FAMILY LAW IS DIFFERENT

Family law and adjudication are conceptually different from most other areas of law. This difference, and the sensitive needs of members of all families in dispute, including children and people from differing ethnic cultures, demand particular awareness and skills from family lawyers and judges. These special features of family law and disputes imply that mediation is more benign than lawyer-controlled dispute resolution.     

Crisis leadership styles—Bligh versus Gillard: a content analysis of Twitter posts on the Queensland floods

This paper presents a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of Twitter posts mentioning Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard during the 2011 Queensland flood crisis. The contrast in the perceived styles of the two leaders is analysed using the theory of transformational leadership as a framework. The implications for effective leadership communication in a crisis are discussed, notably, strategies for instilling pride and gaining respect and trust. The study also highlights the emerging role of Twitter in setting the media agenda at times of fast‐breaking news. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Geophysical Monitoring of Simulated Clandestine Graves Using Electrical and Ground‐Penetrating Radar Methods: 0–3 Years After Burial*,†

Abstract: This study provides forensic search teams with systematic geophysical monitoring data over simulated clandestine graves for comparison to active cases. Simulated “wrapped” and “naked” burials were created. Multigeophysical surveys were collected over a 3‐year monitoring period. Bulk ground resistivity, electrical resistivity imaging, multifrequency ground‐penetrating radar (GPR), and grave and background “soil‐water” conductivity data were collected. Resistivity surveys revealed the naked burial had consistently low‐resistivity anomalies, whereas the wrapped burial had small, varying high‐resistivity anomalies. GPR 110‐ to 900‐MHz frequency surveys showed the wrapped burial could be detected throughout, with the “naked” burial mostly resolved. Two hundred and twenty‐five megahertz frequency GPR data were optimal. “Soil‐water” analyses showed rapidly increasing (year 1), slowly increasing (year 2), and decreasing (year 3) conductivity values. Results suggest resistivity and GPR surveys should be collected if target “wrapping” is unknown, with winter to spring surveys optimal. Resistivity surveys should be collected in clay‐rich soils.     

Forensic psychiatry and the birth of the criminal insane asylum in modern Italy

This paper focuses on the creation of the criminal insane asylum in Italy between unification in 1861 and World War I. The establishment of criminal insane asylums was a triumph of the positivist criminology of Cesare Lombroso, who advocated for an institution to intern insane criminals in his classic work, Criminal Man (1876). As a context for the analysis of the birth of the criminal insane asylum in Italy, this essay also outlines the history of the insanity plea in Italian criminal law and the young discipline of psychiatry during the fifty years after Italian unification.     

Normativity and Norms

Book reviewed in this article:
Stanley L. Paulson and Bonnie Litschewski Paulson, Normativity and Norms     

The Retention of State Level Concealed Handgun Laws: Empirical Evidence from Interest Group and Legislative Models

The present research extends the work of Lott and Mustard (1997) by offering the first categorical examination (using an ordered logit model) of various types of right-to-carry handgun legislation across the50 states for 1997. Such an examination is based on the “market for laws” construct built by Crain (1979) and Benson and Engin (1988), which points out that various interest group (demand side) and legislative (firm, supply side) considerations are important in modeling legislation activity at the state level. To that end, we include a number of property rights, demographic and legislative institutional variables as explanatory factors in ordered log it models and tests for nonnested hypotheses. In general, we find that the property-rights movement has significantly shaped these statewide laws as pointed out by variables which measure the amount of federal land present within each state, per-capita income, and death-row inmate executions. Population density, Republican representation, length of legislative sessions and female legislative representation have also had significant impacts on the retention of various forms of right-to-carry legislation.     

Transaction costs and inter‐jurisdictional cooperation: an application to land use collaboration

• The costs and benefits of inter‐jurisdictional cooperation and how these impede strategic alliances among jurisdictions is an issue of growing importance worldwide. The reason is the potential cost savings, efficiency increase and economic development benefits that can be realized through cooperation. The literature has increasingly mentioned transaction costs as obstacles that mitigate cooperation and as a key component of cooperation costs, which must be outweighed by cooperation benefits in order for communities to perceive advantageous strategic alliances. However, a framework is lacking in the literature for evaluating the implications of transaction costs for inter‐jurisdictional cooperation. This paper develops a framework for evaluating the nature and dynamics of transaction costs and their implications for inter‐jurisdictional cooperation, with an application to land use. A simple cost function model is used to explain the costs and challenges associated with managing coordinated, cooperative or consolidated relationships, and the dynamics of such costs. The analysis highlights the importance of such things as degree of complexity, inter‐party diversity and the relative sizes of collaborating partners. An application to land use cooperation in Michigan suggests that policies to eliminate transaction costs could help reduce the barriers to cooperation of various types.

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Green Criminology Before ‘Green Criminology’: Amnesia and Absences

Although the first published use of the term ‘green criminology’ seems to have been made by Lynch (Green criminology. Aldershot, Hampshire, 1990/2006), elements of the analysis and critique represented by the term were established well before this date. There is much criminological engagement with, and analysis of, environmental crime and harm that occurred prior to 1990 that deserves acknowledgement. In this article, we try to illuminate some of the antecedents of green criminology. Proceeding in this way allows us to learn from ‘absences’, i.e. knowledge that existed but has been forgotten. We conclude by referring to green criminology not as an exclusionary label or barrier but as a symbol that guides and inspires the direction of research.     

Has Legal Realism Damaged the Legitimacy of the U.S. Supreme Court?

Does understanding how U.S. Supreme Court justices actually decide cases undermine the institutional legitimacy of the nation's highest court? To the extent that ordinary people recognize that the justices are deciding legal disputes on the basis of their own ideological biases and preferences (legal realism and the attitudinal model), the belief that the justices merely “apply” the law (mechanical jurisprudence and the myth of legality) is difficult to sustain. Although it is easy to see how the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, the most unaccountable of all American political institutions, is nurtured by the view that judicial decisionmaking is discretionless and mechanical, the sources of institutional legitimacy under legal realism are less obvious. Here, we demonstrate, using a nationally representative sample, that the American people understand judicial decisionmaking in realistic terms, that they extend legitimacy to the Supreme Court, and they do so under the belief that judges exercise their discretion in a principled and sincere fashion. Belief in mechanical jurisprudence is therefore not a necessary underpinning of judicial legitimacy; belief in legal realism is not incompatible with legitimacy.