Official Decision Research Articles

Food safety organisations in Saudi Arabia – Organisational, historical and future analysis

Food safety organisations around the world are increasingly seeking to develop public policies to protect society, improve the economy, and ensure food safety and quality, by reducing the risks of food-borne illnesses, commercial adulteration, and food fraud. These risks present real threats to the food industry worldwide. The development of these organisations often revolves around reform of their systems, focussing on law, regulations, and improving the performance of enforcement officials. This article analyses the historical development of food safety organisations in Saudi Arabia, including the structures and functions of government and non-government organisations. It focuses on the official decisions contributing to public policy leading to the growth and expansion of these organisations, their roles and their functions. The Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA), a central authority, has recently been established in order to unify enforcement and legislative roles in food safety previously carried out by different Saudi government organisations. Several current and future challenges to food safety in Saudi are identified and discussed.

Changes in the Scope of the Law: The Effect of Skill and Reputation on Law Enforcement

The economic analysis of deterrence emphasizes the role of expected sanctions in creating costs to illegal behavior. Typically, the enforcement of the law is compressed into a single probability. This variable is intended to summarize all relevant information regarding not only the chance of observing the violation, but also includes the decisions of the police officers, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, jurors, parole boards, etc. While a substantial literature has developed for assessing the objectives of and influences on judges and prosecutors, the incentives facing police officers has been relatively neglected. Our objective is to develop a theoretical environment to assess determinants of policing decisions.

A Public Law Perspective on Intellectual Property

This paper, delivered as the Annual Francis Gurry Lecture at Melbourne University in 2012, considers intellectual property law as a species of public law serving public purposes. The purposes reflecting the interests of creators, owners and users of intellectual property rights are in tension. That tension affects the normative clarity of intellectual property law and its effective enforcement. It may inform the construction of intellectual property statutes and the application of evaluative criteria of validity under those statutes. In Australia, intellectual property statutes are made under constitutional authority with respect to specified categories of intellectual property, the specific content of which may vary with technological change. Official decisions effecting the creation or discontinuance in intellectual property rights are statutory and subject to constitutionally based judicial review in addition to particular appeal rights conferred by statute. At the heart of the public law aspect of intellectual property rights is a tension between their characterisation as proprietary or instrumental.

Environmental information usefulness to stakeholders: empirical evidence from Malaysia

Purpose – The present study aims to examine the effect of environmental information on fund managers’ investment and bank officers’ lending decisions. Specifically, it looks at the effect of qualitative and quantitative forms of environmental information to their decisions. Design/methodology/approach – Drawing from the normative pressure of institutional theory, the study seeks to identify the extent to which education and professional networks influence investment and lending decisions of fund managers and bank officers. A laboratory experiment was used to collect the data. Twenty-three subjects volunteered in each experimental group, totalling 69 responses from fund managers and bank officers. The subjects were Master of Administration (MBA) students in universities located in Selangor and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to proxy for real practitioners. Findings – The results reveal that fund managers and bank officers do not incorporate environmental information in their investment and lending decisions. Thus, the normative pressure of institutional theory is supported. Research limitations/implications – Acknowledging the limitations of data generalisability using student surrogates, future research utilising real practitioners is proposed. Practical implications – Recognising the importance of environmental information to be incorporated in investment and lending decisions of these major stakeholders, the results suggest universities, professional bodies and companies need to raise awareness concerning the importance and relevance of environmental information in various decisions. Originality/value – The study offers some preliminary insights into the use of environmental information by fund managers and bank officers in Malaysia.

German gynecologic societies investigating their Nazi past.

Research into the activities of German medical specialist associations during the Nazi period is still in its initial stages even today. In the field of gynecology and obstetrics as well, most representatives of the discipline continued to take an attitude based on "concealment and forgetting", even after the turn of the millennium. In order to break with this approach, the Bavarian Society for Obstetrics and Gynecology (Bayerische Gesellschaft für Geburtshilfe und Frauenheilkunde, BGGF) commissioned an interdisciplinary research group to focus on clarifying its Nazi past for the purposes of a history of the institution on the occasion of its centenary. The research was based on the Society's archive. When the files were found to show conspicuous gaps for the Nazi period, the investigation was extended into the role of BGGF representatives and members who were active at the time. In some cases, it was possible to draw on existing studies and to supplement the available information from additional archival sources. It was found that the BGGF started at a very early stage to marginalize and ignore its "non-Aryan" members. No official decision to exclude such members was apparently taken, however. Many representatives and honorary members of the society were involved in promoting and carrying out eugenic sterilizations, simultaneously conducting abortions on some victims, and they at least shared responsibility for forced abortions among Ostarbeiterinnen ("Eastern workers", forced laborers from Eastern Europe). Accompanying unethical research that was mainly intended to garner academic prestige for the physicians involved was never discussed at the Society's conferences. Representatives of the Society who were substantially incriminated were able to continue their careers almost without interruption after 1945.

On Not Revisiting Official Discount Rates: Institutional Inertia and the Social Cost of Carbon

Within the federal government, official decisions are a product of both substantive judgments and institutional constraints. With respect to discounting, current practice is governed by OMB Circular A-4 and the 2010 and 2013 technical support documents of the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon. Reconsideration of existing judgments must be subjected to a demanding process of internal review (and potentially to external review as well). Institutional constraints, including the need to obtain consensus, can impose obstacles to efforts to rethink existing practices, especially in an area like discounting, which is at once technical and highly controversial. Both decisions costs and error costs must be considered.

A federal law on hosting Confederation Cup 2017 and World Cup 2018 in Russia. An overview, state commitments and specific provisions

The 2010s are definitely to become a glorious decade for Russian sport. At least two major events are going to take place on the territory of the Russian Federation, namely, Winter Olympic Games 2014 in Sochi and FIFA World Cup 2018 in 11 cities throughout the ‘European’ part of the country . Moreover, FIFA Confederation Cup 2017 to be held in Moscow should also be considered as a ‘major’ sporting event. This is a great opportunity for Russia to affirm its image of one of the leading sporting nations in the world, to improve inner infrastructure and develop international connections with foreign partners in various business areas. Whilst more focus these days is drawn to upcoming Winter Olympic Games 2014 in Sochi and FIFA World Cup 2014 in Brazil Russian legislators adopted a federal law on hosting Confederation Cup 2017 and World Cup 2018 in Russia, two and a half years after FIFA’s official decision on the host. The aim of this contribution is to provide an insight into legal background and legal procedure of adopting a federal law on hosting these sport events in Russia, present an overview of the legal provisions, pinpoint the most ‘sensitive’ issues and discuss the legal implications.

Making Rocky Mountain National Park: the environmental history of an American treasure

On September 4, 1915, hundreds of people gathered in Estes Park, Colorado, to celebrate the creation of Rocky Mountain National Park. This new nature preserve held the promise of peace, solitude, and rapture that many city dwellers craved. As Jerry Frank demonstrates, however, the park is much more than a lovely place. Rocky Mountain National Park was a keystone in broader efforts to create the National Park Service, and its history tells us a great deal about Colorado, tourism, and ecology in the American West. To Frank, the tensions between tourism and ecology have played out across a natural stage that is anything but passive. At nearly every turn the National Park Service found itself face-to-face with an environment that was difficult to anticipate--and impossible to control. Frank first takes readers back to the late nineteenth century, when Colorado boosters--already touting the Rocky Mountains' restorative power for lung patients--set out to attract more tourists and generate revenue for the state. He then describes how an ecological perspective came to Rocky in fits and starts, offering a new way of imagining the park that did not sit comfortably with an entrenched management paradigm devoted to visitor recreation and comfort. Frank examines a wide range of popular activities including driving, hiking, skiing, fishing, and wildlife viewing to consider how they have impacted the park's flora and fauna, often leaving widespread transformation in their wake. He subjects the decisions of park officials to close but evenhanded scrutiny, showing how in their zeal to return the park to what they understood as its natural state, they have tinkered with its features--sometimes with less than desirable results. Today's Rocky Mountain National Park serves both competing visions, maintaining accessible roads and vistas for the convenience of tourists while guarding its backcountry to preserve ecological values. As the park prepares to celebrate its centennial, Frank's book advances our understanding of its past while also providing an important touchstone for addressing its problems in the present and future.

Police Stop-and-Frisk Practices: An Examination of Factors That Affect Officers' Decisions to Initiate a Stop-and-Frisk Police Procedure

The purpose of this research is to examine the factors that affect an officer's decision to initiate a stop-and-frisk procedure. The primary objective of this study is to rank-order the typical reasons that were reported by police officers and that were deterministic on initiating a police stop procedure. The second objective of this research is to test whether there is empirical evidence suggesting racialised policing. The analyses are based on data that were originally collected and archived by the New York Police Department on stop-and-frisk police practices in 2006. The analyses in this study show that the top five highest rank-ordered reasons for initiating a police stop were high-crime area, time of day fits the crime incident, fugitive movements by the suspects, casing a victim or location, and proximity to a crime scene. Factors that influenced an officer's decision to frisk the suspect after the initial stop were suspect's gender, followed by suspect's physical proximity to the crime scene, suspect's evasive responses to questions and race.

Legal Validity Metrics for Patent Offices and Law Firms – Recycling of Patent Court Appeal Decisions for Quality Management

In all relevant patent systems an adversely affected party has the possibility to appeal the patent office's decision in front of a patent court or Board of Appeal (BoA). Within a European context, the EPO is, in a way, even engaging in de facto competition with national patent offices. As an example, the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA) provides quasi identical patent products and offers the same kind of legal recourse to the German patent court (BPatGer) for these products. Both offices offer an opposition procedure which is open for appeal, and also in the case of a refusal, both offices offer the possibility of appeals. Thus, the EPO Boards of Appeal are engaged in making decisions every year on around 2000 cases and, e.g., the BPatGer on 600 cases regarding the legal validity of the first instance's work. It is thus remarkable that, so far, nobody has systematically included the work of the patent courts in a statistical legal validity evaluation in the context of the Patent & Trademark Offices' (PTOs') quality assurance systems.Since there is obviously a need to establish a common standard for the comparison of first and second instance legal teachings in patent law, a methodology for comparative legal validity analysis is proposed in this paper. I have tested and optimised the approach while working as a project manager at the European Patent Office, based on analysis of 2300 appeal decisions from seven annual batches.

K–12 Students With Concussions

This article provides a multipart analysis of the public schools' responsibility for students with concussions. The first part provides the prevailing diagnostic definitions of concussions and postconcussive syndrome. The second and central part provides (a) the legal framework of the two overlapping federal laws--the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and the varying state laws or local policies for individual health plans and (b) a summary of the developing body of hearing officer decisions, court decisions, and Office for Civil Rights rulings that have applied this framework to K-12 students with concussions. The final part offers recommendations for proactive return to school policies, with the school nurse playing a central supporting role.

Charter Values and Administrative Justice

What would the of Rights and Freedoms have looked like if it had been designed for administrative justice? This is a question underlying this study. Ever since the Canadian Supreme Court made clear in Slaight Communications that discretionary decisions of public officials were to be subject to the of Rights and Freedoms, and expanded the reach of the to most adjudicative tribunals, the Court has wrestled with the coherence of the relationship between the and administrative justice. The Court attempted to synthesize its position and chart a new path forward beyond a traditional application of the to incorporate a potentially broader but inchoate set of Charter in its 2012 decision Dore. With this decision as a point of departure, the author’s elaborate a new framework for the development and application of values in the distinct sphere of administrative justice.

The Law in the Special Education Literature: A Brief Legal Critique

* Given the central role of law special education, exemplified by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), is fitting that the literature is replete with refereed journal articles specific to the legal dimension of various key issues of professional practice. However, the issue is the quality, added to the quantity, of these legal articles special education journals.To examine the extent and nature of this quality dimension, this brief critique examines an illustrative legal article Behavioral Disorders, diagnosing common symptoms and underlying problems. This critique is intended as a constructive salutary diagnosis, although such rigorous assessments are typically less than welcome. The framework consists of these primary legal sources: (a) the U.S. Constitution, (b) federal legislation and regulations, and (c) the court decisions that apply the preceding sources and fill gaps with contract and common law. In addition, due to the administrative structure of the IDEA, hearing and review officer decisions, the state education agency complaint resolution process reports, and the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) policy interpretations serve as tangential supplementary sources. The forums for legal dispute resolution extend to the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) due to the overlapping scope of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act and its sister statute, the Americans with Disabilities Act. For a roadmap of these alternate avenues under the IDEA and Section 504, see Zirkel and McGuire (2010).The next section of this critique examines an article discussing selected legal issues specific to students with emotional and behavioral disorders (E/BD) as a relatively representative example. The subsequent sections briefly identify (a) prevailing symptoms of the special education literature's treatment of legal issues illustrated by the critiqued article, (b) systemic factors that contribute to these prevailing symptoms, and (c) initial suggestions for moving the field forward.Illustrative ArticleSmith, Katsiyannis, and Ryan (2011) described their article as an in discussion of current law involving students with E/BD the areas of (a) response to intervention (RTI) and Child Find procedures, (b) required mental health services, and (c) the controversial uses of restraint to manage aggressive behaviors (p. 185). Careful examination with a legal lens reveals that the treatment is not in-depth and that the selection of these areas as is questionable. For the sake of economy of space, the lens is zoomed on the first area-RTI-and less magnified for the other two-mental health services and restraints.Response to InterventionFirst, RTI is not legally critical for students with EB/D because the IDEA (2012, 11414(b)(6)) provides recognition of RTI only with regard to the identification of students with specific learning disability (SLD), not any other classification, including emotional disturbance (ED) or other health impairment (OHI). The Office of Special Education Programs, which administers the IDEA, has made clear that the use of RTI with other suspected disability classifications is a matter of state law (Letter to Brekken, 2010). Thus far, only a handful of state laws have extended RTI beyond SLD, and Louisiana is the only one to extend to ED and/or OHI (Zirkel, 2011b). Even within SLD, the component of RTI these state laws is notably limited, contrast with nonbinding state guidelines (Zirkel, 2011b). For the IDEA, OSEP has clarified that it would be inappropriate to assume that an adopted RTI process must be based on and/or that this [RTI] process extends to other classifications more closely connected to behavior (Letter to Zirkel, 2011).Second, rather than in depth and case law, Smith et al. (2011) provided an undifferentiated mix of court decisions, hearing officer decisions, state complaint resolution reports, OSEP policy interpretations, and OCR letters of findings that, as a representative sample, is both overand under-inclusive with regard to RTI. …

The Front and Back Stages of Swedish School Inspection: Opening the Black Box of Judgment

This article provides results from a study of the hidden processes of consensus formation that precede and make possible official judgments and decisions of the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (SI). The research question for the study was: How is knowledge negotiated on the back stage of school inspection and presented on the front stage? The article builds on in-depth case studies of school inspection in four schools. Data include internal and official material from SI, on-site observations of inspection in schools and internal quality assurance meetings at SI, and interviews with inspectors. The analysis is inspired by Goffman's usage of the concepts “front stage” and “back stage.” The results suggest that the SI front stage borrows legitimacy from an evidence-based model aiming at objective and “equivalent” judgments, while the back stage displays a complex mix of rigorous formalized guidance and uncertainty that requires inspectors’ brokering and deliberation.

La implementación contenciosa de los programas sociales: el empadronamiento del Programa del Vaso de Leche en Villa El Salvador (2002-2010)

This study analyzes factors that allow local officials to overcome design distortions generated during the process of registering beneficiaries of the «Vaso de Leche» Program in a context in which these beneficiaries are powerful social actors who have a capacity for collective action. This study was conducted between 2002 and 2010 in Villa El Salvador, a district of metropolitan Lima. Villa El Salvador municipal authorities selected beneficiaries without considering the target population as established by the official regulations. This variation from established norms is understood in this study as a «design distortion». Starting in 2004, this distortion was reduced with the introduction of a registry for the program that did follow official norms. In the literature, control mechanisms are highlighted as a key strategy for correcting design distortions. This study suggests an alternative focus: change also depends on the decisions of local officials to establish alliances with program target groups and concludes that such decisions are fundamental to understand the program implementation in contentious settings.

Reactiekeuzes van politieambtenaren en de kans op geweldsincidenten

Response decisions of police officers and their risk of violent incidents There is a high rate of victimization of violence among police officers. Some police officers are more often victimized than others. Studies on correlates of victimization among police officers mainly focus on situational and social demographic aspects and have only been able to explain the variation in victimization to a limited amount. Very few studies were found on the role of psychological characteristics of the police officers in the explanation of different victimization risks. This study explores if response decision, a concept of the Social Information Processing model of Crick and Dodge (1994), is useful in explaining differences in victimization among police officers. Police officers (N = 815) from five police forces in the Netherlands completed a digital questionnaire based on the Social Information Processing Interview (SIP-I). Results show that victimization of verbal violence, threats and physical violence was associated with the response decision of police officers. More specifically, police officers with more negative outcome expectancies of aggressive or assertive responses were more likely to experience victimization. Police officers, who select aggressive, instead of passive or assertive responses, were more likely to experience victimization.

The Bottom Line for Review of an Assessment - A Case Note on Commissioner of Taxation v Futuris Corporation Ltd

Decisions of the Taxation Commissioner are prima facie reviewable, pursuant to s 75 (v) of the Constitution and s 39B of the Judiciary Act 1903 (Cth), for jurisdictional error. However, the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 (Cth) ('ITAA 1936) provides signficant buffers to the ability of a court to review the Taxation Commissioner's decisions. The tension between the general principle of the reviewability of the decisions of Commonwealth officers on the one hand, and the intention of Parliament to protect the Taxation Commissioner's decisions from judicial review on the other hand, was addressed by the High Court in Commissioner of Taxation v Futuris Corporation Ltd ('Futuris'). The context, scope and purposive approach to statutory construction, as refined by the Gleeson Court, is subtly underscored in Futuris by the policy consideration of protecting the public revenue. This is manifest in the Court's construction of ss 175 and 177(1) of the ITAA 1936 which limits challenges to notices of assessment made under the Act. Despite refuting a privative clause construction on these provisions, the Court did not limit the protections that these provisions afford to assessments. Instead, the Court upheld the effectiveness of the provisions in both limiting and conditioning the exercise of a court's jurisdiction to review taxation assessments. Challenging a court's jurisdiction through the operation of a privative clause is fraught with difficulties; it is more effective to limit or condition the grounds of review.

“The Border of Japan” for Chinese Arrivals in Nagasaki, Satsuma, and Ryukyu

When entering a foreign country, one usually fills out an immigration form asking for a set of personal details such as one's name, nationality, date of departure, destination, and the purpose of one's visit. In addition, one needs to answer several questions, for example, whether he has any banned substances or objects like drugs or weapons, whether he have a criminal record, and so on. Furthermore, one has to waive any rights to appeal an immigration officer's decision and finally declare and sign that all answers are true and correct.While many assume that this familiar system is specific to the modern age, historical documents show us that this supposition is not valid. In fact, we can find a similar system in the early modern Ryukyu Kingdom, though little attention has been paid to it. To demonstrate this system, I will begin introducing a document left by a shipwrecked Chinese captain coming to Ryukyu in the late eighteenth century:The captain Li Zhenchun states that: We received a permit for sailing from the government of Min prefecture in Fujian on December 24, 1770, loaded wood under the Nantai bridge on May 13 in the next year, sailed from Min'anzhen for Shandong on May 24, and arrived on June 24. Though we left for Fujian on December 2, after purchasing beans, on the next day, a storm broke our mast and halyards, which made it impossible for us to navigate and caused our ship to drift into Yaeyama Island in your country on the 22nd. Now we are living on board here. There is no Christian missionary, arsenic, Epicanta gorhami [, which is a terribly virulent insect including cantharis], or any other poison with us. None of us are disguised as Chinese people clothed in Chinese clothes. Also we have no weapons. If you find any violation as such, we should be tried by the national laws. There is no lie in this report.

“An Amorphous Code”: The Ku Klux Klan and Un-Americanism, 1915–1965

On 1 June 1965, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) announced that it would hold hearings into the Ku Klux Klan, fifty years after the organization had appeared before the House Rules Committee. Whereas the 1925 investigation allowed the Klan to continue to claim a “100% Americanism,” HUAC unequivocally declared the Klan of the 1960s to be entirely un-American. This essay seeks to explain that turnaround in the understanding of the Klan and its activities, on the one hand, and the contested ideas of un-Americanism and Americanism on the other. It is only within the context of that struggle over un-Americanism's evolving definition, it is argued, that the official decision of civil rights organizations such as COFO and SCLC – whose members had suffered personally from Klan violence – to oppose the proposed HUAC investigation of the Klan can be understood. Similarly, that ongoing contest explains how it was that, after almost three decades of investigating left-wing organizations that often included those fighting for greater civil rights, HUAC was finally moved to turn its attention to the right. Finally, this essay seeks to determine what it was, precisely, about the Klan in 1965 that was deemed “un-American” rather than simply criminal.

European Higher Education Area Establishment and Equal Opportunities: A Sociological Analysis of the Bologna Process Official Decisions

This work tries to analyze the official discourse on the development of a European Higher Education Area and focuses on the issue of equal opportunities of access to and completion of study in higher education. For this aim official documents of the first decade of the 21st century referring to the Bologna process (communiques and declarations of the Bologna process ministers responsible for higher education) were studied using the qualitative content analysis. The results of this work showed that the question of equal opportunities was included in the priority of the social dimension and occupied the Bologna process mainly from the year 2005 and on although mentions for equal opportunities to higher education studies exist in all Bologna process communiques. The priority of social dimension was the outcome of the adaptation of human capital theory and mainly involved notions such as mobility, lifelong learning, students’ socio-economic background, gender and underrepresentation. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n3p261