Suing the Philadelphia Police: The Case for an Institutional Approach

Note: The comments of Alan Snyder, Eugene Lewis and the Editor and anonymous reviewers of Law and Policy are gratefully acknowledged.
This article examines the merits of two alternative briefs in Equal Protection litigation on police misconduct. The several suits brought against the Philadelphia Police Department illustrate the shortcomings of the judicially preferred intentionality brief and indicate the need for a more completely specified institutional brief. The background of the two briefs is traced to a dialectical conflict between discretion and control in the idea of law enforcement.
The use of force is not a philosophical issue for a policeman. It is not a question of should or whether, but when and how much (Rubinstein 1973:323).     

Cave Jurisdictionem – Recent Cases on Family Law and Conflicts in Australia

This article examines some recent decisions of the Family Court of Australia as they relate to matters of private international law in family law matters. Although the notion of forum non conveniens is considered, a major focus remains on the approach of the jurisdiction to the Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. In the various issues which have appeared before it, the Family Court of Australia has demonstrated a degree of confusion which suggests that other jurisdictions should be cautious in their dealings with Australia in the areas which the article discusses.Professor of Law, University of Newcastle (NSW).     

Deterrence and social control: Rethinking the relationship

Until recent years, the operationalization of the deterrence concept has been largely legal in nature. That is, deterrence was defined in terms of certainty and celerity of arrest and severity of sanction. Contemporary research has called this narrow viewpoint into question, pointing out that legal factors are only part of the range of social-control mechanisms. One of the more important of these reformulations was found to have an analytical flaw which could have easily affected the results (Meier and Johnson, 1977). The present study corrects the analysis problems of this previous study and upholds the findings that, for a sample of adult Texas residents, extralegal factors are of more import for determining marijuana use than traditional legal deterrence. Since both legal and extralegal factors are products of the social context, deterrence may be appropriately incorporated into contemporary social- control theories.