Terrorist Finance: Asking the Right Questions

An emerging critical literature from within and outside academia argues that existing understandings of the financing of terrorism are at best severely dysfunctional, and at worst malignantly so. This article argues that at the root of this dysfunction is a failure to ask the 'right' questions about terrorist financing. The right questions, the article finds, are only tangentially related to the supposed mystery of 'who finances and how they do it', and instead revolve around, first, specifying how financial activity influences terrorist behaviour and, second, assessing what such activity tells us about the place terrorists truly occupy in today's global system.     

Project Overview and Emerging Themes

The law has traditionally been, and will remain, a fundamental tool for addressing health care reform in the United States. With this premise in mind, the Legal Solutions in Health Reform project was initiated. The project overview provides a broad understanding of the purpose and layout of the project; the formulation and definition of key legal issues; a brief review of each of the topics covered in the project; a survey of current health statistics in the United States; a discussion of the role of the federal versus state roles in health reform; a review of agencies and committees with jurisdiction over health reform issues; and a survey of means of enforcing health reform efforts.     

The Allocation of Environmental Investigation Costs between the Defense and Indemnity Obligations under General Liability Policies

For policyholders responding to administrative demands of federal or state environmental agencies, the allocation of environmental consultant costs between a carrier's defense and indemnity obligations is a frequent source of disagreement. Likely due to the fact-sensitive nature of such disagreements, existing case law lacks consistency in the analysis of such issues. This article analyzes different legal standards adopted by courts to analyze this issue. Although each court recognizes the fact-intensive nature of the inquiry, some courts are quite detailed in their analysis while others simply seek to achieve a sense of “rough justice.” As a result, attorneys involved in such disputes must have both an understanding of the specific legal standards employed by the courts as well as an understanding of the specific facts that may ultimately tip the scales.     

DNA analysis of ingested tomato and pepper seeds

Ingested food is one of the important types of forensic evidence obtained during a medicolegal autopsy. Many materials containing seeds pass through the human digestive system and are still recognizable; thus, they can be valuable for providing investigative leads. Currently, the identification of seeds relies on microscopic and morphologic examination. However this method sometimes can be problematic. For example, the microscopic appearance of the ingested tomato and pepper seeds is very similar; thus, it is not always easy to distinguish these seeds by comparing their physical characteristics. Tomato and pepper seeds were selected as a model system to assess the value of performing DNA analysis as an alternate and/or complimentary means of seed identification. Results of blind testing indicate that the deoxyribonucleic acid-amplified fragment length polymorphism (DNA-AFLP) results were able to discriminate between pepper and tomato seed samples after they passed through the digestive system.