Legal Power: The Basic Definition

The concept of legal power (often called legal competence) is important in the law since, with regard to actions having legal effect, the “exercise of legal power” delimits those actions for which manifestation of intention to achieve a legal effect is essential for the effect to ensue. The paper proposes a definition that captures this feature of legal power and marks it off from “direct effect,” as well as from permissibility and practical ability to achieve the legal effect. This analysis of power is limited to the “immediate” legal power of a physical person characterized by the power‐holder achieving a legal result by the power‐holder's own behaviour (not by representatives acting on behalf of the power‐holder). It is argued that in the literature on power the concept of legal power is frequently construed in such a way that it becomes either too broad or too narrow.     

A-Legality: Postnationalism and the Question of Legal Boundaries

This paper critically examines the prevailing assumption that legal boundaries are becoming irrelevant in postnationalism. While the boundaries of the nation-state are forfeiting some of their hold on human behaviour, postnational legal orders are simply not legal orders unless they can in some way draw the spatial, temporal, material and subjective boundaries that make it possible to qualify human behaviour as legal or illegal. This implies that reflexively constituted legal orders – whether national or postnational – must be presented as legal unities. To the extent that boundaries are the necessary condition of national and postnational legal orders, and therewith of legal unity, they also spawn the possibility of political plurality, manifested in behaviour that resists the very distinction between legality and illegality, as drawn by an order of positive law: a-legality. Rather than signalling the demise of legal boundaries, postnationalism ushers in a novel way of dealing therewith – and with a-legality.     

Human eye colour and HERC2, OCA2 and MATP

Prediction of human eye colour by forensic genetic methods is of great value in certain crime investigations. Strong associations between blue/brown eye colour and the SNP loci rs1129038 and rs12913832 in the HERC2 gene were recently described. Weaker associations between eye colour and other genetic markers also exist. In 395 randomly selected Danes, we investigated the predictive values of various combinations of SNP alleles in the HERC2, OCA2 and MATP (SLC45A2) genes and compared the results to the eye colours as they were described by the individuals themselves. The highest predictive value of typing either the HERC2 SNPs rs1129038 and/or rs12913832 that are in strong linkage disequilibrium was observed when eye colour was divided into two groups, (1) blue, grey and green (light) and (2) brown and hazel (dark). Sequence variations in rs11636232 and rs7170852 in HERC2, rs1800407 in OCA2 and rs16891982 in MATP showed additional association with eye colours in addition to the effect of HERC2 rs1129038. Diplotype analysis of three sequence variations in HERC2 and one sequence variation in OCA2 showed the best discrimination between light and dark eye colours with a likelihood ratio of 29.3.     

Principled Moderation: Understanding Parties’ Support of Moderate Candidates

Recent scholarship has argued that parties strategically support more moderate, and thus more electable, candidates. Using interviews with party elites and new data on the party support and the ideology of primary candidates for the US Senate, I show that parties do support moderate candidates. However, using evidence from districts with different levels of competitiveness and over time, I find that support of moderate candidates appears not to be strategic. Rather, party support of moderate candidates appears to be the result of the ideological preferences of party leadership rather a strategic effort to win elections.     

Being tough versus being fair

Among his books are The Social Psychology of Social Movements; Violent Men; Reforming Human Services; Living in Prison;and, with Kenneth Adams and J. Douglas Grant, Coping: Maladaptation in Prisons.     

Responses to corporate versus individual wrongdoing

For many years, researchers assumed that the public was indifferent to corporate wrongdoing, but recent surveys have discovered evidence to the contrary. Taking insights from these data a step further, this study employed an experimental design to examine whether people responded differently to corporate versus individual wrongdoers. We varied the identity of the central actor in a scenario involving harm to workers. Half the respondents were informed that a corporation caused the harm; the remainder were told that an individual did so. Respondents applied a higher standard of responsibility to the corporate actor. For identical actions, the corporation was judged as more reckless and more morally wrong than the individual. Respondents' judgments of the greater recklessness of the corporation led them to recommend higher civil and criminal penalties against the corporation.Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the annual meetings of the Law and Society Association (1986), the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1986), and the American Psychological Association (1987). Writing was facilitated by a NIMH Fellowship in Psychology and Law at Stanford University to Valerie Hans. The authors wish to thank Jeffrey Davidson, Sam Gaertner, Michael Levi, Nancy Pennington, David Sciulli, Wes Skogan, and Robert Wood for their contributions to the work.