Assisted suicide and the inalienable right to life

This article focuses on a topic largely overlooked by both the supporters and opponents of assisted suicide. The legalization of suicide assistance damages the interests of persons who value the law's full and equal protection of their lives by designating them as eligible for help in killing themselves. Measures such as Oregon's Death with Dignity Act regard every person diagnosed as having a terminal condition as a candidate for suicide assistance, as if the protection of life was an alienable interest for this class. Thus all members of the eligible class, including those opposed to assisted suicide, lose the status of being regarded by law as having an inalienable right to the protection of life. This status-based injury should inform the standing and substantive constitutional questions raised by a state's adoption of such a policy.     

Democracy and bureaucracy in newly industrialized countries: A systematic comparison between Latin America and East Asia

This article analyzes the political-institutional determinants of bureaucracy quality among a group of newly industrialized countries in Latin America and East Asia democratized in the Third Wave. Four causal conditions are examined for the occurrence of higher levels of bureaucratic “weberianess” in the selected cases: historical sequence, political parties' institutionalization, electoral competition, and ethnic politics. The study employs the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to explore the expectation that each of these conditions' implications depends on other conditions' presence or absence. The findings disconfirm claims about the critical role of party system institutionalization for Weberian bureaucracies in new democracies. Besides, the analysis did not declare a professional public administration's prior existence before democratization as a necessary or sufficient condition for the outcome of interest. Finally, although the electoral competition was declared necessary for the outcome occurrence, it does not imply the same result if combined with ethnic politics.     

Profile of Men Who Are Victims of Physical Violence by an Intimate Partner

The objective of this study was to characterize the profile of men who are victims of interpersonal physical violence (IPV) by an intimate partner. This study is a retrospective analysis of suspected cases of male victims of IPV by an intimate partner, aged 18 years or older, treated at a Forensic Medicine and Dentistry Center in Brazil. Sociodemographic variables of the victims, the types of violence and the patterns of injuries were evaluated. Over this period, 1520 suspected victims of IPV by an intimate partner were examined; 14.6 % (n = 222) of them were men. Based on Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) two dimensions were formed: the first dimension (internal reliability = 0613) was primarily formed by the relationship between aggressor and victim, the marital status and the type of IPV, and the second dimension (reliability = 0509) by the day of week, the period of day and the marital status.