Domains of competency to stand trial

Attempts to improve the clinical rigor of competency to stand trial evaluations have resulted in the development of several psycholegal measures. Among the most widely used of these measures are the Competency Screening Test (CST), the Fitness Interview Test (FIT), and the Georgia Court Competency Test—Mississippi State Hospital Revision (GCCT-MSH). To examine the theoretical domains of the competency construct as assessed by these measures, a series of exploratory factor analyses were performed combining previously reported data on the FIT and GCCT-MSH with a new outpatient sample of 353 court referrals. For the CST, data from a previous sample were compared to the original validation study. Of the three measures, only the GCCT-MSH showed evidence of stable, independent factors. A comparison of the GCCT-MSH to theDusky standard suggested a need to further develop empirical measures to better represent underlying constructs related to the defendant-attorney relationship and defendant's participation in his or her defense.     

Bad Piano? Bad Music? A Response to Comments on Lowe and Pemberton,The Official History of the British Civil Service,Volume II: 1982–1997

The reforms made to the civil service during the premierships of Margaret Thatcher and John Major were unparalleled in scope in peacetime. Undertaken in the name of efficiency and better management, they served to Balkanise the service, shrink the number of civil servants, subordinate them to the will of ministers, and effectively privatise a swathe of public services. Their legacy, however, was a relatively weak centre struggling to cope with a fragmented and extremely complex governmental machine, an overly managerialist senior civil service sometimes side‐lined from policy making, and a system lacking slack as a consequence of the quest for ‘efficiency’ and dependent on private contractors of sometimes dubious worth. Over the past five years that legacy left the country poorly placed to triumph over the challenges of Brexit and then of Covid‐19.     

Snap Judgment: Implicit Perceptions of a (Political) Court

Do people fundamentally perceive the Supreme Court as a political institution? Despite the central importance of this question to theories of public evaluations of the Court and its decisions, it remains largely unanswered. To this end, we develop a new, implicit measure of political perceptions of the Court. This new measure relies on a categorization task wherein respondents quickly associate political or non-political attributes with the Supreme Court relative to institutions that are high or low in politicization. We find that the public implicitly perceives the Court as less political than Congress (high politicization) and more political than traffic court (low politicization) and that this measure is distinct from self-reported (explicit) perceptions of politicization. Finally, we find that implicit perceptions have a distinct effect on predicting diffuse support for the court and specific support for one of two Court decisions.     

SETTING THE SCENE

This article focuses on the Family Law Act of Australia and its subsequent impact on the Australian courts. There is an analysis of the historical and social factors that led to the legislation. The article also discusses the constitutional precedent and framework surrounding the Family Law Act's inception. Finally, the article addresses the future of the Australian courts under the Family Law Act.     

CIA plot, socialist conspiracy, or new world order? the origins of the Bilderberg group, 1952-55

Ever since its first meeting in 1954, the Bilderberg Group, a secretive annual conclave of Atlantic elites, has attracted conspiracy theories. Some observers have perceived it as a CIA plot to take the teeth out of the European left, others as a socialist conspiracy to undermine American capitalism. Recently it has been accused of being the seat of a hidden global government, the 'New World Order'. The article draws on newly available archival sources to reconstruct the early history of the Group and test these conspiracy theories, concluding that Bilderberg was neither an entirely American nor European invention, but rather the product of a complex process of Atlanticist interaction.