诉讼权利的滥用:程序正义的比较标准

一、APR概述综观各种法律制度,给人总体感觉是:滥用诉讼权利(the Abuse of Procedural Right,缩写为APR)的问题随处可见。但各国并未真正意识到司法中的权利滥用现象,对于APR问题的意义和重要性的认识也未达成统一,那种相信在任何地方都存在能够预防和制裁诉讼权利滥用现象的有效可行的救济方式是没有根据的。有人也许会说,没有一个法律制度完全不关注APR问题,但这只是问题的开始,而不是问题的结束,因为,诉讼权利滥用的形式是多种多样的。实际上,各国的情况大不相同:有些国家,例如法国,明确规定了APR的一般规则并授予法院处罚权〔1…     

Environmental Insurance: A Risk Management Tool for Real Estate

Traditional risk management tools including contract allocation and reliance upon statutory defenses or government releases can be incomplete, contentious, and costly solutions to address risks associated with environmental liability and cleanup obligations in real estate transfer and property ownership. Such traditional methods leave environmental risk for the interested parties in the real estate transaction to bear over time and bring added new risks to the parties. Environmental insurance transfers all or part of the risk to a third-party insurance company (insurer) that is not a participating party in the transaction, thereby taking insurable environmental risk out of the transaction. Further, environmental insurance can add positive value to the transaction by bringing necessary risk identification and validation, and loss minimization and claims handling expertise to the transaction by virtue of the underwriting and claims management process, and add the financial strength and expertise of a qualified insurer. Insurance is often perceived by lenders, investors, developers, contractors, tenants, and future purchasers as a positive assurance against environmental risk associated with the property, allowing business relationships and financing to proceed more smoothly. In this way, environmental insurance serves as a more comprehensive and complete risk management tool for the real estate transaction and property ownership.     

The Intent Behind the Cryptic Concurrence That Provided a Reporter's Privilege

Justice Lewis Powell wrote a concurrence in Branzburg v. Hayes that, despite a majority opinion to the contrary, eventually provided room for journalists to claim a privilege against testifying in grand jury proceedings. For decades, scholars and judges have questioned what Justice Powell meant by his concurrence and whether he, in fact, supported a reporter's right to refuse to reveal confidential information. Justice Powell's personal papers and case files, as well as those of his fellow justices, observations of one of his former law clerks, and oral arguments shed light on the reasoning behind Justice Powell's enigmatic concurrence. This article concludes that Justice Powell supported a qualified reporter's privilege, applied on a case-by-case basis.     

A Heterotopian Analysis of Maritime Refugee Incidents

Given the persistent significance of states in the determination of legal identities of people on the move, a consideration of the construction of people as legal (or illegal) migrants, refugees, or asylum-seekers must also recognize that these determinations take place in conjunction with the simultaneous processes through which spaces such as sovereign states or ships carrying asylum-seekers are constructed. A heterotopian analysis of the Tampa and the SIEVX of 2001 allows for a consideration of the ways in which notions of sovereignty, territory and governmentality work to stabilize ambiguous situations produced by the conflictual discourses of human rights and state power.     

The interplay of (semiotic) technologies and genre: the case of the selfie

ABSTRACT

The selfie is one of the most widely publicized, criticized, and debated visual phenomena of our time. However, formulating a definition of the selfie is not straightforward, as visual clues – be they representational or compositional – alone are not sufficient for identification. Recognizing an image as a selfie, rather than a portrait, often requires viewers to interpret the image in relation to the technological and sociocutural context in which the photo was taken and shared. In this paper, we consider the technological conditions that have shaped the evolution of the selfie as a visual genre. Central to our discussion is the premise that the selfie is not simply a genre for self-representation, but means of generating various perspectives: that of the selfie maker, the represented visual participant, and the viewer identification. This unique perspective-generating affordance of the selfie is both facilitated and constrained by the various technologies involved in selfie practices. On the one hand, the technological and physical constraints of the smart phone camera give rise to a specific form of “distorted” look which makes certain types of selfie possible. On the other hand, social media platforms facilitate the sharing of selfies, which results in increasingly stylized and creative ways in which perspectives of the self can be represented, negotiated, and, in the case of selfies manipulated via apps, augmented.     

Al-Qaeda’s Propaganda Decoded: A Psycholinguistic System for Detecting Variations in Terrorism Ideology

We describe a novel hybrid method of content analysis that combines the speed of computerized text analysis with the contextual sensitivity of human raters, and apply it to speeches that were given by major leaders of Al-Qaeda (AQ)—both in its “core” Afghanistan/Pakistan region and its affiliate group in Iraq. The proposed “Ideology Extraction using Linguistic Extremization” (IELEX) categorization method has acceptable levels of inter-rater and test-retest reliabilities. The method uncovered subtle (and potentially non-conscious) differences in the emphases that Usama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri put on the various components of their ideological justification for terrorism. We show how these differences were independently recognized as the crux of the rift in AQ, based on documents that were confiscated in Abbottabad following Usama Bin Laden’s assassination. Additionally, several of the ideological discrepancies that we detected between AQ “core” and its Iraqi affiliate correspond to schisms that presumably led to the splintering of AQ Iraq and the rise of ISIS. We discuss IELEX’s capability to quantify a variety of grievance-based terrorist ideologies, along with its use towards more focused and efficient counter-terrorism and counter-messaging policies.     

Goal Setting and Self-Efficacy Among Delinquent, At-Risk and Not At-Risk Adolescents

Setting clear achievable goals that enhance self-efficacy and reputational status directs the energies of adolescents into socially conforming or non-conforming activities. This present study investigates the characteristics and relationships between goal setting and self-efficacy among a matched sample of 88 delinquent (18 % female), 97 at-risk (20 % female), and 95 not at-risk adolescents (20 % female). Four hypotheses related to this were tested. Findings revealed that delinquent adolescents reported fewest goals, set fewer challenging goals, had a lower commitment to their goals, and reported lower levels of academic and self-regulatory efficacy than those in the at-risk and not at-risk groups. Discriminant function analysis indicated that adolescents who reported high delinquency goals and low educational and interpersonal goals were likely to belong to the delinquent group, while adolescents who reported high educational and interpersonal goals and low delinquency goals were likely to belong to the not at-risk group. The at-risk and not at-risk groups could not be differentiated. A multinomial logistic regression also revealed that adolescents were more likely to belong to the delinquent group if they reported lower self-regulatory efficacy and lower goal commitment. These findings have important implications for the development of prevention and intervention programs, particularly for those on a trajectory to delinquency. Specifically, programs should focus on assisting adolescents to develop clear self-set achievable goals and support them through the process of attaining them, particularly if the trajectory towards delinquency is to be addressed.     

Baseline subjective stress predicts 1-year outcomes among drug court clients

Psychological stress has long been known to predict negative changes in physical and behavioral health in the general population. The same relationships have been found in research on drug abusers. In this longitudinal study, 477 clients of two Kentucky drug courts were followed for 1 year to examine the relationship between subjective stress at intake and outcomes 1 year after the baseline of this 18-month drug court program. Greater baseline subjective stress was significantly associated with poorer employment, substance use, criminal justice, and health outcomes at 1-year follow-up, even after adjusting for selected demographic characteristics and baseline levels of the outcomes of interest. If these results are replicated in these and other drug courts, then a stress reduction treatment trial within the drug court context should be attempted and evaluated.