Negligence, Public Bodies, and Ruthlessness

The Law Commission has concluded in a recent consultation paper ('Administrative Redress') that claimants are able to sue public bodies successfully in negligence in an unacceptably wide range of circumstances. For this reason, it has proposed the introduction of a new touchstone of liability: 'serious fault'. The Law Commission regards the liability regime it proposes as superior to the existing law since it would reduce the number of occasions on which claimants deflect public bodies from their core concerns (delivering goods and services that serve the public interest). The Law Commission also finds support for its proposal in a 'principle of modified corrective justice'. On the analysis offered in this essay, the requirement of 'serious fault' is better understood as strengthening a commitment to ruthlessness (in the sense specified by Thomas Nagel) that is present in the existing law. This essay also argues for a reform of negligence law (as it applies to public bodies) that is very different from that proposed by the Law Commission. This is the application of the proportionality principle at the third stage of the duty of care test in Caparo Industries plc v Dickman . More generally, this essay criticises the Law Commission on the ground that it assumes that public bodies have sufficient information to perform a wide range of tasks effectively. This is often not the case. Moreover, negligence law in its existing form is a (non-market) discovery-procedure by means of which public bodies can, when defending novel claims, become better acquainted with the environment in which they operate.     

Spanish Translations of Miranda Warnings and the Totality of the Circumstances

Spanish-translated Miranda warnings are administered annually to thousands of Hispanic custodial suspects. In examining 121 Spanish translations and their English counterparts from 33 states, the lengths of Miranda warnings were generally comparable but marked differences were observed in the reading levels for individual Miranda components. The adequacy of Miranda translations varies markedly from minor variations to substantive errors. The most serious problems involved the entire omission of Miranda components; several omissions were observed in the Spanish translations for even the basic rights to silence and counsel. More commonly, Miranda discrepancies involved dissimilar content with a substantial trend toward more information in English than Spanish versions. Findings related to the Miranda translations, different word lengths, and varied reading levels are discussed using the totality of circumstances as its framework.

Interpersonal Aspects of Justice in Relationships Between Consumers and Service Providers: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis

There is a controversy in the justice literature as to whether interpersonal aspects of justice are best represented as one construct (interactional justice) or two (interpersonal justice and informational justice). Using confirmatory factor analysis, we tested competing models of these constructs on a sample of healthcare consumers (n = 1919) with respect to their justice judgments of primary care physicians. We found that the single factor model (interactional justice) represented a better fit to the data. Our results do not necessarily contradict those of prior studies that have found a better fit for a bi-dimensional model in organizational settings, however. Instead, we are suggesting a contingency approach: the results may be due in part to the halo effect, which may manifest itself where consumers are unfamiliar with the service provider and with the complexities of that person’s role.     

Psychiatric diagnosis as a risk marker for victimization in a national sample of children

Research examining childhood abuse has shown an association between victimization and psychiatric diagnoses (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder, depression). Historically, psychiatric diagnoses have been emphasized as a consequence of victimization, with less research examining if it also functions as a risk factor for further victimization, perhaps making diagnoses a general victimization risk marker. In addition, much of this research has emphasized particular types of victimization such as childhood physical or sexual abuse. Researchers have given less attention to other forms of victimization (e.g., peer victimization, witnessed violence) or a diverse victimization history. Using the Juvenile Victimization Questionnaire (JVQ) we surveyed parents and children between the ages of 2 and 17 using a random digit dial (RDD) methodology. We examined the relationship between a number of different forms of victimization (termed poly-victimization ) in the preceding year and parent-reported lifetime psychiatric diagnosis. Results show that children with a psychiatric diagnosis have significantly higher rates of victimization than children without a psychiatric diagnosis. In addition, using logistic regression models, we find that psychiatric diagnosis was associated with increased risk for poly-victimization, conventional crime victimization, maltreatment, peer or sibling victimization, and witnessing violence, but not sexual abuse. The results highlight the need to consider psychiatric diagnoses as a risk marker for past and possible future victimization. In addition, the importance of obtaining a comprehensive and more diverse victimization history when working with children is highlighted.     

Drug markets and the selective use of violence

Drug markets and violence are often presented as inextricably linked. Yet, the use of organized violence by trafficking networks against each other and against the state is not uniform. Insights into the selective use of violence lie in disputes between crime groups over control of lucrative distribution networks and market share. Insights into the use of violence against the state lie in the efforts by criminal justice personnel to curtail the drug trade and the political goals pursued by trafficking organizations. This article discusses these arguments in the context of cocaine markets and the Americas before turning more extensively to methamphetamine in the USA and especially Japan. The latter one, understudied by scholars, offers a challenging plausibility probe for arguments addressing the selective nature of organized violence in drug markets.

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Women’s Role in Serial Killing Teams: Reconstructing a Radical Feminist Perspective

This article examines women’s roles in serial killing teams and reconsiders the traditional applications of radical feminist research on serial killers. These applications limit the utility of radical feminist theory for understanding female serial killers who kill in teams. An analysis of patriarchal power relations, which emphasizes the constitutive element of radical feminist theory, provides a useful framework to achieve insight into female serial killers who kill in teams. The advantage of this approach is demonstrated through three case studies of this type of female serial killer: Martha Beck, Myra Hindley, and Karla Homolka.     

Regional integration in Central Asia

This paper analyses the interaction of regionalism and multilateralism in the five Central Asian countries’ trade policies. The basic question is why have leaders been willing to sign so many regional agreements, which often include visions of regional trading arrangements (RTAs), and yet so unwilling to implement any preferential trading arrangements? The paper examines the durability of multilateralism and the added incentives for joining the World Trade Organization in light of China’s WTO accession in 2001 and Russia’s expected accession. The final section draws together arguments for multi-dimensional (bilateral, plurilateral, and regional) regional cooperation within a WTO framework.     

Policy Forum: Studying Eyewitness Investigations in the Field

This article considers methodological issues arising from recent efforts to provide field tests of eyewitness identification procedures. We focus in particular on a field study (Mecklenburg 2006) that examined the “double blind, sequential” technique, and consider the implications of an acknowledged methodological confound in the study. We explain why the confound has severe consequences for assessing the real-world implications of this study.     

Response to Tudor: Remorse-based Sentence Reductions in Theory and Practice

Steven Tudor defends the mitigation of criminal sentences in cases in which offenders are genuinely remorseful for their crimes. More than this, he takes the principle that such remorse-based sentence reductions are appropriate to be a ‘well-settled legal principle’—so well settled, in fact, that ‘it is among those deep-seated commitments which can serve to test general theories as much as they are tested by them’. However, his account of why remorse should reduce punishment is strongly philosophical in character. He sets to one side the many practical difficulties in implementing such reductions in the real world of criminal justice institutions so that he can focus on the question of whether a plausible account of sentencing can show that remorse should mitigate punishment. I contend that Tudor’s defense of such reductions is unpersuasive in certain respects. Yet even if it can be made more persuasive, I argue that the conditions that would have to be satisfied for remorse-based sentence reductions to be justifiably implemented are so many and various that they would likely exceed our abilities to responsibly grant them in real world legal contexts. I therefore claim that Tudor has failed to provide a defense of the ‘remorse principle’ that serves to explain or justify existing legal practices.