Law and the political stakes of global crises: Lessons from development practice for a coronavirus world

Law has translated the coronavirus crisis into politically salient forms in people's lives, from states of emergency, to border closures, to mask mandates. Yet political theory work on these forms has focused on constraining arbitrary state power. In this paper, I try to broaden this focus. Substantively, I argue that policy and its implementation also matter to how we theorize the role of law in crises, in terms of how we understand the political power of society and its relationship to the state. Methodologically, I argue that thinking about law in this way is more than a complement to or replacement for thinking about constraints on arbitrariness. Rather, different forms of thinking about law and crisis should constantly be used to critique each other in order to pursue the sorts of legal innovations required by geomobile and interconnected crises. Given that the current pandemic and its broader consequences are still unfolding, I turn to development policy and practice to demonstrate the process and consequence of such ongoing critique in action. Studying rule of law reforms—including during the West African Ebola crisis—I show how practitioners continually reimagined law in ways that facilitated ongoing legal innovation that could adapt to the politics of the crisis.     

Average Probability that a "Cold Hit" in a DNA Database Search Results in an Erroneous Attribution

Abstract:  We consider a hypothetical series of cases in which the DNA profile of a crime-scene sample is found to match a known profile in a DNA database (i.e., a "cold hit"), resulting in the identification of a suspect based only on genetic evidence. We show that the average probability that there is another person in the population whose profile matches the crime-scene sample but who is not in the database is approximately 2( N  −  d ) p _A , where N is the number of individuals in the population, d is the number of profiles in the database, and p _A is the average match probability (AMP) for the population. The AMP is estimated by computing the average of the probabilities that two individuals in the population have the same profile. We show further that if a priori each individual in the population is equally likely to have left the crime-scene sample, then the average probability that the database search attributes the crime-scene sample to a wrong person is ( N  −  d ) p _A .     

STR polymorphism among two tribal populations of India

Two tribal populations of India, Bison Horn Maria and Muria from Bastar district of Madhya Pradesh in Central India were studied for DNA polymorphisms at tetranucleotide short tandem repeat (STR) loci (F13A01 and HUMvWA). A total of 63 random adult individuals for F13A01 locus and 53 samples for HUMvWA were analyzed in the present study.     

The 2016 Local Government Elections in KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa: Is Jesus on His Way?

Post-1994, the African National Congress (ANC) has increasingly allied itself to traditional authorities in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). Part of the reason for this has been to undermine the support base of the Inkatha Freedom Party. In more recent times, the alliance between chiefs and the ANC has seen them linked to mining interests, often running roughshod over local forms of resistance. In addition, the August 2016 local government elections showed a weakening of ANC support in some of these rural hotspots of KZN, thus creating the possibilities for activists to build alliances anew.