Banishment and the Post-Industrial City: Lessons from Seattle

Seattle deploys several mechanisms by which individuals’ presence in particular spaces can constitute a crime. Through a range of means, police in Seattle are given wide authority to question and arrest those who appear as human manifestations of the “disorder” that is of concern to many. Importantly, these programs accentuate the power of criminal law by mobilizing other forms of law, most notably civil law and administrative law. This legally-hybrid structure works to accentuate the police’s power notably. Yet increased police power does not actually work to reduce “disorder” to any appreciable extent. For this reason, and others, we suggest that different approaches to addressing social marginality represent more promising avenues for cities like Seattle to explore.     

Regulating Law Firm Ethics Management: An Empirical Assessment of an Innovation in Regulation of the Legal Profession in New South Wales

The Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) was the first jurisdiction to fully deregulate law firm structure and allow alternative business structures in the legal profession. At the same time it also introduced an innovation in regulation of the legal profession, requiring that incorporated legal practices implement ‘appropriate management systems’ for ensuring the provision of legal services in compliance with professional ethical obligations. This paper presents a preliminary empirical evaluation of the impact of this attempt at ‘management‐based regulation’. We find that the NSW requirement that firms self‐assess their ethics management leads to a large and statistically significant drop in complaints. The (self‐assessed) level of implementation of ethics management infrastructure, however, does not make any difference. The relevance of these findings to debates about deprofessionalization, managerialism, and commercialism in the legal profession is discussed, and the NSW approach is distinguished from the more heavy‐handed English legal aid approach to regulating law firm quality management.     

The Debate over Police Reform: Examining Minority Support for Citizen Oversight and Resistance by Police Unions

Researchers have argued that the creation of citizen oversight often involves debate between those that support its use and the police which do not. Police unions, for example, have a long history of objecting to the creation of oversight, especially during collective bargaining. Minority demands for police reform, on the other hand, can lend support for its implementation, especially after a highly publicized case of misconduct between the police and minority citizens. Using a retrospective approach, this study examined the extent to which these opposing forces influenced the existence of oversight. Findings suggest that departments that engage in collective bargaining were no more likely to use an oversight agency than departments that did not engage in collective bargaining. Cities with large percentages of African Americans, however, were more likely to have an existing oversight agency.     

Public Support for Punishment and Progressive Criminal Justice Policy Preferences: The Role of Symbolic Racism and Negative Racial Stereotype

Prior studies have found that symbolic racism and negative African-American stereotypes are linked to public preferences for punitive criminal justice policy. But prior studies have mostly focused attention on White respondents and have not adequately examined whether the effects of symbolic racism and negative African American stereotypes are the same across race and ethnicity. This study used the 2000 American National Election Study data to fill this gap in the empirical literature. The study found that the effects of symbolic racism were broad and generally impact Whites, African-Americans, and members of other races/ethnicities the same. The effects of negative African-American stereotype were more limited. This variable predicted punishment policy preference for members of other races/ethnicities and there were significant differences in how stereotypes impacted policy preferences across race and ethnicity. Implications for theory are discussed.     

Precautionary and Proactionary as the New Right and the New Left of the Twenty-First Century Ideological Spectrum

Despite its specific origin in the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly after the revolution of 1789, the right–left divide of the ideological spectrum has proved remarkably resilient in anchoring public intellectual life for over two centuries. In this article, I argue that we are witnessing a 90° rotation of this ideological axis, resulting in a new set of poles, each of which combines elements of the old right–left divide. The ‘precautionary’ pole brings together the conservationist side of the right and the communitarian side of the left, whereas the ‘proactionary’ pole unites the libertarian side of the right and the technocratic side of the left. I prepare the ground for discussing these new alternatives with a consideration of the political theology of the old right–left divide, which ultimately turns on alternative visions of how the past determines the future. This ‘left’ basically holds that what is possible significantly exceeds what is probable, with liberals adopting an ‘antirealist’ and socialists a ‘realist’ stance towards the prospect of an optimal social order. Both the precautionary and proactionary poles of the new ideological spectrum are fixated on our attitude towards a future in which the ontological constitution of the polity (i.e. its ‘humanity’) is among the issue under contestation. In this emerging ideological conflict, more of which is transpiring in video than in print, the precautionaries are marked as more ‘risk-averse’ and the proactionaries more ‘risk-seeking’ than had been presumed to be the normal attitude in the modern welfare state.     

Children and Young People who have Sexually Harmful Behaviours: From Fixed to Transformative Risk Assessment

Risk, risk assessment and risk management have become central to contemporary policies and practices in criminal justice, with consequences for those who apply and receive such approaches. It has been argued that risk has been the key organising principle of contemporary correctional practice and offender management, and that actuarial risk in particular has taken on a hegemonic dominance that supersedes other models of governance, such as welfare and disciplinary forms of regulation. This article focuses on the construction and deployment of two assessment frameworks for young people with sexually harmful behaviour to illustrate the epistemological differences between a clinical/actuarial guided approach and that of constructing safety. It identifies current theorising about risk/technologies as being within a neo-liberal political and governance agenda and the opportunities for moving from a fixed to a transformative risk subject.

The development and application of a diatom-based quantitative reconstruction technique in forensic science

Diatoms are a group of unicellular algae that have been recorded and classified for over 200 years and have been used in a range of applications in forensic science. We have developed a quantitative diatom-based reconstruction technique to confirm drowning as a cause of death and localize the site of drowning in two recent, high-profile, case studies. In both case studies we collected diatom samples from the local and/or regional area to act as a control in the examination of diatom assemblages associated with lungs and clothing. In Case Study 1 the modern analog technique suggested that all lung and clothing samples have statistically significant similarities to control samples from shallow water habitats. In Case Study 2, the analog matching suggested that the majority of lung samples show a statistically significant relationship to samples from a pond, indicating that this was the drowning medium.