Report of the Commission on the Consequences of Devolution for the House of Commons (the McKay Commission)

The report of the McKay Commission on the Consequences of Devolution for the House of Commons is reviewed. The Commission, which contained experts on parliamentary procedure, raised a number of important and difficult questions; the answers are less impressive than the questions. In view of the difficulties of any scheme, including that proposed by the Commission, for what is popularly known as “English Votes on English Laws,” policymakers should revisit one of the options that was specifically ruled out of McKay's terms of reference. This would be a reduction in the numbers, but not the powers, of MPs from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in the way that applied to Northern Ireland between 1922 and 1979.     

Divining Psychoanalysis: Melancholia,Dostoevsky and Kristeva

Julia Kristeva has recently depicted Melanie Klein as a female genius in divining and bringing to life her analytic patients' psyche, by identifying with them and projecting her fantasies into them, as Kristeva says mothers do in transforming the proto-fantasies constituted by their infants' object-oriented bodily drives into semiotic and symbolic meaning. In explaining how Kristeva arrives at this account of psychoanalysis Sayers discusses her previous work on melancholia, and the accounts by Freud and particularly by women psychoanalysts--notably Joan Riviere, Melanie Klein and Hanna Segal--of melancholia as a defence against loss and guilt over the hateful destruction of others through thing-like self-division of hate and love. She also explores the religious and psychoanalytic theories of William James and Wilfred Bion. Most of all, however, she illustrates Kristeva's approach to melancholia, as Kristeva does herself, by using the example of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment , in which Sonia identifies with the arguably melancholic Raskolnikov and thereby resurrects him to psychological life. Sonia, however, is a fiction. Kristeva, by contrast, in describing Melanie Klein as a female genius in transforming psychoanalysis into a species of divination, presents such ideals and fictions about women and femininity as fact.     

SOMATOTYPING,ANTIMODERNISM, AND THE PRODUCTION OF CRIMINOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE*

This study analyzes the work of William H. Sheldon, the psychologist, physician, and advocate of the study of body types. It investigates how he arrived at his much‐repeated finding that a correlation exists between mesomorphy (a stocky, muscular body build) and delinquency and how his ideas were validated and perpetuated. It reviews what Sheldon actually said about the causes of crime; identifies his goals in searching for a relationship between body shape and criminality; explains how he found audiences for his biological theory at a time when sociological approaches dominated criminology; and attempts to understand the current criminological ambivalence about the scientific status of Sheldon's work, despite its discreditation decades ago. I argue that the tripartite structure of Sheldon's thought attracted three different audiences–methodologists, social scientists, and supporters–and that it encouraged the supporters to fund his research without reference to the critiques of the social scientists. I also argue that somatotyping was part of a broader antimodernist reaction within international scientific communities against the dislocations of twentieth‐century life. To understand the origins, acceptance, and maintenance of criminological ideas, we need a historical perspective on figures of the past. Positivism may inform us about what is true and false, but we also need to know how truth and falsity have been constructed over time and how the ideas of earlier criminologists were shaped by their personal and social contexts.     

老骥伏枥 日新月异——评William Tetley教授的新书《海上货物索赔》（第四版）

William Tetley教授是国际知名的海商法专家,2008年,其封山之作《海上货物索赔》第四版发行。该书结构更加完整,内容浩瀚翔实,观点正确,言之有物,并就海上货物运输法相关的新生问题、热点问题进行研讨。