Book reviews

An Artificial Intelligence Approach to Legal Reasoning Anne Von Der Leith Gardner MIT Press 1987. £20.25

Design—The Modern Law and Practice Ian Morris and Barry Quest Butterworths. 1987. £45

Computers and the Law Richard Mawry and Keith Salmon BSP Professional Books,(Oxford, London, Edinburgh) 1988, £19.95

Television by Satellite—Legal Aspects Stephen de B. Bate (ed.) ESC Publishing Limited. 1987. £32.75.

Computer Software: Legal Protection in the United Kingdom Henry Carr E.S.C. Publishing Ltd 1987, £32.50.

Patents in Chemistry and Biotechnology Philip W Grubb Clarendon Press 1987. £12.50.

The International Handbook on Computer Crime Computer‐related Economic Crime and the Infringements of Privacy Ulrich Sieber John Wiley & Sons 1987. £24.95.

Computer Law: Theory and Practice Naomi Assia Advocate     

Reviews

Paul Welfens, Market‐oriented Systemic Transformations in Eastern Europe. Heidelberg and New York: Springer Verlag, 1992, 261 pp., DM120.00.

Jan Winiecki & Andrzej Kondratowicz, eds, The Macroeconomics of Transition: Developments in East Central Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, ix + 154 pp., £35.00.

Roman Frydman, Andrzej Rapaczynski, John S. Earle, et al., The Privatisation Process in Central Europe. CEU Privatisation Report, Volume 1; Roman Frydman, Andrzej Rapaczynski, John S. Earle, et al. The Privatisation Process in Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic States. CEU Privatisation Report, Volume 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press/CEUP, 1993, xiii + 262 pp. (Volume 1), xiii + 276 pp. (Volume 2), £30.00 h/b, £10.00 p/b.

Alexander Dallin, ed., Political Parties in Russia. Berkeley, CA: International and Area Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1993, x+ 102 pp., $10.95.

John Lowenhardt, James R. Ozinga & Erik van Ree, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Politburo. London: ULC Press, 1992, xix + 244 pp., £30.00.

James R. Millar, ed., Cracks in the Monolith: Party Power in the Brezhnev Era. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharp, 1992, xv + 245 pp., $49.95.

A. J. Motyl, ed., Thinking Theoretically about Soviet Nationalities. History and Comparison in the Study of the USSR. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, vii + 284 pp., No price.

Coit D. Blacker, Hostage to Revolution: Gorbachev and Soviet Security Policy, 1985–1991. New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1993, xvii + 239 pp., $16.95.

Peter G. Boyle, American‐Soviet Relations: From the Russian Revolution to the Fall of Communism. London and New York: Routledge, 1993, xiv + 321 pp., £40.00 h/b, £12.99 p/b.

Jan S. Adams, A Foreign Policy in Transition: Moscow's Retreat from Central America and the Caribbean 1985–1992. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1992, 248 pp., $39.95 h/b, $14.95 p/b.

Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union. A short history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, x + 321 pp., £30.00, $49.95.

Bohdan Krawchenko, ed., Ukrainian Past, Ukrainian Present. London: Macmillan, 1993, xii+133 pp., £35.00.

Anatol Lieven, The Baltic Revolution—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and the Path to Independence. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993, xxv + 454 pp., £22.50.

Romuald Misiunas & Rein Taagepera, The Baltic States: Years of Dependence 1940–1990. London: C. Hurst & Co., 1993, xv + 400 pp., £35.00 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

Dirk Philipsen, We Were the People: Voices from East Germany's Revolutionary Autumn of 1989. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 1993, xiv + 417 pp., £47.45 h/b, £16.95 p/b.

Patrick Artisien, Matija Rojec & Marjan Svetli?i?, eds, Foreign Investment in Central and Eastern Europe. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1993, xiv + 206 pp., £40.00.

Stanley Moore, Marx versus Markets. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, x + 126 pp., $22.50.

Eero Loone, Soviet Marxism and Analytical Philosophies of History, Translated by Brian Pearce. London and New York: Verso, 1992, xvii + 280 pp.

Ralph C. Elwood, Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, xi + 304 pp., £49.95, £29.95.     

Food security and secure food in the Anthropocene

Delinquency in middle class areas (and why it is low) has been a neglected topic in criminology. The book by Singer [1] advances knowledge about this topic, focussing on Amherst (NY), but also comparing it with the high crime area of Newark (NJ). The book discusses various community and neighborhood factors that might have contributed to the low crime rate in Amherst, but also emphasizes the importance of parenting and juvenile justice processing. The book highlights the need for more research on community/neighborhood effects on offending after controlling for individual and family factors. It also highlights the need for more research on self-reported delinquency versus court processing of middle class versus lower class youth, and on possible juvenile justice system biases after controlling for characteristics of offenses and offenders. Its main policy implications are that more programs and opportunities are needed for youth in lower class areas, there should be more efforts to increase collective efficacy in these areas, and juvenile court processing should be minimized as much as possible.     

War, Economic Development, and Political Development in the Contemporary International System

The European state-building experience has led many scholars to argue that war forces states to increase their fiscal-administrative capacity, or what we might refer to as political development, in order to compete in the international system. War also requires states to generate wealth to support such competition, which should lead to progressively increased levels of economic development. Yet, in contemporary empirical studies, war is often studied as a dependent variable, with economic and political development modeled as affecting its origination. This reading of theory and empirical work suggests that war, economic development, and political development constitute an endogenous system. In this paper, we develop expectations about how these three processes interact and test them using a three-stage least squares regression model. The results show significant simultaneous relationships between the three processes. We conclude that war, economic development, and political development are mutually constitutive processes in the contemporary international system.     

Social Exclusion: The Interplay of Group Goals and Individual Characteristics

Past research has shown that adolescents justify social exclusion based on concerns for group functioning, and yet, to date, no study has evaluated whether group functioning justifications shift or remain stable across different exclusion contexts. In this study, we systematically manipulated exclusion context (i.e., competitive or noncompetitive soccer groups) and individual characteristics of the target of exclusion to test the nature of the interaction between these factors during exclusion judgments. Adolescents’ (N = 201; 61 % Female) exclusion judgments differed across contexts only when an individual’s ability was under consideration. Intergroup (i.e., gender, nationality) and interpersonal (i.e., aggression, shyness) characteristics overwhelmed contextual considerations. Results indicate the complexity of factors weighed by adolescents when making exclusion judgments, and suggest the need for extension of the present findings to understand more fully the interaction between the context of exclusion and individual characteristics in exclusion judgments.     

Fertility control in historical China revisited: New methods for an old debate

We revisit the debate over the deliberate control of reproduction in historical China through a reanalysis of data from the Qing (1644–1911) Imperial Lineage that accounts for physiological or other differences between couples that affected their chances of having children. Even though studies of contemporary and historical European fertility suggest that failing to control for such differences may obscure evidence of parity-specific control, previous studies of historical Chinese fertility have not accounted for them. We show that in the Lineage, failure to account for such differences leads the association between the number of children already born and the chances of having another birth to appear to be positive, but that once they are accounted for properly, the relationship is inverted. Based on this, we conclude that lineage members adjusted their reproductive behavior based on the number of children. We also show that the sex composition and survival of previous births affected reproductive behavior. We conclude by suggesting that one way forward in the ongoing debate over fertility control in historical China is through application of such methods to other datasets and comparison of results. We also suggest that progress in the debate over fertility in historical China has been impeded by confusion over the definition of fertility control, so that some behaviors are recognized as fertility control by some parties in the debate but not others.     

Wealth stratification and reproduction in Northeast China, 1866–1907

Although the importance of material wealth to population growth is the core of Malthusian theory about population dynamics in pre-transitional societies, our understanding of the relationship between wealth and reproductive success in China is still limited. Until recently, there was little in the way of relevant data. In the absence of empirical evidence to the contrary, conceptions of the Chinese demographic regime were largely Malthusian, in that they did not account for the possible role of a fertility-based preventive check. In this study, we examine wealth differentials in reproduction in historical rural China by using newly available longitudinal individual level demographic and household level land holding data for 108,100 immigrants and their descendants living in 120 villages in Shuangcheng, Northeast China, between 1866 and 1907. Our study demonstrates a positive correlation between land holding status and marital fertility among the population under study. In addition, there is also a clear pattern of fertility differentials according to household context and other measures of socioeconomic status. Our findings suggest that these fertility differentials are not only results of certain social institutions and customs but also the consequences of couple's behavior of fertility control in response to socioeconomic and other household conditions.     

Do Retributive and Restorative Justice Processes Address Different Symbolic Concerns?

In support of a unitary conceptualization of retributive justice (justice through the imposition of punishment) and restorative justice (justice through dialogue aimed at consensus), three studies using hypothetical and recalled experiences of victimization found that people’s endorsement of, and satisfaction with, either justice notion depends on the symbolic meaning of the transgression. In Study 1, perceiving the transgression as a status/power violation was uniquely related to the endorsement of retributive justice, whereas perceiving it as a violation of shared values was uniquely related to restorative justice. In Study 2, motivation to restore status/power was related to retributive responses, whereas motivation to restore value consensus with the offender was uniquely related to restorative responses. In Study 3, a scenario experiment, respondents called for greater additional sanction when the applied justice process (retributive vs. restorative) did not fit the salient meaning of the transgressions compared to when it did (status/power vs. values).     

Virtual forensic entomology: improving estimates of minimum post-mortem interval with 3D micro-computed tomography

We demonstrate how micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) can be a powerful tool for describing internal and external morphological changes in Calliphora vicina (Diptera: Calliphoridae) during metamorphosis. Pupae were sampled during the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th quarter of development after the onset of pupariation at 23 °C, and placed directly into 80% ethanol for preservation. In order to find the optimal contrast, four batches of pupae were treated differently: batch one was stained in 0.5M aqueous iodine for 1 day; two for 7 days; three was tagged with a radiopaque dye; four was left unstained (control). Pupae stained for 7d in iodine resulted in the best contrast micro-CT scans. The scans were of sufficiently high spatial resolution (17.2 μm) to visualise the internal morphology of developing pharate adults at all four ages. A combination of external and internal morphological characters was shown to have the potential to estimate the age of blowfly pupae with a higher degree of accuracy and precision than using external morphological characters alone. Age specific developmental characters are described. The technique could be used as a measure to estimate a minimum post-mortem interval in cases of suspicious death where pupae are the oldest stages of insect evidence collected.