“Who made the code in the first place?”: Delinquency and justice in an American Indian community

This paper examines the emergence of official categories of delinquency and a formal system for the legal processing of youth on one American Indian reservation. The creation of the legal code, Children's Court and Juvenile Detention Center, and the ongoing activities of these agencies are placed in the context of the larger social system of the reservation and the history of federal policies toward Indian peoples. Through in-depth interviews, participant observation, case file review, and the analysis of existing statistics, perceptions of delinquency and justice and trends in the legal processing of adolescents in this community are explored. The implications of this imposed system of law and justice for this community are discussed.     

Repeated postevent questioning can lead to elevated levels of eyewitness confidence

Two experiments tested the proposition that postevent questioning can lead to later increases in witness confidence without corresponding changes in witness accuracy. After a staged interruption in a college classroom, participants were questioned about the event 5 times over 5 weeks in Experiment 1 (n=57) and 3 times over 5 days in Experiment 2 (n=79). During the final questioning session, the participant-witnesses consistently reported higher levels of confidence for those items that had been subject to repeated postevent questioning than for those items that were asked for the first time, yet there was no difference in the accuracy of the responses to the two sets of items. Additionally, in all conditions the participant-witnesses were generally overconfident in their responses. These results suggest that repeated postevent questioning can cause eyewitnesses' subsequent confidence estimates to be artificially inflated.     

Are the similarities between a woman's right to choose an abortion and the alleged right to assisted suicide really compelling?

In this Article, Marc Spindelman examines the relationship between abortion and assisted suicide. He begins his discussion with the constitutional framework within which courts should consider the assertion that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment protects the individual's decision to commit assisted suicide. The Author then considers and, based on relevant Supreme Court doctrine, rejects the conception of personal autonomy that undergirds the claimed constitutional right to assisted suicide. Finally, the Author points out some legal and cultural distinctions between abortion and assisted suicide, arguing that these distinctions offer courts good reasons for holding that the Fourteenth Amendment's promise of liberty does not include the liberty to commit assisted suicide. In addition, the Author makes a few observations about recent assisted-suicide cases decided by the Ninth and Second Circuits.     

Book reviews

Robert Service, Lenin: A Political Life. Vol. 3: The Iron Ring. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1995, xxi + 393 pp., £45.00.

Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. London: University of California Press, 1995, xxv + 639 pp., £45.00.

Yilmaz Akyüz, Detlef Kotte, Andràs Köves & László Szamuely (eds), Privatization in the Transition Process. Recent Experiences in Eastern Europe. Geneva: United Nations, 1994, x + 418 pp.

Jerzy Hausner, Bob Jessop & Klaus Nielsen (eds), Strategic Choice and Path‐dependency in Post‐Socialism. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 1995, xiii + 330 pp. £49.95.

Wladimir Andreff (ed.), Le Secteur Public à I'Est. Restmcturation Industrielle et Financière. Paris: L'Harmattan, Collection ‘Pays de I'Est’, 1995, 238 pp.

Jonathan Klavens & Anthony Zamparutti, Foreign Direct Investments and Environment in Central and Eastern Europe: A Survey. Washington DC: The World Bank, 1995. x + 44 pp., $7.95.

Valdas Samonis, Foreign Investment in the East. New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 1995, 77 pp., £22.50.

Taras Kuzio, Ukrainian Security Policy. Washington DC: Praeger, 1995, xiv + 168 pp., £13.50.

Anssi Paasi, Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish‐Russian Border. Chichester: John Wiley, 1996. xxi + 353 pp., £45.00.

Tuomo Polvinen, Imperial Borderland, Bobrikov and the Attempted Russification of Finland, 1898–1904. London: Hurst, 1995, x + 342 pp. £32.50.

Hugh Poulton, Who are the Macedonians? London: Hurst, 1995, xvii + 218 pp., £12.50.

Jacob M. Landau, Pan‐Turkism. From Irredentism to Cooperation. London: Hurst, 1995, viii + 275 pp., £14.95.

Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution through Reform. New York: W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1995, xxii + 498 pp., £22.00.

Robert Benewick & Paul Wingrove (eds), China in the 1990s., Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995, x + 272 pp., £11.99.

A. James Gregor, Marxism, China and Development. New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1995, xi + 283 pp., £34.95.

David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995, xxviii + 602 pp., $50.00.

Janet W. Salaff, Working Daughters of Hong Kong: Filial Piety or Power in the Family. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, xxxvi + 317 pp., $17.50.

Irene Bloom (ed.), Knowledge Painfully Acquired. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996, ix + 226 pp., £14.95.

Walter Laqueur, The Dream that Failed: Reflections on the Soviet Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, ix + 231 pp., £18.99.

David Iosifovich Ortenberg. Stalin, Shcherbakov, Mekhlis, i drugie. Moscow: MP ‘Kodeks’, Ob"edinennaya redaktsiya MVD Rossii, 1995, 208 pp.

Lewis H. Siegelbaum & Ronald Grigor Suny (eds), Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, xiii + 399 pp., £41.50 h/b, £16.50 p/b.

Walter S. Dunn, Jr, The Soviet Economy and the Red Army, 1930–1945. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995, ix + 256 pp., £53.95.

A. J. Heywood & I. D. C. Button, Russian Locomotive Types, The Union Legacy. Malmo: Frank Stenvalls Forlag, 1995, vi + 175 pp. Obtainable in UK from Luddenden Press, 19 Goitside, Booth, Halifax HX2 6SY, £14.45.

George Orwell, Animal Farm. London: Seeker and Warburg 1995, 180 pp.