Enhancing judicial skills in domestic violence cases: the development,implementation, and preliminary evaluation of a model US programme

ABSTRACT

The overwhelming number and complexity of domestic violence cases in criminal and family courts has resulted in the development of education programmes to assist judges. There is limited research on judicial education in this area. This paper reviews one such initiative entitled ‘Enhancing Judicial Skills in Domestic Violence Cases’ (EJS) that has been developed and implemented over the last 20 years by the National Judicial Institute on Domestic Violence, a partnership of the US Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women, National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges and Futures Without Violence. We present findings of a preliminary evaluation of the programme based on the self-reports of 480 judges who had taken the four-day workshop between 2006 and 2010. Overall, judges reported the programme to be engaging and effective. At a six-month follow‐up, most of the judges identified specific benefits and behavior changes in the areas of access to justice, judicial leadership, victim safety, and abuser accountability as a result of participating in the programme. Critical issues in judicial education are highlighted based on the authors’ experiences in the development and implementation of this programme.     

Assessing the Performance of a Court System: A Comprehensive Performance Measures Approach

Many court systems suffer from long lead times, poor service quality, and low throughput. In many cases improvements are continuously introduced through various managerial and professional methods. This article proposes a set of measures to assess the effectiveness of court systems. This set of performance measures includes response-time, throughput, and work-in-process. While court systems generate a multitude of statistical data it is difficult to apply them across individual courts.

The article tailors well established generic performance measures to the specific court arena. The individual measures are aggregated into a single figure that assesses the court's performance along the time axis and relative to comparable court systems.

The proposed measure of performance and the aggregate score were validated with real life figures from the Israeli court system.     

EDITORIAL

Abstract

Jane Addams (1860-1935), founder of Hull House in Chicago, was a social worker, sociologist, criminologist, feminist, and pacifist. She dedicated her life to caring for the underprivileged and oppressed and to fighting for the rights of workers, women, and children. This paper examines her life and seeks to demonstrate her many contributions to sociology, criminology, and society. Among her pioneer works in criminology that have not been recognized are the ecological maps of Chicago that preceded Park's and Burgess' concentric zone theory, social justice issues such as child labor, compulsory education, and juvenile offenders. She also was a peace activist during World War I and many of her ideas and concepts are found in the peacemaking writings of current criminologists.     

Cultural Policies and Local Planning Strategies: What Is the Role of Culture in Local Sustainable Development?

The authors draw a strategic framework for cultural planning at the local level. The concepts of industrial district and cluster have strengthened the role of space—in terms of external economies of localization and agglomeration—in economic development. The recent debate concerning contemporary development processes has underlined the increasing role of the cultural dimension for local development and has focused on different paths of clustering around cultural investment. The authors review the latest literature on cultural districts and illustrate some key cases around the postindustrialized world in which culture played a critical role by acting as a catalyst for major economic and social renewal. The authors present a strategic model of a progressive cultural district based on an asset-action matrix that intersects cultural policy drivers with capital resources. The authors define a new model of cultural district—the system-wide cultural district—as an emergent, self-organized model of cultural supply that displays significant strategic complementaries with other production chains with a typical, postindustrial characterization.     

司法与行政的有限分立——晚清司法改革的内在理路

面对近世西域分权思想的传入及其对传统中国法律与司法制度的冲击,晚清统治集团把革新司法权力运行体制与方式,推进以司法与行政相分立为核心的司法体制改革,作为施行预备立宪的基本思路和策略选择。在国权统一的模式下,晚清统治集团推行有限度的司法与行政之分立。然而,中央官制改革方案对于法部与大理院之间司法权限的界定并不清晰,遂引发了后来影响广泛的法部与大理院之间围绕司法权限而展开的激烈争论。这场部院司法权限之争,深刻地反映了司法独立理念与行政支配司法理念之间的价值冲突。晚清司法改革标志着新的近代型司法制度的出现,体现了近代中国法制与司法文明的历史进步。     

减刑假释案件开庭审理程序的完善

减刑假释案件的审理并不是一种纯粹的诉讼,而是对执行机关提出的减刑假释建议的一种司法审查。文章指出减刑假释审理程序应从四个方面加以完善,特殊罪犯减刑假释案件的庭审程序与普通罪犯相比应有所差异。     

The International Criminal Court and the Darfur crimes: The dilemma of peace and supra-national criminal justice

ABSTRACT

The supra-national criminal prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of the alleged crimes committed in Darfur raises critical legal and conceptual issues. This article addresses the dilemma of peace, justice and reconciliation from a legal perspective, as well as the justice options that are available. The article also assesses the Sudan's criminal and military laws (both at the substantive and procedural levels) in terms of the country's ability to prosecute international crimes such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. In this respect, the article argues that these laws fall short of international criminal law standards and principles – particularly the amendments introduced after the United Nations Security Council referred the Darfur situation to the ICC. The article critically examines the Sudan government's policy of non-engagement, which ultimately led to supra-national criminal prosecution (represented by the ICC intervention under the complementarity principle of the Rome Statute). Finally, the article interrogates the report issued by the African Union High-Level Panel on Darfur (AUPD), and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of its recommendations.     

Ubuntu. The missing link in the rights discourse in post-apartheid transformation in South Africa

ABSTRACT

A human rights discourse has been central to both the anti-apartheid struggle of South Africa and the country's post-apartheid transformation. But in the drive to extend constitutionally mandated social and economic rights to all South Africans, the approach has had shortcomings. The current neo-liberal economic policy framework constrains policy choices and, in some instances, restricts fair adjudication of rights by the courts. The revival of notions of African Renaissance and indigenous ethnophilosophies, notably ubuntu, which shares the primacy of human dignity of a rights discourse, offers new perspectives. This article looks at the limitations of the human rights discourse and at how ubuntu, as a principled basis for judicial decision making, can contribute to the evolution of the rights discourse in South Africa and lead towards greater realisation of constitutional rights for all.     

Monitoring School Violence

Abstract

National monitoring of school violence is essential for needs assessments, policymaking, and evaluation at the national level. As informative and important as national monitoring is, the data generated at the national level is often not useful at the district or school site levels. There is therefore a need for a feasible method of monitoring school violence on the district and school level; furthermore, we need to find ways to effectively apply national-level information to schools and school districts. over time should be the foundation for the design, implementation, and evaluation of interventions in this area. In this article, we propose an expanded concept of monitoring that links comparable data on school violence at the grade, school site, district, and national levels. The paper presents our conceptual framework and methodology and illustrates its implementation in a district in Israel. We present examples of reports generated to monitor school violence for the district as a whole and for each of the school sites. Finally, we conclude that this is a feasible and useful model that social services could adopt to monitor practice in many other areas.