I — Legislation

In this paper, the various challenges to the prosecutorial discretion of the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) are identified. It deals with two distinct areas of prosecutorial discretion: first, the scope of judicial review relating to prosecutorial decision in the light of the Privy Council judgment of Mohit v The Director of Public Prosecutions [2006] UKPC 20; and secondly, the impact and implications of the decision of the Purdy case which imposes an obligation on the DPP to issue a policy statement as regards conduct which will not be the subject matter of a prosecution even though there may be sufficient evidence to prosecute such conduct under the relevant legislation.     

香港大律师公会主席林孟达致辞

今天各级司法人员，两大法律专业的成员，跟法律界在本地和海外的各方好友，在此齐首共聚一堂，我们正好趁着这个特别的场合，思考过去一年发生的事情和前瞻来年法律界、司法界将面对的挑战。去年，公会执行委员会比往常繁忙。公会就政府关於填补立法会因议员辞职的出缺安排的建议，五次发出声明，也对政府的谘询文件，提交了陈述书回应。     

律政司司长黄仁立龙致辞

去年十月我在巴黎出席在历史悠久、雄伟庄严的司法部大楼举行的庆祝《海牙取消认证公约》50周年的会议,并在会上发言。虽然这项公约仍未适用於内地,香港一向采用公约的原则,并使用公约规定的附加证明书超过40年。     

A tale of two bounties: the impact of competing fees on physician behavior

This study examines how the volume of privately insured services provided in hospital inpatient and outpatient departments changes in response to reductions in Medicare physician payments. We hypothesize that physicians consider relative payment rates when choosing which patients to treat in their practices. When Medicare reduces its payments for surgical procedures, as it did in the late 1980s, physicians are predicted to treat more privately insured patients because they become more lucrative. We use data from 182 hospitals for seventeen major procedures groups, covering a forty-five-month period between 1988 and 1991 that encom passes a twenty-four-month period before the reduction in Medicare fees and twenty-one months after the reduction. Our findings are consistent with the predictions for a number of procedure groups, but not for all of them. One implication of the findings is that societal savings from Medicare fee reductions are overstated if one does not also consider spillover effects in the private insurance market.     

Constitutional law in social choice perspective

Constitutional scholars do not typically employ spatial reasoning in their work. And yet, constitutional jurisprudence and much work in judicial politics implicitly rest on assumptions best cast in spatial terms. These include assuming that positions in constitutional disputes, and the views of Supreme Court justices, generally lie along a common liberal-to-conservative ideological dimension. Although the single dimension assumption is often appropriate, it suffers inherent limitations. First, Supreme Court decision-making rules, both within and across cases, expose problems of dimensionality. Second, important substantive doctrines likewise reveal dimensionality. Third, and finally, throughout the Supreme Court’s history, positions deemed liberal (or conservative) in one period have emerged as conservative (or liberal) in a later period, suggesting that dimensionality is a persistent feature in our jurisprudential history. Social choice proves uniquely suited to explaining these important aspects of constitutional law. After briefly introducing the discipline of constitutional law and its relationship to social choice, this article offers three illustrations of how social choice analysis deepens our understanding of important substantive areas. The analysis exposes dimensionality within Supreme Court decision-making rules, within separation-of-powers doctrine, and over historical shifts in the liberal and conservative valence of once-prominent jurisprudential positions. Failing to appreciate dimensionality, which lies at the core of social choice theory, when studying the Supreme Court and constitutional law risks a truly one-dimensional understanding of a richer and multidimensional institution and body of doctrine.     

School Resource Officers and the School to Prison Pipeline: Discovering Trends of Expulsions in Public Schools

Public school systems in America have come under scrutiny due to the harsh treatment of students by School Resource Officers (SROs). Incidents of armed, uniformed police in schools affecting physical arrests in American classrooms seem to be ever more frequent in news cycles, likely due to the ease of capturing these events on video via cell phones of bystanders. Of particular note, visceral reports of “heavy-handed” SROs reinforce a consistent narrative from some media outlets suggesting that the simple presence of these officers inside schools leads to student arrests for behaviors that can arguably be dealt with by the school administration in a reintegrative manner. The apparent lack of school discretion and the presence of strict zero tolerance policies are at the root of an issue that has been termed the “School to Prison Pipeline” by mass media. SROs are often the exclusive focus of this issue, typically as a symbol of a school’s dedication to strict enforcement of rigid rules.