Special Inquiry Research Articles

The Common Law and Civil War in Fourteenth-Century England: The Prosecution of Treason and Rebellion Under Edward II, 1322–1326

ABSTRACT What did it mean for poor and middling men and women to take up arms against their government? How did they negotiate competing claims for their participation in civil war and what consequences confronted them? This article analyses the crown’s investigation of its opponents following the 1321–22 civil war, comparing its predecessor of the Montfortian civil war (1263–67), to examine how the king, justices and juries tackled these questions. It demonstrates how the crown rooted the summary conviction and execution of Thomas of Lancaster and other noble insurgents in common law procedure; then, at the King’s Bench and a special inquiry in the Welsh Marches, re-framed treasonous offences to tackle non-noble insurgents; then, fearing a new uprising, instrumentalised the common law’s machinery to gather military intelligence. The crown recognized the agency of subjects across society in civil war and juries were ideally placed to investigate it; they also weighed subjects’ culpability, balancing obligation to the king against the mitigating realities of coerced participation in war. Thus, juries and the communities who informed their verdict were invited to engage with the ethical and legal dilemmas of civil war. This article thus presents a people’s history of treason.

Mormon, Muslim, and Sikh Migration to the West

In 1891, the federal government excluded polygamous migrants from entering the United States. This clause, originally designed to stop Mormon migration to the West, had a strange career that filtered diverse religious migrants at American borders in the early twentieth century. Imperial expansion across the Pacific elided racial and religious undesirability in those who traveled to the American West. Inspectors brought these cultural assemblages with them when they asked migrants about their relationships with polygamy, and migrants navigated these encounters with various strategies of passing through the border. Drawing on numerous Boards of Special Inquiry, this article compares Mormon, Muslim, and Sikh migrant experiences with the polygamy question at the border and argues that, even though imperialists and immigration restrictionists policed the movement of insular and foreign people, religion facilitated imperial pathways for migrants to travel along to the American West. This article is part of a special issue of Pacific Historical Review, “Religion in the Nineteenth-Century American West.”

Inquiry Letters and Tax Aggressiveness

AbstractThis study examined the impact of inquiry letters on corporate tax aggressiveness based on the special inquiry system in Chinese stock exchanges. It found that the receipt of inquiry letters significantly inhibited tax aggressiveness. The channel through which inquiry letters worked involved a monitoring effect on related‐party transactions. The disincentive effect of inquiry letters on corporate tax aggressiveness was mainly found in firms with overseas operations, low‐quality of internal control, and weak tax enforcement. Examining the textual information in inquiry letters, the results show that more questions and the demand for a specific opinion from the auditor led to a greater disincentive effect. The level of detail in firms' reply letters weakened this disincentive effect. Finally, the disincentive effect of tax aggressiveness was more pronounced when inquiry letters pointed to tax‐related issues.

Threat of Dissent: A History of Ideological Exclusion and Deportation in the United States

Threat of Dissent explores the United States’ history of excluding or deporting individuals (particularly non-citizens) that held ideological beliefs the US government viewed as threatening to American society. It shows how recent events have a long history that extends further back than the Red Scares of the twentieth century. Kraut's work details America's attempts to restrict or punish citizens, non-citizens, visitors, and residents who the US government deemed radicals.Beginning with the Alien Friends Act in the 1790s and concluding with the War on Terror in the 2000s, Threat of Dissent examines case studies of these ideological exclusions throughout different periods of American history. Organized chronologically, Kraut's book opens with the Alien Friends Act, Alien Enemies Act, and Sedition Act to show how Congress's creation of a Board of Special Inquiry, created to hear deportation cases, set the stage for later restrictions on immigration. Although restricting immigrants based on their health or wealth was already common, the Board introduced the idea of restrictions based on a person's beliefs. Kraut argues that President McKinley's assassination was a turning point that led to bans on anarchists entering the United States and anti-anarchist suppressions of speech such as the case of Emma Goldman, who lost her US citizenship. Wars or the threat of war also produced restrictive legislation; the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act was followed by the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act with both laws containing ideologically restrictive elements. The threat of Communism was another important factor that Kraut discussed, both in the wake of World War I as well as in the 1930s during the Great Depression. Kraut concludes her study by bridging the gap between the Cold War and the September 2001 terrorist attacks, with her final chapter discussing the War on Terror and its aftermath. Threat of Dissent brings the discussion to the present by highlighting the Trump administration's attempts to bar certain individuals from entering the country, particularly with the creation of a travel ban.Contributing an important piece to the historiography of both immigration studies and exclusions and deportations, the book achieves its stated goal to “explore the constitutionality of ideological restrictions” and the “intersection of American immigration and First Amendment law and history” (p. 9). Threat of Dissent was not written to provide a survey of restrictions throughout American immigration history, nor does it attempt to address discrimination based on non-ideological factors. Yet the work strongly demonstrates the author's historical knowledge of both the fields of legal and immigration history; Kraut holds a law degree from American University Washington College of Law and a PhD in History from New York University.The book's eight chapters each investigate a different ideological restriction presented to the US courts. While the information itself may not be new, the author's careful archival work is impressive in her recounting of each case study. The chapters themselves are also well organized, and students in particular will find the detailed conclusions at the end of each chapter a welcome addition. The author's clear, concise writing and her success at connecting the past to the present are major strengths of the work.Historians and experts in the field of legal or immigration studies will appreciate the book's careful scholarship, while students and the public will find Threat of Dissent accessible. The author's writing is free of jargon; whenever Kraut does use legal terminology, she includes definitions in parentheses. Additionally, the presence of at least one image per chapter—photographs, political cartoons, pamphlets, and posters—helps the reader visualize the actors involved with the different case studies. This book is engaging and well suited for undergraduate or graduate legal history courses, immigration and ethnicity courses, or as selected readings for either US history survey.

Relevant topics in Geriatric Forensic Psychiatry

Aging persons can become involved in the criminal justice system, more commonly as victims but also as offenders. They are a growing group of interest in forensic psychiatry, due to the ageing of the population. Moreover, they are overrepresented in long-stay facilities. Forensic psychiatrists may be asked to evaluate elderly individuals whose behaviour has become problematic to their families, caregivers, or third parties. We will focus here on problematic behaviors in eldery people, particularly disinhibition, agitation and aggression, and criminal behaviour and the incarcerated eldery. Forensic psychiatric assessment with new-onset criminal behaviour require special inquiries regarding criminal responsibility or competency to stand trial. Little research is available regarding criminal behaviour in eldery persons in correctional settings. In this paper a forensic-psychiatric expert report will illustrate these topics.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

The Formation of Islamic Law in Indonesia: The Interplay between Islamic Authorities and the State

In the course of the early twentieth century, Muslim majority countries, including Indonesia, attempted to transform Sharia into Islamic law. This transformation has encompassed diverse orientations and interests of Islamic scholars and the (colonial) state. The transformation in Indonesia deserves a special inquiry as Indonesia is a nation with a high degree of cultural heterogeneity. This article addresses the extent to which the interplay between Islamic authorities and the state has shaped the coming into being of Islamic law and its judicial institutions. I argue that Islamic authorities and the state have simultaneously taken part in revising and articulating the content, meaning, and scope of Islamic law. Islamic authorities had to adjust Islamic law with modern law and national sovereignty to make its norms possible. However, for Muslims, the issue was not only the formation of the national legal system but rules on the application of matrimonial matters as stipulated in Islamic legal doctrines. Through Islamic family law, devout Muslims found it important to claim a clearer position of the relationship between Islam and state authority.

Methods Of Teaching English Language Vocabulary To The First-Year Uzbek Students

Assimilation is the ability to use or recognize vocabulary fluently in speech. Possession or mastery means knowing the level of skill. Simple cognition refers to the ability to memorize the meaning of a word or to recognize its form. The consequence of knowing is mastery, that is, the use of a unit of language in speech. Vocabulary control is done through direct speech activities, not through special inquiries. When speaking on a topic, reading / listening comprehension creates sufficient conditions to test the student's lexical skills.Despite the fact that the goal of studying a foreign language lexicon was to conduct speech, working on lexical units during the period of acquaintance (Presentation, Presentation) and exercise (training, activation) was the primary task, when going to the stage of application, speech serves as the primary, and lexical as the engine, that is, “building material”. Consequently, it is natural for lexical skills to be included in the composition of speech skills.

Microbiological diagnosis of tuberculosis in Russia in 2020:achievements and challenges

SummaryMonitoring the status of microbiological diagnostics of tuberculosis is of major national and international importance for achieving tuberculosis control objectives. Objective. To study and characterize the current state, major trends and current trends in the development of microbiological diagnostics of TB in progress. Materials and methods. The study covered health care organiza-tions of the executive authorities in the field of health services of the subjects of the Russian Federation. The data of industrial and single time statistical observation, as well as answers to special enquiries were studied. Results and discussion. Detection of TB patients by means of sputum microscopy is insufficient, amount-ing to 14.9% in new cases and 10.8% in recurrent ones. The increase in the share of pulmonary TB patients with a positive sputum microscopy up to 35.1% can be as-sociated with a worsening of active detection due to a new coronavirus infection. The share of newly-detected pulmonary TB patients with a positive culture for Myco-bacterium tuberculosis has also increased to 52.8%, but this is below the target (54.0%) and will not reach the target by 2024 (60.0%). The decrease is seen at both preanalytical and analytical phases, mainly in selected regions. The coverage by rapid methods was 87.4%, including WHO-recommended was 58.0%, which is be-low the target (90%). The coverage by drug sensitivity testing (DST) was 97.1% (target 100%). The coverage by DST of patients with resistance to rifampicin and fluoro-quinolones was 93.5%, the coverage by DST of patients with resistance to linezolid was 35.0%, to bedaquiline — 8.5%, to two drugs — 6.6%. Conclusion. It is advisable to intensify the targeted supervision by specialists in microbiological diagnostics of TB with low target values, paying attention to participation in quality assessment programmes, ensuring the possibility of DST to bedaqui-line and linezolid.

Growth in Foreign Trade in Liberalized India: The Relevance of FDI

Driven by the need of an economic model that can explain the foreign direct investment (FDI)–export relationship, especially in post-liberalized context, we make a special inquiry on whether FDI has a significant export-promoting impact in India under a time-varying parameter model with vector autoregressive specification. The Johansen’s co-integration test suggests a significant and positive long-run co-movement between FDI and export. The vector error correction model (VECM) confirms a unidirectional long-run causality from export to FDI. However, the Granger causality test establishes a bi-directional causal relationship between these variables in short run. Further, the foreign trade (FT) is found to be a strongly exogenous variable as per the variance decomposition analysis. Again, the impulse response function analysis suggests that the responses generated from a positive shock of FT to FDI and vice versa are small and initially negative, afterward remain steadily positive at a constant level. The study finally recommends the policymakers to channelize the inward-FDI into tradable goods industries rather than only linking it to service sector growth to reap the long-term benefit. In this regard, China’s effort to channelize inward-FDI into manufacturing sectors and the resultant momentous success in export performance can be taken as a classic example for FDI-led foreign trade promotion.

The logic of uncertainty in law and life

Abstract My central interest is decision making in the presence of epistemic uncertainty. A method appropriate for both specialized inquiries and everyday reasoning is based on credal logic, which employs multivalent degrees of belief rather than traditional probability theory. It accounts for epistemic uncertainty as unallocated belief. It holds that, when facing real uncertainty, if a person believes a and believes b, then the person believes a and b together. This brand of multivalent logic underlies and justifies how legal decision makers and the rest of us find facts in a world infused with epistemic uncertainty. Indeed, this article closes by showing the equivalence of multivalent logic and inference to the best explanation. By demonstrating this similarity in reasoning, I aim to shore up our faith in the logic of traditional legal reasoning.

Logic in Law and Science

My central interest is decisionmaking in the presence of epistemic uncertainty. A method appropriate for both specialized inquiries and everyday reasoning is based on credal logic, which employs multivalent degrees of belief rather than traditional probability theory. It accounts for epistemic uncertainty as unallocated belief. It holds that, when facing real uncertainty, if a person believes a and believes b, then the person believes a and b together. This brand of multivalent logic underlies and justifies how legal decisionmakers and the rest of us find facts in a world infused with epistemic uncertainty. Indeed, this Article closes by showing the equivalence of multivalent logic and inference to the best explanation. By demonstrating this similarity in reasoning, I aim to shore up our faith in the logic of traditional legal reasoning.

Collecting evidence on the use of parliamentary oversight tools: A South African case study

Background: Parliament, through its oversight function, plays a central role in holding the executive to account. In South Africa’s 2014 Defence Review policy document, it was stated that the ‘Defence Force is in a critical state of decline’. This brings about the question whether the South African Parliament effectively held the executive to account regarding developments around defence.Objectives: The article aims to gather evidence on the use of oversight tools by the South African Parliament over a 20-year period, within the post-1994 democratic dispensation, in order to determine the broader trajectory of parliamentary defence oversight.Method: To determine the trajectory of oversight, this article gathered evidence on the use of internationally recognised parliamentary oversight tools by South Africa’s two parliamentary defence committees from 1994 to 2014. The period allows for a 20-year review of oversight of defence, inclusive of four full parliamentary terms. Evidence was collected on parliamentary debates, questions, special inquiries, oversight visits and the use of external audits as oversight tools.Results: The article found that tools were used with varying degrees of success. Results for research on each oversight tool is discussed.Conclusion: Based on evidence on the use of oversight tools, this article concludes that over a 20-year period there was a declining trajectory in parliamentary oversight of the defence portfolio. The proven applicability of the criteria utilised in this article can serve to inform evaluations of the effectiveness of parliamentary oversight, specifically at committee level.

Staging Crossings

This article examines the dynamic interactions between Mexican women who sought to circumvent their sexual regulation at the U.S.-Mexico border, and U.S. immigration officials who enforced these regulations and policed these women's bodies in the early twentieth century. Using the transcripts of the board of special inquiry (BSI)—a panel that deliberated over the admission of excludable immigrants and oversaw accompanying interrogations—I contend that, while the BSI operated to encode corporeally Mexican female immigrants as sexually deviant, it simultaneously served as a stage for them to respond with their own performances of crossing. In the interrogation room, women performed a slew of admissible identities, including the devoted mother, aggrieved woman, and hard-working laborer. When those attempts to cross failed, women did not simply return home. Instead, many re-crossed until they reached their intended destination. Thus, the BSI served as a site for Mexican female border crossers to both uphold and challenge the production of heteropatriarchal notions of marriage. These findings contribute to the growing literature on U.S. border enforcement in the early twentieth century and uncover the (dis)order of a growing U.S. bureaucratic infrastructure based on sexual and gendered regulation.

Placebo scrutiny? Far-right extremism and intelligence accountability in Germany

ABSTRACTThe post-9/11 era has seen a proliferation of special, or one-off parliamentary inquiries into intelligence. This article examines the question of what quality such inquiries can achieve, exploring the scandal surrounding the case of the German far-right terrorist group National Socialist Underground (NSU). The article introduces a theoretical framework, with remit, rigor and reception as the key pillars of analysis. While special inquiries are often seen as a way of overcoming imperfections of the traditional accountability system, they can also create a placebo effect – an illusion of accountability which allows intelligence services to go uncontrolled under a blanket of democracy.

Hospital discharge: lost opportunities to promote or maintain older people’s mental health

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of hospital discharge on the wider wellbeing of older people, drawing out implications this can have on mental health.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on research from the Healthwatch England Special Inquiry into hospital discharge. The paper focuses on the experiences of 1,300 older people, with the majority of the research being undertaken by the local Healthwatch network. The 58 local Healthwatch who submitted evidence on the experiences of older people as part of the inquiry were autonomous in how they were able to carry out the research, with results being analysed through use of a qualitative framework.FindingsOlder people often felt they were not ready for discharge due to not feeling involved in planning of their discharge, being discharged without the information they need and having difficulties accessing aftercare support. This paper examines the impact these issues can have on the mental health and wellbeing of older people, their carers and specifically patients with dementia both during and after discharge from hospital. Through examination of these issues the discharge process can be viewed from the perspective of the individual, and start to conceptualise where the hospital discharge process could further support older people’s mental health and wellbeing.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper examines these issues in detail through case studies collected regarding older people, and exposes the impact poor discharge can have on physical and mental wellbeing for older patients. The paper presents a number of issues which have implications for policy and practice in both health and social care, and the integration of the two services.Originality/valueThis is the first Special Inquiry conducted by Healthwatch England in conjunction with the local Healthwatch network and presents a large scale piece of research led by the experiences of older people.

The Church, The Commission and the Truth: Inside the NSW Special Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse

The NSW Special Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse in the Newcastle-Maitland diocese, an area north of Sydney, Australia, held proceedings during 2013. The Special Inquiry investigated allegations made by police whistleblower Peter Fox that the Newcastle police and the Catholic Church colluded to keep criminal sexual activity against children by two Catholic priests from being properly investigated. This article reports on sections of the court hearings dealing with the Catholic Church, and relates these to sociological theories of gender, religion and power. In particular, the article will position gender analysis, via the social construction of clerical masculinity, as a central hermeneutic for understanding the culture of sexual violence which has plagued the Catholic Church in this region, and more broadly, for decades. This analysis uncovers a culture of elitist male clericalism, practices of institutional secrecy, the poor psychosexual development of priests and an exclusivist patriarchal construction of the sacred as key elements in church culture. The article makes a contribution to two areas of inquiry that are under-researched in the child sexual abuse literature: the role of gender and the culture of priesthood.

Shining the Spotlight on Child Sexual Abuse

Earlier this year, the film Spotlight won the Academy Award (Oscars) for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Spotlight tells the story of a group of journalists at The Boston Globe who break the story of the clerical abuse of hundreds of children by over 200 Catholic priests in the Boston area in 2002. It was the first major reporting of abuse by Catholic clerics in the US and shocked the nation, indeed the world, with the breadth of abuse and the silencing of victims and their families by the Church and their lawyers. I saw the film in Australia at a local cinema in Newcastle, New South Wales. As a social researcher writing on the Catholic Church at the Royal Commission and the NSW Special Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, I wasn’t surprised that I recognised in the small audience a number of survivors, families and supporters of victims and Catholic community members. I wasn’t surprised that it was a small number; this is a difficult film to watch about a subject most people do not want to think about. The Royal Commission into institutional child abuse was set up in 2013 after years of work by survivors and supporters to uncover abuse across institutions including the Catholic Church. Despite knowing much of the literature in the field and having attended many sessions at the Royal Commission, it came as a shock when the last screen shots listed the number of American cities affected by clerical abuse and cities around the world. The list runs into the hundreds and in Australia includes Newcastle, Wollongong, Adelaide, Ballarat and Melbourne. People around me gasped as we recognised Newcastle on the list: somehow seeing our small city on the big screen bought home the reality of this crisis. Clerical sexual abuse is not a small issue on the periphery of social maladjustment. It’s a major crisis of institutional abuse of power that has affected millions of people across the globe.

Introduction: Toward a Russian Geopoetics, or Some Ways of Relating Russia to the World

Geopoetics is concerned, fundamentally, with a relationship to the earth and with the opening of a world.—Kenneth White,Geopoetics: Place, Culture, World(2004)The thread that links these convergences is the question of landscape, the poetics and iconology of space and place, and all their relations to social and political life, to experience, to history.—W. J. T. Mitchell, “Geopoetics: Space, Place, Landscape,” Introduction to a special issue ofCritical Inquiry(2000)“Geopoetics” may be a novel concept for Russian studies, but the term is by no means new. The Scottish poet and critic Kenneth White coined it in 1978, inaugurating an international intellectual and creative movement of the same name that has gained particular momentum in the new millennium. Its urgency in a world that has grown exponentially more connected and networked yet, paradoxically, remains deeply bound to the “iconology of space and place” is evident from the way in which the cultural theorist W. J. T. Mitchell, in conversation with Edward Said and others in the symbolically freighted location of Birzeit University in the West Bank, recouped the term as the organizing principle of a special issue ofCritical Inquiryin 2000. If anything, geopoetics as an animating force as well an analytical framework for what Mitchell identifies as “social and political life,” “experience,” and “history” appears in even starker relief against the myriad transnational conflicts that define the globe in 2016 within which, in turn, the region we study has been rapidly redefining itself vis-à-vis the world.

The application of a personal identification database and risk management mechanism

In the ICT era and take into account the trend toward NPM, Governance has been urging the e-government to provide “active” and “tailored” services. More importantly, in the aged society resulting from the aging baby boomers, the services of a democratic government need to be more satisfactory and timely when a large part of the citizens in any society become old. A system or database containing personal data by which to identify individuals is indispensable when the e-government wants to deliver services. According to Tsai (2005a: 7)’s research: a method of personal identification is used to distinguish the data specific to personal characteristics such as ID cards, credit cards, GCA, signatures, fingerprint, iris scans, blood vessels, etc. The first part assigns data on personal characteristics on the “carrier,” and the second part makes us of a “live” body. Because the “carrier” may be lost and copied, the second method is less risky from the current perspectives of “duplication” technology. Although a “live” body is better than a “carrier,” considering the method of personal identification, there is another issue that must be considered when the e-government wants to collect personal data that relates to the issue of “privacy,” not to mention the development of a means by which to integrate different kinds of personal “live” data into a database. Therefore, in this research, a literature analysis and the political economy approach are used to explore this issue based on demand and supply, problems of privacy, risks, and management mechanisms because determining a method by which to ensure that personal identification data is not leaked and misused is a very serious issue. This also involves the concept of “risk,” as Beck, Giddens, Lash & Urry (1994) mentioned in their discussion of “Risk Society” in the “Second Modernity.” As a result, risk management is vital, especially the recognition of how risk diverges among people. This essay therefore focuses on the following: how to choose a proper personal identification tool, the establishment of a personal identification database and the creation of a set of safe enquiry mechanisms, which includes both inquiry rights and inquiry methods. This inquiry method contains both public usage and personal usage, based on group decisions and self-decisions, respectively. Furthermore there should be laws established to punish offenders. Thus, this paper not only provides a method for using personal identification to benefit people, but also offer cures intended to prevent risk by using a special enquiry mechanism. Consequently, the e-government will be able to actively provide tailored services and provide welfare to the population. More important, this decision making mechanism model could be widely applied to solve similar kind of problems, especially in the diverged era. Besides, this kind of integrative platforms could be applied to different ministries as a basic infrastructure to achieve the aims of openness, transparency, knowledge accumulation, etc. on the part of e-governments.

SAE education challenges to academics and NSI

The aim of the paper is to present some experiences in teaching Small Area Estimation (SAE). SAE education experiences and challenges are analysed from the academic side and from the NSI side. An attempt was undertaken to discuss SAE issues in a wider perspective of teaching statistics. In particular, the topics refer to Polish conditions, but they are presented against the background of selected international experiences and practices. Information comes from a special inquiry - a survey conducted among employees of statistical offices and academics from universities involved in SAE research. A further issue is inclusion of SAE in the EMOS project (European Master in Official Statistics). The survey is extended with information collected by monitoring of trainings and projects organized by the leading centres dealing with SAE. The results obtained are related to a similar survey within Eurostat project: ESSnet on Small Area Estimation, which was conducted in 2010. The study includes interest in learning and the need to implement SAE methodology, a range of subjects taught as well as a range of applications, forms of training, type of courses, software used and teaching methods. In particular, it intends to answer how strong the interest in small area estimation is, what the demand for practical and theoretical knowledge in the field is and what the recommendations for universities and statistical institutes are.