Institutional Foundations of Legislative Speech

Participation in legislative debates is among the most visible activities of members of parliament (MPs), yet debates remain an understudied form of legislative behavior. This study introduces a comparative theory of legislative speech with two major implications. First, party rules for debates are endogenous to strategic considerations and will favor either party leadership control or backbencher MP exposure. Second, in some systems, backbenchers will receive less time on the floor as their ideological distance to the party leadership increases. This leads to speeches that do not reflect true party cohesion. Where party reputation matters less for reelection, leaders allow dissidents to express their views on the floor. We demonstrate the implications of our model for different political systems and present evidence using speech data from Germany and the United Kingdom.     

Experimentalism in the EU: Common ground and persistent differences

Our central claim in this rejoinder is that experimentalist forms of organization in making regulatory rules, organizing social services, and articulating constitutional norms arise and diffuse as the problem that the actors and the state face shifts from ignorance to uncertainty. We argue that this has consequences for forms of accountability and for the conception and organization of democracy and constitutionalism. The EU, founded by diverse states in a period of continuing uncertainty, intensified by growing interdependence, proves to be a natural laboratory for observing urgent efforts to adjust to this new situation, and the symposium focuses on developments there. The symposium has brought us to see that there is more common ground in these debates than prior exchanges may have suggested. We therefore emphasize convergence on large points, while underscoring and, we hope, clarifying persistent differences, with the aim of encouraging the joint exploration of them already underway, in part explicitly, in part implicitly.     

Numerical classification of curvilinear structures for the identification of pistol barrels

This paper demonstrates a numerical pattern recognition method applied to curvilinear image structures. These structures are extracted from physical cross-sections of cast internal pistol barrel surfaces. Variations in structure arise from gun design and manufacturing method providing a basis for discrimination and identification. Binarised curvilinear land transition images are processed with fast Fourier transform on which principal component analysis is performed. One-way analysis of variance (95% confidence interval) concludes significant differentiation between 11 barrel manufacturers when calculating weighted Euclidean distance between any trio of land transitions and an average land transition for each barrel in the database. The proposed methodology is therefore a promising novel approach for the classification and identification of firearms.     

Necessity, Moral Liability, and Defensive Harm

A person who is liable to defensive harm has forfeited his rights against the imposition of the harm, and so is not wronged if that harm is imposed. A number of philosophers, most notably Jeff McMahan, argue for an instrumental account of liability, whereby a person is liable to defensive harm when he is either morally or culpably responsible for an unjust threat of harm to others, and when the imposition of defensive harm is necessary to avert the threatened unjust harm. Others may favour a purely noninstrumental account of liability: one that looks only to the past behaviour of the potentially liable person. We argue that both views are vulnerable to serious objections. Instead we develop and defend a new view of liability to defensive harm: the pluralist account. The pluralist account states that liability to defensive harm has at least two bases. First, if an attacker is morally or culpably responsible for an unjust attack then he has forfeited what we call his agency right, and in doing so he has made himself partially liable to defensive harm. Whether the attacker is fully liable to defensive harm depends, however, on whether the imposition of defensive harm would infringe a different right held by the attacker: his humanitarian right. Humanitarian rights are rights to be provided with urgently needed resources or to be protected from serious harms when others can do so at reasonably low cost. We argue the pluralist account avoids the objections to which the instrumental and noninstrumental views are vulnerable, coheres with our intuitive reactions in a wide range of cases, and sheds new light on the way different rights combine to determine a person??s liability to suffer harm.     

Der symbolische Wert der Popmusik. Zur Genese und Struktur des popmusikalischen Feldes

Based on an interpretation of the art theory of Pierre Bourdieu, which is aimed primarily at the neglected relationship of class and field, the essay is dedicated firstly to a critique, informed by theory, of the studies of the cultural omnivore. These are based on the assumption that today the correlation between musical taste and social structure is no longer determined bywhich but rather byhow many musical genres are preferred. For this reason they are supported by the conception of an erosion of musical legitimacy hierarchies. However, with the help from Bourdieu??s field theory and from the reference to the mutual relationship of production and reception, it can be shown that such legitimacy hierarchies have by no means disappeared. An analysis of the representation of pop music in the media and in the education system indicates the simultaneous legitimation and differentiation of pop. Against this background the thesis can be formulated that people with a great deal of cultural capital still prefer the legitimate culture, namely under the condition of a changed consensus of legitimacy.     

The “Forest Jihad”

Recent Al Qaeda threats and related jihadi propaganda potentially herald a new weapon in the terrorist arsenal: the deliberate setting of forest fires and other conflagrations both to terrorize society and wreck untold economic damage. Beyond the immense, new burdens that would be placed on emergency response personnel, these fires could also create grave environmental crises causing severe pollution from gases escaping into the atmosphere. The strategy of “Forest Jihad,” now being championed by Al Qaeda strategists, is supported and justified theologically by radical Islamic scholars. With this new weapon, the terrorists believe, maximum physical and financial damage can be inflicted to targeted countries at comparatively little risk.     

Memory Landscapes and the Labor of the Negative in Berlin

Focusing on the case of Berlin, this article explores the function of memory landscapes using the concept of the labor of the negative. Through three Berlin cases—the memorialization of the Berlin Wall, recent counter-memorials to the Holocaust, and the urban appropriation of voids through temporary projects—the article suggests that the labor of the negative constitutes Berlin’s memory landscape out of the interplay between absence and presence.