To be continued . . . Syntheses and trends in follow-up of quality assurance in West European higher education

The authors report on West European trends in follow-up arrangements of national quality assurance procedures. They argue that external quality assurance ought to adopt a broader conception of quality than is now often the case. Next, the general public ought to have a guarantee that external quality assurance is valid (through meta-evaluation) and has consequences (through follow-up arrangements). Follow-up currently is not well developed in many European countries in a formal sense, but is receiving more attention as external quality assurance is maturing. Finally, the authors link national quality assurance to the European dimension; an international network could fulfil important functions in making quality assurance transparent and credible across Europe. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Law in Culture

Abstract. The relationship of law and culture has long been a concern of legal anthropology and sociology of law. But it is recognised today as a central issue in many different kinds of juristic inquiries. All these recent invocations of the concept of culture indicate or imply problems at the boundaries of established thought about either the nature of law or the values that law is thought to express or reflect. The consequence is that legal theory must, it seems, now systematically take account of the notion of culture. The present paper asks how this might best be done. I argue that a concept of culture, as such, is of limited utility for legal theory because the term “culture” embraces a too indefinite and disparate range of phenomena. But legal theory needs conceptual resources to consider at a general level the relations of law and culture. This paper suggests that these resources should include, above all, a rigorous distinguishing of different abstract types of community. Legal theory requires a sociologically‐informed concept of community. What is encompassed by the vague idea of culture is actually the content of different types of social relations of community and the networks (combinations) in which they exist.     

Investment Treaty Arbitration as a Species of Global Administrative Law

The article outlines a simple thesis: that international investmentarbitration – pursuant to regional and bilateral investmenttreaties – offers the clearest example of global administrativelaw, strictly construed, yet to have emerged. We present thisthesis by explicating four key features of investment treaties:they permit investor claims against the state without exhaustinglocal remedies; they allow claims for damages; they allow investorsto directly seek enforcement of awards before domestic courts;and they facilitate forum-shopping. Our argument is that, owingto this unique conjunction of features, the regulatory conductof states is, to an unusual extent, subject to control throughcompulsory international adjudication. Having highlighted thesefeatures, we then claim that investment arbitration is bestanalogized to domestic administrative law rather than to internationalcommercial arbitration, especially since investment arbitrationengages disputes arising from the exercise of public authorityby the state as opposed to private acts of the state. Further,we claim that the linkages between investment arbitration anddomestic legal systems are more direct and more closely integratedthan other forms of international adjudication in the publicsphere. For these reasons, we argue that the emerging regimeof investment arbitration is to be understood as constitutingan important and powerful manifestation of global administrativelaw.     

Police use of force: examining the relationship between calls for service and the balance of police force and suspect resistance

Over the past decade, the use of force by the police has become an important public policy concern and topic of social science research. A number of researchers hypothesized about the factors that explain the amount of force used by police officers. Prior research focused almost exclusively on the highest level of force used in police-citizen interactions and neglected to examine the relative amount of forced used by the police compared to that used by suspects. To address this shortcoming, this study analyzed data from three years of official use-of-force reports in the Miami-Dade Police Department (MDPD). Contrary to studies that examine only the use of force by the police, this study found that the relative amount of force used by the police was greatest in the less threatening types of offenses. The implications of this study for research and policy are discussed.     

Sex differences in the experience of child sexual victimization

This study analyzed 390 (303 girls and 87 boys) cases of child sexual abuse to understand sex differences in child sexual victimization. Analyses focused on three domains that have received considerable empirical attention: victims' relationships with the offender, type and extent of abuse, and disclosure. Findings largely replicated previous efforts that reported sex differences in terms of victims' relationships with offenders. Although results also replicated previous findings about sex differences in disclosure patterns, these sex differences were minor in comparison with similarities in the way most instances of abuse were eventually identified. In terms of type and extent of abuse, results were the opposite of previous findings: girls, not boys, were the victims of more physical injury, violent threats, and use of force; and girls, not boys, were more likely to have physically resisted abuse. Divergences in findings were interpreted in terms of memory biases and social forces operating differently on the sexes.     

Birth spacing as a family strategy: evidence from 19th century Leuven, Belgium

This article investigates the hypothesis that 19th-century working class families in Leuven, Belgium, were controlling their fertility by means of birth spacing for household economic reasons. Detailed life-course data were collected in order to construct, on one hand, a set of covariates that represent the influences of natural fertility on birth intervals and, on the other, a number of family variables that represent the hypothetical, household economic motivation to space births. The findings strongly suggest that birth intervals were not merely a function of natural fertility differences and that family strategic spacing behavior also played a role.     

Household dissolution, child care and divorce law

This paper sets up a model of household dissolution in which one party decides to leave a household that contains children. We study the effects of divorce law on this decision and, in particular, the role of legal provisions governing the post-dissolution care of the household’s children. In particular, we show that there is an inevitable tension between achieving efficiency in marriage and at the same time achieving efficiency in divorce.