Responding to my interlocutors: a subject in the making...

In this response to Ronnie Lippens’ and Erik Claes’ critiques of a paper entitled ‘The Lore of Criminal accusation,’ Pavlich notes the ways in which his work might be compared to, yet differentiated from, abolitionist approaches to crime. Working through Lippens’ comments, he notes a possible way to understand the analysis and politics of crime (through accusation). Pavlich challenges Claes’ optimistic hypostatization of ‘criminal law’, idiosyncratic understandings of deconstruction and refocuses attention on the centrality of accusation to creating criminal subjects.     

The Seventeenth-Century Origins of Modern Salvage Law

Reginald Marsden argued that Sir Henry Marten, while judge of the High Court of Admiralty, had in 1633 entertained the first action for civil salvage ‘in the modern sense’. But Marsden could find little evidence among the formal Admiralty decrees of the seventeenth century that sea-coasters or mariners had regularly used this new plea in the central court to seek rewards for saving ships and cargoes. A sampling of the court's Act Books, however, reveals that Admiralty judges may well have ruled in more than 200 salvage cases from the time of Sir Henry's innovation until the end of the century. In some of these cases, moreover, Sir Richard Lloyd, a late-Stuart judge, abandoned the ancient custom of rewarding salvors with half of what was saved and developed instead the modern and equitable practice of adjusting awards according to what salvors had done and risked in rescuing the property of others.     

Allele frequency distribution for 21 autosomal STR loci in Bhutan

We studied the allele frequency distribution of 21 autosomal STR loci contained in the AmpFlSTR^® Identifiler™ (Applied Biosystems), the Powerplex^®16 (Promega) and the FFFL (Promega) multiplex PCR kits among 936 individuals from the Royal Kingdom of Bhutan. As such these are the first published autosomal DNA results from this country.     

Fixed Content of Political Obligations

An aspect of political obligations that has received little attention is the means through which their content, i.e., exactly what is required of their bearers, is determined. An adequate moral basis for political obligations must account for this requirement, which is closely linked to the concept of authority, the state's right to substitute its judgement in various areas for the subjects' own. The problems faced by theories of obligation based on gratitude and tacit consent in fixing the content of obligations are examined, while I show how a theory based on the principle of fairness is able to overcome them. As long as a cooperative enterprise supplies public goods that are indispensable to minimally acceptable lives and require 'regulated cooperation' for their supply, it is able to ground obligations with fixed content under the principle of fairness.     

Executive Succession and the Performance of Public Organizations

A theoretical framework is developed for the analysis of the impact of executive succession in public organizations. The central concepts in the model are the motives of chief executives, the means at their disposal and the opportunities available for influencing performance. The main hypothesis that flows from the model is that the effect of executive succession is likely to be small but significant. Furthermore, the strength of the impact of succession is contingent on a variety of external and internal circumstances. Seventeen testable hypotheses concerning these contingency effects are presented as a research agenda for studies of top management change in the public sector. The theoretical arguments are illustrated with reference to UK local government.     

Genotyping the future: scientists' expectations about race/ ethnicity after BiDil

The ongoing debate about the FDA approval of BiDil in 2005 demonstrates how the first racially/ethnically licensed drug is entangled in both Utopian and dystopian future visions about the continued saliency of race/ethnicity in science and medicine. Drawing on the sociology of expectations, this paper analyzes how scientists in the field of pharmacogenetics are constructing certain visions of the future with respect to the use of social categories of race/ethnicity and the impact of high-throughput genotyping technologies that promise to transform scientific practices.