The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft

The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft. By Tom Griffiths (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2016), pp. xviii + 326. AU$34.99 (pb).     

Region-building and critical juncture: Europe and Northeast Asia in comparative perspective

China, Japan, and Korea have begun to engage one another vigorously since the 1997 crisis. As intraregional economic ties have further deepened and broadened, interconnectedness in cultural and political aspects has risen rapidly in a variety of forms. Decision-makers and intellectuals in China, Japan, and Korea have been floating ideas and interests for establishing various types of Northeast Asian community formation. New security dialogues and co-operation frameworks also emerge. Accordingly, the rapidly growing Northeast Asia is likely to emerge as an identifiable regional community. With the incipient emergence of regional community in Northeast Asia, Northeast Asian region-building becomes a salient issue of major academic and policy debates. Yet, in spite of the recent mushrooming of research in and attention to the region-building, the questions regarding within what surrounding and under what situation regional community can be built, as well as what motivates people to choose region-building, and when and how state system can be transformed into a regional community remains only partly resolved. In order to solve this puzzle, this paper will compare the current Northeast Asian region-building with the early stage of European region-building, arguing that while there are important differences in evolution, format, and kind of region-building in Europe and Northeast Asia, critical juncture is influential in region-building.     

‘Their life in your hands’: the experiences of prison-based psychologists conducting risk assessments with indeterminate sentenced prisoners in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT

Assessing prisoners’ risk of recidivism and making risk-management recommendations is central to the work of prison-based psychologists. Risk assessment is particularly crucial when it involves indeterminate sentenced prisoners: psychologists’ recommendations have potentially significant consequences both for prisoners and the public. However, little is known about psychologists’ experiences of conducting such high stakes risk assessments. This paper reports the results of an exploration of psychologists’ experiences, via interviews and discussions with qualified, prison-based psychologists. Analysis using Grounded Theory methods identified one super-ordinate category of meaning, namely The Challenging Context of Risk Assessment, which comprised two sub-categories: (1) pressure of limited resources and (2) pressure of the environment. An additional major category, Risk Assessment as a Weighty Task, comprised three sub-categories: psychologists described (1) a weight of responsibility relating to the magnitude and range of their responsibilities; (2) a weight of expectation from colleagues to provide solutions, and (3) the trainee dilemma associated with the need to balance development of trainee psychologists’ competence in risk assessment with being held accountable for their work. Understanding qualified psychologists’ experiences of undertaking risk assessments with indeterminate sentenced prisoners can facilitate improvements and build on areas of existing good practice.     

The Future of Staatsrecht: Dominance,Demise or Demystification?

The relationship between the national and the European legal orders is affected by the way it is theorised by the national constitutional traditions. This article will explore the opposing constitutional assumptions in Germany that underlie two interpretations of what in Anglo-Saxon countries is known as constitutional law: Staatsrecht and Verfassungsrecht. The two contending visions are generated from different conceptions of the European Union and, especially, the state. The origins of the German constitutional traditions will be historically reconstructed. Although Staatsrecht has historically offered the dominant interpretation of public law, Verfassungsrecht has 'de-mystified' the state. To continue to offer a coherent interpretation Staatsrecht need not abandon the state as its central concept, but will need to re-examine the content of the concept in light of modern forms of constitutionalism and European integration.