Mix-Ups, Mistake and Moral Judgement: Recent Developments in U.K. Law on Assisted Conception

Hard cases make bad law. In a matter of months, two such cases involving assisted reproduction have appeared before the U.K. High Court and legislation has been enacted. The common threads between them are consent and fatherhood. The first case concerns a ‘mistake’ resulting in sperm from the wrong man being used to create an embryo for a couple and the second the revocation of consent by a man to his former partner being allowed to use an embryo they created together. Furthermore, Parliament has intervened, passing legislation which sets out when sperm from a dead man may be used by his former partner to generate an embryo. This note argues that the three developments cannot be reconciled with one another and that the cases in particular, decided on a narrow legal basis, convey contradictory messages, leading in at least one instance to a gross injustice.     

《服务贸易总协定》与中国服务贸易法制之比较

《服务贸易总协定》的成立为国际服务贸易的规范提供了合法性基础与完整的互动框架,其主要原则与规范对会员国的服务贸易法律体系有实质的约束力,并会对一国政治、经济产生重大影响,我国也不例外。对发展相对落后的中国服务业而言,入世既是机遇,也是挑战。本文用比较的方法,按《服务贸易总协定》的结构,将中国服务贸易法制与《服务贸易总协定》进行比较,并提出入世后完善我国服务贸易法制的一些建议。     

软实力:北京发展经济比较优势研究

“软实力”是在上世纪80年代国际上出现的新概念。借鉴软实力这一形象、清晰、富有时代色彩的概念将北京的资源特点加以浓缩、概括,能够较准确地反映北京资源优势的本质特征。北京软实力优势主要有科技实力、人才实力、教育实力、文化实力和首都优势。与软实力相契合的北京优势产业是现代服务业、文化创意产业和以研发为主导的高新技术产业。     

浅析高校图书馆信息服务

高校图书馆的发展与实践,正朝着利用现代化信息技术以实现共享的方向发展.作为高等教育知识存储和传播的中心,如何更好地开展图书馆信息服务工作,在经济和社会发展中发挥更加重要的作用.已成为社会普遍关注的问题.面对知识经济时代的到来,图书馆应当认真考虑如何适应这一新的形势,来更好地为信息化社会服务.     

“Social licence to operate” and the human services: A pathway to smarter commissioning?

Externalised service provision is now an embedded feature of Australia's service delivery architecture. However, the lessons drawn from two decades of contracted service delivery suggest that “competition” is an imperfect platform for the delivery of public services, especially where issues of trust in government come into play. Could the concept of a “social license to operate” (SLO), which has been in use in the natural resources sector for over two decades, help to facilitate the conferral of greater trust, credibility and legitimacy upon governments, and externalised service providers in social policy spaces?     

Developmental Disabilities in Children Involved with Child Welfare: Correlates of Referrals for Service Provision

Using data from the National Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-being (NSCAW), this study explores the characteristics of child welfare involvement for children (N = 639; aged 3–17.5 years) with at least one developmental disability. In addition, a central focus of this exploration was to examine respective differences in how caregivers and caseworkers initiated referrals for services for children with disabilities. The sample was divided into three exclusive groups based on type of developmental disability: learning disability (weighted percentage 70.3%); Mental Retardation (now referred to as Intellectual Disability), Downs Syndrome, or; developmental delay (weighted percentage 1.8%); and presence of multiple types of disabilities, including autism (weighted percentage 27.9%). Results from the logistic regression analyses indicate children in this population who are placed in out-of-home care receive more referrals than those residing in-home with biological caregivers; older children and children with multiple disabilities are also more apt to obtain referrals to formal assessments. On the other hand, children who were considered in the “other” race category (includes children who identify as: multi-racial; Asian; Pacific Islander; Native American) were significantly less likely to be referred for a formal assessment. Regarding the association between specific maltreatment type and assessment referrals, children with reports of emotional maltreatment had significantly higher odds of being referred for formal assessments.     

VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATIONS AND NEIGHBORHOOD CRIME: A DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE*

Although numerous theories suggest that voluntary organizations contribute to lower crime rates in neighborhoods, the evidence for this proposition is weak. Consequently, we propose a dynamic perspective for understanding the relationship between voluntary organizations and neighborhood crime that involves longitudinal analyses and the measurement of the age of organizations. By using longitudinal data on a sample of census blocks (N = 87,641) located across 10 cities, we test the relationship between age‐graded measures of different types of voluntary organizations and neighborhood crime rates. We use fixed‐effects negative binomial regression models that focus on change within neighborhoods of the relationship between voluntary organizations and neighborhood crime. Our results show that although each type of voluntary organization is found to exhibit crime‐reducing behavior in neighborhoods, we find that many of them are consistent with what we refer to as the “delayed impact scenario”—there is a pronounced delay between the placement of a voluntary organization and a neighborhood subsequently experiencing a reduction in crime. With protective effects of organizations typically not demonstrated until several years after being in the neighborhood, these patterns suggest a need for long‐term investment strategies when examining organizations.     

Contracting out local public services in Slovakia

In our paper, we focus on how local self-governments perform in the delivery of local public services to citizen. The paper is based on concrete data, collected from 200l to 2008 by our research team, including following services--waste collection and disposal, street maintenance, public green, public lighting, cemeteries. Local self-governments are responsible for a large number of public services and their share in total public expenditures is almost 7%. However, our concrete data for evaluated services clearly show that large decentralization did not deliver immediate results and much remains to be done to improve the processes of local service delivery. The problems are not so much connected with existing legislation, but the core issue is the quality and effectiveness of functioning of all involved institutions. Outsourcing decisions are not well ex-ante reviewed, neither ex-post comprehensively evaluated for their outcomes and results. In many cases, competitive tendering is not used to get the best bid. The main purposes for such situation are lack of accountability and compliance control, the most important corrective measures are proposed in the last part of the paper.     

Assessing the Domestic Violence Training Needs of Benefits Workers

Domestic violence victims often have economic and employment needs that either directly or indirectly stem from their victimization. In their efforts to seek services, victims may turn to benefits workers who are given the task of providing clients with short-term financial help, job training, access to health care, and assistance in obtaining a job. It is not clear whether benefits workers are adequately prepared to help domestic violence victims. In this study, 189 social services workers from the Commonwealth of Virginia were surveyed to assess the training needs of all social services workers. This article focuses on the specific training needs of benefits workers and draws comparisons between benefits workers’ training needs and other workers’ needs. The findings suggest that benefits workers are perceived as knowing less about domestic violence than other social services workers. Implications are discussed. This research was supported by a contract from the Virginia Institute of Social Services Training Activities     

Explaining variations in enforcement strategy: A comparison of the Swedish health care,eldercare, and compulsory school sector

This article analyzes whether, and if so, why, national inspectorates adopt different enforcement strategies when controlling the provision of welfare services, such as health care, eldercare, and the compulsory school. The findings show that the Swedish Schools Inspectorate uses a predominantly strict strategy, while the Health and Social Care Inspectorate relies on a more situational strategy. To explain this variation in enforcement strategy, the article tests four hypotheses derived from the literature on regulatory enforcement. The findings suggest that the variation between the agencies is not primarily the result of differences in resources or the authority to issue punitive decisions, as suggested by previous research. Instead, we find support for the hypothesis that the definition of quality can explain variation in adopted strategies, and partial support for the hypothesis that differences in regulatory mission can account for a variation in the agencies' formal enforcement strategies.