构建我国证人反对被迫自证其罪特权制度的设想

我国证人出庭作证制度极不完善,尤其是证人权利义务设置失衡,证人的应有权利缺乏保障,导致证人出庭作证难,拒证现象严重。反对被迫自证其罪特权是证人的一项必不可少的权利,它已得到世界众多国家以及联合国公约的认可。构建我国证人反对被迫自证其罪特权制度对于改善我国证人作证的现状,切实保障证人合法权益是非常重要的。     

论全国人大的对外交往

随着中国改革开放的深入发展和国外议会外交的兴起,全国人大的对外交往活动也日益活跃。本文通过对近些年来全国人大对外交往活动的介绍和研究,试图揭示全国人大对外交往在我国整体外交中的地位、独特作用以及其对外交往活动对全国人大自身建设的重要意义。     

Rethinking UK Parliamentary Adaptation in EU Affairs: Devolution and Europeanisation

How national parliaments adapt to the European Union is an important debate. However, scholars often overlook the regional aspect. This is particularly so for the UK where, despite devolution since 1999, scholarship remains largely devolution-blind. It is assumed that evaluating UK parliamentary adaptation only requires assessing the work of Westminster committees. This article takes a first step towards rectifying this oversight through reconceptualising UK–EU parliamentary engagement as multi-territory, not state-centric. This is demonstrated by comparing the social construction of practices in Scotland, Wales and at Westminster since 1999. Acknowledging devolution, however, does not just require comparing practices. Additionally, the paper asks how the ideas of devolution have been taken up by actors, potentially transforming the meaning of UK engagement for them. This necessitates new approaches drawn from interpretivist and constructivist institutionalist theories. Ultimately, therefore, the paper goes further than arguing for devolution-aware research to promoting change more generally in how parliamentary adaptation is theorised.     

From a Top-Down to a Bottom-Up Approach to Legislative Oversight

Over the years there have been several studies of oversight in the context of the US Congress; much less attention, however, has been paid to the study of oversight in parliamentary systems. Comparative studies spearheaded by several international organisations in recent years offer a different perspective of legislative oversight. They emphasise a new concept, oversight potential, and suggest that strengthening this potential would help promote good governance, fight corruption and improve democracy. This study examines the concept of oversight potential in a pure parliamentary system – the Israeli Knesset. It shows that low potential impairs actual oversight in a parliamentary system that uses mainly police-patrol techniques as defined by the 1987 work of McCubbins and Schwartz. It suggests that increasing oversight potential will help improve the oversight outputs of the legislature. Finally, it develops a bottom-up legislative approach for measuring oversight potential, and by doing so it enriches this neglected field of research.     

National Parliamentary Control of EU Policy: The Challenge of Supranational Institutional Development

The history of the EU is characterised by rapid and complex institutional development. This leaves European Affairs Committees (EACs) in national parliaments with a moving target problem in their endeavours to control the government's EU policies. This paper investigates how EACs react to this challenge. Building on the rational delegation literature, it is argued that EACs are likely to adapt control instruments in tandem with institutional changes at the supranational level. Using McCubbins and Schwartz (1984, American Journal of Political Science, 28, 165–179), it is further argued that EACs are likely to want to impose both police patrol and fire alarm control on the government. These arguments are investigated in the case of Denmark during the 50-year period since the first Danish application for EU membership in 1961, and considerable support is found for the authors' hypotheses.     

Briefly Noted

The argument is commonly made that television has changed the character of parliamentary elections. Its ever more central role in election campaigns outside the United States is held to have “presidentialized” parliamentary elections because it is a medium that projects personalities more effectively than ideas or policies. A comparison of the electoral roles of the Australian prime minister and the U.S. president indicates that both leaders are held personally accountable for government performance. However, such “presidentialism” appears to have little to do with television in Australia or in the United States. Television‐dependent citizens in both countries are less susceptible to the campaign appeals of chief executives than the rest of the voting public. Both leaders, but especially the president, do have an electoral impact. Counter to expectations, however, this impact makes itself felt in both cases among those voters who are not dependent on television for their political information and cues. Party identification seems to insulate the television‐dependent more successfully against leader effects.     

Beyond committees: parliamentary oversight of coalition government in Britain

Abstract

A legislature’s ability to engage in oversight of the executive is believed to derive largely from its committee system. For example, powerful parliamentary committees are considered a necessary condition for the legislature to help police policy compromises between parties in multiparty government. But can other parliamentary instruments perform this role? This article suggests parliamentary questions as an alternative parliamentary vehicle for coalition parties to monitor their partners. Questions force ministers to reveal information concerning their legislative and extra-legislative activities, providing coalition members unique insights into their partners’ behaviour. In order to test our argument, we build and analyse a new dataset of parliamentary questions in the British House of Commons covering the 2010?2015 coalition. As expected, government MPs ask more questions as the divisiveness of a policy area increases. Legislatures conventionally considered weak due to the lack of strong committees may nevertheless play an important oversight role through other parliamentary devices, including helping to police the implementation of coalition agreements.     

Institutional change in parliament through cross-border partisan emulation

Institutional responses of parliaments to international developments are widely regarded as efficient changes because they tend to be unaffected by partisan preferences and benefit all members of parliament equally. This article challenges that common notion by providing evidence that the institutional responses of national parliaments to European integration are in large part the result of international partisan emulation. Spatial regression analyses robustly show that parliamentary EU oversight institutions diffuse across member states whose majority parties have similar constitutional preferences. A parliament is more likely to emulate the EU oversight institution of another parliament if their majority parties have similar ideas about the territorial distribution of power and institutional framework for policy making. This result has important implications for our understanding of institutional change in parliament. Responses of parliaments to external developments may appear non-partisan at first sight but unfold partisan characteristics if one looks beyond the domestic level.     

从肖志军案引发的法律问题思考

肖志军案被社会和理论界所关注源于目前针对医疗违法阻却理由的混淆和概念模糊，笔者从违法阻却理由理论人手，试图穷尽所有医疗领域中的违法阻却理由。笔者结合肖志军案件指出了我国立法的缺陷和不足，并介绍了美国判例法中的医疗特权，进而提出我国立法亟待明确医疗特权的范畴，以便于避免此类悲剧的再次发生。     

论知情同意的豁免

本文围绕医疗实务中的知情同意豁免，首先讨论了知情同意豁免规则的法律政策，详细分析了紧急情形豁免、治疗豁免、知情同意权的放弃和强制治疗这四种豁免情形，简述了医务人员在适用知情同意豁免规则时可能的法律责任。