Nations hospitable to organized crime and terrorism

This report assesses conditions that contribute to or are potentially hospitable to transnational criminal activity and terrorist activity in selected regions of the world during the period 1999–2002. Although the focus of the report is on transnational activity, domestic criminal activity is recognized as a key foundation for transnational crime, especially as the forces of globalization intensify. The report has been arranged geographically into the following major headings: Africa, the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and the Western Hemisphere. Within the geographical headings, the report addresses individual countries with particularly salient conditions. Cases such as the Triborder Area (TBA) of South America and East and West Africa, where conditions largely overlap national borders, have been treated as regions rather than by imposing an artificial delineation by country. The bibliography has been divided into the same geographical headings as the text. The major sources for this report are recent periodical reports from Western and regional sources, Internet sites offering credible recent information, selected recent monographs, and personal communications with regional experts. Treatment of individual countries varies according to the extent and seriousness of conditions under study. Thus some countries in a region are not discussed, and others are discussed only from the perspective of one or two pertinent activities or conditions. Because they border the United States, Canada and Mexico have received especially extensive treatment.     

Consensual or Dominant Relationships with Parliament? A Comparison of Administrations and Ministers in Scotland

The study of administrations and ministers and their relationships with UK Parliaments has tended to focus on the issues of accountability and responsibility, levels of legislative dissent or broad performance indicators supported by anecdotal examples. This paper addresses the lack of systematic analysis of executive/legislative relations in the policy‐making process by examining the dominance of different administrations and ministers in the Scottish Parliament. Two questions are addressed. First, is there any variance in the legislative dominance of different administrations in the parliamentary arena? Second, do individual ministers make a difference to the degree of policy dominance? Controlling for both initial authorship and quality of amendments to Executive policy, we analyse the nature and extent of Executive dominance during the legislative process of the First Session of the Scottish Parliament. We find some evidence to suggest that Executive dominance varies both by administration and by individual minister.     

Supporting Accountability in the Field of Mediation

Over time, many fields of work - law, medicine, and teaching - matured from informal bodies of knowledge and skills, passed from one practitioner to another, into professions. In the process each began enumerating and affirming their intellectual and practical roots. Each also began testing practitioners to insure comprehension of relevant knowledge and an ability to demonstrate relevant skills. Family mediators in Canada have moved in this direction. In the United States, people who mediate interpersonal disputes also feel pressured to take additional steps to assure the quality of our work. This article summarizes what mediation organizations in the United States have done and could do to vouch for work in our field. But, taking additional steps calls for a clearer understanding of what a mediator should know and what they are expected to do. These two critical pieces of information remain nebulous. So, this article goes beyond describing ways of insuring accountability by also describing a recently completed job analysis, a tool frequently used in other fields of work to describe the skills and knowledge relevant to a particular job.     

Licensing lifesavers: possible routes to overcome errors and omissions in licence agreements

Legal context. This article is about the possible ways the correctionof errors in a written agreement can be achieved. These errorsmight be in the way that the agreement has been written or thatthe parties misunderstood the agreement each thought they weremaking. Key points. English law provides a number of ways in which suchmistakes or misunderstandings might be resolved, ultimatelyby a court if further agreement cannot be reached. First, thewritten agreement might simply be unenforceable. If not, thena court might construe the wording in the agreement in a waythat reflects the intention of the parties, implying terms intothat contract, or rectify the words used in the agreement. Practical significance. The intention of the article is to makepractitioners aware of these various routes to remedy mistakeswhich have been made in connection with written agreements.This knowledge will enable an informed approach to be takento resolving the dispute of which the mistake or alleged mistakeis the cause. Negotiations can take place around the possibleeffect of the mistake and the available remedies. This knowledgecan be used to resolve disputes arising out of such errors eitherby negotiation, possibly through mediation, and ultimately byappropriate action in the courts.     

Patriotic Liberalism

Law and Philosophy -     

Jurisprudential Regimes and Supreme Court Decisionmaking: The Lemon Regime and Establishment Clause Cases

In this research note, we apply the construct of jurisprudential regimes as described in our recent article in American Political Science Review to the area of Establishment Clause jurisprudence. We hypothesize that Lemon v. Kurtzman represented a jurisprudential regime in the Supreme Court's decisionmaking in this area of law. Our analysis shows that the predictors of the Court's decisions in the two periods differed in ways that are very consistent with the types of changes one would expect the hypothesized regime shift to produce.