The new outlawry and Foucault’s Panoptic nightmare

Michel Foucault seized upon Bentham’s “Panopticon” prison design as a metaphor to illustrate the mechanisms of social control in post-industrial society. In our recent rush to invent alternatives to incarceration, we have created a new and burgeoning class of outlaws, persons for whom privacy is not a legally cognizable right. Combined with Supreme Court decisions finding surveillance of even innocent citizens to be constitutionally benign, our well-intentioned efforts to reduce prison populations are close to bringing Foucault’s metaphor to literal reality.     

Foreign Policy Analysis: British and American Orientations and Methodologies

This paper is concerned with examining the extent to which there is a geographical divide in the academic study of foreign policy analysis. Accepting that there are diverse approaches to that study in the academic communities of the United States and the United Kingdom, this paper argues that it is possible to distinguish between two ideal-types, each exemplified in one of the two communities. This paper outlines these–an American approach based on a desire to construct general theories of foreign policy behaviour, and a British approach which stresses the need for casestudies and eschews the possibility of general theory. The reasons for the development of these two approaches are then discussed, linking the study of foreign policy to the wider political arena, and the general academic orientation of the two countries. Finally, it assesses the possibility of arriving at a synthesis of the two approaches.     

Forensic comparison of soils by bacterial community DNA profiling

This preliminary investigation has shown that a soil microbial community DNA profile can be obtained from the small sample of soil recovered from the sole of a shoe, and from soil stains on clothing. We have also shown that these profiles are representative of the site of collection and therefore could potentially be used as associative evidence to prove a link between suspects and crime scenes. Soil community profiles were obtained using the T-RFLP fingerprinting method that uses fluorescent primer technology and semi-automated analysis techniques similar to those used in human DNA profiling in forensic laboratories.     

Since September 11, All Roads Lead to Rome

The Bush administration has repudiated President Clintons signature on the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. This repudiation comes when the war on terrorism is directed against the very crimes denounced in the Rome Statute. Critical criminology has been skeptical of criminal law regimes within nations on the ground that they legitimize pre-existing power relationships. The criminal law regime among nations in the Rome Statute is the only method to delegitimize military force by any permanent member of the U.N. Security Council as well as the only forum to try accused terrorists that can offer an appearance of fairness.