Parallel imports from outside the EEA: CE marking does not constitute consent

The High Court for England and Wales has ruled that a trademark owner who marks products with the CE mark does not unequivocallyconsent to the marketing of those products in the EEA for trademark purposes.     

Advancing police use of force research and practice: urgent issues and prospects

Leading police scholars and practitioners were asked to reflect on the most urgent issues that need to be addressed on the topic of use of force. Four themes emerged from their contributions: use of force and de-escalation training needs to improve and be evaluated; new ways of conceptualizing use of force encounters and better use of force response models need to be developed; the inequitable application of force, and how to remediate biases, needs to be more fully understood; and misconceptions about police use of force need to be identified and corrected. The highlighted topics serve as an agenda for future research. Such research should provide greater insight into when, where, and why force is used by police officers, and how it can be applied appropriately. If implemented, the practical recommendations included in the contributions should have a positive impact on police performance, public trust and confidence in the police, and citizen and officer safety.     

A tragedy of the anticommons: local option taxation and cell phone tax bills

When multiple taxing jurisdictions overlap and fail to account for one another’s actions, they over-tax the common base. This is a prediction of the anticommons model, in which numerous parties have authority to exclude others from using a resource. This model further predicts that when governments over-tax the base, private parties will underutilize the resource, and underutilization will be greater as the number of parties with exclusion rights rises. We test these predictions by studying cell phone taxation and local option tax authority, which allows some cities, counties, and special-purpose districts to levy taxes on cell phone use. Consistent with theory, we find that the tax rate on cell phone service is higher when local governments have the option to tax. Further, the percentage of households owning cell phones is lower when there is the local option to tax, and ownership rates fall with the number of taxes levied.     

You’ve got to fight to be white: the rural foundation of the new militia for race control

In this paper, we situate the recent rise of racialized and often violent political discourse within a framework of a class-based conception of nature and property. In this theoretical work, we contribute to thinking about how Whites are racially constituted by showing how an understanding of whiteness among the far right is significantly linked to narratives surrounding rural spaces as havens of individualism and in sharp contrast to the perceived multiculturalism of the city. In developing our argument, we utilize public statements made by Ted Nugent as observable examples of this far-right, violent, and racialized rhetoric. We argue that the far right is able to create a common ground with moderate conservatives around a shared understanding of rural places as embodiments of virtuous white culture, private property, and individualism. This politicized whiteness project, we argue, helps to galvanize and strengthen a conservative coalition while simultaneously pulling their collective ideology further to the right.     

Seeing Like an Orientalist State: The Three Deaths of Neda Agha-Soltan

On June 20, 2009 one image became a symbol of violence, as well as a rallying cry for a movement that contested the disputed election of hardline Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The image captured the murder of a 26 year old protester named Neda Agha-Soltan, and showed a first-hand account, in bloody detail, of the savagery of state killing. With the help of social media, the video received mass attention from news organizations in the United States by June 22, 2009. Cursory analysis of the New York Times and The Washington Post, representation of Neda’s death, reveals an Iranian government that was unafraid to violently repress a democratic movement. It is my contention here that such a construction was framed by an Orientalist discourse which helped to fabricate three distinct deaths of this murdered protester. First the lasting images of death became a symbol of freedom; Neda’s second death showed a grievable life, one that provided an emotional space for a US audience; and finally her third death which became a means of defining and (re)stabilizing Orientalized perceptions of Iran as violent and barbaric. Ultimately, these three deaths became an instrument that would help justify the call for US intervention on behalf of Western morality and humanitarian aid.     

Ökonomisches Kapital der Eltern und Medizinstudium im Ausland. Wie Europäisierungs- und Globalisierungsprozesse die Reproduktion sozialer Ungleichheiten verändern

The fact that university degrees are accepted throughout Europe has led to the founding of medical faculties, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, that offer medical studies in German or English and thus attracting students from richer Western European countries like Germany. Unlike medical studies in Germany, access to these foreign universities is not dependent on the final school exam grade, but on the ability to pay high tuition fees. The article compares the social class background of medicine students in Germany with German medicine students in Hungary. The analysis shows that the percentage of medicine students who come from higher social classes is even higher in Hungary than it already is in Germany. Studying medicine in Hungary primarily serves as an immediate reproduction of the parents’ profession as many of German medicine students in Hungary have a parent who belongs to the medical profession. The case of German students studying medicine abroad illustrates how Europeanization and Globalization have changed the reproduction of social inequalities; upper classes profit most from the new opportunities.