The dilemmas of citizenship: Limitations on canadian legal rights

Since the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadian courts have been burdened with a disproportionate number of cases concerned with issues arising from the newly introduced legal rights. However, the transition from the Canadian crime-control model to the American-style due-process model is far from complete. The rights of the accused are consistently deemed to be secondary to the aim of reinforcing the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. Canadians' legal rights will in fact remain limited as long as judges continue to decide cases on the basis of harm done to the justice system, rather than individuals and groups. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a joint session of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association and the Canadian Law and Society Association, Leamed Societies Conference, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario; June 7, 1993. I thank attending colleagues for their useful feedback. I am also grateful for the comments of Piers Beime.     

Off with their Heads: The Need to Criminalize some forms of Scientific Misconduct

Improvement in policy for the management of scientific misconduct has been slow. While assurance of due process at the ORI level is now in place, similar protections at the institutional level and institutional responsibility for further oversight and a workplace where the responsible conduct of research can be practiced have not yet been addressed. In contrast, policy regarding human subject protection has evolved rapidly to reflect firmer norms, with decisive priority given to subject protection over scientific or social needs. Perhaps because scientific misconduct policy has the potential to harm the careers of individual scientists and harms to individual subjects are thought to be indirect, the scientific community has been successful in blocking every move toward testing more rigorous regulation. The mantras that scientists can discipline their own, and the price of competitive science is some level of scientific misconduct are not persuasive. The standards by which science is judged should not be an exception to those governing others who deal with the public's money and have a duty to the public interest.     

Cleavage Formation in Norway: The Contextual Dimension

To explore the mechanism underlying the formation and persistence of cleavage structures the author applies a contextual approach in the case of Norway where regional variation in political cleavages persists over time. This study focuses on the time period between 1890 and 1930, the formative years of the Norwegian party system. The premise of the argument is that a factor contributing to persisting patterns of electoral mobilization is the location of new voters in patterns of social interaction deriving from the class composition in different regions. Initial electoral mobilizations coupled with enduring social structures can be carried on for a long time. These social conditions may pose high costs of mobilization to new parties in a political system. The article shows the persistence of a distinct class composition across regions in Norway and demonstrates the contextual effect by examining the behaviour of new voters in the 1900 election. It evaluates the contextual argument against other party incentives for mobilization by means of a statistical model that incorporates contextual incentives in addition to incentives deriving from electoral rules and political competition.