Departures in Negotiation: Extensions and New Directions

The conception of turning points advanced in this essay emphasizes events that occur in a chronological sequence which the author, in his previous work, has incorporated into a framework for case analysis. The framework covers three stages: precipitants that trigger change; departures which are the reaction to the precipitant; and consequences, which refer to the direction the negotiation takes as a result of the departure. Building on his earlier work, the author uses examples of a less-bounded international negotiation and cases culled from the headlines to demonstrate the framework's generality. He then considers the concept at the individual, relational, and collective levels in an attempt to probe the psychological and social processes that occur before, during, and after departures (turning points); and may be in fact, the underlying impetus for departures.     

Measuring Government in the Early Twentieth Century

This article discusses the early history of performance and productivity measurement. It finds sophisticated development of these tools beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, primarily at the New York Bureau of Municipal Research. These practices grew out of accounting, the social survey, work records, and municipal statistics. The bureau built government's capacity to measure. They advocated such basic empirical practices as making observations at all, doing so systematically and routinely, and recording data at the time of observation. By 1912, performance measurement exhibited many of the features associated with the modern practice: measuring of input, output, and results; attempting to make government more productive; making reports comparable among communities; and focusing on allocation and accountability. Performance measurement was developed in the context of shifting power between the elected executive and the legislature.     

House money effects on trust and reciprocity

In a typical laboratory “Investment Game” experiment, participants’ endowments are provided by the experimenter; thus, the worst case for the investor is that she loses all of her “found” money. By contrast, in naturally occurring environments, investment decisions can often lead to a loss of one’s own money. This paper investigates whether “trust” found in one-shot anonymous laboratory interaction is robust to “own money” environments. Our results show that, consistent with previous investment game results, most investors send a positive amount, and most trustees return at least the transfer amount, regardless of whether the investors purchase or are gifted their endowment. However, investments are on average lower when participants use their own money, and the fraction of maximum investments (the most “risky” investment decision) is only half as large under “own money” as it is under gifted endowments. Our results explain why one should exercise caution in placing trust in any government’s ability to spend other people’s money prudently.     

Failings of Trauma‐Specific and Related Psychological Tests in Detecting Post‐Traumatic Stress Disorder in Forensic Settings

Judges and juries tend to be particularly impressed by test data, especially quantitative test data. Psychometric tests specific for assessing the presence of post‐traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are commonly employed by forensic mental health evaluators. Most of these instruments, however, have been designed to detect PTSD in treatment or research, and not forensic, settings. Those who rely on these measures without adequate awareness of their often significant limits in correctly identifying malingering may induce finders of fact to inordinately confidently accept the presence of PTSD. This article reviews problematic structural and content components of trauma‐specific and related instruments used to evaluate PTSD and discusses the utility of specific techniques liable to be used in forensic settings to “fool” these measures.     

Mental Capacity Act,Anorexia Nervosa and the Choice Between Life‐Prolonging Treatment and Palliative Care: A NHS Foundation Trust v Ms X

The Court of Protection decided in A NHS Foundation Trust v Ms X that an anorexia nervosa patient lacked the capacity to refuse treatment for her eating disorder, but that it was not in her best‐interests to be subject to force‐feeding to prolong her life. The Court, vindicating previous judgments in similar cases, considered that the eating disorder rendered the patient incapable of deciding on nutrition and, therefore, that she lacked the capacity to refuse treatment for anorexia nervosa. This paper questions the narrow way in which the patient's decision was characterised by the Court in this and previous cases, which led to an application of the Mental Capacity Act 2005 that is incompatible with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities because, based on a diagnosis only, anorexia nervosa patients were denied the right to decide where the balance lies between quality and duration of their own lives.     

Can parity of self-esteem serve as the basis of the principle of linguistic territoriality?

In this paper, I argue that Philippe Van Parijs’ argument for the principle of linguistic territoriality rests upon an unexamined and unvindicated assumption, to the effect that most situations in which smaller languages are threatened by larger ones can be assimilated to ‘colonial cases’, that is to cases in which there is injustice as between the two linguistic groups, as opposed to ‘mere number cases’, that is cases in which linguistic groups of different sizes coexist in the absence of injustice. Moreover, I argue that Van Parijs underestimates the amount of coercion that will have to be applied even within linguistically defined territories in order to avoid the erosion of the smaller language.