Legal Settings Research Articles

Navigating Immigration Law in a “Hostile Environment”: Implications for Adult Migrant Language Education

In this article the author analyses the communicative demands placed on migrants navigating immigration law in a fast‐moving policy environment and implications for adult migrant language education. Data are from an ethnographic study of a lawyer, Lucy, and her clients at a legal advice service in Leeds, England, and include interviews and recordings of lawyer–client interactions. The analytical focus is on Lucy’s stance (Jaffe, 2009b), on how she presents herself as an ally of her multilingual clients, and on the stance‐marking strategies she and her clients use as they strive to make meaning. The study took place in 2016, a time of volatility for the policies that impinge on immigration law and on legal interaction for migrants: the upsurge of right‐wing populist movements in Europe, erratic positions on migration in the United States, and the referendum that decided the United Kingdom would leave the European Union. The author maintains that the link is rarely drawn between interaction in legal and other institutional settings and the content of language classes designed to aid adult migrant settlement, and argues for an approach to adult migrant language education that critically addresses this point.

JUDGING ANTIGONE IN OLD AGE: (NEURO)PSYCHOLOGY AND LAW IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Although medicine, psychology and law have a long history behind them (Frank, 1930; Kapardis, 2009), and several issues may emerge at the interface of these scientific fields, new specific disciplines have been created to fill the research gap, such as legal psychology and forensic psychology (Taylor, 2019). In this direction, forensic neuropsychology combines not only psychometric testing, but also interviews, behavioral observations, and record reviews as additional sources of information for answering cognitive functioning questions in legal and forensic settings (Fink, 2007). Additionally, the emergence of a new promising interdisciplinary field, neurolaw, explores how neuroscience and advanced techniques can be used in the legal system (Meynen, 2014; van Dongen & Franken, 2019). Although there are still a plethora of topics that are not adequately described and need further research in neuropsychology, several attempts have been made to collect data for different research questions linked to this complex field (Canter & Žukauskiene, 2019). Methods and protocols regarding the processes of criminal profiling, the examination of cognitive biases in legal decision making, interrogations and confessions, detection of deception, eyewitness memory and false memories-distortions, cognition and emotions of child witnesses, and competence to stand trial, are still not clear (Bornstein & Miller, 2016; Brewer & Douglass, 2019).

Moving Towards a Client-Centred Approach to Legal Advice: Examining the Potential of Qualitative Empirical Research to Explore Empowerment in a University Hosted Interdisciplinary Student Run Clinic

This paper applies the notion of empowerment to clients seeking legal advice. We advocate for the adoption of a different approach to client care in the legal setting modelled on that adopted in the UK by the NHS in healthcare. We argue that moving towards a client-centred approach to legal advice giving may help to provide a possible solution to the lack of public funding for legal advice by enabling more clients to take more personal action to manage their legal issues than at present. This article explores the potential for the use of qualitative research approaches - widely used in health research to understand the perspective of patients - in a law nursing clinical setting. Specifically, it will consider how qualitative research can be used to seek out and understand clients’ viewpoints and particularly to explore how people can be empowered to make sense of their health and wellbeing and their legal needs, when informed by legal and health advice. Furthermore, it will consider how qualitative research can be used to evaluate clinical legal education provision in Law Schools and their efficacy, and in particular to have such evaluations informed by the narrative of clinic clients’ viewpoints. The article will consider how the findings of such research methods can be used to inform and develop legal and clinical practice, with a view to improving professional service delivery and potentially establishing a different holistic approach to client care approaches in the legal profession. The University of Portsmouth will host an interdisciplinary (Law and Nursing) student clinic, with the aim of providing educational opportunities together with legal and health advice to some of the most vulnerable people in the local community. An innovative research programme that will run in tandem with the clinic will explore the relationship between motivation, well-being and empowerment.

Age Assessment of Youth and Young Adults Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Knee: A Deep Learning Approach.

BackgroundBone age assessment (BAA) is an important tool for diagnosis and in determining the time of treatment in a number of pediatric clinical scenarios, as well as in legal settings where it is used to estimate the chronological age of an individual where valid documents are lacking. Traditional methods for BAA suffer from drawbacks, such as exposing juveniles to radiation, intra- and interrater variability, and the time spent on the assessment. The employment of automated methods such as deep learning and the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can address these drawbacks and improve the assessment of age.ObjectiveThe aim of this paper is to propose an automated approach for age assessment of youth and young adults in the age range when the length growth ceases and growth zones are closed (14-21 years of age) by employing deep learning using MRI of the knee.MethodsThis study carried out MRI examinations of the knee of 402 volunteer subjects—221 males (55.0%) and 181 (45.0%) females—aged 14-21 years. The method comprised two convolutional neural network (CNN) models: the first one selected the most informative images of an MRI sequence, concerning age-assessment purposes; these were then used in the second module, which was responsible for the age estimation. Different CNN architectures were tested, both training from scratch and employing transfer learning.ResultsThe CNN architecture that provided the best results was GoogLeNet pretrained on the ImageNet database. The proposed method was able to assess the age of male subjects in the range of 14-20.5 years, with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.793 years, and of female subjects in the range of 14-19.5 years, with an MAE of 0.988 years. Regarding the classification of minors—with the threshold of 18 years of age—an accuracy of 98.1% for male subjects and 95.0% for female subjects was achieved.ConclusionsThe proposed method was able to assess the age of youth and young adults from 14 to 20.5 years of age for male subjects and 14 to 19.5 years of age for female subjects in a fully automated manner, without the use of ionizing radiation, addressing the drawbacks of traditional methods.

Psychological Assessments in Legal Contexts: Are Courts Keeping “Junk Science” Out of the Courtroom?

In this article, we report the results of a two-part investigation of psychological assessments by psychologists in legal contexts. The first part involves a systematic review of the 364 psychological assessment tools psychologists report having used in legal cases across 22 surveys of experienced forensic mental health practitioners, focusing on legal standards and scientific and psychometric theory. The second part is a legal analysis of admissibility challenges with regard to psychological assessments. Results from the first part reveal that, consistent with their roots in psychological science, nearly all of the assessment tools used by psychologists and offered as expert evidence in legal settings have been subjected to empirical testing (90%). However, we were able to clearly identify only about 67% as generally accepted in the field and only about 40% have generally favorable reviews of their psychometric and technical properties in authorities such as the Mental Measurements Yearbook. Furthermore, there is a weak relationship between general acceptance and favorability of tools’ psychometric properties. Results from the second part show that legal challenges to the admission of this evidence are infrequent: Legal challenges to the assessment evidence for any reason occurred in only 5.1% of cases in the sample (a little more than half of these involved challenges to validity). When challenges were raised, they succeeded only about a third of the time. Challenges to the most scientifically suspect tools are almost nonexistent. Attorneys rarely challenge psychological expert assessment evidence, and when they do, judges often fail to exercise the scrutiny required by law.

International Accounting Research: The Italian Context

ABSTRACT Oftentimes, research ideas in the international accounting field arise from the comparison of different contexts and from the curiosity to understand how different constructs work in various settings. Despite knowledge and understanding of the institutional, cultural, and legal settings of countries are prerequisites for this kind of research, studies often focus on very narrow issues and do not allow a grasp of the big picture of the institutional feature of a country, and how this can influence managers' decisions related to accounting choices and disclosures. This paper aims at filling this gap and at fostering an understanding of the Italian institutional setting (e.g., culture, societal values, corporate governance, GAAPs, auditing, and tax regulations), thereby facilitating the work of international accounting researchers who wish to include Italian firms in their samples.

Apples and Peaches—Consumer Protection Goes East

Each and every reform in countries of Eastern Europe and South East Europe, as well as in Russia and Central Asia, was and has to be executed within an area of tension of three dimensions – the socialist path of dependency, the growing national identity and the international influence. Starting with the socialist path, apart from the substantial law, which mostly involved special legal acts, one has to consider the institutional setting of functions, relevant within the consumer protection. These settings had and have influence on the design and implementation of consumer protection in former socialist systems. With regard to national identity, at least within the legal community, there was a tendency to establish its own basic laws, e.g., civil codes. In order to embed consumer protection in these legal settings, it was necessary that new civil codes provide the framework for contractual relations in general. This includes fighting with new national pride for their own system and a desire to protect their own traditions, where consumer protection is partly seen as an intervention in the freedom of contract. Finally, international influence is visible in all Eastern countries. The 1990s combined competition between common law and continental law but also included considerable dependency on international experts. Hence, they act more as consultancies rather than being driven by enthusiasm.

The Impact of Coercive Control on Use of Specific Sexual Coercion Tactics.

There is substantial evidence that women experience unwanted sex under nonviolent duress from partners. This study examined the relationship between coercive control and sexual coercion in heterosexual couples. Among a sample of 136 men arrested for domestic violence, extent of coercive control was used to predict the likelihood of using eight specific sexual coercion tactics. Findings indicated that coercive control predicted significantly greater likelihood of using covert tactics, but not physically violent or overtly aggressive tactics. The tactics that demonstrated the strongest relationship with coercive control seem indicative of a toxic relational environment that may subtly erode victim autonomy and sense of self over time. Implications discuss how use of more covert and insidious tactics maintain invisibility, isolation, blame, and perceived complicitness of victims in clinical, legal, and social settings.

Affinity between us: Examining how psychopathic traits influence the stigmatization of psychiatric disorders.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that is often stigmatized in both the general population and in legal settings. Although individuals with psychopathy face significant stigma, individuals with elevated psychopathic traits may hold fewer stigmatizing beliefs about this population. It is unclear, however, if this relationship stems from feelings of similarity or from traits of fearlessness that are commonly observed in some psychopathic individuals. In this study, 661 participants from the community were recruited online and completed the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure. They were then randomly assigned to read a description of either a nonviolent or violent psychopath, as well as either a nonviolent or violent person with schizophrenia. All participants also read a vignette of a nondangerous person with depression. For each description, participants completed the Attribution Questionnaire to measure stigmatizing attributes based on the vignette. Psychopathic traits were negatively associated with the stigmatization of individuals presented as either dangerous or nondangerous psychopaths, but were not associated with either forms of schizophrenia or with depression. Findings are explained in terms of identification with psychopaths. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Occupational diseases in self-employed workers in France

Abstract Background In France, self- employed workers receive disability benefits, but are outside of the specific legislation protecting employees from occupational accident and diseases. Physicians are generally not aware of this shortcoming and ask for occupational diseases benefits, as they do for salaried employees. The health fund of independent workers (HFIW ), dismiss the application, which is uphold by law, but can be a threat to the patient, if it shutters hope for other available benefits. Our aim was to see if the request for occupational diseases was related to significant disability in self-employed workers, and if such a disability could be handled by available benefits from HFIW. This survey could be instructive for countries without occupational diseases frame for self-employed workers. Methods A prospective study was conducted on self-employed claimants applying for occupational disease, from June 2015 to September 2017, with an 18 month period follow-up, in the Ile- de- France region. A questionnaire was sent to the claimant and the data were completed through a phone call or appointment. The main outcome was the number of claimants qualifying for disability benefit available at the HFIW. Results 148 claimants were identified and 141 (95%) matched with the occupational diseases legal setting. The causative agents were close to those observed in employed workers: musculoskeletal, asbestosis. Disability allowance, complete or partial, could be provided by the HFIW because his criteria were met in 38 claimants(27%);benefits for asbestosis exposure were possible through a specialized body in 16 claimants(11%). Conclusions The occupational disease request from self-employed workers matched with medical conditions granted by the HFIW, or external social bodies. This screening should be routinely implemented by nurses or any insurance officer. Key messages Self-employed workers are outside of the specific legislation protecting employees from occupational accident and diseases but 27% of them may apply for other disability benefits. The occupational disease request from self-employed workers dismiss an application but match with available disability benefits from the Independent health fund and should be routinely screened.

The Limited Relevance of Neuroimaging in Insanity Evaluations

Forensic evaluations of insanity have recently borne witness to an influx of neuroimaging methods, especially structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography, to assist in the development of explanations that help to excuse legal responsibility for criminal behavior. The results of these scanning methods have been increasingly introduced in legal settings to offer or support a clinical diagnosis that in turn suggests that an individual was incapable of knowing right from wrong, or to pinpoint brain dysfunction suggestive of an inability to control behavior. This paper examines how neuroimaging has been employed in insanity evaluations. After addressing the contentious use of neuroimaging scans in insanity evaluations and synthesizing relevant research, we conclude that such scans presently hold limited applicability for forensic determinations of insanity. Furthermore, they can in some cases distract the trier of fact, potentially leading to erroneous conclusions.

Framing the Perpetrators: Lee Miller's Photography of the Liberation of Dachau

The Journal of Perpetrator Research (JPR) is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, open access journal committed to promoting the scholarly study of perpetrators and perpetration of political and mass violence, terrorism, and genocide.JPR does not confine its attention to any particular geographical region or historical period - instead, it fosters scholarly discussions about perpetrators and perpetration across the broader continuum of political and mass violence. The journal's mission is to provide a forum for scholarship taking place within a broad range of fields including history, criminology, law, forensics, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, political science, memory studies, cultural studies, literary studies, film and media studies, museum studies, and education. In providing an interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary space, the journal moves academic research on perpetrators and perpetration beyond, and between, disciplinary boundaries. JPR not only addresses issues related to perpetrators and perpetration in the past but also responds to present challenges. Fundamental questions informing the journal include, for example, questions of terminology, motivation, ideology, agency, processes and dynamics, as well as questions of prevention: Who or what is a perpetrator? How is such a label applied and by whom? How do such labels evolve? What drives people to commit acts of mass violence and genocide and how do these acts unfold? What measures can be taken to identify potential perpetrators before they act, and what can be done to prevent mass violence from occurring? What can be done to rehabilitate perpetrators after the fact? Another set of questions informing JPR pertains to the status and significance of the perpetrator as a discursive formation in legal, political, historical, philosophical, and cultural settings. How do societies come to terms with acts of perpetration and with the perpetrators themselves? What role does the figure of the perpetrator play in the popular imagination? How do representations of perpetrators change over time and across geographical and cultural boundaries as well as across different media, genres, and traditions? Finally, JPR is also interested in exploring questions of theory and method. What are the ethical and moral implications of studying perpetrators? How do ethical considerations influence the methodological and theoretical criteria of the inquiry? How does one address the inherent ambiguity, limitations, and contentiousness of labels such as “perpetrator,” and the strategic and political implications of their application?

Towards a Conceptualization of Legal English as a Lingua Franca?

English is de facto reinforcing its role as the language of international legal communication. Indeed, while different national languages continue to play a crucial role in the definition, the execution, and the application of the law, English is increasingly employed by non-native legal professionals worldwide. Thus, this study focuses on the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in legal settings and aims to offer considerations towards the conceptualization of Legal English as a Lingua Franca (LELF).
 
 As English is considered a global asset in legal communication, it is argued that a finer problematization of LELF is imperative. In this respect, the study also discusses whether it is possible to apply the concept of a lingua franca to legal language tout court or whether the distinctive features of legal discourse across systems make the definition of LELF inapplicable from a conceptual perspective. 
 
 This article also offers a reflection on the main concerns which arise regarding the widespread use of English in legal settings, especially in the light of the specificities of different legal systems, legal cultures and communities of practice. Thus, all stakeholders involved should adopt a more reflexive approach in order to go beyond the unproblematic acceptance of LELF across legal settings and to be more aware of the implications and consequences that its usage entails.

The Return of the Repressed: The Persistent and Problematic Claims of Long-Forgotten Trauma

Can purely psychological trauma lead to a complete blockage of autobiographical memories? This long-standing question about the existence of repressed memories has been at the heart of one of the most heated debates in modern psychology. These so-called memory wars originated in the 1990s, and many scholars have assumed that they are over. We demonstrate that this assumption is incorrect and that the controversial issue of repressed memories is alive and well and may even be on the rise. We review converging research and data from legal cases indicating that the topic of repressed memories remains active in clinical, legal, and academic settings. We show that the belief in repressed memories occurs on a nontrivial scale (58%) and appears to have increased among clinical psychologists since the 1990s. We also demonstrate that the scientifically controversial concept of dissociative amnesia, which we argue is a substitute term for memory repression, has gained in popularity. Finally, we review work on the adverse side effects of certain psychotherapeutic techniques, some of which may be linked to the recovery of repressed memories. The memory wars have not vanished. They have continued to endure and contribute to potentially damaging consequences in clinical, legal, and academic contexts.

An Evolutionary Perspective on Contracting: Evidence from Poison Pills

The law and economics literature on contract theory widely recognizes that contracts are costly to write and therefore are incomplete. As a result, contracts cannot cover all future contingencies, opening parties up to ex post opportunism and renegotiation. These problems posed by contractual incompleteness and the economic arrangements parties design to cope with them is a major research area in law and economics, especially in the theory of the firm. The overall upshot of contractual incompleteness is that parties design economic solutions to deal the problem of underinvestment that incomplete contracts create. The economic institutions hypothesized in this literature, however, are not the only responses to the problem of transaction costs and resulting incomplete contracts. Contract drafters have their own legal responses to economize on the costs of foreseeing all contingencies and writing terms to deal with them. Most importantly, contract drafters use a precedent document as a template in virtually all major transactions as a heuristic to reduce the costs of foreseeing all contingencies and drafting provisions to deal with them. The use of precedent documents is a rational response to the prohibitive costs of drafting complete contracts from scratch. However, precedent-based drafting itself inherits a transaction cost problem, because there are costs associated with understanding the purposes and implications of the terms contained in precedent documents. As a result, terms from precedent documents are copied, modified, and recopied, sometimes indiscriminately. A growing empirical literature has documented this problem, suggesting that contracts are path dependent, varying not only according to the needs of a particular transaction but also according to the line of descent the contract language followed. Thus, while the economic theory envisions contracts with (incomplete) provisions rationally adapted to conscious ends, the path dependency literature sees both incompleteness and vestigial terms, with “drift” rather than “design” as the driver of much of the change in transactional legal documents. The copying, editing, and recopying of transactional text suggests a biological analogy drawn from molecular evolution. A process very similar to the copying, editing, and recopying occurs in the process of propagation of genetic information. Like the legal setting, the variation in DNA over time is partly the result of selection and partly the result of “drift,” and a parallel debate exists over the relative extent of the sources of variation. This paper presents evidence that contract provisions “evolve” in a manner much like that biological genetic sequences, in a process that is at least partly one of drift. This paper illustrates this process of “genetic” drift in the text of transactional legal documents by exploiting a unique observational setting—stockholder rights agreements (or “poison pills”). Because the poison pill was created at a specific point in time in the recent past, its descent can be traced from the very first ancestor to the present versions, allowing clear illustration of the process of change over time. Using a computer analysis of the terms of all extant poison pills, this paper reconstructs a “phylogenetic” tree of all extant poison pills showing the ancestry of each document. The preliminary results suggest most changes in the text of transactional documents do not rapidly respond to exogenous shocks or merely passage of time, but instead drift directly in proportion to generations elapsed since the ancestral document. This paper is only a preliminary exploration of an evolutionary metaphor for contract language, but suggests a number of potential avenues for research. In particular, a model of the “mutations” or changes in legal language is necessary to increase the resolution of this analysis. Such a model will allow a better understanding of how legal provisions change over time, the effects that those changes create, and perhaps increase the quality of judicial interpretation of gaps and ambiguous contract provisions.

Turkey’s tamed civil society: Containment and appropriation under a competitive authoritarian regime

ABSTRACTUnder the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule, Turkey’s civil society has enlarged both in size and diversity of civic engagement. This development is puzzling since Turkey’s weak democratic credentials do not allow an enabling political and legal setting for civil society’s expansion. This study argues that the expansion can be explained through a particular dilemma of rulers in competitive-authoritarian (CA) regimes. The AKP is caught between the conflicting interests of appropriating and containing civil society. While the government needs to cherish civil society to sustain CA regime, it also needs to repress it, as civil society is the only arena where dissenting social forces can still carve pockets of resistance and challenge the dominant paradigms of the regime. Based on extensive fieldwork, this study discusses the patterns of containment and appropriation that have led to the steady expansion of civil society under pressure. The AKP’s dilemma has also rendered Turkey’s civil society ‘tamed’, namely politicized, disabled and segregated. The study broadens the understanding of relations between civil society and the state in CA regimes by offering essential insights into how these regimes are sustained, entrenched and also contested through and within civil society.

Lies within the Law: Therapist’ Beliefs and Attitudes about Deception

ABSTRACTDeception is a phenomenon found within the practice of psychology. Beyond malingering, there are other reasons for people to lie within legal contexts. Therapists who work in legal contexts may be presented with deception within various aspects of practice. Previous research has indicated that non-forensic therapists held a number of inaccurate beliefs about indicators of deception and negative attitudes toward clients who lie. The current study was designed to explore if therapists within forensic settings held any advantages regarding beliefs about indicators of deception and to explore their attitudes toward clients who lie. We found that therapists who work within legal contexts demonstrate a lie bias, hold numerous inaccurate beliefs about indicators of deception, and possess negative attitudes about client’s who lie. Interestingly, we found that therapists in legal settings endorsed two prosocial attitudes toward clients who lie finding them less lazy and less weak. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Attacking spectra to improve data analysis

The reliance on spectroscopic data in various regulatory and legal settings can make it tempting to tamper with spectra to yield desired results. One possible way to tamper might be during the analysis of spectra, by making small perturbations in the data that can lead to major changes in interpretation. Garth Simpson and coworkers at Purdue University are using “adversarial spectroscopy” to figure out how to make data analysis approaches more resistant to such attacks, Simpson reported at the ACS national meeting in San Diego last week. The researchers made small changes to Raman spectra and evaluated how those changes affected the interpretation of the spectra. They used spectra of two polymorphs of the blood-thinning drug clopidogrel bisulfate as a test case. Linear discriminant analysis, a method that searches for data features that can separate things into categories, was able to easily separate the spectra of each polymorph and bare

Human Trafficking: ACOG COMMITTEE OPINION SUMMARY, Number 787.

Human trafficking, or modern-day slavery, is a global problem with broad reach that is often underrecognized in the United States. Victims of trafficking have been found in a wide range of legal and illegal business settings, and this frequently hidden population is most often exploited in the commercial sex industry, agriculture, factories, hotels, restaurants, as domestic workers, and by marriage brokers and some adoption firms. Human trafficking disproportionately affects underserved women and children, with more than 70% of trafficking cases involving women and girls and more than 90% of victims trafficked into the sex industry. Obstetrician-gynecologists and other women's health care providers are well-situated to identify and assist victims of human trafficking. Many trafficked individuals present to outpatient obstetrics and gynecology clinics, community health centers, family planning clinics, urgent care centers, and adolescent medicine clinics, and one half of all female victims of sex trafficking have visited the emergency department while involved in sex trafficking. Obstetrician-gynecologists and other women's health care providers should be aware of human trafficking, recognize signs of human trafficking, and be prepared to assist patients who are victims or who have been victims of human trafficking. This Committee Opinion has been updated to include screening questions and indicators to identify victims of human trafficking, additional information regarding reporting obligations for suspected human trafficking, and additional resources for survivors of human trafficking.

Human Trafficking: ACOG COMMITTEE OPINION, Number 787.

Human trafficking, or modern-day slavery, is a global problem with broad reach that is often underrecognized in the United States. Victims of trafficking have been found in a wide range of legal and illegal business settings, and this frequently hidden population is most often exploited in the commercial sex industry, agriculture, factories, hotels, restaurants, as domestic workers, and by marriage brokers and some adoption firms. Human trafficking disproportionately affects underserved women and children, with more than 70% of trafficking cases involving women and girls and more than 90% of victims trafficked into the sex industry. Obstetrician-gynecologists and other women's health care providers are well-situated to identify and assist victims of human trafficking. Many trafficked individuals present to outpatient obstetrics and gynecology clinics, community health centers, family planning clinics, urgent care centers, and adolescent medicine clinics, and one half of all female victims of sex trafficking have visited the emergency department while involved in sex trafficking. Obstetrician-gynecologists and other women's health care providers should be aware of human trafficking, recognize signs of human trafficking, and be prepared to assist patients who are victims or who have been victims of human trafficking. This Committee Opinion has been updated to include screening questions and indicators to identify victims of human trafficking, additional information regarding reporting obligations for suspected human trafficking, and additional resources for survivors of human trafficking.