Cohabitation and Comparative Method

The paper intervenes in current policy debates on unmarried cohabitation and comparative law debates on methodology. It adopts a culturally alert, discursive methodology of comparison to study regulation of unmarried cohabitation under the common law and civil law as well as the effect of an entrenched right to equality protecting against marital status discrimination. It identifies not different legislative solutions to a common problem, but distinct discourses of family law regulation. Yet the approaches are less radically opposed than is often thought. Discursive comparison tends to highlight dominant voices at the expense of minority ones, wrongly characterising minority views as foreign to a tradition. Discursive comparison should not confine itself to a synchronic view of present legal debates; a richer diachronic approach will also attend to views within a legal tradition's past.     

Chloroquine distribution in postmortem cases

Chloroquine concentrations in blood and tissues were examined in overdose and non-overdose cases to determine appropriate ranges for interpretation. Twenty-nine literature overdose cases and 8 non-overdose literature cases were compared with this laboratory's findings. The results indicate significant postmortem redistribution of chloroquine. Combining this laboratory's results and the literature results indicates that using a liver concentration of 150 mg/kg as a cutoff between overdose and non-overdose concentrations properly identified 30 of the 34 published cases containing liver chloroquine and 19 of the 20 presented cases.     

Salafi and Islamist Londoners: Stigmatised minority faith communities countering al-Qaida

The paper highlights the paradoxical position of certain Salafi and Islamist communities in London who have consistently demonstrated skill, courage and commitment in countering al-Qaida propaganda and recruitment activity while simultaneously facing ill-founded criticism from other Muslim communities and secular political lobbyists for creating the conditions that gave rise to the al-Qaida phenomena. In doing so the paper compares the experience of Salafi and Islamist communities living in London during an ongoing terrorist campaign by al-Qaida with Jewish and Irish Catholic communities living in London during earlier terrorist campaigns against the UK’s capital city. In each instance community policing is shown to have a crucial role to play in terms of reassurance for minority faith communities and the prevention of terrorism. However, the intersection between policing and counter-terrorism is shown to produce tensions that may weaken minority community confidence in policing and thereby reduce proactive community support for counter-terrorism measures. At this intersection a London policing initiative is shown to have developed proactive counter-terrorism partnerships with Salafi and Islamist community groups of a pioneering nature. In consequence the same critics who conflate Salafis and Islamists with an urgent terrorist threat to London have accused this policing initiative of appeasing extremism.     

Really Responsive Regulation

Really Responsive Regulation seeks to add to current theories of enforcement by stressing the case for regulators to be responsive not only to the attitude of the regulated firm but also to the operating and cognitive frameworks of firms; the institutional environment and performance of the regulatory regime; the different logics of regulatory tools and strategies; and to changes in each of these elements. The approach pervades all the different tasks of enforcement activity: detecting undesirable or non-compliant behaviour; developing tools and strategies for responding to that behaviour; enforcing those tools and strategies; assessing their success or failure; and modifying them accordingly. The value of the approach is shown by outlining its potential application to UK environmental and fisheries controls. Putting the system into effect is itself challenging but failing to regulate really responsively can constitute an expensive process of shooting in the dark.