Justifying Punishment: A Response to Douglas Husak

In ‘Why Criminal Law: A Question of Content?’, Douglas Husak argues that an analysis of the justifiability of the criminal law depends upon an analysis of the justifiability of state punishment. According to Husak, an adequate justification of state punishment both must show why the state is permitted to infringe valuable rights such as the right not to be punished and must respond to two distinct groups of persons who may demand a justification for the imposition of punishment, namely, individuals subjected to punishment and the society asked to support the institution of punishment. In this discussion, I analyse Husak’s account of the right not to be punished with an eye to showing that the parameters of that right do not extend to the cases that would make it controversial. I also consider two other distinct groups of persons who have equal standing to alleged offenders and society to demand justification for the imposition of state punishment, namely, direct victims of crimes and criminal justice officials.     

Aligning Ideologies and Institutions: Reorganization in the HIV/AIDS Services Administration of New York City

How effective was organizational reform implemented inside one critical New York City health agency? Specifically, we examine the extent to which the reorganization of the HIV/AIDS Services Administration (HASA) into the Medical Insurance Services Administration (MICSA) achieved three goals: (1) realizing synergies among the component MICSA programs; (2) cross‐fertilizing ideas among MICSA agencies; and (3) facilitating HASA operations through the lens of organization change theory. Qualitative methods including interviews, site visits, and document analysis triangulate the effects of the reorganization. Implications for organization change literature are explored, especially highlighting where more theoretical and empirical studies are needed.     

Neonatal Limb Amputation—An Unusual Form of Postmortem Canine Predation

Cases of postmortem canine predation often involve elderly recluses and their dogs. The face, head, and genitalia are targeted. Two unusual cases of postmortem canine predation of abandoned newborns are described to demonstrate an unusual alternative pattern of mutilation related to the small size of the decedents, marked decomposition, and canine scavenging behavior. Both bodies were abandoned/concealed soon after birth and were subsequently disturbed by dogs. Both were markedly decomposed with absent arms. Other injuries included skin and soft tissue defects of the torsos, with loss of distal portions of the right foot and the left lower leg in one case. No interstitial hemorrhage was observed in any of the exposed soft tissue wounds. There were no significant head or neck injuries. These cases show that patterns of postmortem canine predation will vary depending on the age, physical characteristics, degree of decomposition, and location of decedents.     

Of Bodies and Burkinis: Institutional Islamophobia,Islamic Dress,and the Colonial Condition

The 2016 burkini controversy and the criminalization of visibly Muslim women in France is a violent reminder of the precarity of colonial bodies in public space. These laws demonstrate the ongoing management of colonial bodies and communities which speaks over time from historical colonization to present, and future, neocolonial narratives. This article moves beyond the dominant logics of security and gender oppression in the Islamic dress debate which, it is argued, are invoked in a strategic manner to obfuscate the colonial condition and engender a normative, institutional Islamophobia in the public‐political imaginary. It critiques the instrumental use of law in creating political space for such agendas and analyses the whiteness of public space and institutions. The article insists that it is necessary to acknowledge the epistemic lens of the colonial condition in the Islamic dress debate and critically reflects on the alienation and reduced capacity for action of bodies wearing Islamic dress.     

The Limits of Legal Pluralism in the Roman Empire

The Roman empire was legally pluralistic. But what exactly does this entail in concrete terms? With the growth in historical studies of legal pluralism in the Roman empire, some significant differences in approach have emerged. This article tests and clarifies some of the limits in the current ‘legal pluralism’ conceptual landscape, focussing on disputes and dispute resolution. It is argued that a clearer distinction should be drawn between ‘normative’ and ‘jurisdictional’ pluralism, though both approaches still raise certain conceptual problems. The place of disputes within the family within this wider institutional picture is then taken as a case study in the final part of the paper, and it is suggested that while family disputes can evidence ‘legal pluralism’ in the ‘norms’ sense, there is less to suggest that there were a multitude of officially sanctioned legal fora available for resolving family disputes. As a result, many went beyond the law. This has wider implications for the study of legal pluralism in antiquity and the problem of integrating alternative dispute resolution (ADR) into the pluralistic picture.     

Using the 1994 Rwanda Genocide to Intergrate Critical Criminology and Liberation Sociology

This article explores the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and its educational ramifications in terms of linking critical criminology to liberation sociology and giving greater exposure to Genocide as a criminological issue. The article provides practical advice and theoretical insights on teaching Genocide Studies in the undergraduate classroom. I start by exploring critical criminology and liberation sociology. I then introduce the reader to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and resources used in my classroom. I explore the implications for (critical) criminology of these materials. Finally I discuss issues that arose during the class.

---

The reliability of immunoassay for determining the presence of opiates in the forensic setting

Urine immunoassays are commonly used as a rapid screen for drugs of abuse in emergency room, hospital, clinic, and forensic settings. The authors were concerned whether or not a negative screen of the urine for opiates was of significance and indicative that analysis of blood for opiates was not necessary. Specifically, we wished to determine whether a negative test for opiates by immunoassay absolutely rules out an acute overdose, and if not, what percentage of cases with negative results have opiates in the blood. A retrospective analysis was performed using the toxicology results for cases ruled an acute narcotic overdose at the Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office between 1998 and 2003. One hundred eighty-three cases met the criteria for the study. A false-negative rate of approximately 15% was found using an immunoassay as compared with blood analysis for narcotics. The authors feel that while this rate may be acceptable in a clinical setting, it is unacceptable in a forensic setting.     

Digging Up, Dismantling, and Redesigning the Criminal Law

The criminal law raises wonderfully thorny foundational questions. Some of these questions are conceptual: What is a plausible conception of crime? What is a plausible conception of criminal law? Some of these questions are genealogical: What are the historical and genealogical roots of the criminal law in a particular jurisdiction? Other questions are evaluative: What are the political and moral values on which a given conception of criminal law depends? What kind of rational reconstruction, if any, could the criminal law be given? And, finally, still other questions are exploratory and normative: Should parts of existing criminal law be abandoned? What new topics in criminal law theory need to be addressed in our globalised, technologically savvy world? The contributors to Antony Duff and Stuart P. Green’s collection Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law tackle these questions with zeal and independent spirit. They disagree markedly with each other about what the foundational questions are. And, they disagree about how those questions should be handled. This article charts their disagreements by situating the contributors within two taxonomies. The first groups them according to their approaches to the foundational questions; the second groups them according to their modes of theorising. This double taxonomy provides a useful frame within which to analyse these competing takes on the philosophically foundational work of criminal law theory.     

Motivated to Adapt? The Role of Public Service Motivation as Employees Face Organizational Change

Researchers concerned with organizational change have consistently emphasized the role that the work environment plays in employee acceptance of change. Underexamined in the public management literature, however, is the role that employee values, particularly public service motivation (PSM), may play in employee acceptance of change. Some scholars have noted a positive correlation between employee PSM and organizational change efforts; this article extends this work by attempting to isolate the mechanisms that explain this relationship. Using data from a survey of employees in a city undergoing a reorganization and reduction in workforce, the authors find that only employees who scored high on a single dimension of PSM—self‐sacrifice—were more likely than others to support organizational change. Rather than support changes for their potential to improve public service, this finding suggests that employees with higher PSM may simply be less likely to resist changes that might disadvantage them personally.