Lord Curzon and British policy towards the Franco‐Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in 1923

An analysis of the ways in which different composite monarchies conducted international relations in the eighteenth century reveals the interplay of structure and contingency in shaping change and the discussion of change. Hanover-Britain is compared with Saxony-Poland. Considering Britain as an example of a polity created and shaped by a dynastic personal union redresses teleological tendencies in the treatment of international relations and offers an important perspective.     

Who has turned the project management lights on? A comparative analysis of transportation and information technology in US state governments

We provide a comparative analysis of capital project management for major transportation and information technology (IT) acquisitions in US state governments, focusing on the use of earned value management (EVM). Results indicate that most states have adopted basic reforms, such as establishing project management offices and developing guidelines based on industry standards. However, fewer have implemented reforms with more teeth to them, such as centralized oversight and EVM. We find that states with greater spending are more likely to use EVM but that it is more commonly prescribed for IT than transportation.     

Assessing the Impact of Harassment by Peers: Incident Characteristics and Outcomes in a National Sample of Youth

Although there are widely held assumptions about the characteristics of peer bullying that are of greatest concern, very few studies have empirically assessed which characteristics most affect its impact. The current research addresses this gap by using a nationally representative U.S. sample of youth ages 10–20 to examine the relative effects of a variety of potentially aggravating incident characteristics on emotional, physical health, and school-related outcomes. Findings show support for power imbalance and duration (a stronger predictor than repetition) as incident characteristics that exacerbate the negative impact of peer harassment. However, several other incident characteristics have substantial effects with or without the presence of these qualities. Injury, sexual content, involvement of multiple perpetrators, and hate/bias components of peer harassment incidents each increased at least one negative outcome. Findings point to several features of peer harassment that can provide a basis for prioritizing victimization experiences in greatest need of intervention efforts.     

The Morphology of Fecal and Regurgitation Artifacts Deposited by the Blow Fly Lucilia cuprina Fed a Diet of Human Blood

Fly feces and regurgitation deposits may be mistaken for bloodstain patterns at a crime scene, potentially compromising event reconstruction and/or misdirecting police resources. In some instances, these artifacts contain sufficient human biological material to generate a full DNA profile, sometimes 2 years after deposition. Clearly, it is important that investigators can make the distinction between artifacts and bloodstains. This study examined 6645 artifacts deposited on a smooth, nonporous surface after Lucilia cuprina were fed human blood. Artifacts were also compared with bloodstains on a variety of other surfaces. Both similarities and differences were found between artifacts and bloodstains, highlighting the need for an identification system to assist personnel with little training in bloodstain pattern analysis. The morphology of the artifacts has been described so that these deposits may be more clearly distinguished from bloodstains, targeted by crime scene personnel as potential sources of human DNA, and/or identified as potential evidence contaminants. Flowcharts have been devised to facilitate the analysis.     

Rehabilitating Retributivism

This review essay of Victor Tadros’s new book, “The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law,” responds to Tadros’s energetic and sophisticated attacks on retributivist justifications for criminal punishment. I argue, in a nutshell, that those attacks fail. In defending retributivism, however, I also sketch original views on two questions that retributivism must address but that many or most retributivists have skated past. First, what do wrongdoers deserve – to suffer? to be punished? something else? Second, what does it mean for them to deserve it? That is, what is the normative force or significance of valid desert claims, either with respect to retributivist desert in particular or with respect to all forms of desert? Because the answers that this essay offers are preliminary, the essay also serves as a partial blueprint for further work by criminal law theorists with retributivist sympathies.     

Devolution and party change: Candidate selection for the 1999 Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly elections

The article analyses the candidate selection procedures of each of the major parties in the run‐up to the 1999 Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly elections, assessing the extent to which they reveal developments in party democratisation and decentralisation on the one hand, and evidence of countervailing central control on the other. Procedural innovations achieved greater openness in candidate nomination and gender balance in candidatures but developments in democratisation were contested and evidence of decentralisation was mixed. Surveys of candidates reveal a perception in the Labour Party that there was too much central influence, although its implications differed in Scotland and Wales. There were perceptions of unfairness and lack of internal democracy in the other parties as well, suggesting in particular a contradiction between central influence in all of the parties’ approaches to list selection and candidates’ expectations of such influence diminishing. Devolution, therefore, released tensions in all parties.     

Oran Young and international institutions

Current understandings of global environmental governance owe much to the numerous theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions of Oran Young. Over the course of 50 years, Young has created many of the theories and typologies we use to explain why international environmental institutions form and what types of effects they have and the conditions under which they have them. His contributions have been central to the development of the concepts of institutional dynamics, interplay, and scale. He has made major contributions to environmental policy globally and in the Arctic, both through his own work and by fostering the work of other scholars. This article summarizes the contributions Young has made to the field and introduces the articles in this special issue that honor those contributions.