From Konfrontasi to Disintegrasi : ASEAN and the Rise of Islamism in Southeast Asia

This article evaluates the development of militant Islamic threats in Southeast Asia from the early 1990s onwards and its security implications for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The analysis contends that the extent of extremist Islamic infiltration of the region was obscured by governmental rhetoric, along with much Western opinion, which argued erroneously that ASEAN was following a unique developmental path based on shared regional values that had resulted in economic growth and political stability. However, by ignoring underlying religiously motivated tensions within and among its membership, and by refusing to countenance mature debate about them within their societies, ASEAN has succeeded only in incubating its potential nemesis.     

Assessing oral skills—time for reflection,time for risk

Abstract

THIS PAPER aims to establish a framework from which we can explain our dissatisfaction with defining what we teach and what and how we assess within legal education. To what extent can we, the professions or the public, have confidence that our assessment processes predict effective professional competence?

We will try to establish this framework by placing the discussion in the context of a workshop of assessment of oral skills run at the 2001 Bar Vocational Course conference. The workshop raised issues which we believe encapsulate the difficulties of measuring performance in such a way that it reliably predicts professional effectiveness. From this we will attempt to highlight the shortcomings of the current teaching, learning and assessment strategies more generally.

We go on to consider the role of student reflection in support of summative assessment: is it a reliable way of helping to plug the competence‐performance gap we have identified? What is its role in summative assessment? What demands does it make on tutor and learner? Since we cannot guarantee to find the best solutions first time, we make a plea for taking the risk of failure as well as success, and trying out ideas.     

Developing a Spatial-Temporal Method for the Geographic Investigation of Shoeprint Evidence

Abstract:  This article examines the potential of a spatial-temporal method for analysis of forensic shoeprint data. The large volume of shoeprint evidence recovered at crime scenes results in varied success in matching a print to a known shoe type and subsequently linking sets of matched prints to suspected offenders. Unlike DNA and fingerprint data, a major challenge is to reduce the uncertainty in linking sets of matched shoeprints to a suspected serial offender. Shoeprint data for 2004 were imported from the Greater London Metropolitan Area Bigfoot database into a geographic information system, and a spatial-temporal algorithm developed for this project. The results show that by using distance and time constraints interactively, the number of candidate shoeprints that can implicate one or few suspects can be substantially reduced. It concludes that the use of space-time and other ancillary information within a geographic information system can be quite helpful for forensic investigation.     

Gated Communities in Law's Gaze: Material Forms and the Production of a Social Body in Legal Adjudication

This article focuses on the legal geography of gated communities. Sociolegal research has paid comparatively little attention to how specific material forms fare within legal contexts. Drawing on work in legal geography and in science and technology studies, this article isolates judicial decisions that deal with the borders of gated communities from other cases involving private homeowner associations. By focusing on these boundary disputes in which outsiders are excluded from the area, this article finds that courts are resisting the localism presented by gated communities and are instead articulating a social imaginary in which the landscape flows uninterrupted by the exclusionary presence of gates. In contrast to the privatopia literature, this article finds that courts are not complicit in promoting neoliberal visions of community. The social imaginary being developed by courts resists the spatial differentiation of gated communities, producing in its place a thoroughly modern polity in which legal, economic, and political relations flow easily between those inside and outside the gate.     

An Economic Justification for Open Access to Essential Medicine Patents in Developing Countries

This paper offers an economic rationale for compulsory licensing of needed medicines in developing countries. The patent system is based on a trade-off between the "deadweight losses" caused by market power and the incentive to innovate created by increased profits from monopoly pricing during the period of the patent. However, markets for essential medicines under patent in developing countries with high income inequality are characterized by highly convex demand curves, producing large deadweight losses relative to potential profits when monopoly firms exercise profit-maximizing pricing strategies. As a result, these markets are systematically ill-suited to exclusive marketing rights, a problem which can be corrected through compulsory licensing. Open licenses that permit any qualified firm to supply the market on the same terms, such as may be available under licenses of right or essential facility legal standards, can be used to mitigate the negative effects of government-granted patents, thereby increasing overall social welfare.     

Knowledge on Tap: Police Science and Common Knowledge in the Legal Regulation of Drunkenness

Although scholars have devoted considerable attention to the formation, modification, and dissemination of knowledges in and around the legal complex, few systematic inquiries have been made into the sociology of legal knowledges. In this paper, we focus on two areas of law–liquor licensing and drunk driving–and contextualize their development from the perspective of police science. We document the ways in which contemporary police science authorizes a "common knowledge," which is not to be confused with lay knowledge, or even trade knowledge. Rather, the "common knowledge" that is authorized is what legal authorities believe everyone should know, despite any lay or trade knowledge individuals may have. This analysis demonstrates the need for further work on the ways in which knowledges are formed and authorized within law, with particular emphasis on documenting how a "responsibility to know" comes to be deployed beyond the state.