Effects of Necessary,Sufficient, and Indirect Causation on Judgments of Criminal Liability

Law and Human Behavior - When has one essentially committed a crime? When are one's actions necessary for its occurrence or sufficient to bring it about under normal circumstances? Participants...     

Die Zulassung von Eingriffen trotz artenschutzrechtlicher Verbote

Die Eingriffsregelung benötigte nach ihrer gesetzlichen Einführung (1976) ihre Zeit, um in der Praxis der Zulassung betroffener Projekte wirksam zu werden. Die Entwicklung erfuhr eine gravierende Korrektur dadurch, dass das Investitionserleichterungs- und Wohnbaulandgesetz 1993 das Verhältnis der Eingriffsregelung zum Baurecht speziell regelte. Nicht nur auf nationaler, sondern auch—und dies vor allem—auf EG-Ebene prägte und prägt der Schutz von natürlichen Lebensräumen und Habitaten nach der Flora-Fauna-Habitat-Richtlinie (FFH-RL) und der Vogelschutz-Richtlinie (V-RL) die Projektzulassung nachhaltig . Insoweit geht es um einen besonders qualifizierten, gemeinschaftsrechtlich eingeforderten Gebietsschutz. Kaum dass sich die Rechtslage insoweit zu konsolidieren beginnt, sieht sich die Praxis der Projektzulassung zunehmend vor die Aufgabe gestellt, spezifisch artenschutzrechtlichen Anforderungen Rechnung zu tragen. Zur Bewältigung dieser Aufgabe will der nachstehende Artikel einen Beitrag leisten.

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Capitalism,Democracy and the War in Iraq

Although Saddam Hussein was a bloody tyrant, and although deposing him served a noble purpose, one still may doubt the wisdom of the American war against Iraq. It is quite dubious whether the democratisation of Iraq can serve as a justification of the American war effort. Properly understood, the democratic peace proposition does not promise that poor, emerging, and illiberal democracies surrounded by autocracies are more peaceful than autocracies. By itself, the transition towards democracy is quite likely to imply some semi-democratic phase when the country is at risk of civil war. Moreover, the democratic peace proposition says nothing at all about the likelihood of success of democratisation in a poor, oil-rich, Arab and Muslim country where there is little common ground to unite the democracy-imposing occupier and the defeated country. Finally, defeating the insurgency in the Sunni triangle of Iraq might require means which a democracy cannot even wish to apply. Whereas the promotion of democracy by war looks like a dead end and is doomed to failure, the prospects of promoting peace by exporting capitalism, growth, and prosperity look much better. Such a strategy even serves the purpose of later democratisation of those countries that now accept only creeping capitalism.     

Umweltrechtliche Treuhandklage

Der Jubilar ist nicht nur für die Information und Diskussion in Bezug auf alles, was die Begriffe Natur und Recht umfassen, eingetreten. Vielmehr lag ihm vor allem auch die Durchsetzung der Belange des Naturschutzes und der Landschaftspflege, nicht zuletzt vor Gericht am Herzen. Der Autor hofft, dass die Erweiterung der einschl?gigen Thematik über den Bereich des Naturschutzes hinaus den Jubilar interessiert, geht diese Erweiterung doch auch mit einer entsprechenden ?ffnung von „Natur und Recht“ einher.     

The Federal State and the Breakup of Czechoslovakia: An Institutional Analysis

This article examines the breakup of Czechoslovakia from aninstitutionalist perspective. The federal state adopted afterWorld War I failed to accommodate tensions in society and heightenedethnic conflict. After World War II, an "asymmetrical" federationwas created that, while designed to provide a degree of homerule to Slovakia, further alienated Slovaksfrom national politics.Each effort to reform the federal order unintentionally promptednew concerns over the balance of political power. The inabilityto construct an enduring federal state helps explain why thetransition from communism proved fatal for the union that wasCzechoslovakia.     

Reuniting families: an online database to aid in the identification of undocumented immigrant remains

The Reuniting Families project attempts to aid federal, state and local agencies currently working towards the identification of deceased undocumented immigrants. This initiative has created a distributed on-line database, accessible by public officials and private citizens interested in searching for missing individuals based on both phenotypic and genotypic characteristics. This broad effort includes the exhumation of individuals from geographically disparate pauper graves, the classification of their physical characteristics, and the cataloging of observed metric traits in a local relational database, to include associated articles of possession and related metadata. Concurrent with the documentation of physical forensic evidence is the analysis of mitochondrial DNA sequences. Computational techniques and scoring parameters are applied to automate the process of discovery and identification as well at to preserve information on the missing. The result is a prototype knowledge base that may serve as a model for future efforts in international forensic science collaborations.     

The size of human capital externalities: cross-country evidence

Human capital accumulation is usually held to generate positive externalities. However, the empirical evidence on human capital externalities has been scarce and inconclusive. The missing evidence appears to be caused by misleading comparisons between private and social rates of return, by incorrect interpretations of regression coefficients, or by an inappropriate level of aggregation. Our own estimates point to relatively robust empirical evidence for a human capital externality that is about twice as large as a benchmark estimate, which is derived from a standard parameterization of a simple growth model. We ponder a possible causal link from human capital to social capital in the context of alternative views of long run development and argue that the grand transition view (Paldam 2002) is compatible with the existence of a large human capital externality.