Sub-Constitutional Engineering: Negotiation, Content, and Legal Value of Interinstitutional Agreements in the EU

Abstract:  This article analyses the roles and impact of Interinstitutional Agreements (IIAs) in the EU, taking into account their relationship to primary law. Concretely speaking, these roles range from (a) explicitly authorised specifications of Treaty provisions via (b) not explicitly authorised specifications of vague Treaty law to (c) pure political undertaking. Based on the distinction between the constitutional and the operational level of the political game, we challenge the assumption that IIAs usually strengthen the European Parliament. As our case study, the 1993 interrelated package of IIAs on democracy, transparency and subsidiarity, illustrates, the European Parliament is not the only institution that benefits from IIAs, especially if they lack a sufficiently precise Treaty basis. Furthermore, if Treaty provisions underlying IIAs are precise, they also tend to produce precise and thus legally relevant content. Conversely, if IIAs deal primarily with elusive concepts they are likely to be legally ambiguous or even irrelevant at all.     

Ethnicity, gender, and the Level of Service Inventory-Revised

Offender assessment and classification is becoming an increasingly important part of correctional supervision and intervention. Over the last several decades, several different methods and “generations” of offender classification have emerged. Of most value appear to be third-generation, actuarial, dynamic risk/need assessments. With any new correctional strategy, however, there is a need to investigate the use of these risk/need assessments on offender subgroups in order to inform issues, such as reliability and prevalence of criminogenic risk factors. The present study utilized data that were gathered using the Level of Service Inventory-Revised (LSI-R). Results and comparisons of these assessments were investigated and presented for Native American and non-Native American offenders as well as male and female offenders. Discussion of the results, implications, and recommendations for further research are presented.     

"We Live in a Country of UNHCR"—Refugee Protests and Global Political Society

Between September and December 2005 over 3,000 Sudanese refugees held a sit-in demonstration at the Mustapha Mahmoud Square in Cairo, Egypt, which is located directly across from the offices of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). We analyze the events of the refugee sit-in as an act of global political society, one that saw people outside the realm of the political making demands for recognition and a say in the solutions being developed to relieve their plight. We argue that the sit-in at Cairo was fundamentally a disagreement between the refugees and the UNHCR over the politics of protection, care, and mobility. The article analyzes the strategies through which the refugees named their "population of care" in ways that countered the UNHCR's governmental strategies to classify the Sudanese refugee population in Cairo. We propose the concept of "global political society" as a way of thinking about global political life from the perspective of those who are usually denied the status of political beings. Global political society is a highly ambiguous site where power relations are enacted, taken and retaken by various actors, but in ways that do not foreclose opportunities for refugees to actively reformulate the governmentalities of care and protection.     

What Do Prosecutors Maximize? Evidence from the Careers of U.S. Attorneys

This study examines the performance of chief federal prosecutors(U.S. attorneys) and their subsequent careers. In a sample of570 attorneys in office from 1969 to 2000, the length of prisonsentences is positively related to subsequent favorable careeroutcomes for U.S. attorneys. In contrast, conviction rates donot appear to affect the careers of U.S. attorneys. These resultsare consistent with longer total prison sentences’ beingpersonally beneficial to prosecutors, and prosecutors’maximizing the length of prison sentences. Overall, the resultssuggest that sentence length, as opposed to convictions rates,is the relevant performance metric.     

Acidic and neutral drugs screen in blood with quantitation using microbore high-performance liquid chromatography–diode array detection and capillary gas chromatography–flame ionization detection

Blood previously acidified with aqueous saturated ammonium chloride solution was extracted with ethyl acetate. The dried extract was subjected to acetonitrile–hexane partition. The acetonitrile portion was analysed for the presence of acidic and neutral drugs by HPLC–DAD (200 mm×2.1 mm I.D. microbore ODS-Hypersil column) and GC–FID (25 m narrow-bore×0.25 mm I.D. HP-5 column with 0.33 μm film thickness). The protocol was found to be suitable for both clinical toxicology (including emergency toxicology) and postmortem toxicology. At least 66 drugs of interest were unequivocally identified by RRTs (HPLC) and UV spectra (DAD) match while another 12 were unequivocally identified by double RRTs match (HPLC and GC). Quantitation was facilitated by incorporating calibration blood standards in each assay batch. The five drugs most commonly encountered in clinical blood specimens (1150 cases) were: paracetamol (47.4% of the cases); chlormezanone (6.6%), theophylline (1.74%), naproxen (1.65%) and mefenamic acid (1.56%). The following drugs were detected in toxicologically significant quantities in postmortem blood specimens (245 cases): phenobarbitone (1.22% of the cases), naproxen (0.82%), chlormezanone (0.82%), theophylline (0.82%), carbamazepine (0.41%) and paracetamol (0.41%).     

Men and women's attributions of blame for domestic violence

Attributions of blame for the first and latest episodes of violence were assessed in a sample of 139 couples who were referred to a mandatory domestic violence treatment program in the military. Use of a methodology which allows for reports of nonmutually exclusive categories of attribution from both members of the dyad revealed more complex patterns of attributions than reflected in the existing literature. In addition, there were low rates of agreement within couples as to who was to blame for the violence. Although both men and women exhibited a high frequency of blaming their partner for both episodes of violence, men were significantly more likely to blame themselves for the latest than for the first episode. Attributions of blame were related to contextual variables in both men and women. Sex specific relationships emerged. These results were discussed with specific reference to predictions derived from attribution theory and their clinical implications.