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Retrograde Step (retrograde + step)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Law and Criminology	75%

Selected Abstracts

A Retrograde Step: The Potential Impact of High Visibility Uniforms Within Youth Justice Reparation

THE HOWARD JOURNAL OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, Issue 1 2010
NICHOLAS PAMMENT
Abstract: The Labour government has recently introduced uniforms for adult offenders undertaking community service as part of their community orders. There have also been calls within the youth justice arena to introduce uniforms to young offenders undertaking reparation. Through observations, interviews and questionnaires with young offenders and their supervising staff, we argue that the introduction of uniforms will be counterproductive on a number of levels. In short, it would be a retrograde step. We conclude with a suggestion on how to increase the visibility of unpaid work by offenders within the community, without the negative impact of uniforms. [source]

Protecting the vulnerable: legality, harm and theft

LEGAL STUDIES, Issue 3 2003
Alan L Bogg
The law of theft, as understood in Gomez and Hinks, has been the occasion of almost unanimous academic condemnation and of robust dissenting opinions in the House of Lords. While much of the critical discussion is sophisticated and challenging, it is important that the baby is not to be expelled with the bathwater. We suggest that one argument in favour of the current position is that it offers distinct protection to some of the more vulnerable members of society. This advantage ought nevertheless to be sacrificed if it can be purchased only at the cost of violating the rule of law and the harm principle. But our examination of these ideas reveals that the price need not be paid. The rule of law contains not one idea, but a plurality of ideas, many of which support the current position. As for the harm principle, it is notable that Hinks does not castigate harmless behaviour; rather it attacks the wrong of exploitation. This raises many difficult issues, but we argue that unless such exploitative behaviour is explicitly addressed in Legislation, reforming the current ,broad' understanding of the law in favour of a ,reductive' account assimilating theft to non-voluntary transfers would be a retrograde step. In principle the new concern for protecting the vulnerable from exploitation is welcome. [source]

A miniscule optimized visual system in the Lower Cambrian

LETHAIA, Issue 3 2009
BRIGITTE SCHOENEMANN
Simultaneously with the development of animal body plans, probably before the Precambrian, there was an explosive diversification of visual systems. Competition of performance in these visual systems was a critical factor in the evolution of life systems. Here we analyse the visual system in the lobopod Miraluolishania haikouensis (Liu et al., 2004) from the Lower Cambrian Chengjiang Lagerstätte, Kunming, China. It consists of a very small eye with a miniscule lens. A physical problem lies in the fact that due to the usual refractive conditions of such a lens, it hardly represents an improvement of the visual quality over the basal pit- or pinhole camera eyes. To develop such a lavish visual system, however, would not have been of any value, if it achieved no more than an equal level or represented even a retrograde step in evolutionary progress. We show how this system may have allowed pattern recognition even under poor light conditions. Optimization of such a tiny eye is costly but is not ,a wasted effort' in evolution. In M. haikouensis (Liu et al., 2004), an excellently adapted miniscule visual system has become possible. [source]