established at a large state prison in the Midwest. Qualified inmates were randomly assigned to the training or to a control condition. Both groups were administered measures assessing legal knowledge, the use of legal knowledge, attitudes about the criminal justice system, and self-perceptions before and after training. The trainee group showed a significant increase in its amount of legal knowledge after training. Members of the trainee group also reported a significant increase in the number of other inmates requesting aid from them on legal problems. In addition, interviews were conducted with two random samples of the general inmate population, before and after the paralegal training program. These interviews revealed strong support for the training program, and this support increased over the period of the program. Limited data on longer-term effectiveness of the paralegal's performance in the prison legal aid clinic and in paralegal jobs following parole supported the positive, shorter-term results.