Willing Executors of Hitler's Will? The Goldhagen Controversy, Political Analysis and the Holocaust

Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) has won its author a succession of accolades, from the American Political Science Association's prestigious Gabriel A. Almond Prize in comparative politics in 1994 to the even more prestigious Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik's Democracy Prize (awarded last in 1990). It has also occasioned an unprecedented and intense controversy on both sides of the Atlantic. In this article I consider the attribution of responsibility for the Holocaust in the Goldhagen thesis and the controversy this has spawned. I argue that despite Goldhagen's efforts to restore the conscious human subject to the perpetration of the Holocaust, the logic of his thesis in fact serves largely to absolve German subjects of culpability for an act of barbarism he regards as at least latent in an 'exceptional' and 'eliminationist' anti-Semitism that predates the rise of fascism. I take issue with Goldhagen's identification of Hitler's willing executioners as 'Germans', arguing that if human subjects are to be restored to the analysis of the Holocaust (as, indeed, they should be), it is imperative that we acknowledge the distinctly unexceptional character of 'Ordinary Germans' and, consequently re-examine our own culpability in this most modern of atrocities.     

Australian court holds that sublicensor cannot validly assign brand management and termination rights

In Pacific Brands Sport and Leisure Pty Ltd v Underworks PtyLtd the Full Federal Court of Australia held that a sublicensorcould not validly assign certain rights, including brand managementrights and termination rights, to a third party because thenature of the rights was personal between the sublicensor andthe sublicensee and the assignment of those rights requiredthe sublicensee's consent.     

Statistical Inference on Measures of Lineup Fairness

Psychological research on eyewitness testimony has made important contributions to the measurement of lineup fairness. The mock witness task, and measures of functional size, effective size, and diagnosticity have proved useful both in application to real-world problems and to ongoing research aimed at the optimization of criminal investigation techniques. However, these measures are typically used in the absence of any inferential statistical considerations. This is unfortunate, since the mock witness task relies on an implicit probability model. An attempt is made in this paper to identify a suitable formal probability model for the mock witness task, and suggestions are made with respect to how to reason inferentially about many of the lineup measures developed in psycholegal research. It is important to reason inferentially about these measures, and a failure to do so may mislead those to whom measures of lineup fairness are presented.