Types and Causes of lawyers' Professional Liability Claims: The Search for Facts

Lawyers have become concerned about the rising numbers and the rising amounts of professional liability claims, which have in turn driven up liability insurance premiums and temporarily even caused an alarming contraction in the supply of insurance coverage. This article examines the state of factual information that could be used to measure and explain the development. It goes on to discuss the potential role that increased knowledge of the types and causes of professional liability claims could play in efforts to reverse the development, followed by a discussion of the difficulties of obtaining usable data from the two principal potential sources—lawyers and their insurers. The second half of the article describes and evaluates the work of the American Bar Association's Special Committee on Lawyers' Professional Liability in developing, in cooperation with the major insurers, a comprehensive data collection and reporting system for lawyers' professional liability claims.     

Management im Krankenhaus – Eine Fallstudie zur Bearbeitung der Innen- und Außenspannungen unter den Bedingungen des deutschen DRG-Systems

The article discusses the management of a municipal hospital from the standpoint of its currently typical internal and external tensions. Based on the results of a reconstructive study, the paper investigates how the associated perspectives of reflection are processed and related to one another by actors. This provides insight into the main problems experienced by a contemporary hospital. In addition to the theoretical background of management sociology, the discussion draws attention to what research needs, both methodologically and metatheoretically, to be able to be sensitive not only to the empirical co-presence of multiple institutional logics and perspectives, but also to permit the question as to how these logics and perspectives are related to each other in concrete practice.     

Work-Family Conflict and Intimate Partner Violence in the South Korean Military: Mediating Role of Aggression and Buffering Effect of a Counseling Resource

The objective of the current study was to identify the relationship between work-family conflict (WFC) and intimate partner violence (IPV) among military personnel, and verify the mediating role of aggression and buffering effect of a counseling resource. A total of 293 married Korean Air Force personnel were surveyed using a self-administered questionnaire; their responses were analyzed with a structural equation model. The major findings were that 36.9 % of respondents have perpetrated IPV, the prevalence of verbal violence was 33.4 % and physical violence was 16.0 %. Aggression mediated the important part of the association between WFC and IPV. Also, presence of a counseling resource attenuated the relationship between WFC and aggression. The findings suggest that it is necessary for the military to build a personnel counseling system to prevent spouse abuse, develop professional counseling services, and accurately identify aggression tendencies among military personnel.     

Berlin's Republic: Parliamentary government in a German land

Berlin is the only German Land that has had to manage its own reunification and originally many hoped that it would turn into a model for east–west reconciliation. Yet 15 years later there is widespread consensus that Berlin failed to live up to the challenges of the time and adequately deal with the consequences of reunification. Instead of embarking on structural reforms Berlin produced its own version of a Reformstau. The article describes and examines some basic features of the party system in Berlin and the Berlin polity. It will thus give an answer to the question as to how unification affected the institutional setting in this Land. Overall it will be shown that the Reformstau in Berlin cannot be explained by a fragmented political system or powerful veto players. Political stagnation in Berlin rather was due to the combined effects of party system change, institutional stagnation, and constitutionally inhibited political leadership.