The role of the united nations in East Timor's path to independence

East Timor has been the subject of a substantial peace keeping and peace building operation. Will the role of the UN be judged a success? Despite the evident flaws in the operation, there is little doubt that the UN played an essential role in restoring peace and stability to East Timor. Even its most controversial episode, the 1999 ballot and surrounding violence, in hindsight, can be seen as a success given the constraints of the international environment at the time. The statements of leading Indonesian officials during 1999 betrayed an incorrect reading of the East Timor problem, and generally perpetuated the myth of a civil conflict between two politically opposed sides — the reality was that the violence was the near exclusive domain of the pro‐integrationist militia groups. East Timor has now undergone a massive reconstruction of infrastructure and aspects of governance, it has had constituent elections, and full independence is expected by mid‐2002.     

Performance pledges–power to the consumer or a quagmire in public service legitimation?

One of the latest initiatives in Hong Kong's public sector reform is the launch of “performance pledges” in 1992, which have essentially been modelled on citizen's charters in the United Kingdom. While the stated aims of performance pledges, citizen's charters, or similar initiatives, are to raise the standard of public services and to make such services answer better to the needs of ordinary people, hence “empowering” the public service consumers, this latest consumerist trend in public management has more far-reaching implications, both in terms of the organization as well as the legitimation of public service provision. This article examines such implications, with specific reference to the Hong Kong situation, and argues that the outcome of the development seems to point to the empowerment of public managers rather than the consumers as the official rhetoric would imply.     

Review essay / rethinking criminal law

George P. Fletcher, Rethinking Criminal Law Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1978, xviii + 898 pp.     

Emergence of the Entertainment Age?

Celebrities abound in the media today largely because of improved technology allows celebrant and fan to access each other directly. This shift may indicate the era of entertainment as well as an entangled society characterized by reduction of a rational public.     

Credible Commitments and the Early American Supreme Court

Conventional wisdom holds that the role of the U.S. federal judiciary was underspecified and undefined until the era of Chief Justice John Marshall. In contrast, I argue that prior to the Marshall era, the Supreme Court had the specific institutional role of providing an administrative remedy to aggrieved nations to deprive potentially hostile nations of any excuse for belligerence. Specifically, concern among the Framers about this nascent country's absence of dispute resolution mechanisms in the areas of trade and admiralty was critical in the institutional design of the judiciary. Original jurisdiction was designed primarily to remedy trade disputes. The independent judiciary made trade commitments more credible and self-help by the aggrieved less likely. By providing this administrative remedy and lowering the uncertainty associated with trading with revolutionaries, the Framers claimed a seat for the new country at the table of nations. Moreover, enhanced commercial credibility that the administrative avenue for redress provided was instrumental in the early economic development of the United States.