Nothing but gloom: Women and academia in the new Germany

The real losers in restructuring the former East German university system are women scholars. Women are not only the first to lose their positions in the process of Abwicklung they are also the last to be considered in the new stage of rebuilding the university system. Thus the politics of Abwicklung, has to be understood as a microcosm of the gendered nature of German unification as a whole. Unification has provided German conservatives the opportunity to roll back not only the social policies of the east, but also the feminist achievements in the west. While this process may, because of the specificity of unification, be restricted to the German situation, nevertheless many studies show that even without the process of unification, women in virtually all former eastern European countries are experiencing their ‘forced’ return to the private sphere.     

Cesare Beccaria: Utilitarian or retributivist?

Ever since Cesare Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments first appeared in 1764, it has been common to regard its author as a theorist of criminal jurisprudence who stressed considerations of utility to the exclusion of considerations of justice. There is strong evidence for this view, and Beccaria was in many ways a forerunner of Bentham. There is, however, another side to Beccaria that has often been overlooked. In the way in which he established the right of the sovereign to punish and in his concern for the rights of the criminal (rights which no consideration of utility could override), Beccaria showed that he was much closer to the outlook commonly associated with Kant and Hegel than one would at first suspect. Though there were utilitarian aspects to his thought, Beccaria may be considered basically a retributivist who incorporated certain obvious, though by no means dominant, utilitarian themes into his work. In blending utilitarianism and retributivism, Beccaria was usually consistent, and he usually gave greater emphasis to the former.     

The false memory syndrome: Clinical/legal issues for the prosecution

Early trauma, especially alleged recollected sexual or ritualistic abuse, has dominated both the clinical and legal systems recently. The clinical/legal challenge is to discern between true abuse and false memories. Modern medical technology has provided new insights into the operation of the brain along with the central and peripheral nervous systems and their relationship to the endocrine system. We now have a better understanding of how our system processes trauma and severe anxiety. An understanding of trauma recollection and client's susceptibility to causal suggestions from the neuropsychological perspective is crucial when these types of abuses are alleged.