Is EU enlargement bad for environmental policy? Confronting gloomy expectations with evidence

As the EU expands to include the Central and East European (CEE) countries, its capacity to adopt and implement environmental policy will be negatively affected—this has been a widely held assumption. The CEE countries have been expected to be laggards, slowing down, weakening or even reversing progress in environmental policy-making. More than 2 years have now passed since the enlargement, and the new member-states have begun to make their mark on EU decision-making and implementation. This article confronts gloomy expectations with evidence in three issue-areas: genetically modified organisms, air pollution and climate change. The main conclusions are, first, that there is no indication that enlargement will result in any breakdown of EU environmental policy. Second, the consequences vary across issue-areas. The new member-states have strengthened the group that favours strict regulation of genetically modified organisms, weakened the implementation of the EU emission trading directive and have affected EU air policy hardly at all. These results can give an indication of what is to come. On the other hand, only a short time has passed since enlargement, and the picture may change with regard to other issue-areas.     

Operationalizing risk: The influence of measurement choice on the prevalence and correlates of prison violence among incarcerated murderers

A retrospective review was performed on the disciplinary records of 1,659 convicted murderers who had been admitted to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice between February 2001 and November 2003. Institutional violence was disaggregated by type of infraction, inmate or staff victim, extent of injury, and weapon usage to determine baseline prevalence and rates. Characteristics of the perpetrators, including younger age, more serious murder conviction, and longer sentence were associated with a higher incidence of prison assaults. Logistic regression analysis of a restricted sample of 1,440 male, non-death row inmates resulted in modestly predictive models for potentially violent acts (AUC = .668), assaults (AUC = .700), and assaults resulting in serious injury (AUC = .750). The findings suggest that the choice of measure used when operationalizating prison violence is crucial in determining baselines, but may have a more limited effect on identifying correlates and predicting outcomes.     

How your website can be a friend or an enemy

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently affirmedthe decision of the TTAB in denying Reed's registration of itsmark ‘Lawyers.com’ as being generic.