State-Organized Crime,International Law and Structural Contradictions

Following the trail blazed by Bill Chambliss in his 1988 Presidential Address to the American Society of Criminology, this article engages two interrelated issues concerning the concept of state-organized crime that he pioneered. First, the article develops Chambliss’s argument that criminologists should define state crime as behavior that violates international agreements and principles established in the courts and treaties of international bodies. Second, although Chambliss effectively argued that international law “on the books” provides a framework of substantive concepts and categories that allows criminologists to define certain state actions as a form of crime, “in action” international laws fail to provide legal accountability for states and protection for victims. This article demonstrates, however, that Chambliss’s structural contradictions theory of law can help to explain this paradox.     

Advance directives in bipolar disorder, a cognitive behavioural conceptualization

Mental Health Advance Directives (MHADs) are potentially useful for bipolar patients due to the episodic characteristic of their disease. An interest for the development of a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) approach in the creation process of MHADs arises because of a lack of efficiency of the non-collaborative processes, the potential impact of psychopathology and the awareness of the illness in MHADs' content, the link between the patient's directives interest and the case manager's interest, and the lower interest reported by the potentially high MHADs beneficiary. The CBT intervention in the MHADs creation process that is proposed in this article is based on: the self-determination model for adherence, the cognitive representation of illness model, and the concordance model. The principles of the intervention were adapted from Motivational interviewing's (MI), emphasising personal choice and responsibility, and focusing on the patient's concerns about the treatment through Socratic dialogue. During the course of 2004, 20 advance directives written by patients (17 with bipolar disorder, 3 with schizoaffective disorder) have been collected following the described intervention. Therefore, this intervention seems to be relevant for patients with bipolar disorder.     

Spreading the Wealth

The new American president promoted the value of “spreading the wealth around” as an election theme, providing low-income families with tax breaks, rebates, and credits. The practice of using federal income taxes to re-distribute wealth, which sometimes reflects the noblest of goals, frequently generates significant unintended harm. Prominent among those unplanned casualties is a reduction in charitable giving: American voluntary wealth transfers (e.g., charitable contributions) are in danger of being crowded out by mandatory transfers (e.g., federal taxes) used to redistribute wealth. This paper considers the social and economic costs of raising taxes that crowd out charity.     

A Failure to Communicate: 9/11 and the Tragedy of the Informational Commons

ABSTRACT

We investigate how networks among service organizations are integrated through a shared participant type of governance. Shared participant governance is a non-brokered type of network coordination where a network is governed by its members without a separate governance entity. We study the integrative capacity of this type of governance by measuring the effect of participation in a shared participant governance on tie formation in networks among service organizations. We analyze three networks of service organizations in three districts of Antwerp, Belgium. In each of these districts, the networks are governed by welfare meetings, defined as a shared participant type of governance. We use exponential random graph models. The results show that a shared participant type of governance has a positive effect on tie formation. We also find that the positive effect on tie formation is dependent on the active participation of centralized actors in the welfare meetings.     

Why The Axioms and Theorems of Arithmetic are not Legal Norms

Ronald Dworkin has long criticized legal positivists for theirefforts to distinguish between legal and non-legal standardsof conduct that are incumbent on people. Recently, Dworkin hasbroached this criticism in his hostile account of the debatesbetween Incorporationist Legal Positivists and Exclusive LegalPositivists. Specifically, he has maintained that Incorporationistscannot avoid the unpalatable conclusion that the axioms andtheorems of arithmetic are legal norms. This article shows whysuch a conclusion is indeed avoidable and why Dworkin's criticismis therefore wide of the mark.