Moral Pluralism, Political Justification and Deliberative Democracy

We can make progress in political justification if we avoid debates about the extent of moral pluralism. Just by having a political view we are committed to its realization but also to its defence upon justifying grounds. It would be inconsistent to seek to realize my view in ways that undermined my ability to justify it. Yet justifying a view implies that I am open to challenges to it, and that perpetually draws me potentially into dialogue with all others, regardless of my will, and into structures which allow an inclusive dialogue to take place, with decisions being made, on the basis of open public discussion, with which I may disagree. Thus a form of deliberative democracy, probably with representative institutions, is justified, without any normative assumptions being made.     

Procedural justice training for police recruits: results of a randomized controlled trial

Journal of Experimental Criminology - Procedural justice training for police officers is designed to improve officers’ interactions with the public. Aside from the fact that it is a given...     

English High Court decides that “making available” over the internet only occurs in the jurisdiction where the servers are based

The English High Court has considered the meaning of “making available to the public” by online transmission in the context of database rights and has determined that the act of making available is only committed in the country where the host server is located, and not the country where the material is accessed by the public.     

Quantitative assessment of evidential weight for a fingerprint comparison I. Generalisation to the comparison of a mark with set of ten prints from a suspect

The authors have published elsewhere a quantitative method for assessing weight of evidence in the case where a finger mark from a crime scene is compared with a control print taken from a single finger of a suspect. The approach is based on the notion of calculating a likelihood ratio (LR) that addresses a pair of propositions relating to the single finger that was the origin of the crime mark. In practice, things are rather different because the crime mark will not just be compared with a single finger from a suspect but with a set of prints from all of his/her fingers; likewise, when the mark is compared with a database, this will consist of ten print records from random individuals. It is clear that "finger propositions" are not realistic in this situation and we show how our approach may be generalised to address a pair of propositions that relate to the person that made the crime mark. It often is the case that information is present at the crime scene that enables some inference to be drawn relating to which of the offender's ten fingers left a particular mark of interest. This kind of inference may profitably be drawn into the formal analysis. We illustrate our approach with an example.