The shielding capacity of the standard military flak jacket against ballistic injury to the kidney

An animal model was designed to evaluate the ability of the standard military flak jacket to protect the kidneys from direct ballistic trauma. Yorkshire swine were anesthetized and their flanks were protected by flak jackets. Ballistic insults ranging from a low-velocity handgun to a high-velocity rifle were evaluated. The results demonstrate that a flak jacket provides adequate protection against low- and mid-velocity projectiles since none of the animals from this group had evidence of internal trauma and because only minor superficial surgical attention would have been required. Survivability in each case was considered to be excellent. The flak jacket failed to provide any protection against several types of high-velocity bullets. These weapons caused severe internal injury to the genitourinary system as well as to other major organ systems. Survival would have been unlikely.     

Official standards versus actual criteria in bond dispositions

The setting of bond in a first appearance court in one southeastern judicial district was examined to determine its relationship with official standards based on the recommendations of the American Bar Association advisory committee on standards for criminal justice and the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals. Eighteen measures of five different recommended standards were considered. Only seriousness of charge showed apparent strength in its relationship with bond. The authors suggest a “facility hypothesis” (that court officials gravitated toward factors such as seriousness of charge) that may be readily processed and understood within constraints of time and organization. As added support for this hypothesis, defendants' demeanor in court is also shown to be significantly related to bond in the present study. These legal and personal criteria may be more identified as indicators of defendants' culpability than many other considerations recommended by the study commissions. Use of other official recommendations may require changes in the concepts of defendants held by court personnel or drastic changes in the organization of first appearance in court.     

Arunabh Ghosh,Making It Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China

Journal of Chinese Political Science -     

Governance landscapes for emerging technologies: The case of cryptocurrencies

Scholars call for “adaptive governance” to balance concern about technology uncertainty with the need for innovation in the governance of emerging technologies. Yet, empirical assessment of such governance systems remains sparse. Do the actors interested in the potential regulation of an emerging technology focus on their own interests and opportunities, or do they think in terms of the collective interest? We focus on the actors who embed such systems from a novel landscape perspective that combines two dimensions of governance: the nature of the regulatory target, and the nature of the process they advocate for governing the target. We present data from over 70 actors in the area of cryptocurrencies for evaluating this new logic.     

Research on Gender and the Law: Where Are We Going,Where Have We Been?

This article provides an overview of issues related to research on gender and the law. Following a discussion of the ways in which gender and the law interact, we assess the extent to which Law and Human Behavior (LHB) has addressed the issue of gender. Specifically, we present the results of our analysis of the role of gender in articles published in LHB from 1990 through 1996. We discuss the relatively few gender-relevant studies that appeared, as well as comment upon the attention given to gender by research with other primary foci. We then discuss various strategies for conducting gender research and their implications for research on gender and the law. We conclude by introducing the articles in this special issue on gender and the law, commenting on how they add to our accumulated knowledge in this area.