Visual Jurisprudence of the American Yellow Traffic Light

In the United States, the steady yellow light means that a driver should either speed up or slow down. State laws written about a driver’s behavior at these yellow lights are vague and indeterminate and result in what is referred to as the dilemma zone (Hurwitz et al. in Transp Res Part F Traffic Psychol Behav 15(2): 132–143, 2012). This paper will reconsider law’s vagueness as intentional rather than problematic, insofar as cultural understandings of the yellow light lead to a framework of visual jurisprudence in which drivers interact with law through legal discretion and common sense confronting a yellow light. Through a jurisprudential juxtaposition between the yellow light and red light cameras used to enforce yellow lights, the semiotics of automaticity compete with the semiotics of context-bound decision-making.     

Britain's smart meter programme: A case study in privacy by design

Following requirements in the 1996 EU Energy Efficiency Directive, member states are developing programmes to encourage the installation of ‘smart’ power meters that record much larger quantities of data about power usage than traditional meters. These data can reveal a great deal of information about individual household activity, leading privacy regulators to call for privacy to be ‘designed in’ to these systems. The British smart metering programme has given some attention to this privacy by design process. This article assesses its effectiveness in this case, using documentary analysis, participant observation, and follow-up interviews with a range of stakeholders. It finds that decisions made early in the British programme had negative privacy impacts that have only been partially remedied by the later development of detailed rules on the processing of smart meter data by energy suppliers and distributors. The article also considers broader lessons for the privacy by design approach.     

Guilt,spectatorship and The third man

Abstract

Though no longer as strong a current in film theory as once it was, psychoanalysis presses upon one in looking at a film that looks as much like a film noir as The third man. If, in addition, one wishes to examine the theme of guilt in the film, then a psychoanalytical approach might appear inescapable. This paper seeks to escape it, not because it is wrong, but because, in relation to this particular film, at least, an alternative approach could prove revealing. Besides drawing upon some invaluable contextual work by other scholars on The third man, this paper seeks that alternative in an account of spectatorship and perception culled from Bishop Berkeley and Samuel Beckett. It is an approach that reveals the film's preoccupation with being as well as with power, and with the significant absence of certain religious concepts or preoccupations, which seem to have left the shape of their evacuation behind them in the film. It thus sheds light on the persistence of religious categories in modernity, and it brings into focus radically incommensurate points of view (e.g. of morality), whose clash the film dramatizes.     

No Sex Scandals Please,We’re French: French Attitudes towards Politicians’ Public and Private Conduct

The notion of distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres underpins much normative and practical engagement with political misconduct. What is less clear is whether citizens draw distinctions between misdemeanours in the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, and whether they judge these in systematically different ways. This paper explores attitudes to political misconduct in France. French citizens are often said to be particularly relaxed about politicians’ private affairs, but there has been little empirical evidence for this proposition. Drawing on original survey data, this paper demonstrates clearly that French citizens draw a sharp distinction between politicians’ public and private transgressions, and are more tolerant of the latter.     

Tax Code Knowledge and Behavioral Responses Among EITC Recipients: Policy Insights from Qualitative Data

We build on the robust quantitative literature on behavioral responses to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) by using in‐depth qualitative interviews with 115 EITC recipients to examine how they understand and respond to its incentive structures regarding earnings, marriage, and childbearing. We find that respondents consider their tax refund as a whole, without differentiating the portion from the EITC; as a result, they cannot predict how their EITC refund would change if they altered their labor supply or marital status. Incentives for childbearing are better understood, but are not specific to the EITC; rather, parents respond to a combination of tax deductions and credits as a whole. Respondents would like to maximize their refunds, but most cannot or would not alter their behavior due to structural constraints they face in the labor and marriage markets. Rather than adjust work hours, defer marriage, or have additional children, respondents exhibit a different type of behavioral response to the incentive structure of the EITC: They alter their tax filing status in order to maximize their refunds. They routinely claim zero exemptions and deductions on their W‐4s, file their tax returns as head of household rather than as married, and divide children among the tax returns of multiple caregivers. Although some of these behaviors qualify as tax noncompliance, they emerge because the intricacies of the tax code conflict with the complexity and fluidity of finances and family life in low‐income households.     

Helplessness and Hopelessness in Adolescents who Commit Sexual and Nonsexual Crimes

The authors’ purpose was to test the relationship of helplessness and hopefulness to experienced trauma, as well to explore the role of these emotions to sexual and nonsexual criminal behaviors among 332 residential youths adjudicated for sexual crimes. All subtypes of trauma measured were positively correlated with helplessness, whereas hopelessness was not associated with sexual or physical abuse. Helplessness was associated with the severity of sexual crimes, as well as the commission of multiple nonsexual crimes. Hopelessness was not associated to any sexual crime characteristics and only associated with general delinquency and property damage. In the regression models, controlling for trauma, helplessness predicted sexual and nonsexual criminality, and hopelessness predicted nonsexual criminality. Implications for practice, policy, and research are discussed.     

Commemoration as Symbolic Reparation: New Narratives or Spaces of Conflict?

This article examines the role of commemorative processes as a form of symbolic reparation and their potential use in deeply divided societies. After discussing definitions and contexts of symbolic reparation, it will then explore the tensions inherent in this process as it speedily encounters hybridisation, the construction of narratives of ethnic identity and the political contestation of memory in deeply divided societies. An overarching question will be how symbolic reparation might meaningfully allow for the seeding of human rights norms and values in divided societies, and thus aid the recasting of both inter-communal relations and engagement between citizen and state.