The uncertain future of US‐China relations

The coming months may be critical in determining whether it will be possible for the United States and China to forge a stable and productive relationship, says Harry Harding, Dean of the Elliot School of International Affairs, George Washington University. Problems are mounting in several sensitive areas of the relationship: human rights, trade, and security, and there remain differences between the two countries over Taiwan and Korea that could bedevil their bilateral ties. Furthermore, American critics of China are resuming their attacks on the relationship, charging that engagement has failed either to narrow differences or to promote common objectives. Harding argues that the benefits of the US‐China relationship are so great, and the costs of failure so large, that the two countries should make every effort to maintain the momentum toward building a constructive strategic partnership.     

Coming Clean About the Criminal Law

This paper addresses three doctrinal phenomena of which it finds evidence in English law: the quiet extension of the criminal law so as to criminalise that which is by no means an obvious offence; the creation of offences the goal of which is not to guide potential offenders away from crime; and the existence of offending behaviour which is not itself thought to justify arrest or prosecution. While such phenomena have already been criticised by other criminal law theorists, this paper offers a critique to which little attention has yet been paid. It argues that the existence of these phenomena has been concealed from public view: that the organs of state have encouraged the belief that they are no part of English law. The paper then argues that it is high time the state came clean. The state owes its people answers for the imposition of the criminal law: it must account for the creation and enforcement of any given criminal offence. When the state misleads its people about the criminal law’s scope, goals and enforcement, it refuses to provide those people with the answers they are owed.     

Labour market discrimination against indigenous people in Peru

In this article, the component of the gross wage differential that can be explained by productivity‐enhancing attributes and that which is due to unexplained factors and labour market discrimination are empirically determined. Individual data from the 1991 Living Standards Measurements Survey of Peru are used to analyse labour market earnings and to decompose the gross earnings differential. A large portion of the indigenous/non‐indigenous wage gap is unexplained by human capital and other observable differences.