Regulatory Failure and the Collapse of Japan's Home Mortgage Lending Industry: A Legal and Economic Analysis

This article analyzes the dynamics of contemporary cooperation and conflict in Japanese financial regulation through the prism of the jusen problem, the collapse of Japan's home mortgage lending industry in the 1990s. The jusen problem is one of the most striking examples of regulatory failure, strategic interest group bargaining, and large-scale dispute resolution in Japanese history.     

Interdisciplinarity and the Authority Paradigm: Should Law Be Taken Seriously by Scientists and Social Scientists?

This article questions whether those outside law should take law seriously as an intellectual discipline capable of contributing to the development of epistemological thinking in the natural and social sciences. The discipline is approached from a diachronic and synchronic position with emphasis on the civil law tradition. It will be shown that the governing paradigm in legal studies has always been the 'authority paradigm', which results in law being closer to theology than to the social sciences. Its principal actors (judges) make assertions free from the normal constraints of scientific method; accordingly, the idea of a 'legal science' (imported into the common law tradition after 1846) must be treated with great caution. It is not a science dedicated to enquiring about the nature of the physical world, society or social relations. Its epistemological development remains trapped in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: thus, as a discipline, law has little to offer other social sciences.     

Justice,Sustainability, and Integrated Management: Concluding Thoughts

Social Justice Research -     

Book reviews

M.B. Hayne, The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War 1898-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) £35. ISBN 019-820270-9.

Keith Hamilton, Bertie of Thame: Edwardian Ambassador (Woodbridge/Suffolk: Boydell Press 1990 (= Royal Historical Society Studies in History, No. 60)), ix + 436 pp. ISBN 0-86193-217X. £35.

Anita Inder Singh, The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship, 1947-56 (Pinter, 1993) pp. 309. £45.

Robert H. Ferrell (ed.), Truman in the White House: The Diary of Eben A. Ayers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991) $37.50. ISBN 0-8262-0790-1.

Robert Pearce (ed.), Patrick Gordon Walker: Political Diaries 1932-1971 (London: The Historians Press, 1991) £20. ISBN 1-872273-05 X.

Richard J. Aldrich (ed.), British Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-51 (London: Routledge, 1992) £40. ISBN 0-415-07851-2.

Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe's Name. Germany and the Divided Continent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993) £25. ISBN 0-224-02054-4.     

EXAMINING THE CONNECTION BETWEEN CHILD ACCESS AND CHILD SUPPORT

This article examines the connection between fathers' access to children and their maintaining child support. Also examined are various approaches to obtaining compliance with support orders. The effect of various factors on payment of support, such as frequency of contact, remarriage, and the length of time since the separation, is analyzed.     

Advancing police use of force research and practice: urgent issues and prospects

Leading police scholars and practitioners were asked to reflect on the most urgent issues that need to be addressed on the topic of use of force. Four themes emerged from their contributions: use of force and de-escalation training needs to improve and be evaluated; new ways of conceptualizing use of force encounters and better use of force response models need to be developed; the inequitable application of force, and how to remediate biases, needs to be more fully understood; and misconceptions about police use of force need to be identified and corrected. The highlighted topics serve as an agenda for future research. Such research should provide greater insight into when, where, and why force is used by police officers, and how it can be applied appropriately. If implemented, the practical recommendations included in the contributions should have a positive impact on police performance, public trust and confidence in the police, and citizen and officer safety.