Government lawyers and the training of senior civil servants. Maintaining law at the heart of the French state

To assess the influence of law and jurists in the conduct of contemporary French state, this article examines the role of the Council of State at ENA (École Nationale d'Administration), the main school for top civil servants. Although the study reveals the decreasing part of law in the bureaucratic capital over the past fifty years, it also shows how government lawyers have resisted this downsizing process. The teaching of a subject called ‘legistics’ provides top officials with a different view of law. Dedicated to promoting the political utility of law, legistics complies with managerial values while it sticks to the Weberian model of bureaucracy. As a result of the introduction of legistics, new techniques of legal drafting have been spreading within French public administration. Legistics thus plays a role in the contemporary reshaping of public legal practices, as well as in the renewing of legal legitimacy in the reform of public affairs.     

Caught in an Authoritarian Trap of Its Own Making? Brazil's ‘Lava Jato’ Anti-Corruption Investigation and the Politics of Prosecutorial Overreach

The negative and corrosive impacts of corruption in the fields of economics, politics, and law are widely discussed. Less understood are the potentially negative impacts of anti-corruption struggles and strategies themselves. This article presents a case study of Brazil's ‘Car Wash’ (‘Lava Jato’) scandal from a legal and political perspective. Although the subsequent Operation Car Wash investigation was widely regarded as remarkably successful, supposedly buttressing the rule of law through high-profile prosecutions of leading politicians and businesspersons, the article argues that legal due process, wider constitutional law, and the political process were undermined. While the use of media leaks to strengthen the investigation proved tactically successful, when coupled with new legal instruments it undermined the presumption of innocence and contributed to a climate in which political and legal debates themselves became increasingly subordinated to simplistic polarizing anti-corruption discourses, thereby undermining an already fragile political and institutional environment.     

Disparities in the Spending Needs of Highland Municipalities

A certain rough consensus holds that highland municipalities have higher spending needs than others, because of the particularly adverse conditions in which they provide essential public services. However, there is no empirical evidence to support this assertion. This study examines whether any relevant differences actually exist in the spending policies of highland and lowland municipalities. To this end, we make logarithmic estimations of per capita municipal spending in order to determine whether the indicators selected, which are based on local government powers, adequately reflect spending needs. Our results point to the special circumstances of highland districts as a key explanatory factor for higher municipal spending, along with demographic factors, locational population patterns, economic activity, subsidies, and local fiscal capacity.     

Forensic medical assessment of the mechanisms of development of gunshot lesions caused by elastic destructive agents

This paper reports the results of analysis of the data obtained in experimental studies and practical expert assessments of body injuries inflicted by rubber balls for traumatic weapons. The causes accounting for the polymorphism of such injuries and the mechanisms of their development were elucidated by means of damage simulation taking into consideration the physical and dynamic properties of elastic ball-type destructive agents and the morphological structure of different anatomical regions of the human body. The results of the study may be of interest for differential diagnostics of gunshot lesions caused by elastic destructive agents.     

NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSING INVESTMENTS AND VIOLENT CRIME IN SEATTLE, 1981–2007*

Despite significant advances in the study of neighborhoods and crime, criminologists have paid surprisingly less attention to the extralocal forces that shape violence. To address this issue, we draw on an emerging body of work that stresses the role of home mortgage lending—a resource secured via interaction with external actors—in reducing neighborhood violence and extend it by addressing concerns that the lending–violence relationship is spurious and confounded by simultaneity. We explore the longitudinal relationship between residential mortgage lending and violence in Seattle with a pooled time series of 118 census tracts over 27 years, and we instrument our endogenous predictors (home mortgage lending and violent crime) with changes in their levels from prior periods. Employing Arellano–Bond difference models, we assess both the effect of mortgage lending on violent crime as well as the effect of violent crime levels on mortgage activity. We find that infusions of home mortgage lending yield reductions in subsequent violent crime; yet the impact of violent crime on subsequent lending is not significant. Results underscore the importance of incorporating external forces such as home mortgage lending into explanations of neighborhood violence.     

Ways of Solving Conflicts of Constitutional Rights: Proportionalism and Specificationism*

This paper deals with the question of the conflict of constitutional rights with regard to basic rights. Two extreme accounts are outlined: the subsumptive approach and the particularistic approach, that embody two main conceptions of practical rationality. Between the two approaches there is room for a range of options, two of which are examined: the proportionalist approach, which conserves the scope of rights restricting their stringency, and the specificationist approach, which preserves the stringency of rights restricting their scope. I will present arguments in defence of the latter.     

The limits to royal power: contrafueros or actions against violations of privileges in the Valencian parliamentary assemblies until 1604

SUMMARY

The parlement of Navarre, which was located at Pau (1620–1789), had a very distinctive existence during the crisis years 1760–70. The first to experience a purge in May 1765, through a series of forced resignations of magistrates, which culminated in the Maupeou reforms of 1771, this parlement was the last to resume its functions after ten years of exile in 1775. If no one doubts the urgent need for a reform of the judiciary in the eighteenth century, and as part of it a virtual revolution at the heart of the magistracy, the methods adopted by the royal government have not ceased to divide French historians, who have rarely gone beyond the parameters of contemporary debate, which contrast two revolutions: that of the king for the common interest and that of the office holders for the interests of the nobility. The crisis of 1765 had originated in a local disciplinary problem but in a context of exacerbated national protests over taxation and resulted in a purge of most of the magistrates, amid a local indifference that was scarcely mitigated by the few gestures of support from fellow magistrates. A careful study of the parlementaire discourse of the new officers appointed by Maupeou, the ‘interlopers’, drawn from the bourgeois members of the local Bar, reveals in reality a disturbing continuity with that of the ‘expelled’ magistrates. Ridiculed by public opinion, harassed by the Estates of Béarn and by the intendant, and on top of that poorly rewarded for their devotion to the royal authority, the new magistrates, who had suffered a total lack of appreciation, displayed to extremes the defensive attitudes of the traditional office holders. This unwavering stand throws new light on the continuities of a political culture and modifies as too simplified and one-dimensional assessments of the principles and discourse of the parlementaire opposition.