Contesting Legality in Authoritarian Contexts: Food Safety,Rule of Law and China's Networked Public Sphere

Since the introduction of the Internet, China's networked public sphere has become a critical site in which various actors compete to shape public opinion and promote or forestall legal and political change. This paper examines how members of an online public, the Tianya Forum, conceptualized and discussed law in relation to a specific event, the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal. Whereas previous studies suggest the Chinese state effectively controls citizens' legal consciousness via propaganda, this analysis shows that the construction of legality by the Tianya public was not a top‐down process, but a complex negotiation involving multiple parties. The Chinese state had to compete with lawyers and outspoken media to frame and interpret the scandal for the Tianya public and it was not always successful in doing so. Data show further how the online public framed the food safety incident as indicative of fundamental problems rooted in China's political regime and critiqued the state's instrumental use of law.     

Canadian prime ministers in the house of commons: Patterns of intervention

This paper explores the parliamentary activity of six Canadian prime ministers from St Laurent to Mulroney. Employing Hansard, each parliamentary utterance by a prime minister from 1949 to 1993 has been coded into one of four categories: answers to questions, speeches delivered, statements made and other interventions. Voting records have also been coded. Employing this database, the analysis compares and contrasts the prime ministers in terms of their political personalities and explores the overall scope and character of prime‐ministerial activism in the House throughout the past 40 years. Canadian profiles are compared with already existing British data in order to test generalisations concerning the diminishing presence of prime ministers in parliaments in Canada and Britain.     

The Influence of Personal Values on Legal Judgments

The non‐legal factors that influence judicial decisions have been the subject of extensive debate. Theoretical and empirical work has focused on factors including political ideology, activism, attitudes, and demographics. Personal values are related to these factors and are central to decision making. The study described in this article translated theories and techniques from psychological research to examine the role of personal values in judicial decision making. A novel method of assessment of value expression in legal opinions revealed a different pattern of values expressed in the majority and minority opinions of a case that divided the Supreme Court. An empirical study of legal academics extended this analysis and highlighted the significant influence of personal values on legal decisions. The value:decision paradigm provides a new framework to analyse judicial decision making, judicial division, and judicial discretion and has significant implications for judicial diversity.     

Portable high‐resolution automated 3D imaging for footwear and tire impression capture

The forensic science community raised the need for improved evidence recognition, collection, and visualization analytical instrumentation for field and laboratory use. While the 3D optical techniques for imaging static objects have been extensively studied, there is still a major gap between current knowledge and collecting high‐quality footwear and tire impression evidence. Among optical means for 3D imaging, digital fringe projection (DFP) techniques reconstruct 3D shape from phase information, achieving camera‐pixel spatial resolution. This paper presents a high‐resolution 3D imaging technology using DFP techniques dedicated to footwear and tire impression capture. We developed fully automated software algorithms and a graphical user interface (GUI) that allow anyone without training to operate for high‐quality 3D data capture. We performed accuracy evaluations and comparisons comparing with the commercial high‐end 3D scanner and carried out qualitative tests for various impressions comparing with the current practices. Overall, our technology achieves similar levels of accuracy and resolution with a high‐end commercially available 3D scanner, while having the merits of being (1) more affordable; (2) much easier to operate; and (3) more robust. Compared with the current practice of casting, our technology demonstrates its superiority because it (1) is non‐destructive; (2) collects more evidence detail than casts, especially when an impression is fragile; (3) requires less time and money to collect each piece of evidence; and (4) results in a digital file that can easily be shared with other examiners.