The Formal Divide: Customary Rights and the Allocation of Credit to Agriculture in Tanzania

It is generally held that one mechanism to enable inclusive growth in Tanzania is enabling farmers to access credit to raise productivity and incomes. The formalisation of property rights in Tanzania is being undertaken by a multiplicity of actors at great expense to donors, individuals and the government. While there have been a variety of different justifications for allocating Certificates of Customary Rights of Occupancy (CCROs) to farmers in Tanzania, perhaps the most prominent argument is that it will enable farmers to finally overcome the divide between ‘informal’ customary rights and the formal banking sector. CCROs would provide the collateral that would induce banks to lend money to small-scale farmers. As part of a six-year investigation in Manyara, Mbeya and Dodoma regions, our research team evaluated the impact of formalisation on farmers’ access to credit. The paper will present the results while pointing to the continuing institutional and market imperfections that perpetuate the formal divide.     

Severity of penalty,seriousness of the charge,and mock jurors' verdicts

It has been suggested that jurors in criminal trials are less likely to convict when the penalty is more severe or the charge is more serious. This was explained by Kerr (1975) in terms of a perceived increase in the cost of a Type I error (convicting an innocent person) that resulted in a criterion shift in the amount of evidence jurors required to vote guilty. The previous research found only weak support for the prediction regarding severity but consistent support for the predicted effect of seriousness. However, in the case materials used in these studies, more evidence was legally required to prove guilt on the more serious charges. This article presents studies in which the amount of evidence needed to prove guilt was equated for all charges. Under these circumstances, there was no effect on verdicts of seriousness of charge or severity of penalty and no evidence of a criterion shift due to either variable. There may still be reason to believe that these factors affect real juries, but this belief is not supported by the systematic evidence from mock jury studies.     

New Legal Realism and the Ethnography of Transnational Law

The new legal realism builds on the strengths of the legal realism of the early twentieth century, viewing law as a set of social processes embedded in historical and political contexts. As it addresses sociolegal phenomena of the early twenty-first century, however, the new legal realism is more attentive to the effects of transnationalism, legal culture, and legal consciousness, and the way ideas and norms travel and are adopted around the world. Asking questions of this kind requires new, more multi-sited or deterritorialized methods of scholarship. This article explores these new perspectives and their methodologies through an examination of the use of human rights in the international movement against violence against women.     

Narrating Domestic Violence: Producing the "Truth' of Violence in 19th' and 20th-century Hawaiian Courts

Stories told by and about men who batter women in the courts of Hawai in the mid-19th century and in the late 20th century are strikingly similar. Courts, then as now, accept some justifications for battering and reject others, in the process constructing the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate violence. Throughout this period, the legal system claimed to focus only on the violent act itself, not the emotional or personal violation. The law interprets the violence as brute fact, knowable without regard to the social relationship or system of cultural meanings within which it occurs. There are persistent contradictions between the law's construction of domestic violence as an unambiguous physical act and litigants' and judges' views that these violent acts are moments within the social dynamics of gendered power relations. At the same time, there are recurrent tensions between the efforts of the legal system to portray violent acts against women in terms of rational categories of action and, in contrast, the experience of violence and the meanings within which it occurs that are often opaque to such sense-making, defiant of a simple means-ends calculus.     

The influence of fit perceptions, equal opportunity policies, and social support network on pre-entry police officer career commitment and intentions to remain

This longitudinal field study examined the influence of (1) perceived person-job and person-organization fit, (2) social support network, and, (3) equal employment opportunity (EEO) policy on pre-entry career commitment and intentions to remain in the profession. In addition, the study explored whether gender moderated the relationship between equal employment opportunity policy and pre-entry career commitment and intentions to remain in the profession. The sample consisted of 116 Australian police force applicants who completed a questionnaire prior to formal selection procedures (Time 1) and on completion of the selection procedure (Time 2). Hierarchical regression analyses showed that perceived fit perceptions and EEO policy were significant predictors of pre-entry career commitment and intentions to remain in the profession; social support network was a significant predictor of the latter, but not the former variable. Analyses showed that gender was not a moderator variable. The practical and future research implications of the results are discussed.     

Proposed EU accession to the Hague Agreement on international registration of designs

The European Commission proposes to link the Community designsystem, which protects designs within the EU, with the internationaldesign registration system of the World Intellectual PropertyOrganisation (WIPO).     

Fragmenting Fatherhood: The Regulation of Reproductive Technologies

Reproductive technologies offer the potential to break down parenthood into a number of constituent parts. These disruptive possibilities mean that the regulation of reproductive technologies holds important potential for study, providing a significant resource that has been little analysed with regard to fatherhood. This study attempts to remedy that lacuna through consideration of a range of recent developments in this area of English law. It reaches two general conclusions. First, while the law regulating reproductive technologies attributes great importance to fatherhood, this is rooted primarily (though not exclusively) in concerns for the symbolic importance of fathers, rather than in more practical considerations such as ensuring financial provision or a second hands-on carer for a child. Secondly, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (1990) contains a clear attempt to protect and entrench the role of the father as completing the nuclear family. However, recent developments suggest that this legal preference for the nuclear family is subject to clear emerging cracks.