A Prehistory of the Best Value Regime

Best Value was one of the central planks of New Labour's modernisation agenda for local government. This article uncovers the origins of the regime by unpicking the activities of two working groups responsible for its design. Licking its wounds in the aftermath of the 1987 General Election the Labour Party's leadership had come to see the party's record in local government as a source of increasing embarrassment. A series of policy initiatives, first emerging from the party's policy review, later given the Best Value tag, were intended to neutralise producer interests and improve the party's reputation for governing competence.     

Managing Middle Earth: The Evolving Role of Local Authority Chief Executive Officers in Auckland,New Zealand

New Zealand is often seen as a ‘test-bed’ for public sector management reform. Indeed, much has been written about the machinery and operation of central government, yet little attention has been paid to the actors and institutions of local government. This article, using evidence obtained through a series of semi-structured interviews with serving and former Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) in the Auckland region, examines the impact upon local authority chief executives of two major reforms within local government. Firstly, the impact of sweeping managerial reforms in 1989, and then secondly reforms to reinvigorate and reinvent the scope and scale of local authorities in the period since 2002. The article argues that whilst local government CEOs in New Zealand are managerially strong, these skills need to be refocused to ensure maximum benefit for local government can be gained from post-2002 reforms.     

L'affaiblissement du Parlement français dans la dernière législature de la Troisième République (1936–1940)

SUMMARY

In this article, Simone Lassig examines franchise reforms in the federal states of the German Empire before 1914. She is critical of restricting the history of the German Empire to the history of Prussia. From this viewpoint, electoral reforms in several of the German federal states are used to indicate the capacity of the political elites to resolve problems related to the system. When we observe southern and central Germany, it can be shown that the old elites were capable of learning. Although the non-socialist parties opposed every form of mass politics until the turn of the century, by limiting the right to vote, after that they opened up to the increasing demands for participation from the lower levels of society. Tendencies towards democrati;tation appeared not only in many new electoral laws, but also in the political culture, expecially in the development of new methods of parliamentary conflict. Legitimation of authoriry gained a new status: the parliamentary resolution of conflicts was revalued as against legal restrictions, and facilitated the partial integration of the formerly excluded workers' party. The concept, scarcely challenged in research, that there was only a primitive level of democratization in Wilhelmine Germany should be reconsidered at least, as a result of this analysis.     

The Antisaccade Task Performance Deficit and Specific CNV Abnormalities in Patients with Stereotyped Paraphilia and Schizophrenia,

Antisaccade task performance and mean amplitudes of slow cortical potentials (contingent negative variation—CNV) were investigated in 19 healthy volunteers, 16 schizophrenic patients (SP), and 12 patients with stereotyped form of paraphilia (PP). Compared with healthy subjects, schizophrenic and paraphilic patients committed significantly more erroneous saccades. The clear between‐group CNV differences were observed during the early CNV stage that is associated with cognitive aspects of preparatory set. In SP, as compared to controls, the significant decline of CNV amplitude was found at frontal‐central area. PP have demonstrated the lack of CNV over central and parietal regions, but their CNV amplitudes in frontal area did not differ from values of control group. Thus, two distinct types of CNV abnormalities have been found. The SP results have been interpreted as support for frontal dysfunction in schizophrenia. The disconnection between prefrontal cortex, sensorimotor cortex, and related subcortical structures is hypothesized in paraphilia group.     

R. (Martin) v Mahony: the History of a Classical Certiorari Authority

R. (Martin) v Mahony, a decision of the Irish High Court of 1910, continues to be acknowledged by modern textbook writers as a leading authority for the classical rule that certiorari could not correct error of law. This rule, which considerably reduced judicial superintendence of magistrates' courts, had been established by the English court of Queen's Bench in the 1840s. However, the rule was repudiated by the Exchequer Division in Ireland in the late 1880s, which developed a novel, liberal theory of certiorari. This doctrinal innovation, which was used in overturning convictions under the anti-boycotting statute, the Criminal Law and Procedure Act 1887, appalled sections of Lord Salisbury's government, was disapproved of by the English courts, and split the Irish judiciary. The division caused by the doctrine persisted until 1910 when the Irish High Court, having assembled in banc in Martin's Case in order to resolve the impasse, re-established orthodox English doctrine.     

Controlling Jury Composition in Nineteenth-Century Ireland

Difficulties in securing convictions in nineteenth-century Ireland led the authorities to resort to various methods of ensuring that petty juries delivered guilty verdicts in cases where this was clearly warranted by the evidence. This article examines some of the ‘stratagems’ put forward by David Johnson and suggests a number of other practices which were used, arguing that many of these mechanisms centred around controlling the composition of trial juries. Examples included altering the property qualifications for jurors, the system of asking jurors to ‘stand by’, and the use of fines to compel attendance. While some of these were the legitimate exercise of established procedures, it will be seen that the Crown on occasion abused or over-used its powers.     

A human rights-based practice framework for sexual offenders

Abstract

Human rights create a protective zone around people and allow them the opportunity to further their own valued personal projects without interference from others. In our view, the emphasis on community rights and protection may, paradoxically, reduce the effectiveness of sex offender rehabilitation by ignoring or failing to ensure that offenders’ core human interests are met. In this paper we consider how rights-based values and ideas can be integrated into therapeutic work with sex offenders in a way that safeguards the interests of offenders and the community. To this end we develop a rights-based normative framework (the Offender Practice Framework: OPF) that is orientated around the three strands of justice and accountability, offender needs and risk, and the utilization of empirically supported interventions and strength-based approaches. We examine the utility of this framework for the different phases of sex offender practice.