Law’s Cultural Project and the Claim to Universality or the Equivocalities of a Familiar Debate

Do our present circumstances allow us to defend a specific connection (that specific connection) between ?legal rules?, ?moral claims? and ?democratic principles? which we may say is granted by an unproblematic presupposition of universality or by an ?acultural? experience of modernity? In order to discuss this question, this paper invokes the challenge-visée of a plausible reinvention of Law??s autonomous project (a reinvention which may be capable of critically re-thinking and re-experiencing Law??s constitutive cultural-civilizational originarium in a ?limit-situation? such as our own). The discussion is developed by recognising that the claim to universality is not only incompatible with a substantive conception of juridicalness as validity but also sustained with difficulty by a procedural representation of discourse and rationality (a representation which, against its own conclusion-claims, could also be said to be culturally and civilizationally bounded). Not forgetting some specific features of contemporary juridical pluralism??namely that which emerges from the counterpoint between semiotic groups or interpretative communities (and their differently assumed claims of intersemioticity concerning the signifier law)??this train of reflection diagnoses briefly a sequence of complementary main difficulties (as ?obstacles? to recognising Law??s demand as an unmistakable cultural project), namely those arising from the formalistic normativistic inheritance (confounding legal autonomy with isolationism), from the challenges and seductions of practical holism (justifying a continuum in which Law??s project loses its sense and autonomy), and also from the familiar debate between exclusive and inclusive versions of positivism and non-positivism (a debate which establishes-consecrates an equivocal counterpoint between Law and Morality).     

Quantification of the subpubic angle in South Africans

Due to the high crime rate in South Africa, forensic anthropologists are increasingly approached to aid in the identification of skeletonized remains, with sex and population affinity assignment being some of the most critical tasks they face. For over a century, the pelvis has been known to be one of the most sexually dimorphic bones of the human body and the subpubic angle is one of the most accurate, albeit scarcely quantified, features thereof. Hence, the aim of this study was to quantify the size of the subpubic angle and compare it between male and female South Africans of African (black) and European (white) descent. One hundred and forty five (145) pelves were selected, consisting of 68 white (43 male and 25 female) and 77 black South Africans (44 male and 33 female), from the Raymond A. Dart Collection of Human Skeletons housed at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Each of the pelves were articulated and placed into a custom built stand for photographing. Measures of the subpubic angle from these digital images were subjected to numerous statistical analyses. Results indicated that significant differences exist between the sexes, as well as between the two population groups. For black individuals it was found that males generally possessed a subpubic angle of 74.9° or less, with larger values being indicative of the female sex. For white individuals, subpubic angles of 81.4° and less indicated males whilst larger values indicated females, with an average accuracy of 86% for both population groups. These results illustrate the advantages of using the subpubic angle to assist in the estimation of sex and population affinity and also reinforce the need for population specific parameters to be applied.     

Are there population differences in minutiae frequencies? A comparative study of two Argentinian population samples and one Spanish sample

In recent years, both scientific and judicial sources have highlighted the need for more knowledge about minutiae variability, in order to improve their statistical application to fingerprint identification. In line with this trend toward improving our knowledge of this subject, the aim of the present study was to calculate the frequency with which 20 types of minutiae appeared in 2780 fingerprint impressions obtained from 278 individuals from two Argentinian population samples (100 individuals from Ramal and 178 from Puna-Quebrada). The different types of minutiae were located, identified, and quantified visually in two areas on the fingerprint, the inside and outside of a circle, the radius of which cut fifteen ridges perpendicularly, starting from the center cut of the axes defining the sectors. The non-equiprobability found in both population samples for the different minutiae types studied demonstrated that the evidential weight provided by these characteristics is not the same when applied in identification processes, whether used quantitatively (numerical standard) or qualitatively (holistic method). The results obtained for both populations were compared statistically with those published previously for a Spanish population sample, which had been collected using the same methodology. This comparison has enabled us to demonstrate, for the first time, the existence of significant differences between populations in minutiae frequencies, independently from the main pattern type.     

Disobedience and Criticism. The Ethos of Ombudsman's Institution and the "East-European Revolution of Human Rights"

The commissioners of human rights in the Parliament aim at ensuring the protection and formation as well as the development of the culture of human rights with their activities in Hungary and all over the world. What else could be done by the citizens practising their disobedience during the non-violent revolutions in 1989 after Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the American Henry David Thoreau? At a first glance, it perhaps seems to be strange to put the following question: what is the connecting link between the role of political law of a public state and the citizens breaking the rules in order to protect the constitutional rights? What will be the result of this comparison? I think, the result is that we can recognize the role of both functions more thoroughly in operating the constitutional state suitably in order to protect the culture of constitutional rights (reactive role) and to develop them (proactive role).     

阿拉斯加的辅导倡议:通过公民参与促进领导力的成长

本文对公民参与和青年领导力形成的关系进行了详细阐述,并介绍了安克雷奇大学与社区合作加强大学生公民参与的研究,提出在青年反社会行为上的"辅导空白",倡议进行阿拉斯加辅导项目,让大学生意识到公民参与的价值,并开始扮演其领导角色.     

Note – Walking on Solid Ground: A Replication Study of ‘Housing Health and Happiness’

This note summarises our replication study ‘Housing, Health, and Happiness’, henceforth HHH2009, which constitutes an important paper in the literature of housing and slum upgrading. The original authors conduct a quasi-experimental impact evaluation of ‘Piso Firme’, an intervention that replaced in-house dirt floors with cement in Mexico. We conduct a Pure Replication (PR), a Measurement and Estimation Analysis (MEA), and a Theory of Change Analysis (TCA). In our PR, we did not find any major discrepancy with the original study. In the MEA, we generally find the results to be strongly robust to different types of alternative analysis. Finally, in TCA we explore a dimension that was not reported on the published version of the study and found that households with high initial levels of cement-floor coverage benefitted significantly less from Piso Firme’s intervention. These findings are discussed in greater detail on International Initiative for Impact Evaluation’s (3ie) working paper version.