Political Bases for the Dissolution of a Public Corporation: A Nigérian Case

All social theory emphasises that institutions universally play a crucial role in organising the ways in which people live together. At the same time the concept is vaguely defined and used in different ways. Inspired by the pragmatic sociology of critique, we emphasise how institutions enable people and things to hold together and provide important references for action in settings with limited predictability for everyday life. We first analyse how the concept of institutions has been used in scholarship on land tenure in Sudan. We then suggest, using a case study, that increased attention to the different ways in which actors validate or challenge institutions helps to examine the precariousness of institutional orders in the Sudans. This can move Sudan Studies beyond some of the limitations of previous scholarship, such as a tendency towards interpretations that reiterate institutions as timeless, discrete and immutable units such as “traditional” or “modern”.     

UNIFIED FAMILY COURTS

Fragmented court systems are especially problematic for domestic violence victims because they typically are involved in more than one proceeding that stems from the same pattern of abuse. The proceedings are handled in different courts and before different judges, who are often unaware of these orders being issued in other proceedings. Consequently, conflicting orders are prevalent and the protection and needs of victims are often not met. A unified family court, on the other hand, provides one court with the subject-matter jurisdiction to handle all family-related matters and one judge to hear all cases that involve a single family, resulting in conflicting orders being issued less frequently. Additionally, the needs of victims are better served as a result of the services component. Given the fragmented state of the court systems in New York and Pennsylvania, United States; Alberta, Canada; and Australia, unified family courts should be implemented in each locality.     

行政命令与行政处罚关系之辨析与整合

行政命令与行政处罚是两种重要的具体行政行为。法律对它们的规制不同，它们理应彼此区分。然而，现实中却存在一些界于命令与处罚之间、难以进行明确区分的行政行为。相对于以形式上是否表现为意思表示行为，以内容上是否具有制裁性为标准来对这类行政行为进行区分更有利于保障相对人的合法权益。     

Section 8 orders on the public-private law divide*

While section 9(2) of the Children Act 1989 prevents a Local Authority from applying for a child arrangements order directly, a case file study of residence and contact orders made in 2011 found that a significant number of applications for residence orders in the County Court were supported and sometimes even instigated by local authority children’s services (Harding & Newnham, 2015). The findings of the study demonstrate that residence orders often formed part of solutions offered to the family and can even operate as an alternative to formal public law remedies in situations where the parents are no longer able to provide care, and grandparents or other relatives take over. In these ‘hybrid cases’ private law orders are used to resolve situations on the fringes of public law action and, in some cases, divert cases from voluntary accommodation or formal care proceedings. This article raises questions about whether cases are being diverted to private law remedies in an appropriate manner and argues that closer scrutiny of the practice is required to ensure that the rights of parents, children and kinship carers are appropriately respected.     

Psychological models of mental disorder, human rights, and compulsory mental health care in the community

Recent amendments to the 1983 Mental Health Act in the UK (Mental Health Act 2007) include the controversial provision for: “supervised treatment in the community for suitable patients following an initial period of detention and treatment in hospital”. This provision is widespread, and more formal, in other English-speaking jurisdictions. Reviews of the international literature, human rights considerations and the perspective of psychological approaches to mental health care suggest that proposed ‘supervised community treatment orders’ are valuable, lawful, and compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights if certain specific conditions are met. Provisions for ‘supervised community treatment orders’ in the UK should be supported, but with the provisos that: the powers of the Mental Health Act are limited as in Scotland, to persons whose “ability to make decisions about the provision of [care] is significantly impaired”, that each order is time-limited and subject to review by a properly constituted Tribunal, and that the use of such orders should represent a benefit to people in terms of more appropriate treatment, or be a least restrictive alternative, or better preserve the person's private and family life.     

An Ecological Study of Nonresidential Services for Battered Women Within a Comprehensive Community Protocol for Domestic Violence

This paper is an ecological study of services provided to 392 battered women under a comprehensive domestic violence protocol. It focuses on microsystemic interactions between battered women and battered women's services and legal systems. We examine the relationships between women's receipt of services from a battered women's agency, receipt of protective orders, and completion of prosecution of batterers. We also explore the associations between women's receipt of services and protective orders and their partners' subsequent arrests and police contacts. We use open-ended interviews with battered women and with staff of the battered women's agency to expand and illustrate the quantitative data. The analysis shows that when a woman received battered women's services or had a protective order, a completed court case was more likely and numbers of arrests rose. We found that these associations were strongest when women received both battered women's services and at least one protective order.     

From Hybridity to Standardization: Rethinking State-Making in Contexts of Fragility

Having been top of the agenda for the past two decades, debates on state fragility have recently witnessed the emergence of pluralist concepts. While the concept of ‘hybrid political orders’ has invigorated our thinking about fragile states, it yields to the fallacy that pluralism constitutes the birth certificate of statehood. This article introduces an alternative concept to better grasp state trajectories, proposing an understanding of state developments in terms of institutional and identity standardization. Rooted in existing accounts of state-making, the analytical prism of ‘rule standardization’ is original in that it conceptually bridges the gap between statebuilding and nation-building as well as between state-making and state-breaking. Substantiating the theoretical discussion with three case studies from the Somali territories, the paper fundamentally proposes that what is required to sustain states should not be confused with what is required to initiate them.