The paraphilia-related disorders: an investigation of the relevance of the concept in sexual murderers

Paraphilic disorders (PAs) and sexual preoccupation are known risk factors for recidivism in sexual offenders. Nonparaphilic sexual excessive behaviors-so-called paraphilia-related disorders (PRDs), like paraphilias, are also characterized by sexual preoccupation and volitional impairment and can be diagnosed in paraphilic men. The prevalence and clinical significance of PRDs in sexual homicide perpetrators, however, is unknown. We investigated the relationship between PAs and PRDs retrospectively in a sample of 161 sexual murderers. Four groups were compared: men without a PA or a PRD diagnosis, men with at least one PRD but no PA, men with at least one PA but no PRD, and finally, those with a combination of both (PA+PRD). The PA+PRD group had the most lifetime cumulative sexual impulsivity disorders, more developmental problems, the highest persistent frequency of sexual activity, the highest number of previous sexual offences, more sexual sadism, and compulsive masturbation. Men of the PRD subsample had suffered more from childhood sexual abuse, showed more promiscuity, psychopathy, and alcohol problems. The use of the PRD concept in this special offender group should be further investigated with prospectively designed studies.     

The influence of brain abnormalities on psychosocial development, criminal history and paraphilias in sexual murderers

The aim of this study was to investigate the number and type of brain abnormalities and their influence on psychosocial development, criminal history and paraphilias in sexual murderers. We analyzed psychiatric court reports of 166 sexual murderers and compared a group with notable signs of brain abnormalities (N = 50) with those without any signs (N = 116). Sexual murderers with brain abnormalities suffered more from early behavior problems. They were less likely to cohabitate with the victim at the time of the homicide and had more victims at the age of six years or younger. Psychiatric diagnoses revealed a higher total number of paraphilias: Transvestic fetishism and paraphilias not otherwise specified were more frequent in offenders with brain abnormalities. A binary logistic regression identified five predictors that accounted for 46.8% of the variance explaining the presence of brain abnormalities. Our results suggest the importance of a comprehensive neurological and psychological examination of this special offender group.     

Extreme right-wing voting in Western Europe

Abstract. In this study we explain extreme right-wing voting behaviour in the countries of the European Union and Norway from a micro and macro perspective. Using a multidisciplinary multilevel approach, we take into account individual-level social background characteristics and public opinion alongside country characteristics and characteristics of extreme right-wing parties themselves. By making use of large-scale survey data (N = 49,801) together with country-level statistics and expert survey data, we are able to explain extreme right-wing voting behaviour from this multilevel perspective. Our results show that cross-national differences in support of extreme right-wing parties are particularly due to differences in public opinion on immigration and democracy, the number of non-Western residents in a country and, above all, to party characteristics of the extreme right-wing parties themselves.     

Individual and contextual characteristics of the German extreme right-wing vote in the 1990s. A test of complementary theories

Abstract In this article we set out to improve our knowledge on voting for extreme right–wing parties, i.e. the Republikaner, by taking into account social, political and contextual characteristics. We test four theories that provide explanations as to why certain social categories are more likely to vote for the Republikaner. The hypotheses are tested with multilevel analyses, with data from a national sample (N = 4688). Multinomial analyses provide additional information on how theoretically derived political attitudes effect voting behaviour.     

'New Governance' in European Corporate Law Regulation as Transnational Legal Pluralism

The present transformation of European corporate governance regulation mirrors the challenges that have been facing the EU's continuously evolving polity, marked by tensions between centralised integration programmes, on the one hand, and Member State's embedded capitalisms, path-dependencies and rent-seeking, on the other. As longstanding concerns with remaining obstacles to more mobility for workers, services, business entities and capital in recent years are aligned with post-Lisbon commitments to creating the world's leading competitive market, European corporate governance regulation (ECGR) has become exposed to and implicated in a set of highly dynamic regulatory experiments. In this context, 'New Governance' offers itself as both a tentative label and immodest proposal for a more responsive and innovative approach to European law making. The following article assesses the recently emerging regulatory forms in ECGR as illustrations of far-reaching transformations in market governance. The arguable parallels between the EU's regulatory transformation in response to growing legitimacy concerns and the recurring question about whose interests a business corporation is intended to serve, provide the framework for an exploration of current regulatory trajectories in European corporate law that can most adequately be understood as a telling example of transnational legal pluralism.     

Piercing the Legal Veil: Commercial Arbitration and Transnational Law

The contemporary search for new forms of international governance, of which the debate around lex mercatoria is but an example, should attentively build on the lessons on public and private ordering learned in the nation state. Sophisticated commercial practices on a transnational scale, while necessitating adaptive and flexible procedures within an adequate institutional framework, involve many of the same normative questions posed by economic law in the nation state. The following article critically discusses the claims made in the lex mercatoria debate as to the rise of a transnational private law society ('Privatrechtsgesellschaft') in which political problems of exclusion and freedom have allegedly been resolved by the universal spread of private autonomy. Against similar images of a world exclusively made up of independent, self-relying market citizens, it is argued that if a conception of rights is to be rescued from the deathbed of the traditional nation state, then the learning experiences made within its confines are well worth considering in light of the pressing legitimacy needs of emerging institutions and polities.     

Positive versus Negative Framing Affects Justice Judgments

This research demonstrates the effect of framing on justice judgments. Presenting identical allocation situations in different modes of accomplishing the resource allocation, resulting in either positive (benefits) or negative (harms) outcomes, affects justice judgments. Two independent studies revealed that participants judged non-egalitarian principles (i.e., merit, ability, effort, need, and tenure) as more just when allocation of a resource was presented in the positive framing manner (e.g., to deliver goods or to withhold bads) relative to presenting the exact same resource allocated in a negative framing manner (e.g., to deliver bads or to withhold goods). It is suggested that the way resource allocation is framed evokes favorable (or unfavorable) associations that cause people to judge the situation as more (or less) just.     

Regulation under uncertainty: The coevolution of industry and regulation

As production and design disintegrate and become more collaborative, involving dynamic relations between customers and firms supplying complex subsystems and service, products and production methods become more innovative but also more hazardous. The inadvertent co‐production of latent hazards by independent firms is forcing firms and regulators to address the problem of uncertainty – the inability to anticipate, much less assign a probability to future states of the world – more directly than before. Under uncertainty, neither the regulator nor the regulated firms know what needs to be done. The regulator must induce firms to systematically canvas their practices and identify potential hazards. But recognizing the fallibility of all such efforts, the regulator must further foster the institutionalization of incident or event reporting procedures: systems to register failures in products or production processes that could be precursors to catastrophe; to trace out and correct their root causes; to alert others in similar situations to the potential hazard; and to make certain that countermeasures to ensure the safety of current operations are taken and the design requirements for the next generation of the implicated components or installations are updated accordingly. In this essay we develop these arguments and look closely at changes in the Norwegian offshore oil and gas industry and its regulator, the Petroleum Safety Authority to better understand the coevolution of vertically disintegrated industry and new forms of regulation.     

Public Values, Private Contractsand the Colliding Worlds of Family and Market:German Federal Constitutional Court,`Marital Agreement' Decisions of 6 February2001 and 29 March 2001

In two decisions delivered inFebruary and March 2001, the German FederalConstitutional Court voided the maritalagreements struck between a man and a pregnantwoman on the grounds that they were the productof an inequality of bargaining power betweenthe parties. These findings, involving anapplication of the fundamental rightsprovisions of the German Basic Law to privateagreements, demonstrate the creeping competenceof the F.C.C. into the sphere of contractualrelations and an ongoing questioning ofthe traditional public/private law divide. Exploring some of the implications of applyingpublic values and constitutional reviewstandards to private agreements, this notecontextualises the decisions within the debateupon competing (and ultimately colliding)social systems of the family and the market.