Divorce reform and the image of the child

This article analyses the images of the child which underpinned debates on the Family Law Act 1996 and which justified particular provisions of that Act in relation to the substantive law and procedure of the divorce process. It argues that, notwithstanding other developing images of the child by the end of the 20th century, the image of the victim was still influential in the passage of legislation

Assessing assessment

Assessment is not only a major practice tool for social workers and medical professionals but also a gatekeeper. It operates to open or close the way for intervention or treatment for a child or his family in the same way that the Crown Prosecutor controls entry to the courts when applying prosecution guidance. Furthermore, the scope and results of the assessment influence or determine the nature and extent of the intervention. Consequently, assessment, comprising of the investigation and the professional conclusions drawn from it, can categorise children – in relation to ss 17, 37 or 47 of the Children Act 1989 – as in need of services or make them the focus of compulsory measures to address significant harm. Compliance with detailed guidance about assessment and the completion of the requisite questionnaires, scales and pro forma also constitute a type of insurance for those who work in a field where certainty of outcome is impossible. It is difficult, then, to over-estimate the importance of assessment

Should impact constitute mitigation?: structured discretion versus mercy

Sentencing guidance on the weight to be given to mitigation about the impact of punishment on an offender has differentiated between serious and less serious offending and between degrees and types of disadvantage. This article reviews current sentencing approaches and analyses the justifications for taking impact into account. In particular it notes that increased emphasis on victim impact and a recent 'inflation' of seriousness decreases the likelihood that punishment impact will influence sentencing decisions. Consequently, it argues that, at a time of rising use of imprisonment, principled justifications could support more attention to impact, and that this is particularly important where offending lies on the ‘cusp’ of a custodial sentence. NOTE: In Bata, [2006] EWHC 468 (QBD), the case referred to on pages 143-4, the minimum period of 10 years set by the trial judge and confirmed by the Secretary of State, had taken Mr Bata’s age and infirmity into account. The author regrets that it was not made clear in the published article that this was the context for the decision of Jack J. in the High Court that it was not appropriate to make further deductions in view of the gravity of the offence

Personal Continuity and Instrumental Rationality in Rawls’ Theory of Justice

I want to examine the implications of a metaphysical thesis which is presupposed in various objections to Rawls' theory of justice.Although their criticisms differ in many respects, they concur in employing what I shall refer to as the continuity thesis. This consists of the following claims conjointly: (1) The parties in the original position (henceforth the OP) are, and know themselves to be, fully mature persons who will be among the members of the well-ordered society (henceforth the WOS) which is generated by their choice of principles of justice. (2) The OP is a conscious event among others, integrated (compatibly with the constraints on knowledge and motivation imposed on the parties) into the regular continuity of experience that comprises each of their ongoing constitutes lives. (3) The parties in the OP thus are, and regard themselves as, psychologically continuing persons, partially determined in personality and interests by prior experiences, capable of recollection and regret concerning the past, anticipation and apprehensiveness regarding the future, and so on. Although the continuity thesis as stated above is not at odds with any of the conditions that define the OP, its exegetical validity is a matter for discussion. I shall be concerned to argue that if it is indeed contained in or a consequence of Rawls' theory, then it casts into doubt the capacity of the OP to generate or justify any principles of justice at all. On the other hand, if the continuity thesis is viewed as dispensable and unnecessary to the Rawlsian enterprise, then Rawls is correct in maintaining the irrelevance of the question of personal identity to the construction of his moral theory. In this case, the contract-theoretic, instrumentalist justification for the two principles of justice (henceforth the 2PJ) needs to be supplanted by a modified conception of wide reflective equilibrium. The considerations that form the bulk of this discussion then may be understood as providing a rationale for Rawls' recent revisions in the model of justification on which his theory of justice rests, and for his increasing emphasis on us as moral mediators between the OP and the WOS. Now I want to consider the question of whether or not, given the textual evidence, anything like the continuity thesis is stated or implied by Rawls, and what problems for his theory, if any, turn on a positive or negative answer to this question

The Changing Dimensions of Japanese Security Issues

Presentation on post-Cold War security issues and international relations in Japan. Delivered to the Japan Industry and Management of Technology Program (JIMT) at The University of Texas at Austin on August 11, 1999.IC2 Institut

NEW YORK’S FIGHT OVER BLIGHT: THE ROLE OF ECONOMIC UNDERUTILIZATION IN KAUR

This note discusses the issues raised by the policy of seizing land through eminent domain by saying that a certain property is blighted . The author of the note feels that blight should be limited and not merely a way of saying that economic interests of the city are better served by seizing the property through eminent domain. Part I of this Note describes the background of eminent domain and, in particular, the elimination of blight as a qualifying public use. It summarizes the history of the “public use” requirement in the federal and state context and how economic underutilization fits into the analysis. Part II examines the problem of permitting economic underutilization to be used as evidence in determining whether an area is blighted, as well as the role that economic underutilization played in the outcome of Kaur. Part III argues that New York needs to limit the extent to which a blight determination can be based on economic underutilization. It contends that the legislature should address Kaur and the issue of economic underutilization by restricting the statutory definition of blight

E-infrastructures fostering multi-centre collaborative research into the intensive care management of patients with brain injury

Clinical research is becoming ever more collaborative with multi-centre trials now a common practice. With this in mind, never has it been more important to have secure access to data and, in so doing, tackle the challenges of inter-organisational data access and usage. This is especially the case for research conducted within the brain injury domain due to the complicated multi-trauma nature of the disease with its associated complex collation of time-series data of varying resolution and quality. It is now widely accepted that advances in treatment within this group of patients will only be delivered if the technical infrastructures underpinning the collection and validation of multi-centre research data for clinical trials is improved. In recognition of this need, IT-based multi-centre e-Infrastructures such as the Brain Monitoring with Information Technology group (BrainIT - www.brainit.org) and Cooperative Study on Brain Injury Depolarisations (COSBID - www.cosbid.de) have been formed. A serious impediment to the effective implementation of these networks is access to the know-how and experience needed to install, deploy and manage security-oriented middleware systems that provide secure access to distributed hospital based datasets and especially the linkage of these data sets across sites. The recently funded EU framework VII ICT project Advanced Arterial Hypotension Adverse Event prediction through a Novel Bayesian Neural Network (AVERT-IT) is focused upon tackling these challenges. This chapter describes the problems inherent to data collection within the brain injury medical domain, the current IT-based solutions designed to address these problems and how they perform in practice. We outline how the authors have collaborated towards developing Grid solutions to address the major technical issues. Towards this end we describe a prototype solution which ultimately formed the basis for the AVERT-IT project. We describe the design of the underlying Grid infrastructure for AVERT-IT and how it will be used to produce novel approaches to data collection, data validation and clinical trial design is also presented