Belt and Suspenders? The World Heritage Convention's Role in Confronting Climate Change

In the face of increasing frustration with the tepid, and largely feckless, national and international institutional responses to the growing threat of climate change, many governments, as well as non-governmental actors, have either initiated or are exploring potential causes of action in judicial and quasi-judicial fora. This article explores one of these recent actions, the petitions before the World Heritage Committee requesting listing of several sites listed as World Heritage Sites under the World Heritage Convention on the List of World Heritage in Danger. The article explores the contours of the petitions filed to the Committee, the potential implications of listing of sites threatened by climate change on the List of World Heritage in Danger and the merits of the legal arguments advanced in opposition to such listings.     

Shadow Writing and Participant Observation: A Study of Criminal Justice Social Work Around Sentencing

The study of decision‐making by public officials in administrative settings has been a mainstay of law and society scholarship for decades. The methodological challenges posed by this research agenda are well understood: how can socio‐legal researchers get inside the heads of legal decision‐makers in order to understand the uses of official discretion? This article describes an ethnographic technique the authors developed to help them penetrate the decision‐making practices of criminal justice social workers in writing pre‐sentence reports for the courts. This technique, called ‘shadow writing’, involved a particular form of participant observation whereby the researcher mimicked the process of report writing in parallel with the social workers. By comparing these ‘shadow reports’ with the real reports in a training‐like setting, the social workers revealed in detail the subtleties of their communicative strategies embedded in particular reports and their sensibilities about report writing more generally.     

1989 and Post-Cold War Policymaking: Were the “Wrong” Lessons Learned from the Fall of Communism?

Twenty years after the events of 1989, most American academics and policymakers continue to see the end of the Cold War as a victory for the United States. This Cold War “triumphalism” is based on a number of assumptions which have, in turn, served as important framing devices for US foreign policy. This chapter argues that the “wrong lessons” were learned from the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. These lessons were based on a misreading of both Cold War history, in general, and its endgame, more specifically. This chapter outlines ten such lessons and explores the ways in which they were used to legitimate policies of regime change from above after 9/11. In this way, we can see a direct line between Berlin in 1989 and Baghdad in 2003, one driven by the hubris of both US policymakers and intellectuals.     

Adapting and Applying the Phenice (1969) Adult Morphological Sex Estimation Technique to Subadults

This research evaluated whether adult morphological sex estimation methods of the innominate could be adapted and applied to subadults. The subpubic concavity, described by Phenice (1969) and revised by Klales et al. (2012), was modified for use with subadults. Two observers scored radiographic images from the PATRICIA database of 334 individuals of both sexes aged between 1.19 and 20.47 years. Score frequencies shifted from score 2 (straight) to higher frequencies of score 3 (convexity) in males and score 1 (concavity) in females with increasing age. Using ordinal logistic regression, sex classification was highest for the oldest age cohort at 97.2% and then decreased by age cohort. Interobserver error rendered a high level of agreement (0.806) using the intraclass correlation coefficient. Results indicate that the Klales method can be modified and applied to subadults to accurately estimate sex following the onset of puberty with a high degree of reliability and validity.     

Living victims of strangulation: a 10-year review of cases in a metropolitan community

The prevalence of reported domestic violence or intimate partner violence has greatly increased, with approximately 1.5 million women violently assaulted annually in the United States by an intimate partner. Strangulation is often seen in violence against women, including domestic violence cases. Strangulation is defined as "a form of asphyxia characterized by closure of the blood vessels or air passages of the neck as a result of external pressure on the neck." This is a 10-year case review of 102 living victims of strangulation who underwent medicolegal evaluation at the Clinical Forensic Medicine Program at a State Medical Examiner's Office serving Southern Indiana and all of Kentucky. The majority of victims (79%) were strangled by an intimate partner, and manual strangulation was the most common method (83%). A total of 38 victims (38%) described a history of domestic violence, and the same number lost consciousness while being strangled. Nine (9%) women were pregnant at the time of the attack, while 13 (13%) had a history of being sexually abused in addition to being strangled. A paucity of cases involved only strangulation, as most of the victims were subjected to myriad forms of blunt force trauma which included not only the head and neck but also other bodily regions. This is a unique presentation of strangulation of living persons as most evidence of strangulation in the forensic literature has been derived from postmortem examinations of the victims. This comprehensive study discussing the examination of a living strangulation victim offers valuable insight into the mechanism and the physical findings involved in the strangulation process.     

Global warming and state-corporate crime: the politicalization of global warming under the Bush administration

Global warming is one of the most significant and difficult issues facing the world today. As result, researchers in a number of disciplines have directed their attention to addressing issues relevant to the study of and responses to global warming. This has been less true in the social sciences, and especially within specific social sciences such as criminology, in comparison to the physical sciences. Global warming does, however, have criminological and sociological relevance on several levels. This article examines one of those levels by exploring the politicalization of global warming under the Bush Administration, and addresses this issue as an example of state-corporate crime.     

The impacts of the Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University shootings on fear of crime on campus

There has been a substantial increase in the number of mass shooting incidents on college campuses in the United States in recent years. Although empirical research examined the impacts of secondary school shootings on student fear, there have been no comparable studies of the impacts of campus shootings. This study began to fill this void by examining responses to surveys administered to convenience samples of students enrolled at the University of South Carolina prior to and following the mass shooting incidents on the campuses of Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University. Findings indicated that both shootings were associated with modest increases in various measures of fear. Other findings were that the impacts of the shootings depended on both the type of fear measured (e.g., general fear versus fear of being a victim of specific crimes) and student characteristics such as age, sex, and race.     

Adult guardianship: human rights or social justice?

Adult guardianship in English-speaking countries has its roots firmly planted in the protective parens patriae principle. In the last 20 years, in response to societal changes and international developments, concerns about human rights have fundamentally challenged the historic basis of guardianship. This article argues that social justice offers a better framework than human rights for adult guardianship legislation.