Legal Structures (legal + structure)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Risk assessment and management: A community forensic mental health practice model

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF MENTAL HEALTH NURSING, Issue 4 2002
Teresa Kelly
ABSTRACT: In Victoria, the Crimes (Mental Impairment and Unfitness to be Tried) Act (1997) reformed legal practice in relation to the detention, management and release of persons found by a court to be not guilty on the grounds of insanity or unfit to be tried. This Act provides a legal structure for such ,forensic patients' to move from secure inpatient facilities into the community. This new legislative landscape has generated challenges for all stakeholders and has provided the impetus for the development of a risk assessment and management model. The key components of the model are the risk profile, assessment and management plan. The discussion comprises theory, legislation, practice implications and limitations of the model. Practice implications concern the provision of objective tools, which identify risk and document strategic interventions to support clinical management. Some of the practice limitations include the model's applicability to risk assessment and management and its dependence on a mercurial multi-service interface in after-hours crisis situations. In addition to this, the paper articulates human limitations implicit in the therapeutic relationship that necessarily underpins the model. The paper concludes with an exploration of the importance of evaluative processes as well as the need for formal support and education for clinicians. [source]


Confessions and Criminal Case Disposition in China

LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 3 2003
Hong Lu
This research examines confessions and criminal case disposition in China. It describes how wider economic reforms in China and subsequent changes in its legal system may have affected the nature and consequence of criminal confessions. Bivariate and multivariate analyses of a sample of 1,009 criminal court cases reveal that the majority of offenders confessed to their crime and that confession is associated with less severe punishments (e.g., lower risks for imprisonment, shorter sentences). Changes in the nature of confession and its impact on criminal court practices are also examined before and after legal reforms in the mid-1990s. These context-specific findings are then discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the interrelationships between legal structure, legal culture, and case disposition in communitarian-based societies. [source]


Seigniorial control of villagers' litigation beyond the manor in later medieval England*

HISTORICAL RESEARCH, Issue 213 2008
Chris Briggs
Medieval villagers were assiduous users of legal structures in defence of private interests. To enforce contracts against and recover debts from residents of other villages, rural plaintiffs had to prosecute in courts situated beyond the boundaries of their ,home' manors. The ability to sue elsewhere than the local manor court was thus crucial to commercial development in the countryside. This article explores the obstacles to such litigation, challenging the claim that servile villeinage acted to restrict villagers' choice of court. It lays the foundation for a larger investigation into the importance of villagers as civil litigants in ecclesiastical and royal jurisdictions. [source]


Fuzzy Legality and National Styles of Regulation: Government Intervention in the Israel Downstream Oil Market

LAW & POLICY, Issue 1 2002
Margit Cohn
This article examines the role of statute law in regulation and government intervention through a detailed historical case study of a crucial retail market. The history of state intervention in the Israeli oil supply market is dominated by "fuzzy legality," a concept expounded in a former article. Legal fuzziness allowed the industry, acting in concert with the government regulator, to retain a lucrative, practically non,accountable arrangement in changing politico,economic climates. Three central forces encouraged continuing fuzziness: a "cloud" of state security, institutional stickiness that preserved colonial mandatory legal structures, and a prevalent national culture of nonlegalism. The article ends with a careful suggestion regarding the Israeli national style of regulation. Compared to American "adversarial legalism," and its opposite, "consensual nonlegalism" the Israeli style may be termed "adversarial nonlegalism," and holds less promise for balancing market and public interests. [source]


Networking as a Means to Strategy Change: The Case of Open Innovation in Mobile Telephony

THE JOURNAL OF PRODUCT INNOVATION MANAGEMENT, Issue 6 2007
Koen Dittrich
The purpose of this article is to investigate how innovation networks can be used to deal with a changing technological environment. This study combines different concepts related to research and development (R&D) collaboration strategies of large firms and applies these concepts to R&D alliance projects undertaken by Nokia Corporation in the period 1985,2002. The research methodology is a combination of in-depth semistructured interviews and a large-scale quantitative analysis of alliance agreements. For the empirical analysis a distinction is made between exploration and exploitation in innovation networks in terms of three different measures. As a first measure, the difference between exploration and exploitation strategies by means of the observed capabilities of the partners of the contracting firms is investigated. The second measure is related to partner turnover. The present article argues that in exploration networks partner turnover will be higher than in exploitation networks. As a third measure, the type of alliance contract will be taken; exploration networks will make use of flexible legal organizational structures, whereas exploitation alliances are associated with legal structures that enable long-term collaboration. The case of Nokia has illustrated the importance of strategic technology networks for strategic repositioning under conditions of change. Nokia followed an exploitation strategy in the development of the first two generations of mobile telephony and an exploration strategy in the development of technologies for the third generation. Such interfirm networks seem to offer flexibility, speed, innovation, and the ability to adjust smoothly to changing market conditions and new strategic opportunities. These two different strategies have led to distinctly different international innovation networks, have helped the company in becoming a world leader in the mobile phone industry, and have enabled it to sustain that position in a radically changed technological environment. This study also illustrates that Nokia effectively uses an open innovation strategy in the development of new products and services and in setting technology standards for current and future use of mobile communication applications. This article presents one of the first longitudinal studies, which describes the use of innovation networks as a means to adapt swiftly to changing market conditions and strategic change. This study contributes to the emerging, but still inconsistent, literature on explorative and exploitative learning by means of strategic technology networks. [source]


Taking young people as political actors seriously: opening the borders of political geography

AREA, Issue 2 2010
Tracey Skelton
This article challenges the absence of young people from Political Geography. It shows how in many parts of the world young people are in an in-between space politically and legally. This article suggests that the geographically divergent liminal positioning of young people within political,legal structures and institutional practices is what makes them extremely interesting political subjects. I argue for a deconstruction of the generally accepted binary of capital P Politics and lower case p politics. Using an illustration from a non-Western geography, I argue that young people can do more than act politically in the interstices of this binary; they can in fact meld and blend both elements. Taking young people seriously may well create new definitions of the political and demonstrate other ways of conceptualising geopolitics and political geographies. [source]