Bank Charges and the Core Exemption: Office of Fair Trading v Abbey National Plc

Consideration is given to the treatment of the core exemption in Regulation 6(2) of the Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 in Office of Fair Trading v Abbey National Bank. Certain aspects of the approach taken to the general limitation of the exemption to terms in plain intelligible language are looked at, before the scope of Regulation 6(2)(b) itself is addressed.     

Resource allocation and voter calculus in?a?multicandidate election

This paper links campaign resources and voter calculus through a microeconomic optimization framework. I assume that candidate policy positions are fixed while personal valence scores and the salience of issue dimensions are malleable. Low valence candidates with many proximate competitors in the policy space will focus on building valence. High valence candidates who are relatively ??unclustered?? in the policy space will focus on manipulating issue salience. Resources devoted to diminishing others?? valence scores will increase as the number of viable candidates decreases. The model??s results are tested, where feasible, using data from the Democratic Party primary of 2004.     

Bridging the Ideological Divide: Trust and Support for Social Security Privatization

Using a pair of national surveys, this article analyzes the individual-level sources of public support for Social Security privatization. Given the inherent risks associated with privatization, we argue that the political trust heuristic affords untapped theoretical leverage in explaining public attitudes toward privatization. We find that, among certain individuals, political trust plays an instrumental role in structuring privatization preferences. Political trust increases support for privatization, but only among liberals. This heterogeneity in trust’s impact is best explained, we argue, by the unbalanced ideological costs imposed by the potential privatization of Social Security. Among liberals, embracing privatization requires the sacrifice of core values, thereby making political trust a potent consideration. Political trust is inconsequential among conservatives because supporting privatization requires no comparable sacrifice for them.

The effects of electability on US primary voters

The general consensus of the research on US primary contests is that voters consider candidates’ potential for a general election victory when choosing their party’s nominee. Yet, at the individual level, this literature has failed to (1) clearly isolate the effects of electability from the money and media attention that they generate; and (2) properly control for the potential effects of ideology. Using an original experimental design, I find that electability can increase the likelihood of a voter supporting a more ideologically distant candidate. I also show that when faced with a tradeoff, a large percentage of subjects from both parties choose electability over ideology. The resulting implication is that there is potential for moderates to be successful in primaries, as even ideologically extreme voters appear to be willing to compromise on policy representation when confronted with a more distant but electable candidate.     

Faith and palliative care: a partnership of care in low- and middle-income countries

ABSTRACT

The provision of holistic palliative care has been identified by WHO as a human right, important for all people, at all ages, with all life-limiting illnesses. When faced with death and dying, issues of meaning and relationships with others, the world, and with the sacred are intensified even more in communities where faith and spiritual beliefs have a significant place. Being able to understand the significance of dying and interpreting the experience and period of living with life-limiting illness, presents an important challenge for palliative care. This article sets out the contribution that faith communities have made in understanding the significance of spiritual issues in health and in delivering palliative care in lower to middle-income contexts where palliative care has been prioritised.     

The Longitudinal Association of Relationship Quality and Reoffending Among First-Time Juvenile Offenders and Their Mothers

To understand how youth desist from crime after their first arrest, it is necessary to investigate their primary support system: their parents. As such, this study examined the reciprocal effects of justice system contact on the mother–child dyad. Interviews with 317 mothers and their sons from Orange County, CA, Jefferson Parish, LA, and Philadelphia, PA were conducted semiannually over two and a half years. At the beginning of the study, the sons were first-time offenders aged 13–17 and mostly non-White (i.e., 19.2 White, 56.5 Latino, 21.5 Black, and 2.8% another race/ethnicity). The results revealed that a high quality initial mother–son relationship reduces youths’ re-offending over time. Furthermore, as mothers perceived that their sons were offending more, they reported less warmth in their relationships with their sons two and a half years later. Interestingly, youth’s age emerged as a moderator. First, older youth were less likely to engage in reoffending if they had a warm maternal relationship. Second, decreases in relationship warmth associated with re-offending were steeper for younger youth. The findings have implications for juvenile justice policy in terms of improving probationary outcomes for youth offenders, and alleviating the financial and emotional burden on justice system-involved families.     

“TO ME ITS [SIC] REAL LIFE”: Secondary Victims of Homicide in Newer Media

This article explores what happened when two people personally affected by a 1999 homicide participated in an online forum in which the homicide was being discussed. The two individuals in question were the younger brother of the victim and the elder brother of the man convicted of her murder. The case had been the subject of a 12-part audio podcast called Serial. An online forum—the Serial Subreddit—had been set up independently of the podcast and its producers as a space for listeners to discuss their views on the case. We analyzed the contributions of the two aforementioned individuals and the responses they received. We argue that new media spaces like the Serial Subreddit break down the traditional barriers between those personally affected by homicide and consumers of mediated representations of homicide. As such, they raise important questions for criminologists.     

Critics and Rebels: Older Arab Intellectuals Reflect on the Uprisings

Most Arabs, including intellectuals, agree that the recent uprisings have profoundly changed the realities they have known for decades since the independence of their states. The historical character of the moment, and the emergence of a youth capable of producing unprecedented changes, have together forced an older generation of Arab intellectuals, born roughly between the 1930s and the 1950s, to acknowledge the coming of a new generation of critics and rebels. This article looks at how thinkers of the older generation have written about the uprisings and its actors, by examining their public statements in the form of articles or interviews on television channels, in newspapers and journals, some of them newly launched. I focus on Lebanese poet Abbas Baydoun, Syrian philosopher Sadeq Jalal al-Azm, Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, Egyptian novelist Baha' Taher, Bahraini thinker Muhammad Jaber al-Ansari, Syrian poet Adonis and Tunisian sociologist Taher Labib. While most of them value the importance of intellectual work in the struggle for human dignity and freedom, they also admit its limitations. They reflect on the significance of the popular and youth participation in advancing the causes they militated for in previous decades.     

Building capacity in indigenous governance: Comparing the Australian and American experiences

This paper compares key aspects of governance structures for Indigenous populations in the United States and Australia. The paper focuses on policy coordination and administration, in particular the nodes of decision-making in the two countries in relation to government contracting and accountability. The U.S. approach to funding Indigenous organizations stems from the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Act and its subsequent expansions. Through the development of contracting into permanent compacting via block grants, this approach builds established nodes of Indigenous government and facilitates whole-of-government coherence at the level of the American Indian tribe. The U.S. approach seems correlated with better performance and may lighten bureaucratic loads over the long term. The Australian model, on the other hand, seeks to create whole-of-government coherence through top-down financial accountability in a way that hampers the development of Indigenous political capacity. The paper traces the development of these practices through time and illustrates how they contribute to the fragmentation rather than growth of Indigenous political capacities. It suggests ways the Australian model could be improved even in the absence of fundamental reform by drawing on the contracting-to-compacting framework of longstanding U.S. practices.