bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Constitution-Making under UN Auspices
Authors: Sripati Vijayashri
Published: April 2020

As an 18th century ‘standard of civilization,’ the Western liberal constitution has since been integral to public international law and colonial trusteeship. This book is the first comprehensive treatment of the ostensible purposes why international organizations have internationalized this Constitution: from the League of Nations in Danzig, to the UN starting from Libya in 1949, and from 1989-2018, in more than forty poor states including most recently in Colombia and The Gambia. This pioneering study sets the Constitution’s internationalization via United Nations Constitutional Assistance (UNCA) at centre-stage. The Constitution’s salience makes its post-1989 rise via UNCA the most significant post-Cold War development, one which has spawned and shaped all other legal and political developments. For example, the internationalization of this Constitution (subsumed under the ‘rule of law’ label) drives the famed post-1989 rule of law movement, shaping all sectors from electoral, judicial, security, and parliamentary to international criminal and transitional justice. This Constitution’s internationalization is traced, from France’s drafting of Turkey’s 1856 monetary laws, British lawyer, Travis Twiss’ drafting of Congo’s 1885 constitution to the constitutional assistance offered by the League of Nations during the inter-war period and from 1949, by its successor, the United Nations and through a combined historical international constitutional framework, UNCA’s legitimacy is appraised. Through this new constitutional history of trusteeship, Sripati demonstrates that creating an equitable order requires considering seriously why sovereign states’ constitution-making is being internationalized. The book concludes by arguing that UNCA continues its trusteeship role. UNCA makes a new fiscally oriented addition to the ‘standards of civilization’: ‘transparent, inclusive and participatory’ constitution-making.
United Nations Constitutional Assistance
Authors: Sripati Vijayashri
Published: April 2020

This chapter establishes United Nations Constitutional Assistance (UNCA) as a significant but uncharted international and constitutional law topic. UNCA is defined as a set of activities undertaken to produce/internationalize the Western liberal constitution. The Constitution’s salience is outlined to show that UNCA: sires UN/International Territorial Administration; is salient vis-à-vis the UN’s assistance in all other sectors (e.g., electoral, judicial, rule of law); and underpins UN peacebuilding/UN Statebuilding. This backdrop sets the stage for the book’s mission: to analyze UNCA through the concept of ‘Policy Institution’ and Purposive Analysis (analysis of the UN’s official statements). Which is: to investigate and identify the Constitution’s internationalization by international organizations (e.g., the League of Nations and the United Nations); to analyse how the Constitution and its purposes fit into international law and public policy; to consider how states internationalized the Constitution to achieve colonial trusteeship; and to explain how the legitimacy of UNCA with, and without ITA might be appraised in the light of this analysis.
The Western Liberal Constitution’s Internationalized Making Sires Foreign Territorial Administration
Authors: Sripati Vijayashri
Published: April 2020

This is the first and the shorter of two chapters that establishes United Nations Constitutional Assistance’s (UNCA) historical background. UNCA equates to the internationalization of the Western liberal Constitution which provides a blue print for territorial administration. This chapter, therefore, provides the historical context in which the Constitution’s conceptual ties with territorial administration were forged. It establishes that from 1700-1960, Western colonial powers imposed the Constitution to establish foreign territorial administration to achieve common ends: free markets, rule of law, good governance, and civilized practices. In this way, Colonial powers colonized Third World peoples, ostensibly acting as trustees to ‘civilize’ them. This sets the stage for tracing UNCA’s origins non-chronologically (in the next chapter) through Ralph Wilde’s Family of Foreign Territorial Administration (FTA) policy institutions, of which Colonialism is the first.
United Nations Constitutional Assistance
Authors: Sripati Vijayashri
Published: April 2020

This chapter conceptualizes UNCA as an ‘institution’ or ‘established practice.’ Towards this end, it maps out UNCA’s use to produce the Western liberal constitution, conceptualized as a rule of law/development strategy (discussed in Chapter 5) from 1989-2018 in Asia, Asia-Pacific, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean and Indian Ocean regions and Latin America. In this way, UNCA’s use in the post-conflict and development assistance contexts is covered. This chapter also covers the five UNCA-ITA projects, explaining how UNCA gave rise to and governed ITA’s role. The role of UN Family members such as the Bretton Woods Institutions and the United Nations Development Programme in shaping constitutional content is underscored. This chapter tabulates the constitutional commonalities produced by UNCA: the common constitutional provisions in all UNCA-recipients-states (e.g., constitutional supremacy; foreign investor protections, and anti-corruption commissions). On this basis it concludes that the UN promotes a one-size-fits-all model in all states, conflict-torn and stable.
How Does the UN Justify Offering ‘Constitutional Assistance’ in This Post-Colonial Era?
Authors: Sripati Vijayashri
Published: April 2020

This chapter analyses the UN’s official explanations for assisting states in adopting the Western liberal constitution. It considers how the UN officially explains tutoring local actors in the conduct of, what it admits is inherently a ‘sovereign process,’ and in the creation of what it admits is inherently, a sovereign document. In this way, UNCA’s justificatory framework is established to explore (in the next chapter) its use to fulfil international law. UNCA projects ‘manifest commonality on a purposive level.’ UNCA has been conceived as a response to one or both of two types of a perceived constitution-making problem. First, UNCA works in response to a problem perceived with the conduct of constitution-making by local actors. Second, UNCA works in response to a problem perceived with the constitutional content created by them. This Chapter concludes that UNCA, a parent Policy Institution guides its child, UN or International Territorial Administration’s (ITA) policy role.
United Nations Constitutional Assistance
Authors: Sripati Vijayashri
Published: April 2020

This chapter draws on the purposive analysis from the previous chapter to consider how UNCA with, and without its child, UN Territorial Administration (ITA) serves to implement certain areas of international law and public policy. It considers how the Constitution and its four ends (e.g., free markets; good governance; women’s rights) fit within the UN Charter framework. The Constitution which underpins the territorial state and confers territorial status, became in 1993, the UN’s core conflict-prevention tool. Moreover, from 1993 onwards, UNCA operated without plenary ITA in sovereign states. Given this, UNCA’s role covers four areas: (1) Right to self-determination (external and internal dimensions); (2) Conflict-Prevention; and (3) achieving public policy ends (e.g., ‘saving failed states’ and achieving good internal governance); and (4) the promotion of international policy in the area of peace and security, including peacemaking, peacebuilding, and peacekeeping. This Chapter underscores the Security Council’s key role in mandating UNCA and establishes UNCA’s salience vis-à-vis ITA. It concludes that UNCA amounts to the UN’s most intrusive form of intervention.
First Study
Authors: Govind Nikhil
Published: April 2020

The first chapter discusses the path-breaking contemporary novel Hangwoman (2016) written by K. R. Meera, and translated by cultural historian J. Devika. The novel focalizes the ethical dilemmas of capital punishment through the perspective of a young woman, Chetna. Chetna inherits the gruesome profession—however, the new factor is the presence of a sensationalist television media, which reduces what should have been a moment of crime and pathos to a lurid search for commercial visibility. The chapter allows the book to foreground the questions of injustice and ethics as they interact with the gendered perspective of a subaltern young woman. The notion of subjectivity finds an opening and horizon within these difficult questions of private shame and a determination to make one’s way in a hard and unforgiving world.
Fifth Study
Authors: Govind Nikhil
Published: April 2020

The fifth and last chapter gathers together the threads of the previous chapters’ meditations on subjectivity—a subjectivity that may first be triggered by a sense of injustice, subjectivity that is often sharpened by powerful negative affects such as humiliation, or developed over the course of a lifetime as it navigates difficult life experiences. The oeuvre of Krishna Sobti is an apt summation of the themes of the previous chapters. Sobti’s characters too negotiate subjectivity vis a vis difficult family relationships (especially mothers and daughters), the legitimate wife vis-à-vis extramarital establishments and children, or again, the self vis-à-vis the darkness of depression. Few people round off the theme of subjectivity, affect, and meaningful moral action in an anguished and confusing world than Sobti’s protagonists, so it is fitting that the book ends with her.
The Second Dominant Proprietary Class
Authors: Harriss John
Published: April 2020

At around the time that The Political Economy of Development in India (PEDI) was first published in 1984 the rich farmers of India had begun exercising the power of their numbers in massive public demonstrations. A few years later the influence of rich farmers seemed to be on the wane. This chapter considers the trajectory of agrarian politics over the last thirty years. While a narrow alliance between state and big business increasingly appears to determine the pattern of Indian development, these dominant partners have still had to make compromises with rural interests for electoral reasons. Yet the capture of public resources by wealthy farmers comes at the expense of the agricultural economy as a whole.
Malgudi on the Move
Authors: Harriss-White Barbara , Jan Muhammad Ali , Amirali Asha
Published: April 2020

In his seminal book The Political Economy and Development of India (PEDI), Pranab Bardhan recognizes the ‘ferment’ of subordinate classes but does not tackle the questions of their origins and roles. In this chapter we examine three aspects of the impact on the ‘rest of India’ of the coalition of dominant proprietary classes, whose competitive jousting over scarce resources in the 1970s and 1980s led Pranab Bardhan to conclude they had slowed investment and growth. We conclude that much of the economy is neither purely agrarian nor industrial, a heterogeneity that challenges distinct class categories. Not only is the persistent mass of small firms indispensable to dominant classes but also, to driving growth and livelihoods, the power of numbers is able to challenge the power of capital.
An Indian Gilded Age?
Authors: Walton Michael
Published: April 2020

According to Forbes, India has experienced a striking growth in billionaire wealth since 1991. It has also experienced high-profile corruption scams between politicians and business. This chapter develops an interpretative comparison between contemporary India and the Gilded Age in the United States of America. It argues that there are important parallels with the Gilded Age, around private wealth creation on the back of corporate expansion, extensive links between business and political interests, and widespread sharing of economic rents as part of the political equilibrium; this nevertheless coexists with significant building of industrial capabilities. It then explores a contrast with the US Progressive Era. The comparison suggests the medium-term prospect is for a continuance of a mix of connected capitalism and populist social strategies, including in the wake of Narendra Modi’s election. This can be interpreted as a new version of Pranab Bardhan’s collective action problem.
How Russia Learned to Talk
Authors: Lovell Stephen
Published: April 2020

Russia in the late nineteenth century may have been an autocracy, but it was far from silent. In the 1860s, new venues for public speech sprang up: local and municipal assemblies, the courtroom, and universities and learned societies. Theatre became more lively and vernacular, while the Orthodox Church exhorted its priests to become better preachers. Although the tsarist government attempted to restrain Russia’s emerging orators, the empire was entering an era of vigorous modern politics. All the while, the spoken word was amplified by the written: the new institutions of the 1860s brought with them the adoption of stenography. Russian political culture reached a new peak of intensity with the 1905 revolution and the creation of a parliament, the State Duma, whose debates were printed in the major newspapers. Sometimes considered a failure as a legislative body, the Duma was a formidable school of modern political rhetoric. It was followed by the cacophonous freedom of 1917, when Aleksandr Kerensky, dubbed Russia’s ‘persuader-in-chief’, emerged as Russia’s leading orator only to see his charisma wane. The Bolsheviks could boast charismatic orators of their own, but after the October Revolution they also turned public speaking into a core ritual of Soviet ‘democracy’. The Party’s own gatherings remained vigorous (if also sometimes vicious) throughout the 1920s; and here again, the stenographer was in attendance to disseminate proceedings to a public of newspaper readers or Party functionaries.
Introduction
Authors: Lovell Stephen
Published: April 2020

The introduction considers the place of the spoken word in Russian history, presenting a pre-history of rhetoric and oratory in Russia before the 1860s. Examples are drawn from sermons, literature, theatre, and the universities, as well as from the political practice of Russia’s rulers. The introduction goes on to explain the significance of public speaking in Russia’s ‘stenographic age’, highlighting the challenges of modern mass politics and communications. It further offers comparisons between Russian political culture and the political culture of Britain, Germany, and the United States, paying particular attention to the place of oratory in the political imagination. It concludes by outlining the structure and rationale of the book.
Public Speaking in the Age of the State Duma
Authors: Lovell Stephen
Published: April 2020

The main fruit of the 1905 revolution had been the creation of an imperial parliament, the State Duma. Although the status of this body was challenged by the tsarist government and its legislative achievements are sometimes considered modest, it was a formidable rhetorical school for Russia’s new political class. Its debates were recorded by stenographers and brought to an eager newspaper-reading public. This chapter reviews the rhetorical performance and significance of the Duma through its four iterations: the short-lived first and second, which were dominated by outspoken critics of the government; the more conservative third, which nonetheless saw a good deal of rhetorical combat between left and Right; and the chequered fourth, which by late 1916 was producing fierce criticism of the government’s wartime performance. The chapter also explores various forms of extra-parliamentary rhetoric (public lectures, zemstvo and municipal assemblies, preaching).
On Writing a History of Quantum Gravity
Authors: Rickles Dean
Published: April 2020

This chapter describes some of the special challenges and novelties facing historical research in quantum gravity. Though often looked at with wry amusement when mentioned in the same breath, “history” and “quantum gravity” fit remarkably well together. Not only is there more than enough in chronological terms, the episodes are closely intertwined with other important developments in the life histories of the ingredient theories, quantum theory and general relativity. However, there are also more sociologically interesting aspects having to do with the emergence of a community of quantum gravity scholars, itself piggybacking on the availability of funding sources. Finally, we note the special status of quantum gravity, historiographically speaking, as a rare case of a field of research with more than a century of history behind it, including within it various rejections and selections of results, and yet which has as yet no experiments of its own, and no final endpoint from which to interpret the past.
“Prehistoric” Quantum Gravity
Authors: Rickles Dean
Published: April 2020

In this chapter we examine the very earliest work on the problem of quantum gravity (understood very liberally). We show that, even before the concept of the quantization of the gravitational field in 1929, there was a fairly lively investigation of the relationships between gravity and quantum stretching as far back as 1916, and certainly no suggestion that such a theory would not be forthcoming. Indeed, there are, rather, many suggestions explicitly advocating that an integration of quantum theory and general relativity (or gravitation, at least) is essential for future physics, in order to construct a satisfactory foundation. We also see how this belief was guided by a diverse family of underlying agendas and constraints, often of a highly philosophical nature.
Quantum Gravity as a Resource
Authors: Rickles Dean
Published: April 2020

This chapter focuses on the central motivation for much of what can be labeled ‘quantum gravity’ in the earliest phases of research, namely that it provides a potentially abundant resource for curing problems in quantum field theory. While it was rare to have fully worked out examples along these lines, it provided a much needed impetus to the study of quantum gravity at a time when there were few other reasons to bother with it. The primary problem was the ubiquitous divergences, which proved extremely stubborn and worrying to field theorists. Not all of the approaches were looked at involved gravitation directly, however, and focused more on ways of generating a discrete structure (with a minimal length or maximum energy) that would provide a physical cutoff, thus grounding a finite theory. These filtered through into gravitational research only later than our timeframe, in a variety of ways, including the small scales necessarily reached in gravitational collapse.
Imagining and Knowing
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: April 2020

Works of fiction are works of and for the imagination. Additionally, they very often provide opportunities for learning—for the acquisition of knowledge and of skills. And the learning they provide comes to us through our imaginative engagement with them. We learn from them in surprisingly effective ways, and what we learn is often the sort of thing we can hardly ever learn in other ways. So it is said. This book defends the connection between fiction and imagination; it responds to a number of challenges to that idea, and argues that there lies within the domain of the imagination a number of not well-recognized capacities that make that connection work. The book is less enthusiastic about the connection between fiction and learning. The connection is surely one that exists, but it is easy to exaggerate it, to ignore countervailing tendencies to create error and ignorance, and to suppose that claims about learning from fiction require no serious empirical support. The book makes a case for modesty about learning from fiction: it suggests that a lot of what we take to be learning in this area is itself a kind of pretence, that we are too optimistic about the psychological and moral insights of authors, that works of fiction bear little resemblance to the celebrated thought experiments of the sciences, that the case for fiction as a Darwinian adaptation is weak, and that empathy is both hard to acquire from fiction and not always morally advantageous.
An essential connection
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: April 2020

I argue that, beginning with the idea of a fictive utterance, we can draw on plausible assumptions about people’s primary and secondary purposes in uttering to explain a good many of our intuitive judgements about what counts as a work of fiction. I consider and reject a rival approach due to Stacie Friend which asks us to think of fiction as a genre. I say, therefore, that there is a close and not merely contingent connection between fiction and imagination. There is some tendency among historians of literature to scepticism about conclusions of this kind when they are not carefully relativized to particular places and time; some of these scholars are also apt to say that the idea of fiction is of relatively recent invention. I believe they are wrong on both counts.
How fiction works
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: April 2020

Moving from the production to the consumption side of fiction, I argue against a proposal of Derek Matravers, who claims that appeals to the imagination won’t help us distinguish between the responses of an audience to fiction and to non-fiction. I reject Matravers’ proposal, along with his claim that representations do not motivate action in egocentric space. I also reject the idea that much of the work we have supposed to be done by imagination is actually done by a state recently called ‘alief’ (Gendler). I defend the idea that imagination plays an important role in our interpretation of other people—real as well as fictional. I defend the irreducibility of the imagination to other states.
Fiction, mentalizing, and planning
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: April 2020

Fiction has a remarkable degree of focus on the mind: the beliefs, desires, intentions, and feelings of its characters, and especially the ways their minds interact, understanding or misunderstanding one another, sharing feelings of intimacy, divided by conflicting desire, united in a common cause. This chapter focuses on the representation in fiction of the ways mental states interconnect and their consequences for action. Two works of ancient literature are picked out as puzzling in this regard: the Iliad and the Gilgamesh epic. It ends with a response to the idea that, on Darwinian grounds, fiction’s close connection to the imagination makes it likely that it is in some way a good source of knowledge. It is argued that there are a number of plausible accounts consistent with Darwinian ideas which are not supportive of the idea that fiction is a source of knowledge.
Knowledge from imagination
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: April 2020

We start with the idea of the role of imagination in planning and in the formation of conditional beliefs. We then consider ways in which the process of belief-fixation by imagination can be unreliable, taking as my example a legal judgement. I argue that the role of the imagination in learning may be very restricted, and yet have conferred a selective advantage on those who possessed it, paving the way for an adaptive account of the imagination. The role of the imagination in the fixation of conditional belief suggests a role for it in thought experiments. It has been suggested that we should think of fictions such as novels as offering thought experiments, and hence as able to facilitate learning in the way that thought experiments in science and philosophy do. I argue that there are features of fictions-as-thought experiments which should make us pessimistic about their epistemic value.
Fiction, truth, and the transmission of belief
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: April 2020

This chapter focuses on the ways in which we acquire propositional beliefs, and sometimes knowledge, from fictions. It distinguishes between pathways to belief that depend on sub-rational mechanisms such as heuristics and biases, and pathways that encourage rational reflection on the issues in hand. It suggests a mechanism for generating reasonably reliable factual beliefs from fictions, but emphasizes the difficulty of extending this account to cover the evaluative propositions more often celebrated as the fruits of engagement with literature. It concludes by considering the case for saying that whatever we may learn from fiction has nothing to do with the literary value of the work itself. I argue that this cannot be the correct view.
Fiction and empathy
Authors: Currie Gregory
Published: April 2020

It is often claimed that fiction refines and enlarges our empathic sensitivities to morally charged situations, exposing us to exemplars—imaginary ones—of demanding, complex situations beyond those we are likely to encounter in daily life, expanding the circle of those we care about and our ability to help them. I begin by outlining a concept of empathy useful for our discussions, and offer some reasons for thinking that empathy is not always to be thought of as aiding moral reflection or leading to morally good outcomes. I then review some of the evidence relevant to assessing fiction’s impact on our empathic tendencies, finding a somewhat mixed picture. In light of this I list a variety of ways that fictions may fail to deliver empathic benefits. Finally I look in some detail at the phenomenon of ‘moral self-licencing’, which suggests that at least one of these possible ways really is a barrier to the enlargement of empathy by fiction.
Ants in Space
Authors: Heller Nicole E.
Published: April 2020

Patterns in space can be used to infer ecological and evolutionary processes. This is a foundational practice in the study of natural history. To make good inferences, patterns must be viewed at the appropriate scale. Humans may perceive and study phenomena on scales that accord with their own experiences rather than the experiences of the organism under consideration. Using the global invasive Argentine ant, Linepithema humile, as a case study, this reflection shows how a bias toward studying phenomena at the anthropocentric scale, relevant to the imagination and experience of human researchers, can lead to bizarre ideas about the lives of other organisms. To avoid such scaling problems in the venture to know something about another being it is essential that research stays with the embodied experience of that being.
Concepts of Space in the Fourteenth Century
Authors: Sylla Edith Dudley
Published: April 2020

Spatium or “space” was not a technical term of late medieval natural philosophy. Instead, scholastic Aristotelians took locus or “place” as the relevant physical concept. The major topics to be considered here are (1) Aristotle’s concept of “place” in book IV of the Physics and in commentaries on it; (2) the appearance and use of the Latin word spatium in works of abstract or concrete mathematics; and (3) discussions of imaginary space outside the physical cosmos, often in connection with the ubiquity of God or the place and motion of angels. Examples are taken from the works of John Philoponus, Henry of Ghent, and most often from the work of the fourteenth-century natural philosopher and theologian Nicole Oresme.
Space, Vision, and Faith
Authors: Hara Mari Yoko
Published: April 2020

Linear perspective served as a useful tool in the pursuit of verisimilitude in early modern art. But the technique’s enduring appeal among visual artists from this period did not stem from its ability to transcribe the world’s appearance alone. Rather, as this Reflection highlights, it was the perspectival image’s capacity to build a direct, one-to-one rapport with a viewer that most excited art practitioners. Painters like Piero della Francesca and Giovanni Bellini took full advantage of linear perspective’s potential for simulating vision. The spaces they constructed in altarpieces and other devotional imagery often showed supernatural realms that clearly defy human optical function. This essay presents several examples of early modern works that evoke spiritual vision through linear perspective constructions.
The Demise of Procedural Fairness
Authors: Hodgson Jacqueline S.
Published: April 2020

Charting trends in legislation, case law, and commissions of enquiry, this chapter considers the ways in which values of procedural fairness were strengthened in the criminal justice traditions of England and Wales and of France during the late twentieth century, and how these have subsequently been eclipsed by broader concerns with managerialism, efficiency, and crime control, as both countries move inexorably toward what might be described as an administrative system of criminal justice. Manifested through a variety of mechanisms for the avoidance of trial, the avoidance even of a full investigation, and the rapid disposal of cases, the roles of criminal justice actors are changing. Power and responsibility are shifting away from the judiciary toward the prosecution, the defense is co-opted into the managerialist objectives of the criminal process, and a version of efficiency is elevated as the overriding objective, while the values of procedural fairness disappear from view.
Terrorism, Security, and the Management of Risk
Authors: Hodgson Jacqueline S.
Published: April 2020

This chapter focuses on twenty-first-century criminal justice’s preoccupation with prevention, security, and the management of risk. Across both jurisdictions, these discourses increasingly trump the procedural values of fair trial, as well as criminal law principles designed to avoid criminalizing the innocent through premature intervention and sanction. Criminal law and procedure have adapted to operate prospectively and predictively, with the introduction of new forms of civil and hybrid preventive orders. Blurring the boundaries between criminal, civil, and administrative law in this way, however, creates confusion in the allocation of legal and constitutional functions, responsibilities, and safeguards. Due process and judicial safeguards have been weakened as exceptional measures and police powers addressing terrorism have become normalized, and in both jurisdictions, there has been an expanded program of criminalization, in which the elements making up offenses are both broad and vague, and so easily satisfied.
Mixing Inquisitorial Functions within an Adversarial Process
Authors: Hodgson Jacqueline S.
Published: April 2020

This chapter centers on the tensions produced by the novel mixing of procedural traditions in the creation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC): on the function of the commission as an inquisitorial review body, its interactions with legal actors and processes operating within the adversarial tradition, and how this illuminates the nature of our attachment to values such as truth, innocence, or justice as they operate within different procedural frameworks. Following a series of high-profile miscarriages of justice in the 1980s and 1990s, in which the adversarial process failed those it accused, the CCRC was tasked with reviewing cases for possible referral to the appeal court. This chapter examines the operation of the commission, the procedural lens through which it structures its review, and how this impacts on its understanding of what constitutes a real possibility that a conviction will be overturned, such that it will refer a case to the appeal court.
The Criminal Cases Review Commission, the Applicant, and Her Lawyer
Authors: Hodgson Jacqueline S.
Published: April 2020

This chapter evaluates the uncertain place allotted to the defense within the inquisitorial CCRC review process, comparing this with the French instruction model and the broader principle of contradictoire. Where a case is referred back to the appeal court, the results of the case review are likely to have a significant impact on the nature of the defense case that is presented, and so ultimately, on the success of the appeal. Equally, the way in which the defense chooses to argue the case may build on the evidence uncovered by the commission, or it may misunderstand, or fail to argue, some grounds identified by the CCRC as going to the safety of the conviction. In this way, the intersection of adversarial and inquisitorial roles and procedures disrupts traditional procedural models, creating an inherent tension between the commission and defense lawyer functions, which sometimes conflict and at other times coincide.
Concluding Comments
Authors: Hodgson Jacqueline S.
Published: April 2020

Centering on the criminal justice systems of England and Wales and France, this book has analyzed recent changes in criminal justice policy trends and process values as they have played out across the core functions of prosecution and defense, as well as how systems malfunction and seek to correct themselves in different ways. Both jurisdictions face common challenges, such as the changing terrorist threat, the constraints of public sector austerity, and the need to adapt to pan-European measures and standards of fair trial. The ways in which, through their criminal law and procedure, they resist, respond, or adapt to these challenges illuminate the legal and political values that motivate criminal justice in each jurisdiction. This in turn invites reflection on the nature and significance of the two contrasting procedural traditions within which they understand themselves to be located....
Some important macro points
Authors: Fair Ray C
Published: April 2020

This paper lists 19 points that follow from results I have obtained using a structural macroeconomic model (SEM). Such models are more closely tied to the aggregate data than are DSGE models, and I argue that DSGE models and similar models should have properties that are consistent with these points. The aim is to try to bring macro back to its empirical roots.
Frequency of Early Refills for Opioids in the United States
Authors: Kern David M , Cepeda M Soledad , Salas Maribel , Phillips Syd , Secrest Matthew H , Wedin Gregory P
Published: April 2020

Objective

Refilling an opioid prescription early is an important risk factor of prescription opioid abuse and misuse; we aimed to understand the scope of this behavior. This study was conducted to quantify the prevalence and distribution of early refills among patients prescribed opioids.

Methods

We conducted a retrospective cohort study utilizing dispensed prescription records. Patients filling one or more prescription opioids were identified and followed for one year. Early refills were defined as having a second prescription filled ≥15% early relative to the days’ supply of the previous prescription for the same opioid (according to the National Drug Code [NDC]). The distribution of the number of early refills and patient characteristics were assessed.

Results

A total of 60.6 million patients met the study criteria; 28.8% had two or more opioid prescriptions for the same opioid during follow-up. Less than 3% of all patients receiving an opioid had an early refill. Approximately 10% of those with two or more opioid prescriptions for the same drug had an early refill. For patients with multiple fills (N = 1.5 million with extended-release long-acting [ER/LA] opioids; N = 17.1 million with immediate-release short-acting [IR/SA] opioids), early refills were more common among patients with an ER/LA opioid (18.5%) compared with an IR/SA opioid (8.7%). Three-quarters of patients with an early refill had only one (70.9% and 78.4% for ER/LA and IR/SA, respectively).

Conclusion

Refilling an opioid prescription with the same opioid early is an infrequent behavior within all opioid users, but more common in ER/LA users. Patients who refilled early tended to do so just once.
Housing Wealth Effects: The Long View
Authors: Guren Adam M , McKay Alisdair , Nakamura Emi , Steinsson Jón
Published: April 2020

We provide new time-varying estimates of the housing wealth effect back to the 1980s. We use three identification strategies: ordinary least squares with a rich set of controls, the Saiz housing supply elasticity instrument, and a new instrument that exploits systematic differences in city-level exposure to regional house price cycles. All three identification strategies indicate that housing wealth elasticities were if anything slightly smaller in the 2000s than in earlier time periods. This implies that the important role housing played in the boom and bust of the 2000s was due to larger price movements rather than an increase in the sensitivity of consumption to house prices. Full-sample estimates based on our new instrument are smaller than recent estimates, though they remain economically important. We find no significant evidence of a boom–bust asymmetry in the housing wealth elasticity. We show that these empirical results are consistent with the behaviour of the housing wealth elasticity in a standard life-cycle model with borrowing constraints, uninsurable income risk, illiquid housing, and long-term mortgages. In our model, the housing wealth elasticity is relatively insensitive to changes in the distribution of loan-to-value (LTV) for two reasons: first, low-leverage homeowners account for a substantial and stable part of the aggregate housing wealth elasticity; second, a rightward shift in the LTV distribution increases not only the number of highly sensitive constrained agents but also the number of underwater agents whose consumption is insensitive to house prices.
RADIATION SITUATION IN THE TERRITORIES AFFECTED BY MINING ACTIVITIES IN STEPNOGORSK AREAS, REPUBLIC OF KAZAKHSTAN: PILOT STUDY
Authors: Ibrayeva Danara , Bakhtin Meirat , Kashkinbayev Yerlan , Kazymbet Polat , Zhumadilov Kassym , Altaeva Nursulu , Aumalikova Moldir , Shishkina Elena
Published: April 2020

The Republic of Kazakhstan has a long history of mining activities, viz., gold and uranium. Mining activities represent sources of potential naturally occurring radionuclides contamination of the environment and human health of population. The aim of this study was to investigate the radiation situation of industrially modified environment in Stepnogorsk areas of Kazakhstan to understand the sources of contamination. Quite high values of ambient equivalent dose rates in air ~2.87 μSv h−1 were found in the Aqsu gold-mining site. The radon equivalent equilibrium volume activity (indoor) were in the range of 313–858 Bq m−3 in the study area buildings. The high values of activity concentration of natural radionuclides found in Aqsu soil samples were 226Ra-4060, 232Th-1170 and 40K-4080 Bq kg−1, respectively. However, our comprehensive surveys implied that the increased natural radiation background caused by the radionuclide transport from the tailing area did not have an impact, while evaluation of its potential radiation risks and remediation of the territories of the former gold mining should be needed.
The N170 event-related potential differentiates congruent and incongruent gaze responses in gaze leading
Authors: Stephenson Lisa J , Edwards S Gareth , Luri Natacha M , Renoult Louis , Bayliss Andrew P
Published: April 2020

To facilitate social interactions, humans need to process the responses that other people make to their actions, including eye movements that could establish joint attention. Here, we investigated the neurophysiological correlates of the processing of observed gaze responses following the participants’ own eye movement. These observed gaze responses could either establish, or fail to establish, joint attention. We implemented a gaze leading paradigm in which participants made a saccade from an on-screen face to an object, followed by the on-screen face either making a congruent or incongruent gaze shift. An N170 event-related potential was elicited by the peripherally located gaze shift stimulus. Critically, the N170 was greater for joint attention than non-joint gaze both when task-irrelevant (Experiment 1) and task-relevant (Experiment 2). These data suggest for the first time that the neurocognitive system responsible for structural encoding of face stimuli is affected by the establishment of participant-initiated joint attention.
Phylogenomics Reveals Ancient Gene Tree Discordance in the Amphibian Tree of Life
Authors: Hime Paul M , Lemmon Alan R , Lemmon Emily C Moriarty , Prendini Elizabeth , Brown Jeremy M , Thomson Robert C , Kratovil Justin D , Noonan Brice P , Pyron R Alexander , Peloso Pedro L V , Kortyna Michelle L , Keogh J Scott , Donnellan Stephen C , Mueller Rachel Lockridge , Raxworthy Christopher J , Kunte Krushnamegh , Ron Santiago R , Das Sandeep , Gaitonde Nikhil , Green David M , Labisko Jim , Che Jing , Weisrock David W
Published: April 2020

Molecular phylogenies have yielded strong support for many parts of the amphibian Tree of Life, but poor support for the resolution of deeper nodes, including relationships among families and orders. To clarify these relationships, we provide a phylogenomic perspective on amphibian relationships by developing a taxon-specific Anchored Hybrid Enrichment protocol targeting hundreds of conserved exons which are effective across the class. After obtaining data from 220 loci for 286 species (representing 94% of the families and 44% of the genera), we estimate a phylogeny for extant amphibians and identify gene tree–species tree conflict across the deepest branches of the amphibian phylogeny. We perform locus-by-locus genealogical interrogation of alternative topological hypotheses for amphibian monophyly, focusing on interordinal relationships. We find that phylogenetic signal deep in the amphibian phylogeny varies greatly across loci in a manner that is consistent with incomplete lineage sorting in the ancestral lineage of extant amphibians. Our results overwhelmingly support amphibian monophyly and a sister relationship between frogs and salamanders, consistent with the Batrachia hypothesis. Species tree analyses converge on a small set of topological hypotheses for the relationships among extant amphibian families. These results clarify several contentious portions of the amphibian Tree of Life, which in conjunction with a set of vetted fossil calibrations, support a surprisingly younger timescale for crown and ordinal amphibian diversification than previously reported. More broadly, our study provides insight into the sources, magnitudes, and heterogeneity of support across loci in phylogenomic data sets.[AIC; Amphibia; Batrachia; Phylogeny; gene tree–species tree discordance; genomics; information theory.]
Multiplex qPCR Assay for Direct Detection and Quantification of Colletotrichum truncatum, Corynespora cassiicola, and Sclerotinia sclerotiorum in Soybean Seeds
Authors: Ciampi-Guillardi Maísa , Ramiro Juliana , Moraes Maria Heloisa Duarte de , Barbieri Marina Coan Goldoni , Massola Nelson S.
Published: April 2020

Precise diagnosis of plant diseases is one of the most effective tools to minimize yield losses. Colletotrichum truncatum, Corynespora cassiicola, and Sclerotinia sclerotiorum are common soilborne pathogens that affect soybeans all over the world. We developed a multiplex quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) assay to simultaneously detect and quantify the three pathogens in soybean seeds and to survey their occurrence in the main soybean production areas in Brazil. Species-specific primers and probes for C. truncatum and C. cassiicola were designed based on GAPDH and TEF1 genes, respectively, to be combined with qPCR detection of S. sclerotiorum previously reported. The multiplex qPCR assay was successful in the simultaneous detection of C. truncatum, C. cassiicola, and S. sclerotiorum, along with a host internal control. The four pathogens were detected and quantified in artificially and naturally infested soybean seeds, even in the lowest incidence level tested of 0.0625% or 1 infected seed out of 1,599 healthy ones. From 81 seed samples tested, C. truncatum was the most frequently detected pathogen and with higher incidence levels (0.25 to 0.125%), followed by S. sclerotiorum and C. cassiicola, both with lower incidence levels (0.125 to 0.0625%). Together, the results evidenced the high sensitivity of the multiplex qPCR assay, indicating its usefulness for a quick and reliable diagnosis of soybean diseases in seeds.
Reconstructing a Nursing Skills Lab
Authors: Brendel Heidi , Walker John P.
Published: April 2020

Safety is a paramount consideration when preparing nursing students for clinical practice. Skills lab traditions steeped in the rote memorization of procedures fail to bridge the gap between theory and practice, leaving patients at risk. The foundations of nursing skills lab curriculum in an associate degree nursing program was revised utilizing the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses and evidence-based teaching pedagogy to better prepare students for their first clinical experience. This article discusses how the skills lab curriculum was revised and examines how faculty felt the revisions impacted students’ clinical performance outcomes related to safety and patient-centered care.
Addressing Nursing Student Understanding of Health Care Transitions Through a Cross-Course Writing Assignment
Authors: Keeler Donna Turissini , Gotwals Beth
Published: April 2020

Caring for patients with chronic health conditions and providing them appropriate transitional care that provides positive outcomes and decreased rehospitalizations is essential in today’s heath care environment. Nursing students must learn to think critically and communicate effectively in order to provide appropriate transitional care. This pedagogical challenge may be met in part by implementing a cross-course writing assignment that combines the concepts of chronic illness and community health as an effective tool to teach students about transitional care, stimulate critical thinking, and improve writing competencies.
Correlating Ophthalmology Exposure in Medical School to Applying and Matching Into an Ophthalmology Residency
Authors: Yamane Maya L.M. , Kassotis Alexis S. , De Moraes C. Gustavo , Dagi Glass Lora R.
Published: April 2020

Purpose

To correlate ophthalmology curricular exposure in medical school to the number of students who applied and matched into ophthalmology residency programs. Given the high curricular burden placed on medical schools, the authors sought to better characterize existing ophthalmology curricula and to delineate which offerings are closely related to high numbers of students applying and matching into ophthalmology residencies.

Method

The authors reviewed the extent of ophthalmology curricula between 2007 and 2017 via a survey administered in 2018 to all U.S. Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC)-affiliated medical schools. They obtained residency application and match data with permission from the Association of University Professors of Ophthalmology. The authors compared metrics of ophthalmology exposure with the number of students who applied and matched into ophthalmology during the corresponding year using mixed-effects Poisson regression analysis.

Results

This study includes 49 U.S. AAMC-affiliated medical schools. When adjusted for the number of applicants per year, the following were significantly (P < .05) associated with matching into an ophthalmology residency: the presence of an ophthalmology department, an ophthalmology residency program, an ophthalmology interest group, ophthalmologists on faculty, ophthalmology content in the preclinical curriculum, preclinical lectures taught by ophthalmologists, and the availability of an optional fourth-year ophthalmology elective. Multivariable analysis indicated both that the presence of an ophthalmology residency program was the only independent predictor of matching into an ophthalmology residency and that the presence of an ophthalmology residency program, ophthalmology content in the preclinical curriculum, and preclinical lectures taught by ophthalmologists are independent predictors for applying.

Conclusions

A foundation in ophthalmology is crucial for all physicians, especially those who may encounter patients with eye problems in emergency or primary care settings. However, for those students considering a career in ophthalmology, choosing a medical school with an ophthalmology department and residency program is particularly important.