Fostering Economic Growth through a “European” Debt

Economic growth in the EU area is one of the European Union's tasks and the Union's budget should be used to finance actions aimed at development. It is hard to imagine that an increase in budget revenues or a significant reduction in spending in other areas can provide the resources for this purpose. The proposal put forward is to allow for debt financing of investment spending and to downgrade the current constitutional status of the rule regarding a balanced budget. A “European” debt, it is suggested, could strengthen the international role of the euro. If such a reform were not to find consensus within the Union as a whole, it could, alternatively, be adopted in the Eurogroup.     

Problem based learning in legal education: Intentionally overlooked or merely misunderstood

Abstract

FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT is widely considered to be central to student achievement. Unfortunately, however, on modules with large numbers of students, there is not sufficient time for academic staff to provide written feedback to all students on a regular basis. It is proposed that a potential solution to this problem is the provision of online multiple‐choice questions (MCQs) which generate detailed feedback to students who attempt them. This article critically analyses the implementation of online MCQs as a form of formative assessment on an undergraduate level three equity and trusts module. It is argued that MCQs, when prepared in the light of relevant academic theories and implemented appropriately, are a means by which deep learning can be stimulated and tested with sufficient rigour, and are therefore a suitable method of formative assessment at undergraduate level. It is also argued that there are significant advantages to be gained from making the MCQs and feedback available to students online. Analysis and synthesis of available data from the module in question bears out these arguments, suggesting that the provision of online formative assessment in this manner is indeed beneficial to students.     

Does Decentralization Improve Perceptions of Accountability? Attitudinal Evidence from Colombia

Decentralization is argued to create incentives for local and regional politicians to be more responsive and accountable to their constituents, but few studies have directly tested this claim. We use survey data from Colombia to examine individual‐level evaluations of the degree to which decentralization prompts citizens to view department government as more accountable. We estimate the effect of administrative, fiscal, and political decentralization, controlling for participation, political knowledge, confidence in government, education, and income on perceptions of accountability. Our results indicate that administrative and fiscal decentralization improve perceptions of accountability, while political decentralization does not.     

The variable choice set logit model applied to the 2004 Canadian election

Formal work on the electoral model often suggests that parties should locate at the electoral mean. Recent research has found no evidence of such convergence. In order to explain non-convergence, the stochastic electoral model is extended by including a competence and sociodemographic valance in a country where regional and national parties compete in the election. That is, the model allows voters to face different sets of parties in different regions. We introduce the notion of a convergence coefficient, c for regional and national parties and show that when c is high there is a significant centrifugal tendency acting on parties. An electoral survey of the 2004 election in Canada is used to construct a stochastic electoral model of the election with two regions: Québec and the rest of Canada. The survey allows us to estimate voter positions in the policy space. The variable choice set logit model is used to built a relationship between party position and vote share. We find that in the local Nash equilibrium for the election the two main parties with high competence valence, the Liberals and Conservatives, locate at the national electoral mean and the Bloc Québécois, with the highest competence valence, locates at the Québec electoral mean. The New Democratic Party has a low competence valence but remains at the national mean. The Greens, with lowest competence valence, locate away from the national mean to increase its vote share.     

Crime Reporting Decisions and the Costs of Crime

The paper develops a model of crime reporting based on an economic approach. It identifies the principal costs and benefits of reporting from the victim’s perspective, taking account of insurance provision and the risk of intimidation by an offender. It shows how a victim might use backward induction to infer a rational reporting strategy. The recording of crime by the police is a process that relies on victim reports, and is thus influenced by the reporting decisions made by victims. The paper uses empirical evidence from the British Crime Survey and from the International Crime Victims Survey to explore the hypotheses generated by the model. It finds support for the suggestion that the propensity to report a crime increases with the size of the loss entailed. The paper also explores the implications of the findings for the estimation of the costs of crime. Reporting and intimidation costs are generally excluded from bottom-up estimates of costs, an omission that may be quite serious in the context of offences such as domestic violence.     

English- and Spanish-speaking women's use of violence

This study analyzes variables related to the context and consequences of women's use of violence as well as a wide range of violent behaviors used and experienced by court-ordered English- and Spanish-speaking women. Data were derived from intake assessments of 125 court-ordered women over 24 months. Almost all of the women reported a history of abuse perpetrated by their partners. Women committed significantly fewer violent acts against their partners than their partners committed against them. Differences between English- and Spanish-speaking women's victimization, use of violence, and help seeking were largely similar, however, important differences emerged.     

Suicide by blasting caps: a case study of rare cranial trauma

Suicide is a deliberate act of ending one's life. Suicide by use of any explosive device, when not involved in a terrorist act, is quite rare in occurrence when compared with other methods routinely utilized. In this paper, we present to the medicolegal community a case of an adult male who committed suicide with blasting caps and the subsequent extensive damage to the cranial hard tissue. Although the cause and manner of death were relatively straightforward, consultation with forensic anthropologists was requested for an anthropological trauma assessment of the highly fragmented skull. After the skull was cleaned and reconstructed, the analysis revealed similarities between blasting cap trauma to the head and high velocity gunshot trauma to the head. Therefore, in a case where some evidence may have been removed or destroyed, forensic analysis involving trauma of this magnitude could result in a misinterpretation of the true mechanism responsible for the osseous damage. In this case, cooperation among the law enforcement agency, coroner's investigators, the forensic pathologist, and forensic anthropologists provided a comprehensive death case analysis.     

Research with minors in Greece and the EU Directive on clinical trials

This article describes the legal rules for research with minors in Greece in relation to the EU Directive on clinical trials and the Greek Code of Medical Ethics.     

Reflective Judgement and Prudential Rationality: A Contribution to an Inclusive Practical Application of Law

Hannah Arendt has developed a theory of the importance of judgment of taste for political manners, founded on the Kantian aesthetic theory. Nowadays this theory is considered a current theoretical reference for establishing a political way to reconcile the demands of the radicalization of deliberative democracy with the need for political inclusion (Iris Marion Young, Seyla Benhabib). Albena Azmanova in her The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment proposes an inclusive political rhetoric. The political theory founded on judgment is based on Kant’s philosophy; it was developed by Arendt and has greatly influenced the current debate, as an alternative theory in which the moral basis of law can be more sensitive to human contexts; a universalist theory more adequate for dealing with the tragic dimension of human life. The theory of political judgment uses the concepts of reflective judgment and ‘enlarged thought’ as its main concepts. As a starting point, a theory like this considers the singular judgments of justice that each person makes. The background, therefore, is not a rational foundation of principles, but the capacity of rational beings to make judgments. This post-metaphysical theory of law, based on a theory of judgment, is a critique of legal positivism, but presents itself as an alternative to the idealistic theory of law. But this theoretical project has received some criticism related to the adequacy of Arendt’s rereading of Kantian philosophy and her attempt to approximate Kant’s reflective judgment to the Aristotelian concept of phronêsis. Some critics, such as Bryan Garsten, believe that Kant’s rhetoric of public reason diminished and displaced the prudential faculty of judgment that Arendt is to be interested in reviving. Arendt’s attempt to find a theory of judgment in Kant’s aesthetic theory is not successful, in Garsten’s view. Our purpose is to show that a critical theory of judicial judgment is not only possible, but necessary; Arendt’s theory of judgment offers an important contribution to a critical theory of judicial judgment, particularly one devoted to the construction of a legal theory that prioritizes a politics of social inclusion. This theory proposes a critical approach to the project of the procedural conception of democracy, since it can mask social exclusion. An adequate understanding of judicial argumentation cannot forget that it happens in a rhetorical context: it is not only important what a discourse says, but how it says it. The radicalization of deliberative democracy supposes a revision of the ways judicial deliberation is thought: not by reference to universal or at least general principles, but taking into consideration what is ‘critically relevant’, with a view to remedying social injustice (following Azmanova).