Demonstrably Awful: The Right to Life and the Selective Non-Treatment of Disabled Babies and Young Children

Twenty-five years ago it was common practice to bring about the deaths of some children with learning disabilities or physical impairments. This paper considers a small number of landmark cases in the early 1980s that confronted this practice. These cases illustrate a process by which external forces (social, philosophical, political, and professional) moved through the legal system to effect a profound change outside that system – primarily in the (then) largely closed domain of medical conduct/practice. These cases are considered from a socio-legal perspective. In particular, the paper analyses the reasons why they surfaced at that time, the social and political contexts that shaped the judgments, and their legacy.     

Conditional openness: young people define practices for successful child protection interventions

Taking the reforms of child protection legislation that have occurred since the 1980s as a backdrop, this paper considers young people’s perspectives on the factors that facilitated their engagement with child protection services and the barriers they perceived to effective service delivery. Drawing on findings from a New Zealand study of young people’s experience of multiple service use (child protection, mental health, youth justice and remedial education), the paper identifies that that rather than being ‘resistant’ or ‘hostile’ to statutory child protection intervention, young people reported a ‘conditional openness’. This conditional openness was characterised by three themes: communication; continuity and consistency; and contextual and cultural responsiveness. Interventions with these characteristics activated this conditional openness allowing effective interventions to occur. Using a series of case studies, comprising interviews and agency case file records; the paper considers the experiences of 109 young people (12–17 years) as well as those of the ‘person most knowledgeable;’ an adult nominated by young people because they knew the young person’s situation well.     

The effect of participation in a conversation on recognition and identification of the speakers' voices

Subjects' recognition of their own voice, the voice of a person they had a conversation with, and the voices of two people they heard converse, were compared. They listened to or conversed with each voice for five minutes and then attempted to recognize each voice from among 26 voices saying the same test phrase. In general, subjects recognized the voice of their conversational partner better than the voices of people they had listened to passively. They did not recognize their own voice better than that of their partner. Subjects who recognized their own voice always identified it without error. Although subjects correctly identified other voices they correctly recognized, they also falsely identified voices they falsely recognized. These results are discussed with respect to their practical implications for voice identification by witnesses in legal proceedings and with respect to current theories of memory.     

Tax morale and (de-)centralization: An experimental study

We consider an economy composed of two regions. Each of them provides a public good whose benefits reach beyond local boundaries. In case of decentralization, taxes collected by members of a region are spent only on that region's public good. In case of centralization, tax receipts from the two regions are pooled and used to finance both public goods according to the population size of each region. The experiment shows that centralization induces lower tax morale and less efficient outcomes. The reasons are that centralization gives rise to an interregional incentive problem and creates inequalities in income between regions.     

以关系为视角的加拿大原住民司法

司法除了应该及时保护社会外,还需要包涵以下目标:使得加害人在情感层面上了解犯罪所造成的损害不止发生在被害人一个人身上,与被害人有关的每个人都会受到伤害;确定加害人生活中的哪些不和谐因素导致了犯罪,并且为加害人努力塑造其他各种关系来减少重复犯罪的可能;寻求途径使得加害人和被害人双方都能摆脱受损的关系,因为在犯罪发生后他们都被束缚在了受损关系上.可见,关系模式中对加害人的惩罚和刑事司法制度中的惩罚,二者基础不同.后者的基础是与犯罪行为的社会危害性程度相适应的刑罚,而不考虑加害人对自身罪行的理解和悔罪程度.而在关系模式中,惩罚的重点在情感层面,惩罚的基础是悔罪.一旦用关系的视角看待犯罪,便开始重新审视西方刑事司法系统的一些基本理念,它们没有我们一直以为的那样精致.     

The Temporal Dimension in Accounts of Violent Conflict: A Case Study from Darfur

This article explores the notion of time in relation to the recording of peace and conflict. In particular the article is interested in how concepts of time (linear, seasonal, vague, precise, etc.) shape the narrative of events – giving them an apparent order. A close look at the mechanics of how accounts of conflict are compiled and presented, and how time is represented within them, reveals an ambiguity and social construction of the temporal dimension in accounts of conflict. This article draws on two data sets on violence in Darfur – one quantitative, one qualitative – to investigate how time is represented, focusing on how ‘events’ are captured and produce real-time actionable data, and how the data sets cope with narratives of chronic insecurity.