Interim measures are procedural means that allow persons or States to have their rights preserved when a case is pending. Application of these measures especially in environmental cases is very important. In many of these cases (e.g. cases dealing with territorial planning, IPPC permits, environmental impact assessment, etc.) the claims deal with the protection of environment or its components (water, air, soil, etc.) as well as with the protection of public interest. Legal regulation of application of interim measures provided by (...) Lithuanian Law on Administrative Proceedings is not optimal. That is why the first part of the article is dedicated to the analysis of the possibilities and problems of application of interim measures in the administrative proceedings in Lithuania, paying special attention to environmental cases. The second part of the article reflects the findings of a workshop of the Association of European Administrative Judges on „Interim relief in environmental matters” held in Vilnius on 22 September 2011. It briefly describes various national rules on interim relief procedures, especially in the German and the French legislation, with an assessment from the German point of view. This part of the article focuses on provisional legal protection where a permit is challenged by a third party whose rights are allegedly afflicted. In such a constellation the rights of the plaintiff compete with the rights of the operator. The article concludes that, when deciding on the necessity of interim measures, it is vital to ensure the balance of interests: both by ensuring effective access to justice and by protecting the respondent and the third party (in environmental cases - usually the operator) from the violation of their rights and the damage caused by the abuse of the right to request interim measures. In such cases short time limits for procedural steps both of the parties and the court are not advisable and a prima facie prognosis on the outcome in the main proceedings meets the interests of the parties. (shrink)

This article analyses jurisdiction regarding administrative proceedings (lawsuits) in Jordan and France. Moreover, it also discusses the fact that jurisdiction regulates two matters of the utmost importance: the distribution of jurisdiction between ordinary and administrative jurisdictions and the distribution of jurisdiction between administrative jurisdictions themselves in States whose jurisdiction in administrative proceedings is distributed to more than one administrative organ. Moving on, this research was conducted using several research approaches such as, the comparative (...) and analytical approach. The research concluded with a number of conclusions and recommendations, the most important of which was the establishment of an Administrative Proceedings Management Service (APMS), as did the French Administrative Judicial Code, in which attendance was compulsory. To add on, the office of the Administrative Proceedings Administration must have a judge of its own, which corresponds to the post of the judge in the French Administrative Court. The judge will handle the completion of the data regarding both lawsuit parties, and request the documents needed for the case at hand. With that being said, the Jordanian Constitutional Court must reverse its interpretative decision, stating that the administrative justice is part of the ordinary judiciary—in referral to The Constitutional Court’s interpretation of the provisions of the Constitution, which considered the administrative judiciary as an integral part of the ordinary judiciary. Lastly, the research concluded that The French Administrative Judiciary must be taken into consideration regarding the establishment of an administrative judiciary independent from all aspects of the ordinary judiciary, and the explicit introduction of the dual judicial system. (shrink)

This article refers to the issues associated with the crucial significance of the interpretation of tax law provisions made by administrative courts in the course of the judicial inspection of tax decisions, within the context of protecting the subjective rights of taxpayers. The analysis in that regard has been prepared based on the provisions of art. 153 of the Act of 25 July 2002 on Proceedings before Administrative Courts, which expresses the important rule of binding the court (...) and the administrative authority, whose act was the subject of an appeal, with a legal assessment and instructions regarding the further proceedings described in the decision of the administrative court. As a result of this rule, a decision of an administrative court exerts the results exceeding the scope of judicial administrative proceedings, while its effect also covers the future tax proceedings. If the legal assessment made by the court refers to the regulations that affect the subjective rights of a taxpayer, it means that the administrative court imposes the effects of “its” interpretation of those provisions on a tax authority. In turn, the tax authority is obliged to respect those rights in accordance with the opinions of the court, which usually affects the final resolution of a tax case. It should be borne in mind that a taxpayer, by submitting an appeal against a tax decision to an administrative court, demands not only an inspection of the acts of tax administration, but also - which should be emphasized - demands the execution of its rights, including its subjective rights. Therefore, we should not forget the crucial role of the administrative courts in the protection of the substantive rights of taxpayers. The instrument that allows the administrative courts to guard the subjective rights of taxpayers, consists in the procedural regulations included in the provisions on proceedings before administrative courts, and in particular art. 153 of the Act on Proceedings before Administrative Courts in Poland. (shrink)

ArgumentIt is well known that the development of a diphtheria anti-toxin serum evolved in a competitive race between two groups of researchers, one affiliated with Emil Behring in Berlin and Marburg, and another affiliated with Émile Roux in Paris. Proceeding on the basis of different theoretical assumptions and experimental practices, the two groups developed a therapeutic serum almost simultaneously. But the standardized substance they developed took on very different forms in the two countries. In Germany the new serum was marketed (...) in the private sphere and subjected to state regulations, becoming a kind of prototype of industrial medications. In France, however, the same substance was marketed as a gift of science to humanity and distributed through the communal health care system. This article demonstrates how a new medication emerged from the efforts to produce, market, regulate, distribute, and apply it in the two respective countries. It attributes the difference to the negotiations between the respective actors (scientists, industrialists, politicians, officers, and the public) and institutions (firms, academies, private and public institutes, legislative bodies, professional corporations). I develop this argument on three different levels: First, I stress the importance of the institutional foundations of serum production; second, I illustrate the decisive role played by existing “ways of regulating” in the rapid development of new legal statutes; and third, I describe the consequences that flowed from the respective administrative organization of marketing and dissemination. In sum, I explore how an experimental object was transformed into an object of the public health system and stabilized by administrative means. (shrink)

Law as one sign system can be recorded and interpreted by another sign system—media. If each transaction in court is taken as a sign, it can be interpreted or transferred by different signs of media for the same purpose, though with different effects. This study focuses on the transformative effects of the semiotic revolution in media on law. The present research revealed that the evolution of media has driven the administration of justice to pay more attention to the process of (...) court proceedings. This research also discusses the semiotic conflict and compatibility between the sign subsystems within media upon interpreting the administration of justice. In addition, disequilibrium between different sign systems highlights the consequent need for intersemiotic translation, consciousness and evaluation as part of decision making on court domains. (shrink)

Legal interpreting and translation are some of the oldest and most frequently practised bilingual activities in Hong Kong. The principles and operation of the bilingual legal system actually impinge on the legal interpreting services and the practices of legal interpreting services also in ways impact on the system itself. This study adopts a historical approach to analyse the jurisprudence and administration of legal interpreting in Hong Kong courts from 1966 to 2016, across the 1997 dividing line between British colonial rule (...) and the return of Hong Kong to the government of mainland China. It focuses on the opinions of judges and other participants in courtroom proceedings as recorded in Hong Kong case reports. It is discovered that the jurisprudence of having an interpreter to interpret for participants who do not speak the language of the court is clearly indicated and well versed in the precedents. However, there is a gap between the jurisprudence and the actual interpreting services, mainly caused by the malpractices of the concerned administration department and some of the law enforcement agents working in the frontline. (shrink)

In this article the influence of scientific attitudes of Prof. Mykolas Romeris upon modern administrative justice of Lithuania is investigated by historic and comparative aspects. In the first part of article the Professor’s ideas, stated in the fundamental monograph “Administrative Court”, published in Kaunas, in 1928, about the foundation of the Administrative court are reviewed. Here are also pointed out Prof. M. Romeris’ principal,alternative and critical notes concerning the draft of the Law of Administrative Court, made (...) by the Seimas (Parliament) Committee on April 1940. As due to historical circumstances of that time the Law was not passed, in the second part of this article the author proposes the analysis of which ideas of Prof. M. Romeris and to what ambit they were reflected in the Republic of Lithuania Law on the Proceedings of Administrative Cases enacted in 1999, and improved in 2000. The conclusion is made that in this case almost all principle attitudes of Prof. M. Romeris on the organizing the Administrative court and its competence were realized in this Law. It is also stated that the Law mentioned also embedded some other norms, e.g. the possibility to settle a dispute in a pretrial way in Administrative Disputes Commissions. (shrink)

This paper examines the Bush Administration’s immigration “reform” initiative of January 2004, which proposes a guest worker category to further regulate the continuing immigration of workers into the United States. The plan is particularly intended to affect the flow of workers from Mexico. I will argue that this doesn’t represent an improvement but rather creates a deeper level of alienation for the laborer and greater control for global capital, and results in another layer of control over human subjects through the (...) regulation of identity. However, there are promising signs that global capital may be weakening, due to both internaland external forces. I don’t propose specific immigration policy changes in this paper. (shrink)

Arbitration and insolvency proceedings are legal instruments governed by different objectives and different legal principles. While in arbitration the autonomy of the parties plays a major role, all insolvency proceedings are collective proceedings where autonomy of the parties is strictly limited, the majority of issues are regulated by binding legal provisions and strong controlling powers are vested into insolvency court. Therefore, in this article the authors analyse the issues of compatibility between insolvency proceedings and arbitration. The (...) Lithuanian legal framework which was in force until 30 June 2012 was ambiguous. According to the wording of Article 11 of the previous Law on Commercial Arbitration, disputes connected with bankruptcy shall not be submitted to arbitration. It was not entirely clear whether this provision was restricted to ‘core’ insolvency issues such as opening and conduct of the proceedings, appointment of the office holder, administration of the estate, liquidation etc. or it also included all other questions related with insolvency. The jurisprudence of the Lithuanian courts gave a broad meaning to the restriction expressed in the Law on Commercial Arbitration. Accordingly, such questions as verification of claims and disputes with the creditors were also excluded from arbitration after announcement of bankruptcy of the debtor. The authors argue that distinction should be drawn between cases in which an insolvent enterprise is a claimant and where it is a defendant. It is also important to draw a line between arbitration agreements entered into before announcement of bankruptcy and arbitration agreements concluded by the bankruptcy trustee with the consent of the majority of creditors. In this article, the new Law on Commercial Arbitration which has entered into force on 30 June 2012 is analysed and according to which an insolvent enterprise remains bound by arbitration agreement in both cases where it is a claimant and where it is a defendant. Several contentious issues of the new law are identified and analysed in the article, such as the position of other creditors in the proceedings, relation between arbitration and restructuring procedure, enforceability of arbitration agreement in cases where an insolvent enterprise lacks funding to pay arbitration costs etc. (shrink)

When business organisations become involved in contributing to and resolving social issues, they enter areas traditionally seen as the purview of governments. In doing so, they begin to take on the expectations and responsibilities of government; they become politicised. This politicisation is a product of business’s success and power and appears largely unavoidable. Adopting Matten & Crane’s (2005a) extended view of corporate citizenship, business organisations’ responsibilities extend to the administration of citizens’ social, civil and political rights. We term these areas (...) where business organisations take over the administration of citizenship rights as the social governance gap. Drawing upon the agenda of Margolis and Walsh (2003), we seek to enhance the understanding of how business navigates its responsibilities within the social governance gap, including its function as a significant actor influencing societal development and wellbeing. We do this through an exploration of Rio Tinto’s involvement in the WA Future Fund. This paper forms part of an introductory scoping case study of the Rio Tinto WA Future fund and its function as one of Rio Tinto’s diverse responses to community development issues in Western Australia. (shrink)

The article explores court forms as an interactive genre essential for legal-lay communication in civil and family proceedings: court forms elicit key information from predominantly lay users for the purposes of court administration and the judiciary. The information presented in court forms defines the agenda and communicative focus of the subsequent hearings and settlement negotiations, and in some instances even the path the proceedings would take. It is thus important to consider court forms in terms of their comprehensibility (...) as well as functionality for eliciting legally coherent narratives and facilitating efficient engagement of lay participants with the proceedings. The case study presented in the article draws on the combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to explore two versions of the court form most frequently used by self-represented parties in England and Wales, ‘Form C100: Apply for a court order to make arrangements for a child or resolve a dispute about their upbringing’. The comparison of the paper form and its redesigned online version identifies the improvements made as part of the digitisation process but also indicates communicative challenges which can prevent the lay person from presenting the relevant information. The discussion provides an opportunity to reflect on the role of language in online courts. (shrink)

Decisions of regulatory government bodies and courts affect many aspects of citizens’ lives. These organizations and courts are expected to provide timely and coherent decisions, although they struggle to keep up with the increasing demand. The ability of machine learning (ML) models to predict such decisions based on past cases under similar circumstances was assessed in some recent works. The dominant conclusion is that the prediction goal is achievable with high accuracy. Nevertheless, most of those works do not consider important (...) aspects for ML models that can impact performance and affect real-world usefulness, such as consistency, out-of-sample applicability, generality, and explainability preservation. To our knowledge, none considered all those aspects, and no previous study addressed the joint use of metadata and text-extracted variables to predict administrative decisions. We propose a predictive model that addresses the abovementioned concerns based on a two-stage cascade classifier. The model employs a first-stage prediction based on textual features extracted from the original documents and a second-stage classifier that includes proceedings’ metadata. The study was conducted using time-based cross-validation, built on data available before the predicted judgment. It provides predictions as soon as the decision date is scheduled and only considers the first document in each proceeding, along with the metadata recorded when the infringement is first registered. Finally, the proposed model provides local explainability by preserving visibility on the textual features and employing the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP). Our findings suggest that this cascade approach surpasses the standalone stages and achieves relatively high Precision and Recall when both text and metadata are available while preserving real-world usefulness. With a weighted F1 score of 0.900, the results outperform the text-only baseline by 1.24% and the metadata-only baseline by 5.63%, with better discriminative properties evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic and precision-recall curves. (shrink)

This article examines public involvement in the six-year administrative review of an application by Waukesha, Wisconsin, to draw water from Lake Michigan to replace its radium-contaminated local water supply. The article shows that public positions on the proposal inverted the typical relationship between partisanship and environmental attitudes, prompting both supporters and opponents to ignore scientific evidence and the central matter of water safety. In successive rounds of state and regional administrative review, these political stances induced administrators to engage (...) in increasingly legalistic forms of assessment. Although Waukesha’s application was approved in 2016, such administrative dynamics may limit the ability of the recently enacted Great Lakes Compact to address current and prospective water safety problems in the region. The case typifies an emerging pattern in water governance in the United States: contentious administrative politics drive cooperative agreements to resemble adversarial proceedings, limiting their ability to adapt to new environmental problems. (shrink)

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld, in Presbyterian Medical Center of the University of Pennsylvania Health System v. Shalala, 170 F.3d 1146, a federal district court ruling granting summary judgment to the Department of Health and Human Services in a case in which Presbyterian Medical Center challenged Medicare's requirement of contemporaneous documentation of $828,000 in graduate medical education expenses prior to increasing reimbursement amounts. DHHS Secretary Donna Shalala denied PMC's request for reimbursement for increased GME (...) costs. The appellants then brought suit in federal court challenging the legality of an interpretative rule that requires requested increases in reimbursement to be supported by contemporaneous documentation. PMC also alleged that an error was made in the administrative proceedings to prejudice its claims because Aetna, the hospital's fiscal intermediary, failed to provide the hospital with a written report explaining why it was denied the GME reimbursement. (shrink)

For the purposes of this article, the right to confidentiality of communications between a lawyer and a client (legal professional privilege) is analysed and understood as a rule under which, in judicial or administrative proceedings, the content of communications between a lawyer and his client shall not be disclosed; if this rule is breached, the content of the communications in question is not treated as evidence in the process. Legal professional privilege is related to several articles of the (...) Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The European Court of Human Rights has found that the violation of the right of an accused to communicate with a lawyer without a third party departs from Article 6(3)(c) of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms which entitles to defend oneself in person or through a legal assistant. This kind of communication also relates to the Article 8 of the Convention, which provides a right to respect for private and family life, home and correspondence. In the opinion of the European Court of Human Rights, according to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms there is no difference if a lawyer representing a client is a practitioner or not. However, when dealing with the violations of EU competition law, the Court of Justice of the European Union acknowledges the protection of legal professional privilege only with regard to the communications between an accused companies and an independent lawyer (who does not work for his client on an employment contract basis). When the protection of legal professional privilege is not granted for communications of the accused company with its own legal personnel, a question may arise whether it is considered that sufficient level of confidentiality is ensured for these companies. (shrink)

The fundamental character of a punishment is the subject of this paper. Based on the assumed function of a punishment (deterrent), a punishment has to be perceived and experienced to be an adverse result by the punished and the public. The first factor in particular means that the courts have to have flexibility to sentence a person to such a punishment that is experienced as such. The legal question becomes how this customization of a punishment is acceptable from an equality (...) standpoint. In the field of environmental protection, the administrative process poses serious problems. There may be administrative proceedings that result in substantial economic losses for individuals and groups alike. (shrink)

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held, in Murrey v. United States ), that claims for a physician's failure to obtain a patient's informed consent are not barred by the Federal Tort Claims Act as a species of misrepresentation. The court further held that the claim was not barred by the failure to include the issue of informed consent in the administrative claim. This decision reduces the burden on plaintiffs to state every cognizable claim consistent (...) with the facts in an administrative proceeding; the failure to do so would prevent them from raising the claim in court.The patient, Thomas Murrey, a sixty-eight-year-old U.S. veteran, sought treatment at a Veteran's Administration hospital in North Chicago, Illinois. VA doctors diagnosed him with prostate cancer, and advised him to undergo surgery to remove his entire prostate. (shrink)

The administrative discretionary act differs from regulated act because while the latter refers to the simple execution of the law, the former refers to cases where there is some leeway for a further understanding and application of the rule. For example, discretionary is necessary when the law can provide two possible proceedings, none of which is mandatory. It is also necessary when legislation merely indicates its ends, without specifying the means to achieve them. When it is not dissociated (...) from the exercise of the discretion of a constituted authority, discretionary is the opposite of arbitrariness. After defining this important notion, this paper emphasizes two highlights of it, namely, that the foundation of its power lies in the law itself, and that the distinguishing feature of a discretionary act is the justification of the reasons for the decision. (shrink)

Research related to indigenous peoples in Sweden and elsewhere has a history marked by discriminatory practice and unequal research processes. Sweden has still not been very visible in terms of openly debating, developing and implementing ethical strategies specifically suited for indigenous research. The present study explores how research ethics is discussed among scholars within the Sami research field in contemporary Sweden. Fifty-six research proposals deriving from eight different research institutions and 160 individual researchers are analyzed, discovering how scholars relate to (...) research ethics when planning for new research projects related to the indigenous Sami. The results demonstrate that ethical guidelines for research are often referred to, but that a common view on what guidelines to use is lacking, leading to a notable variety between different researchers. Ethical discussions are present in the vast majority of the proposals, however there are notable differences between the theories around how to proceed in a culturally safe, ethical manner, and the proposed methods that are to be used to implement theory in practice. In conclusion, there exists a great uncertainty among scholars on where to seek ethical guidance, how to relate to current legislation around research ethics and at the same time act ethically in a culturally appropriate manner. This uncertainty leads to questioning whether discussions of ethics are relevant in the first place, what they are supposed to include, how they are meant to be undertaken and what consequences can be expected from the presence or absence of ethics in indigenous research. (shrink)

Given how long bioethics has been around, how long bioethicists have devoted themselves to tackling ethical issues, how much work has gone into professionalizing the practice of clinical ethics consultation, how often bioethicists have either testified as experts in court proceedings or attached their names to amicus curiae briefs, and how ubiquitously they are present throughout the clinical, research, administrative, and other dimensions of health care, one would have thought that a convergence of opinion would exist on what (...) it is that the clinical ethics consultant's expertise consists of—if only for reasons of professional solidarity and reputation management. And yet, as a recent series of articles written by... (shrink)

In 'Yeogi (禮記)', the Chinese scriptures of Confucianism, they recoded the solar calendar of modern viewpoints. According to the ancient document, the 24 solar terms was one of seasonal divisions in a year. The regularly change of the four seasons play an important part in the national economic project. For a national economy depended on agriculture in East Asia of ancient times, the administration to pay no regard to the change of the season was directly connected to the fall of (...) the nation. And then the legislator must enact laws to reflect the change of the season. According to the 'Wolryeong (月令)' in 'Yeogi (禮記)', there is recoded national regulations to suit with the each twelve momth. The first month of spring is the prime of the year (February). The month shows sign of new livingthings. The ruler take order to protect the first breath of spring and ought to put a ban on the military training and labor mobilization. The reasons are to safeguard the new life and not to interrupt the preparation for farming. Confucian attach value to the nature within a human’s way of life. Therefore the norm of human do correlate closely with the principle of nature. The rule of Wuju (宇宙) was not a simple concept of the natural phenomenon and Cheon (天) was not the Almighty for himself. Cheon was just the existence of virtue and moral influence in the confidence of man. And Ji (地) was the Mother of all things. In this space man had to manage the world in sympathy with the process of cheonJi (天地); Cheonsi (天時), JIri (地利), Inhwa (人和). (shrink)

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has profoundly transformed many people's lives, ChatGPT being a clear example, whose capabilities have substantially influenced the automation of tasks such as writing texts and providing information sources for researchers. This review article aims to understand the impact of AI on academic writing and why its use can be considered plagiarism. The Prism method was used to analyze the studies, which initially totaled 824, and after excluding them for duplicity and by title, a (...) total of 137 were left, of which we proceeded to review those that were open access and those that were related to the study, obtaining a total of 54 manuscripts closely related to the research topic; the results were then segmented into three questions, What are the text-matching tools that help to identify the use of AI in article writing?, What strategies are used to regulate the use of AI in writing scientific articles? and What techniques are used to detect AI-generated text?, which were key to comparing the results of the review with the findings of the authors belonging to the literature review. The results showed that, from 2022 onwards, AI became a recurring topic among researchers in China and the United States, allowing the emergence of popular techniques and software such as Turnitin or GPTZero to identify when these linguistic models were used in writing tasks, as well as strategies to regulate their use in controlled environments. In the end, it was concluded that there is a fine line between ethics and abuse of AI capabilities, and further research and study of different techniques is recommended to recognize when these tools are blatantly used. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 11.4 (2001) 391-400 [Access article in PDF] Bioethics Inside the Beltway A Shooting on Capitol Hill: "The Ruby Satellite System," Mental Illness, and Failure of the American Legal System Peter J. Cohen On 24 July 1998, Russell Eugene Weston, Jr., stormed the United States Capitol, forced his way through a security checkpoint, bypassed a metal detector, and entered the office complex of Representative Tom (...) DeLay (R-TX), the House Majority Whip (Weil 1998). During this period of terror, he shot and killed two officers of the Capitol Police and seriously wounded another as they attempted to end his foray. 1 Weston was severely wounded by several Capital police officers and taken into custody. After being treated for his injuries, he was incarcerated in the District of Columbia. 2On 5 May 1999, Weston was transferred to the Federal Correctional Institute in Butner, North Carolina (United States v. Weston, 69 F. Supp. 2d 99 (D.D.C. 1999), 103), where he remains to this day. He has neither been brought to trial nor received appropriate psychiatric therapy, but continues to be warehoused "in solitary confinement under constant observation... in a psychotic state (United States v. Weston, 255 F.3d 873; LEXIS 16851 (U.S. App. 2001b), 3-4 [LEXIS]). I will briefly detail the legal events responsible for this mad situation and suggest alternative actions that should have been taken at the very onset of the case. Early Chronology Although overtly the crime appeared to be senseless and without any conceivable motivation, Weston believed that his acts were justified and necessary. The story he told to the court-appointed forensic psychiatrist, Sally C. Johnson, M.D., 3 was that while working for NASA in the early 1980s, he had developed a "Ruby Satellite System," a powerful machine that could reverse time. With access to this system, nothing was permanent--the user could simply reverse time and exit from the current scene. However, the "System" was now controlled by cannibals who were developing and spreading "Black Heva," the deadliest disease known to [End Page 391] humankind, similar to HIV or the plague. It resulted from human corpses rotting and turning black. Time was running out, and Weston believed he had to return to override the "Ruby Satellite System" in the Capitol so that he could stem the spread of "Black Heva" and prevent world calamity. He believed that if he were tried, convicted, and even executed, he could simply time reverse himself, place himself in a safe within the Capitol, and subsequently resume his life at whatever point he chose (United States v. Weston, 206 F.3d 9 (D.C. Cir. 2000), 19-20).On 22 April 1999, the district court accepted Dr. Johnson's diagnosis that Weston suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, the symptoms of which were so severe that he would be incapable of understanding the proceedings against him and of assisting in his own defense. On this basis, the court had no difficulty in finding him incompetent to stand trial (U.S. v. Weston 1999, 102).At Weston's initial hearing, Dr. Johnson had testified that medication would be efficacious in treating Weston's delusions: [T]he standard of care in someone suffering from this type of symptom picture would be to treat them with medication.... [T]here is a good likelihood that he'll have a positive response, positive in the sense that his symptoms will diminish in response to treatment.... The potential benefits to treating the defendant far outweigh the risks.... (U.S. v. Weston 1999, 108) The defense presented no expert testimony refuting Dr. Johnson's presentation. The district court then ordered that Weston begin receiving medication in order to render him nondangerous and competent for trial (U.S. v. Weston 1999, 108-9). The Problem Weston refused to be medicated! 4 He has continued to claim that the administration of antipsychotic drugs against his will would violate his Fifth Amendment due process liberty interest in avoiding unwanted bodily intrusion and implicated... (shrink)

This book is the result of a three-year study undertaken by a multidisciplinary working party of the Institute of Medical Ethic (UK). The group was chaired by a moral theologian, and its members included biological and ethological scientists, toxicologists, physicians, veterinary surgeons, an expert in alternatives to animal use, officers of animal welfare organizations, a Home Office Inspector, philosophers, and a lawyer. Coming from these different backgrounds, and holding a diversity of moral views, the members produced the agreed report as (...) a result of detailed and rigorous discussions. The book sets out facts about animal experiments and about animal abilities to experience pain, distress and anxiety. There is a detailed examination of the moral claims related to the benefits likely to accrue from animal research, and of strategies for weighing these benefits against the harm caused to animals, in order to decide whether particular research projects ought or ought not to proceed. This leads to consideration of the statutory and non-statutory controls which safeguard standards in such research. The final section explores a variety of philosophical arguments about the use of animals in research, and offers a philosophical justification for the Working Party's more practical conclusions. Written in clear, nontechnical language, this book is accessible to lay people as well as to scientists. It is the first such document to emerge from a meeting of people with such widely differing views on this highly controversial subject, and represents a major contribution towards informing and raising the quality of contemporary debate. The book is unique in drawing together material and ideas never before found in one volume. It will interest a broad spectrum of readers, from ethicists and animal rights advocates to scientific researchers and laboratory administrators, along with general readers concerned about this compelling issue. (shrink)

Emerging technologies are, by definition, full of surprises: developments that we cannot fully anticipate and that might have some bad outcomes as well as good ones. This presents a challenge for anyone trying to make forward‐looking policy decisions, including those who apply benefit‐cost analysis. BCA is now widely known and used, but it is also widely misunderstood—by many of its advocates as well as its detractors. In this essay, I will begin by examining some of the strengths and weaknesses of (...) BCA as a normative science. Yes, “normative science” is an oxymoron, and the incongruity it speaks to is a source of much of the controversy; BCA is an imperfect answer, but often the best available answer, to the question of how a society should go about making collective but not unanimous choices.I also want to take a hard look at the question of what we are evaluating. BCA is designed to weigh government actions, to see whether they are in the public interest; it is not designed to evaluate private actions. But if the government action is to approve a private action that otherwise would be prohibited, then the BCA inevitably must evaluate the latter. From the perspective of a government regulator, it is very tempting to shift the burden of proof onto private innovators—to obligate them to seek permission to proceed, and to demonstrate that their proposed actions have acceptable risks and will produce a net social benefit. But such burden‐shifting is not merely an administrative convenience; it has serious economic consequences that need to be examined. (shrink)

The theme of the 6th biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, held at Howard University in Washington, D.C. in November 2004, was "Philosophy Against Empire." The U.S. imperial project, pursued by both Republican and Democratic administrations, has many dimensions, including military force and the mechanisms for its legitimation; the global economy and flows of money and people across borders; and biopolitics, or the disciplining of bodies through the micro-mechanisms of power apart from traditional forms of sovereignty. These issues are explored in (...) depth in these collected and revised essays from the Conference, along with the forms of subjectivity that can resist and respond to the alienation produced within and by the imperial project, toward the creation of an alternative global order. Authors include Karsten Struhl, Ann Ferguson, Edmund Byrne, David Cormier, Harry Targ, Jo-Ann Pilardi, Lucinda Joy Peach, Devin Zane Shaw, Tzuchien Tho, Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Schmitt, Richard Jones, Richard Peterson, Peter Amato, William McBride, Omar Dahbour, Kory Schaff, David Schweickart, and Carol Gould. (shrink)

The formulation of “putting people first” as core values in contemporary China had its profound realistic context, witnessed a zigzag historical course, and cherished a Marxist theoretical origin. Against the background of developing market economy, the looming large of “putting money first”, “putting property first”, or “putting officials first” etc., it came into being by meeting China’s actual social demand, deriving yet elevated from the viewpoints of administrative science. It gained powerful impetus in the reflection of “cultural revolution”, and (...) through the practice of reform and opening up. Meanwhile, it is also a spiraling process ofideological emancipation. Its formulation rested upon a unification of theory and practice, benefited not just from a continuously deepened understanding of Marxist theory about humanity, but from an innovative application of that theory in face of a new situation and practice. (shrink)

This piece explores the proposition that environmental restoration is the only acceptable alternative to a world left with diminishing natural regions. The article reviews the ethical debate concerning the moral obligation of humankind to restore regions that have been stripped of their resources. It demonstrates thatthrough the assistance of both legislative and technological measures nature can be renewed to spawn healthy ecosystems when permitted to do so. Furthermore, the article claims that the restoration thesis is proven by the paradigm of (...) the Adirondack region – a region that was once clear-cut and enabled to restore itself through both rewilding and the “Forever Wild” clause in the New York State Constitution. The article is particularly timely and provocative given the current Bush Administration’s environmental policies. (shrink)

This article deals with the relations in the triangle state–society–business in modern Russia. It is shown against Russian historical background, that the absolutist state in this country could never be identified with the society and these relations were shaped under its strong domination. The ethics of rule-following characteristic for market economy in general did not develop in Russia. The breakdown of communist Russia and market reforms proceeding since 1992 did not change this situation significantly. The period of political alliance between (...) big business and government was followed by restoration of state dominance in somewhat modified forms. Both periods were characterized by corruption, which contrary to Putin’s slogans, increases in Russia. In the article I show the evolution of Putin administration’s policy which changed from emphasizing and improving legal institutions to selective use of legal norms depending on personal loyalty. Main forms of state exploitation of Russian business are described. The conclusion is that Russian experience of balancing state and market should be called negative. (shrink)

Les divers points de vue relatifs au concept mathématique de l’infini sont ordonnés en série croissante d’après le degré où l’on reconnaît ce concept en ses diverses complications. Cette série est divisée en trois groupes : la mathématique du fini, la « conception constructive », et la « conception en soi » de l’infini. D’après cette série, l’on explique le programme d"Hilbert, qui est de prouver que la mathématique est libre de contradiction, et l’on rapporte brièvement les méthodes qui sont (...) en question pour administrer cette preuve. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:President’s Council on BioethicsEdmund D. Pellegrino (bio) and F. Daniel Davis (bio)Approximately two weeks before what was to have been its final meeting, the White House dissolved the President’s Council on Bioethics by terminating the appointments of its 18 members. The letters of dismissal, dated 10 June 2009, informed the members that their service on the Council would end with the close of business the next day.The Council’s term (...) was set to expire on 30 September 2009. After President Obama’s election in November and during the transition, we were advised to proceed on the assumption that the Council would be permitted to cease on that date. Reasons for the abrupt move to disband the Council are unknown. We have accepted the fact that we Council members served at the pleasure of the President and that he simply exercised his rightful prerogative. No explanation is therefore required.Some observers have speculated that the action was retaliatory. They related to the fact that several members of the Council disagreed with the President’s stem cell policy in a signed statement published in the Hastings Center’s Bioethics Forum. Others have speculated that the move was pre-emptive. At its final meeting, scheduled for 25–26 June, the Council was set to sign-off on two of its final publications. One was a comprehensive report on the ethics of organ transplantation, and the other a white paper entitled Health Care and the Common Good. The aim was immediately to release the latter as a contribution to the intensifying debate about health care reform. Health Care and the Common Good could well have aided rather than impeded the President’s drive to better control health care costs and achieve universal coverage. The Council report attempted to ground both goals in the ethical framework of, as the title indicates, the common good of all Americans.In his letter terminating the members’ appointments, Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel Don Gips said that the President “recognizes the values of having a commission of experts in bioethical issues to provide objective and non-ideological bioethics advice to his administration.” Gips went on to say that the President is “currently rethinking the purposes and goals of such a bioethics commission, and is carefully considering a revitalized mission and mandate.” And, [End Page 309] responding to media enquiries, White House press officer Reid Cherlin explained that the President’s Council was terminated because it was a “philosophically leaning advisory group” and, according to a New York Times account by Nicholas Wade, “because it favored discussion over developing a shared consensus.” As for the ultimate outcome of the President’s “rethinking,” Cherlin indicated that President Obama will appoint a new commission with the mandate of offering “practical policy options” in bioethics.In the light of our experiences with the Council, we leave it with hopes that certain questions of national importance will be addressed. In light of the nature of federal advisory commissions, what is or are the proper roles of a national bioethics commission? If the aim is to provide advice and counsel to the President or, perhaps to the U. S. Congress, is that advice best rendered as a group consensus or as an in-depth exploration of the inevitably conflicting ethical perspectives on a given issue? How should such a commission be constituted—with what sorts of individuals? And what is the nature of the expertise that they individually and collectively bring to the commission’s functions? If the commission is to promote public debate and discussion, how exactly should it go about that task? And how is the efficacy of a commission to be assessed? Such questions inevitably lead us deep into contested territory, as the experience of this Council has shown: into the intersections of politics, religion, and science and into the relations between practice and theory—between policy and what some seem to deride as “philosophy.” Indeed, policy without an underlying philosophy is an edifice without a foundation; philosophy without policy is a foundation without an edifice.At the last meeting of the Council in March 2009, we launched a discussion of these questions with the... (shrink)

This study replicates and extends previous work by Oppenheimer and Wiesner [1990, Sex discrimination: Who is hired and do employment equity statements make a difference? Proceedings of the 11th Annual Conference of the Administrative Sciences Association of Canada, Personnel and Human Resources Division], and examined the effects of minority qualifications on hiring decisions, the effects of employment equity directives when minority candidates are less qualified and the effects of different types and strengths of employment equity directives on hiring (...) decisions. The results indicate that when employment equity is in place, people are increasingly more likely to hire underrepresented group members, to the extent that they are more qualified. Men appear to be treated in a positively biased manner, and are more likely to be hired when they are less qualified. Women are less likely to be hired when they are under-qualified, and in the absence of employment equity directives or when there is a suggestion that women are underrepresented. Moreover, when employment equity directives are strengthened, there appears to be a subtle backlash for women but not for men. (shrink)

Off-label prescribing is an integral part of contemporary medicine. Many patients benefit when they receive drugs or devices under circumstances not specified on the label approved by the Food and Drug Administration. An off-label use may provide the best available intervention for a patient, as well as the standard of care for a particular health problem. In oncology, pediatrics, geriatrics, obstetrics, and other practice areas, patient care could not proceed without off-label prescribing. When scientific and medical evidence justify off-label uses, (...) physicians promote patients’ interests by prescribing products off label.Off-label prescribing can also harm patients, however. The potential for harm is greatest when an offlabel use lacks a solid evidentiary basis. A 2006 study examining prescribing practices for 169 commonly prescribed drugs found high rates of off-label use with little or no scientific support. Researchers examining off-label use in U.S. children’s hospitals concluded, “[W]e still have incomplete knowledge about the safety and efficacy of many medications commonly used to treat children across a range of drug classes and clinical diagnoses.”. (shrink)

Court (Shar’iyya) recordings are at the forefront of primary written sources, which contain important documents related to Turkish history, sociology and culture. The court records shed light on city history of the period concerned with rich information and documents. These records are important books in which the documents related to the judicial, administrative, economic, architectural and social structure of a city as well as diplomatic correspondence between the center and the province were recorded. The purpose of this study is (...) to prepare a detailed catalog in addition to the catalog which was made in 1963 and contained only 119 books specifying only the dates covered by the book number. As we have seen in this study, all of the 119 notebooks in the records do not consist of the court registers in the known form. They are the books that include the records of court proceedings, which are different from those of the court, especially after the Tanzimat e.g. Qassam, Enkiha, Zabt al-Da’wa, Permission and so on. The microfilms of the books were presented to the service of researchers in Sivas Ziya Bey Library of Ancient Works. The originals of the books are in the Prime Ministry State Archives.SummaryShar’iyyaregisters are one of the primary written sources about Turkish history, sociology, and culture relevant to our life. Registry records shed light on the history of city in the relevant period by containing rich information and documents. They are important notebooks, which are related to the judicial, administrative, economic, architectural and social structure of a city, and also in the form of diplomatic correspondence between the central and provincial posts.After the Anatolian Selçuk (Saljūq) State, which collapsed under the pressure and domination of the Iranian Mongols in the last half of the XIIIth century, a state was established in the Selçuk-Byzantine border in the north-west of Anatolia in XIVth century, which did not even lasted a hundred years and had a reign in three continents. In the Bursa inscription, which dated to 1337/8, the second Ottoman Sultan (Sulṭān) Orhan was titled as the mujahedeen (warrior), the sultan of the veterans, son of veteran of veteran. The fact that Orhan carring these titles shows that since the earliest times, the Ottoman sultans considered themselves as the leader of the religious war against the infidels. Since the first years of the establishment of the Ottoman State, the Sharīʿa ruled on the establishment of administration and for this reason, they established institution of the Shaykh al-Islām(the chief juristconsult). Firstly, by appointing a subaşı(subashi, an Ottoman gubernatorial title) to the conquered places, then it gradually began to establish judicial courts from the smallest areas.In the XVth century, the number of qāḍī increased in parallel with the increase in their jurisdiction as a result of the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, and the proliferation of the administrative units called sancak, (sanjaq, division of a province) and so the failure of oneqāḍīto satisfy court affairs of an entire sanjaq. New districts arose from some of the former large districts. As a result of this in the XVIth century, the administrative system of the sanjaq's Tımar system and at the same time a geographical integrity of the districts/provinces to see the legal work of a qāḍī to pass by the districts and sub-district as a legal caused to occur two legal definitions that is legal and military administrative. Records of qāḍīs, which is called as sicilemerged because it was their duty to record their works and orders issued to them and the answers and the provisions given to them.The courts of Shar’iyyaserved as primary general courts (maḥākim-i ʿumūmiye) until the declaration of the Tanẓīmāt in the Ottoman Empire and heard the suit at legal, criminal, administrative, military, financial and all kinds of cases. Tanẓīmāt period, or rather Maḥmūd II and the period following him, the judicial organs in terms of reorganization was a circuit that was on the scene.In this way, which was occurred in the judicial system, records which were kept in the Meşihat (Mashīkhat) began to diversify depending on this change. Since in the registry books, which we call classical, all correspondence between the central and provincial offices were recorded. Records such as pleas, letters of patent, verdicts, order of the high, bonds etc. could be found in these documents.These records, which are one of the most important sources of an Ottoman city history, were kept in the museums and libraries of the cities until recently. A few years ago, these records, with a correct decision, were collected in the Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives and it was preserved and presented to the use of researchers by transferring them into digital. The Sivas Court building as it is known in history is now in the Pāshābeg quarter and known as the Court Bazaar in these days. There is no clear information about when the court was built in Sivas. In time, changes have occurred in cities and we are losing the historical side of them. In addition, the fact that people acted in an unconscious manner that would harm the historical texture was the biggest factor in disappearance of material remains. With the remaining physical materials available, we can only access crumb information and we can only make predictions. In this evaluation, the biggest materials are the documents and notebooks, which are the memory of city dates. However, it is understood from the records that there is a foundation belonging to this court and some of the court's repair and maintenance works were carried out by this foundation. As it is understood from a document dated 14 August 1798, one of the repairs was sponsored by Ḥüseyin Efendī. In an inscription dated 1906, which was found during the renovation of the basement of an apartment building owned by the General Directorate of Foundations in May 2018, the location of the building was previously known as the Sivas Muftī 's Office.In this study, a total of 240 registry books belonging to Sivas were prepared as in a catalog system. In this study, we have seen that a great deal of records have been lost, burnt or destroyed in a certain way through history. The burn marks in the records of 79 is a striking example in this regard. The book number 139, which is not shown in Osman Ersoy's work, is a record book in classical form. An important case in this study is that the register number 206, which is registered to Sivas, belongs to the province of Burdur and it is also a registry book in classical form. This book covers the dates of 18 M. 1248/23 N.1250 - 1832-1835. (shrink)

Liberalism in Russia is one of the most complex, multifaced and, indeed, controversial phenomena in the history of political thought. Values and practices traditionally associated with Western liberalism—such as individual freedom, property rights, or the rule of law—have often emerged ambiguously in the Russian historical experience through different dimensions and combinations. Economic and political liberalism have often appeared disjointed, and liberal projects have been shaped by local circumstances, evolved in response to secular challenges and developed within often rapidly-changing institutional and (...) international settings. This third volume of the Reset DOC “Russia Workshop” collects a selection of the Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism conference proceedings, providing a broad set of insights into the Russian liberal experience through a dialogue between past and present, and intellectual and empirical contextualization, involving historians, jurists, political scientists and theorists. The first part focuses on the Imperial period, analyzing the political philosophy and peculiarities of pre-revolutionary Russian liberalism, its relations with the rule of law, and its institutionalization within the Constitutional Democratic Party. The second part focuses on Soviet times, when liberal undercurrents emerged under the surface of the official Marxist-Leninist ideology. After Stalin’s death, the “thaw intelligentsia” of Soviet dissidents and human rights defenders represented a new liberal dimension in late Soviet history, while the reforms of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” became a substitute for liberalism in the final decade of the USSR. The third part focuses on the “time of troubles” under the Yeltsin presidency, and assesses the impact of liberal values and ethics, the bureaucratic difficulties in adapting to change, and the paradoxes of liberal reforms during the transition to post-Soviet Russia. Despite Russian liberals having begun to draw lessons from previous failures, their project was severely challenged by the rise of Vladimir Putin. Hence, the fourth part focuses on the 2000s, when the liberal alternative in Russian politics confronted the ascendance of Putin, surviving in parts of Russian culture and in the mindset of technocrats and “system liberals”. Today, however, the Russian liberal project faces the limits of reform cycles of public administration, suffers from a lack of federalist attitude in politics and is externally challenged from an illiberal world order. All this asks us to consider: what is the likelihood of a “reboot” of Russian liberalism? (shrink)

"The tragedy of the left is that, having achieved an unprecedented victory in helping stop an appalling war, it then proceeded to commit suicide." So writes Todd Gitlin about the aftermath of the Vietnam War in this collection of writings that calls upon intellectuals on the left to once again engage American public life and resist the trappings of knee-jerk negativism, intellectual fads, and political orthodoxy. Gitlin argues for a renewed sense of patriotism based on the ideals of sacrifice, tough-minded (...) criticism, and a willingness to look anew at the global role of the United States in the aftermath of 9/11. Merely criticizing and resisting the Bush administration will not do--the left must also imagine and propose an America reformed. Where then can the left turn? Gitlin celebrates the work of three prominent postwar intellectuals: David Riesman, C. Wright Mills, and Irving Howe. Their ambitious, assertive, and clearly written works serve as models for an intellectual engagement that forcefully addresses social issues and remains affirmative and comprehensive. Sharing many of the qualities of these thinkers' works, Todd Gitlin's blunt, frank analysis of the current state of the left and his willingness to challenge orthodoxies pave the way for a revival in leftist thought and a new liberal patriotism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 13.1 (2003) 53-64 [Access article in PDF] Incentives for Providing Organs Patricia Milmoe McCarrick and Martina Darragh After a contentious debate at its 2002 annual meeting, the American Medical Association's House of Delegates voted to endorse the opinion of its Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs that the impact of financial incentives on organ donation should be studied (Josefson 2002). The shortage of organs (...) for transplantation has been an ongoing problem for more than 20 years. In June1981, Representative Philip Crane (R-IL) introduced legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives proposing a $25,000 income tax deduction and a $25,000 estate tax exclusion for donating an organ (Tax Incentives 1981). Still the National Organ Transplant Act enacted in October 1984 prohibited the offering of any "valuable consideration" in return for organs (United States 1984).The developments of a legal market for tissues in the United States and a black market for organs around the world have raised the question of whether donation without compensation is the only ethically viable option. Some critics of the current system claim reliance on donation actually promotes a black market in organs (Kaserman and Barnett 2002, p. 38; Palmer 1999, p. 36). In addition, a new set of compensation issues has arisen as living kidney donor transplantations begin to rival those performed with cadaveric organs (United States 2001).As a result, current suggestions for incentives go far beyond the traditional death benefit payment to include such ideas as medals of honor for donors, reimbursement for funeral expenses, exchange programs for organ donation, and special medical insurance for living organ donors. Numerous bills introduced into the 107th Congress have proposed such incentives (Delmonico et al. 2002.) In October 2002, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded $5.2 million in grants to study both clinical and behavioral interventions for increasing organ donations that do not involve incentives. The inspiration for some of the funded proposals comes from the successes of Spain's social services and the United Kingdom's clinical administration of organ procurement programs (Robeznieks 2002). [End Page 53]With a nod to evidence-based medicine, the underlying concern expressed in much of the current literature is that no idea for increasing the supply of organs should be discounted before it is studied. This bibliography provides a short introduction to the range of opinions expressed on the issue of incentives for providing organs.al-Mousawi, M.; Samhan, M.; al-Mezairee I.; Razzak, M.A.; and Khawari, F. Cadaver Organ Procurement in Kuwait. Transplantation Proceedings 31 (8): 3375-76, 1999.The authors describe a protocol that significantly increased cadaveric organ donation and credit it with fostering the expansion of an organ sharing program among the Arab Gulf states. Developed by Kuwaiti neurologists and anesthetists after a continuing education course on transplantation, the protocol places a special emphasis on the role of local transplant coordinators who facilitate the investigation of brain death cases by neurologists.Arnold, Robert; Bartlett, Steven; Bernat, James; et al. [Ethics Committee of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons] Financial Incentives for Cadaver Organ Donation: an Ethical Reappraisal. Transplantation 73 (8): 1361-67, 27 April 2002.To prepare for proposed studies of financial incentives for organ donation, the American Society of Transplant Surgeons convened a panel to develop a methodology for evaluating the ethics of such research. Comprised of organ procurement organization executives, physicians, surgeons, and ethicists, the panel generated a list of nine criteria for use in judging any incentives proposal. While opposed to direct payment or tax incentives for organ donation, a majority of the members support funeral expense reimbursement or charitable contributions as incentives that would not violate or undermine the ideal of altruism.Cameron, J. Stewart, and Hoffenberg, Raymond. The Ethics of Organ Transplantation Reconsidered: Paid Organ Donation and the Use of Executed Prisoners as Donors. Kidney International 55 (2): 724-32, February 1999.After reviewing arguments for and against payment for organ procurement, the authors apply these arguments to the specific case of obtaining organs from executed... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Chair’s Perspective on the Work of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation ExperimentsRuth Faden (bio)On January 15, 1994, President Clinton created the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments in response to his concern about the increasing number of reports describing alleged unethical conduct of the U.S. Government, and institutions funded by the government, in the use of, or exposure to, ionizing radiation in human beings at the height of (...) the Cold War. He directed the Committee: (1) to uncover the history of human radiation experiments and intentional environmental releases of radiation; (2) to identify the ethical and scientific standards for evaluating these events; and (3) to make recommendations to ensure that whatever wrongdoing may have occurred in the past will not be repeated.The Committee was composed of 14 members: a citizen representative and 13 experts in bioethics, radiation oncology and biology, epidemiology and statistics, public health, history of science and medicine, nuclear medicine, and law. We reported to a cabinet-level group (the Human Radiation Interagency Working Group) convened by the president, which includes the secretaries of defense, energy, health and human services, and veterans affairs; the attorney general; the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration; the director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and the director of the Office of Management and Budget.On April 21, 1994, at the end of the first day of our first meeting, President Clinton invited us to the White House to personally communicate his commitment to the process we were about to undertake. He urged us to be fair, thorough, and unafraid to shine the light of truth on this hidden and poorly understood aspect of our nation’s past. Our most important task, he said, was to tell the full story to the American public. [End Page 215] At the same time, we were to examine the present, to determine how the conduct of human research today compares with that of the past, and to assess whether, in light of this inquiry, changes need to be made in the policies of the federal government. Eighteen months later, the Committee’s attempt to tell the story of the past and to report on our inquiry into the present was delivered to the president in a 900-page Final Report (ACHRE 1995) and several supplemental volumes.The Committee’s charge was enormous. We were asked to conduct a massive investigation into events that occurred as much as 50 years ago and that involved the highest reaches of the defense establishment and the medical community. This investigation necessitated an examination of the conduct and policies of six federal agencies and countless agents in the private sector, as well as the location and interpretation of hundreds of thousands of documents, many of which were buried in obscure locations or were still classified.In addition, the Committee was instructed to establish standards for judging, in moral terms, the events that it uncovered. This charge necessitated the confrontation of contentious debates in moral thought and theory about history, relativism, and the significance of context in moral judgment. But our purpose was not to engage in these debates in the abstract. Although the Committee was not expressly charged with considering issues relating to remedies, including financial compensation, we felt obliged to address the type of remedies that we believed the government, as an ethical matter, should provide to subjects of experiments where the circumstances warranted such a response. Thus our deliberations about relativism and moral judgment were tied to concrete recommendations for public policy and were conducted in a public context that included participants from numerous adversarial legal proceedings.In tandem with our reconstruction of the past, we undertook three projects to examine the current state of human radiation experiments. First, we studied how each federal agency that currently conducts or funds research involving human subjects regulates and oversees its research activity. Second, from among the very large number of federally-supported research projects involving human subjects, we randomly selected 125 projects for closer scrutiny. We reviewed all available relevant documentation for each project in order to assess how well it appeared to protect the rights and interests of the participating subjects. Third... (shrink)

Hegel’s political philosophy regards the “corporation” as both a civil society association and an institution guaranteed under the constitution. The present article focuses on the concept of corporation as an institution of the ‘internal constitution’ by analysing some of the writings which go back to Hegel’s Heidelberg and Berlin phases, namely the Heidelberg review of the Proceedings of the Estates Assembly of the Kingdom of Württemberg, 1815–1816, his first lectures on the Philosophy of Rights, and the Elements of the (...) Philosophy of Rights. Notwithstanding the analysis shows that Hegel’s sophisticated constitutional culture is informed directly by, and developed along with, his involvement in the Württemberg’s political debates, yet his idea of State administration is far more elaborate than the constitutions of nineteenth-century German States which it does not, in fact, intend to merely reproduce. I shall argue that Hegel’s account of corporation is based on his specific understanding of European history and the related conceptualization of institution as a guarantee of freedom. Both history and theory are necessary tools to frame and comprehend the philosopher’s discussion of corporation, whose civil and institutional nature is essential to conceive the connection established between the government of civil society and legislative power. I contend that the role that Hegel attributes to corporations cannot be interpreted as an idea reflecting or inherited from the history of the German states, and that rather it represents the key to understanding his concept of patriotism and model of political representation via the assemblies of estates. From this perspective, it appears clear that the Hegelian theory of corporation is at the center of the philosopher’s diagnosis on the crisis and evolution of the modern State. (shrink)

The result of 2007’s presidential election in South Korea symbolizes the decline of the Left and the growth of the new Right. They say it goes with the global retrogression of democracy, or the consolidation of the hegemony of the rightist versions of democracy. According to Choi Jang-jip, the general public in Korea has thought that the Roh Moo-hyun’s administration had betrayed them, handing power over to the market, and seeking to form a coalition government with theconservatives. Similarly, Professor Jang (...) Ha-jun asserts that the democratic governments of Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun have mistaken economic democratization for neo-liberalistic structural adjustment. (shrink)

The advent of writing in the Greek polis administration resulted in the appointment of officials responsible for document management. These were known as grammateis (secretaries). The need for records connected to judicial proceedings led to the involvement of secretaries in the polis legal procedure. Although there remains little evidence of this, in Athens secretarial support was certainly connected with almost every use of writing in a judicial context. Secretaries appear to have received suits, published notifications of trials and recorded (...) fines, but their most well-attested duty is that of the reading of documents brought as evidence in the courtroom. The study of references to secretaries in a judicial context demonstrates that their duties were essential to the persons involved in the administration of justice. By keeping track of judicial documents secretaries helped the officials to keep accurate records for the sake of accountability, while the reading of legal texts enabled the Athenian citizen-judges to get to know verbatim the texts of the state laws and avoid manipulation by litigants who produced their own interpretations of a law. The purpose of this article is to present all the relevant cases of secretarial support in the justice system of Athens and to discuss the contribution made by the secretaries to the Athenian legal procedure. (shrink)

"In a famous article first published by The Independent in 1998, the British journalist Robert Fisk recounted that when he met with Osama bin Laden for the second and last time — in Afghanistan at the end of the previous year — the first thing that the Saudi billionaire did upon seeing him was to grab the newspapers that were sticking out of his interviewer’s briefcase. Bin Laden then proceeded to read through them for more than a half-hour — though (...) they were a week old — bringing himself up to date about Pakistan, Palestine, and his home country, Saudi Arabia. At some point, he stumbled upon a piece of news that startled him: Iranian and Saudi officials were about to hold talks. Is it true, bin Laden asked Robert Fisk, is Tehran really trying to establish contact with Riyadh? -/- In his article — which he wrote after the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam — what Fisk found noteworthy about this anecdote was the contrast between a man that the Clinton administration and the Western media had just presented as the most dangerous terrorist on the planet and the under-informed bin Laden he had seen in Afghanistan, less than a year earlier. In the wake of what happened on September 11th, however, bin Laden’s isolation no longer is the crucial part of the story. Much more than the fact that he did not know about the imminent encounter between Iranian and Saudi diplomats, what matters now are the long-term consequences he drew from learning about it. To put it dramatically, one could claim that the rationale behind the recent attacks on New York and Washington originated in what Osama bin Laden read that day in Robert Fisk’s newspapers." [excerpt provided by the journal website in lieu of an abstract]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Update on Waiving Informed Consent in Emergency ResearchCharles R. McCarthyMadam: The closing statement of my article on Waiving Informed Consent in Emergency Research published in the June 1995 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal was: "No doubt we shall hear more of this issue."Indeed, we have heard much more on this issue. (1) In May 1995, after my article had already gone to press, the Food and (...) Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) jointly published a report on the Public Forum on Informed Consent in Clinical Research Conducted in Emergency Circumstances. (2) On July 26, 1995, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published in the Federal Register a Notice of Action Related to Emergency Research Activity (60 FR 38353-54). This action constituted a waiver of the requirement to obtain prior informed consent from subjects, as required by the Department's Regulations for the Protection of Human Subjects (45 CFR 46), for one specific NIH-funded project under strictly defined circumstances. (3) On September 21, 1995, FDA published a proposed rule to amend its current informed consent regulations (21 CFR 50) to permit harmonization of federal policies on emergency research and to reduce confusion as to when such research can proceed without obtaining prior informed consent from research subjects. The proposed regulation provides a narrow exception to the requirement for obtaining and documenting informed consent from each human research subject.The HHS waiver (a harbinger of a proposed amendment to its regulations) and the FDA proposed rule are intended to be harmonized so that an Institutional Review Board (IRB) in compliance with one set of regulations relative to the waiver of informed consent will be, ipso facto, in compliance with the other set of regulations.In brief: The FDA proposed amendments will allow an IRB to waive informed consent in emergency situations when:1. The human subjects are in a life threatening condition;2. Obtaining informed consent is not feasible because: (i) the subjects will not be able to provide consent because of their medical condition, (ii) the intervention must be administered before consent from legally authorized representatives is feasible, (iii) there is no reasonable way to identify prospectively the individuals likely to become eligible for the research because the emergence of the condition to be studied cannot be predicted reliably in particular individuals; [End Page 385]3. The opportunity to participate is in the interest of the subjects because: (i) a life threatening situation necessitates intervention, (ii) the risk of the intervention is reasonable in the light of what is known about the medical condition and the patient, the risks and benefits of current therapy, if any, and what is known about the risks and benefits of the proposed intervention or activity;4. The research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver;5. Additional protection of the rights and welfare of the subjects will be provided including, at least: (i) consultation (which may include consultation carried out by the IRB itself) with representatives of the communities from which the subjects will be drawn, (ii) public disclosure prior to commencement of the study sufficient to describe the study and its risks and benefits, (iii) public disclosure of sufficient information following completion of the study to apprise the community and researchers of the study and its results, and (iv) the establishment of an independent data and safety monitoring board;6. The IRB has reviewed and approved an informed consent document for use with subjects or legal representatives in situations in which obtaining such consent may be feasible for some subjects.The preamble to the proposed amendments to the regulations and the amendments themselves contain much more information than is presented here. Readers are therefore encouraged to study the proposals carefully. The public comment period ended November 6, and the FDA is expected to issue a final rule in 1996.Charles R. McCarthyKennedy Institute of Ethics Georgetown University Washington, DCCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

Our world is mobile. People move, either within the state or from one state to another, to access opportunities, to improve their living conditions, or to start afresh. Yet, we usually assume that migration is an exceptional activity that leads to permanent settlement. In this paper, I invite us to reconsider this assumption. First, I analyse several ways in which people experience mobility in contemporary societies. Then, I turn to migration, as a specific form of mobility. I distinguish between a (...) legal/administrative, a social, and a self-identification-based approach to migration, demonstrating that they lead to divergent definitions of who is a migrant. I proceed by introducing the concept of mobile migration and by developing a typology of mobile migrants. I conclude that, in order to devise migration policies that treat migrants fairly, a careful consideration of the claims and interests of the different types of mobile migrants is necessary. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas has emerged as a sharp, and occasionally harsh, critic of the Bush administration’s policies since the Iraq war. Habermas has developed this critique in several of his short pieces and interviews, some of which are available in fine collections in both English and other languages. However, the occasional and journalistic character of Habermas’ political interventions often hide the theoretical basis of his critique. In this paper, I argue that Habermas’ critique of the Bush administration’s foreign policy emanates from, (...) and is founded upon, his conception of modernity, and specifically his views about the relationshipbetween “particularity” and “generality.” The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate how Habermas’ critique can actually be read as a critique of particularism, which Habermas sees operating behind American (and British) foreign policy, and which, in his view, compromises the key achievements of modernity (especially in its Kantian version.). (shrink)

Ilan Pappe, one of the New Historians in Israel, answers Amaya et Bacha’s questions concerning the disciplinary proceedings initiated against him by the administration of the University of Haifa. Pappe argues that the measures taken against him were the result of his critique of Israeli academia for its lack of independence, as well as of his scholarly work on the « Nakba » and, in particular, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian village of Tantura at the founding of the (...) state of Israel. In an academic milieu characterized by conformism and cowardice, the work of the New Historians is less and less tolerated by the Israeli authorities. (shrink)

In his newly updated version of The Anatomy of a Constitutional Law Case, Alan F. Westin provides a documentary portrait of historically important constitutional law case, 'Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, ' from its rise in a bargaining dispute in the steel industry during 1952 to the aftermath of its decision by the United States Supreme Court. Westin has added to his classic book additional materials and personal commentaries collected since the work was first published. The new information (...) covers what went on within the Truman administration, what went on within the Supreme Court when analyzing and resolving issues that come before it. Westin includes selections from transcripts, briefs and other official proceedings, adds notes describing each phase of the constitutional process, and a section of commentary and questions relating this case to others. (shrink)

In article the author investigates evolution of legal status of the Black Sea Cossack Host in the general administrative and legal system of the Russian empire. The author considers the basic stages of this evolution in a concrete historical context, shows, how depending on concrete historical circumstances legal status of the Black Sea Cossack Host changed. Proceeding from the received results, the author comes to a conclusion that to Cossack elite which has been closely connected with the simple Cossacks, (...) long time was possible to keep as much as possible wide autonomy of the Black Sea Cossack Host, to save up high enough level of democratic traditions of the Ukrainian Cossacks - the self-management, an influential role of Cossack communities, rather considerable economic independence. Thanks to persistence and diplomatic abilities of heads of the Black Sea Cossacks, it was possible to them to achieve from imperial structures of acceptance of such acts which allowed Cossacks of Kuban to keep a wide autonomy that favourably distinguished these Cossacks from other Cossack formations of the Russian empire. (shrink)

Sun Yat-sen’s superior position in modern Chinese history is represented in the movement of the modernization of China with him as a representative went from the stage of ‘imitation’ to the stage of ‘creativity’. He put forward, China, as a country engaging in modernization late, could draw on Western experience and lessons, run (“突驾”) from capitalism directly into socialism, and realize ‘accomplishing both the political revolution and the social revolution at one stroke’. He designed the modernization program of ‘accomplishing both (...) at one stroke’ as the Three People's Principles (Nationalism, Democracy and the People's Livelihood); each separately connects with Human rights, civil rights and national sovereignty pursued by modern Chinese and the essence of them develops around the value of equality approved by socialist thoughts of the day. According to Sun’s thinking: 1. People’s livelihood is the root of the Three People'sPrinciples, which involves most primary human rights --- right of survival because the value of human’s seeking survival necessarily directs to ‘equality and helping each other’, which is the law of the evolution of humanity. So the justice of socialism lies in ‘Leveling out the differences between the rich and the poor’, which can be realized with many ‘artificial’ elements such as nation and morality, etc. What must be done by People’s livelihood in contemporary China are ‘equalizing landownership’, ‘regulating capital’ and ‘developing industry’. 2. Democracy is the request of ‘civil rights’ in the sense of modern democracy. In the special national situation of China, it presents itself as the specific political framework ‘balancing people’s civil rights with elite administration’. 3. The essence of nationalism lies in constructing modern Chinese national country to save the nation from crises. Sun Yat-sen pointed out: First, the foundation on which Chinese nations build up their country is totally different from that of the West. So the country must take ‘collectivism’ as its value direction. Secondly, the ethos of the Chinese nation is different from that of the West. Chinese national country must take ‘morality first’ as the direction of value. Sun’s point of view is unique and single-eyed but contains unavoidable historical limits. (shrink)