Racial Discrimination and Alcohol Problems: Examining Interactions with Genetic Risk and Impulsivity among African American Young Adults

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - Experiences of racial discrimination have been shown to increase risk for alcohol problems. Some individuals may be particularly vulnerable to the negative...     

The future of political campaigning: the American example

The Internet will provide a way to force direct democracy to the fore, replacing many of the prerogatives now reserved for representative democracy. This is especially true in Europe where the continental integration of the economy has not been matched by integrated political democracy. Lobbying in the UK will become less relevant as the EU comes to predominate. Lobbying in the future will have to be directed downward — to mobilise the public — rather than upward, attempting to influence the Parliament. Copyright © 2003 Henry Stewart Publications.     

Structuring Legal Institutions

The article is concerned with the question of how legal institutions are structured with the use of constitutive, institutive, consequential, and terminative rules. To that end, the regulation of international treaties as laid down in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 is analysed. This leads to the discovery of two additional categories of rules: content rules and invalidating rules. Finally, the special status of unique legal institutions is investigated. Unique legal institutions – for example, heads of state, parliaments, and supreme courts – enjoy validity in a legal system to the exclusion of the validity of any other legal institution of the same category in that system.     

Legal Validity Qua Specific Mode of Existence

The author investigates how the conception of legal validity as a specific mode of existence, adopted by Kelsen in Allgemeine Theorie der Normen (General Theory of Norms), can be reconciled with a conception of the legal system in which conflicts of legal norms remain of logical concern. To this end he makes use of Ludwig Wittgenstein's picture theory of the proposition as set out in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The conclusion is that in order to reconcile the two conceptions, the legal system itself must be conceived of as consisting of three sub-systems, namely, (i) a sub-system of perceptible legal judgments, (ii) a sub-system of valid legal conditions, and (iii) a sub-system of observable social practices.     

Conflict in a changing world: Looking two decades forward

This article begins by outlining the likely changes in the strategic environment over the next 20 years, first globally than by regions. It goes on to offer some propositions on the nature of future conflict, given the perceived preference in the West for limited, low‐cost interventions. Most recent wars did not begin as inter‐state conflicts, and future ones will follow this trend. The characteristics of intra‐state conflicts are then examined in detail, particularly the effects of asymmetries on policies and perceptions: between states with widely differing capabilities, between states and non‐state actors, and in particular those involving guerrilla and terrorist movements.