In search of interactive globalisation: Critical criminology in South Africa's transition

Maureen Cain (2000) identifies orientalism and occidentalism as features of much criminological writing on ``non–western' societies. As alternatives to these opposite but complimentary tendencies, she argues for the possibility of mutual and reciprocal learning under conditions of interactive globalisation. The purpose of this article is to look for evidence of orientalism, occidentalism and interactive globalisation in the exchange of critical criminological ideas between North and South during the period of South Africa's transition to democracy. The discussion focuses on two bodoes of critical criminological work –– left realism and nodal governance theory –– and traces their development–in–use both as examples of criminological theorising and attempts to reshape the practice of policing. traces of orientalism and occidentalism are detected in the evolution of critical criminology in South Africa over the last 25 years, but it is argued that the exchange of criminological ideas has been far from unidirectional and can indeed be characterised as a continuing process of interactive globalisation.     

Seasonal Affective Disorder: Clerk Training and the Success of Supreme Court Certiorari Petitions

We investigate why the Supreme Court grants a smaller percentage of cases at the first conference of each term compared to other conferences. According to received wisdom, Supreme Court law clerks are overly cautious at the beginning of their tenure because they receive only a brief amount of training. Reputational concerns motivate clerks to provide fewer recommendations to grant review in cert. pool memos written over the summer months. Using a random sample of petitions from the Blackmun Archives, we code case characteristics, clerk recommendation, and the Court's decision on cert. Nearest neighbor matching suggests clerks are 36 percent less likely to recommend grants in their early cert. pool memos. Because of this temporal discrepancy, petitions arriving over the summer have a 16 percent worse chance of being granted by the Court. This seasonal variation in access to the Court's docket imposes a legally irrelevant burden on litigants who have little control over the timing of their appeal.     

Insurance fraud in Taiwan: Reflections on regulatory effort and criminological complexity

The nature and prevalence of insurance fraud has been studied only to a limited extent, even in the USA and Europe. Nevertheless, national authorities have pressed ahead with various approaches to control such fraud. This paper briefly outlines the nature and difficulties around measurement of insurance fraud and reviews key international trends in the regulation of fraud. It then presents the findings of an empirical study of insurance fraud in Taiwan and recent proposals for anti-fraud control. It analyses these findings in the context of actual practices of insurance companies which give evidence to the idea that ‘moral hazard’ is embedded in the institutional arrangements, social relationships, and moral economies of private insurance.     

Toward a Green-Cultural Criminology of “the Rural”

There are many connections between the various strands of critical criminology. Previously, we highlighted common issues between green and cultural criminology, while also noting some of the ways that each perspective could potentially benefit from cross-fertilization (Brisman and South in Crime Media Cult 9(2):115–135, 2013, Green cultural criminology: constructions of environmental harm, consumerism and resistance to ecocide. Routledge, Oxford, 2014; McClanahan in Crit Criminol. doi:10.1007/s10612-014-9241-8, 2014). In this article, we extend our analysis to consider green, cultural and rural criminologies through the exposition of several key issues, including “the rural” as local context in which exploitative global forces may exercise power; agribusiness and the food/profit chain; farming and the pollution of land, water and air; and finally, cultural/media images and narratives of rural life. We focus more specifically on this final intersectionality through an analysis of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010), analyzing his depictions of rural people, environmental activists, and the rural environment through the issue of mountaintop removal. We conclude our article by identifying several examples of key directions in which the intersectionality of green, cultural and rural criminologies might proceed, including trafficking and abuse of farmworkers, harms associated with the cultivation of quinoa, and a critical interpretation of media and popular narrative depictions of environmental issues within rural contexts.