Law and ethics for the bioeconomy and beyond

The convergence of biological, technological and economic realms of life has fostered the development of the bioeconomy as a new feature of contemporary society. As the meaning of life and the human body is redefined in the context of the bioeconomy, new challenges have emerged for ethics and law In the face of these challenges, it is imperative that the currency of regulatory frameworks is maintained through the processes of regular review and update. The National Health and Medical Research Council has recently released the new National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research to provide guidance for health research in Australia. The new National Statement will play an important part in supporting innovation and the development of the knowledge economy.     

Exploring the relationship between sentencing and the legitimacy of trial justice

This paper argues that recent sustained criticism of judicial sentencing in England and Wales reflects a much deeper malaise afflicting the legitimacy of punishment in the late post-modern era. It suggests that this phenomenon not only threatens the liberal-consensus view of the judiciary as pivotal to the rule of law, but also undermines the rationality which underpins conventional paradigms of criminal justice more generally. The paper goes on to argue that there are important lessons to be learned from engaging with the debates about punishment and sentencing which are taking place on the international stage, suggesting that the crisis in domestic sentencing is really symptomatic of a more fundamental crisis in penal legitimacy affecting the whole of civil society; one that touches upon the role of punishment in the governance of so-called democratic states. The paper concludes that the time may have come to modify the predominant neo-liberal paradigm prevalent in western democracies by developing notions of punishment and sentencing as relational contexts which provide meaningful links between trial outcomes and aspirations for justice.     

Children's Rights and the Politics of Food: Big Food Versus Little People

This article traces the battle in the United States during the Obama administration, continuing into the Trump administration, to protect children's rights to food. It explores barriers to development of sound, science‐based food policies, including the refusal to recognize food as a human right, anti‐science denialism, hostility toward government regulation, and relative powerlessness of children. It points to the role of a “Big Food Pyramid” composed of powerful food industry and large scale distribution and marketing interests in blocking sound policies in prenatal and infant nutrition, school lunches, SNAP and WIC, the marketing to children of high fat and fructose‐laden products, and campaigns to increase youth fitness. While predicting a continuing assault at the federal level on children's rights to safe and healthy foods, the article highlights the positive role of consumer demand in shaping marketing, labeling and production of food and opportunities for leaders in the food industry and in government at local, municipal and state levels to continue the battle for sound food policies.     

Psychopathology and world politics

The relationship between psychopathology and world politics can be considered firstly from the world politics perspective. This means examining the dysfunctional forms of human behaviour manifest there—both individual and collective/communal. It means examining how such behaviour can be described and explained in psychiatric or psychological/psychoanalytical terms. The relationship between psychopathology and world politics can also be considered from the psychopathology perspective. This means examining some of the key psychopathological concepts that are of relevance to world affairs. It means examining paranoia or narcissism, for example, and the way understanding syndromes like these helps further our understanding of world affairs.     

Poetic Justice

This note examines the decision of the Court of Appeal in Tabernacle v Secretary of State for Defence (2009). The court held that byelaws prohibiting camping on Ministry of Defence land adjacent to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire violated the human rights of women peace protestors under Articles 10 and 11 European Convention on Human Rights. The note argues that this decision calls into question arguments recently made, that the association of women with peace should be abandoned. It also reveals the potential of law to facilitate the performative and transformative production of subject positions, as ‘woman’, which do not depend on or connect with debilitating patriarchal constructions of women as weak or vulnerable.     

Promoting democracy in Latin America: foreign policy change and US democracy assistance, 1975–2010

Since the Cold War the USA has articulated and implemented explicit strategies of democracy promotion. One interesting target of such efforts is Latin America, in part because of the region’s geographic proximity to the USA and of the mixed record of US support for democracy there. This paper examines the impact of the end of the Cold War and the 9/11 episode on the nature, purposes, targets and consequences of US democracy assistance to Latin America. Examining democracy aid allocations, social and political factors and other variables, it traces changes in aid strategies, purposes and recipients generated by these paradigm shifts, and assesses the impact of such assistance on the politics of the region. It concludes with implications of these findings for US democracy promotion policies.     

A Universal Test of an Expected Utility Theory of War

Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman's version of an expected utility theory of war has become one of the most widely cited theories of international conflict. However, the testing of the theory has lagged behind its theoretical development. In its most sophisticated formulation, the theory has been tested on only 707 dyad-years, all drawn from Europe between 1816 and 1970. We present a test of the expected utility theory of war (as developed in War and Reason ) on the international system from 1816 to 1984. Specifically, we examine the relationship between the main equilibrium variables derived under the "domestic variant" of the international interaction game and behavioral outcomes using multinomial logit. We find that the equilibria correlate with actual behavior in both the set of all dyads and a subset of politically relevant dyads, even after including a set of control variables. The relationship is somewhat less clear among the population of all interstate-directed dyads, however, with key equilibrium variables having smaller effects at increasing the odds of interstate conflict among all dyads. We also present a new software program, EUGene , which generates expected utility data and can serve as an important data management tool for international relations researchers.