Newspaper juries

This article reports on a field experiment on the effect of media information on people’s attitudes towards the justice system. For the duration of a year a Dutch local newspaper took small groups of readers, called ‘newspaper jurors’, to court sessions of criminal cases and subsequently reported on their experiences and perceptions. Using a quasi-experimental design, we examined whether an attitude change in the general reader population of this particular local newspaper occurred as a result of the jury’s newspaper reports. Findings show that, after the treatment interval of 1 year, no attitude change in the general reader population could be identified that was absent in the control group.     

(Re-)Setting the Scholarly Agenda on Transjudicial Communication

We consider the contributions made by Robert H. Bork's Coercing Virtue (2003) and Anne-Marie Slaughter's A New World Order (2004) to the ongoing debate over the citation of foreign law in United States courts. While empirically minded sociolegal scholars might be tempted to dismiss these books as mere op-eds, that would be a mistake. Taken with the spate of other recent work, they supply the makings of an agenda for rigorous research devoted to understanding the exchange of law among nations.     

Düngemittelrecht, Atomrecht und Bodenschutzrecht – lückenlose Anwendungsbereiche?

Das deutsche Bodenschutzrecht ist angesichts seines geringen Anwendungsbereiches sowie seiner sehr lückenhaften und zudem vollzugsunfreundlichen Konkretisierung in Grenzwerten h?ufig wenig effektiv. Diese These verfolgt der vorliegende Beitrag anhand eines besonders wesentlichen, in der politischen, juristischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Debatte bisher kaum beachteten gesundheits- und umweltrelevanten Faktors: der düngungsbedingten Belastung von B?den durch Uraneintr?ge. Dies verhilft zugleich zu einer n?heren Bestimmung der konkurrierenden Anwendungsbereiche verschiedener Umweltgesetze.