Update to international guidelines on HIV/AIDS and human rights

On 10 September 2002, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) released a revised international guideline on "Access to prevention, treatment, care and support." The update to Guideline 6 of HIV/AIDS and Human Rights: International Guidelines reflects significant therapeutic, political, and legal developments in this area since the 12 guidelines were originally published in 1998. The new Guideline 6 significantly expands the guidance given to governments on what international human rights norms require of them in relation to HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, care and support.     

US: Supreme Court adopts narrow definition of "disability" under anti-discrimination law

In January 2002, the US Supreme Court issued the latest in a series of court judgments adopting a narrow interpretation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The unanimous decision is fundamentally flawed in several important respects. It does not bode well for people with disabilities seeking protection from discrimination in employment.     

Ontario appellate court denies HIV-positive man's constitutional claim to medical marijuana

In January 2002, the Ontario Court of Appeal denied a claim by a Toronto man living with HIV/AIDS that Canada's laws prohibiting marijuana possession and cultivation infringe his constitutional rights to liberty and security of the person.     

Reassessing Schoenfeld Residual Tests of Proportional Hazards in Political Science Event History Analyses

An underlying assumption of proportional hazards models is that the effect of a change in a covariate on the hazard rate of event occurrence is constant over time. For scholars using the Cox model, a Schoenfeld residual‐based test has become the disciplinary standard for detecting violations of this assumption. However, using this test requires researchers to make a choice about a transformation of the time scale. In practice, this choice has largely consisted of arbitrary decisions made without justification. Using replications and simulations, we demonstrate that the decision about time transformations can have profound implications for the conclusions reached. In particular, we show that researchers can make far more informed decisions by paying closer attention to the presence of outlier survival times and levels of censoring in their data. We suggest a new standard for best practices in Cox diagnostics that buttresses the current standard with in‐depth exploratory data analysis.     

Partisanship,Sophistication, and Public Attitudes about Majority Rule and Minority Rights in Congress

The balance between majority rule and minority rights is a central issue in the design and operation of democratic institutions and remains a contested issue in debates of policy‐making processes. Remarkably, public attitudes about this balance are not subjected to scholarly investigation. In this article, we report the findings of the first survey experiment in which the American public's attitudes about majority rule and minority rights in legislative bodies are explored. We find robust support for both majority rule and minority rights, discover that only a few Americans distinguish between the US House of Representatives and Senate in the application of these principles, and demonstrate that views of majority rule and minority rights can be moved once we introduce respondents to the partisan implications of procedural rules. Moreover, with conflicting theoretical expectations about the effect of political sophistication on attitudes about majority rule and minority rights, we find that higher levels of political sophistication are associated with stronger partisan effects on attitudes about the balance between majority rule and minority rights in Congress.