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People with dementia suffer not only from symptoms but also from social vulnerability including an increased risk of abuse and criminal victimization. In existing quantitative studies, the data are based on reports by people with dementia themselves, their family members, or concerned persons, which may be insufficient to accurately identify the actual mechanisms and circumstances of abuse or victimization. To speculate on the exact realities of people with dementia victimization, we extracted criminal sentences of perpetrators collected from the Japanese judgment database. A total of 152 cases in approximately 23 years included various victimization situations; these cases were classified into six categories of harm (physical, psychological, neglect, sexual, financial, and miscellaneous) and five categories of perpetrator (spouse, child, other family, supporter, and stranger or other). There were 93 cases of physical victimization by the spouse or child, which were statistically analyzed. Through case inspections, we provide an accurate victimization process of people with dementia and propose a four-class typology of physical victimization by the family: care exhaustion, antipathy to people with dementia, self-righteous or self-contained family, and continuous abuse type. These case scrutinies and their classifications may contribute to interventions regarding the support of people with dementia and their families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the development of machine learning algorithms and the increasing computational resources available, artificial intelligence has achieved great success in many application domains. However, the success of machine learning has also raised concerns about the fairness of the learned models. For instance, the learned models can perpetuate and even exacerbate the potential bias and discrimination in the training data. This issue has become a major obstacle to the deployment of machine learning systems in high‐stakes domains, for example, criminal judgment, medical testing, online advertising, hiring process, and so forth. To mitigate the potential bias exhibited by machine learning models, fairness criteria can be integrated into the training process to ensure fair treatment across all demographics, but it often comes at the expense of model performance. Understanding such tradeoffs, therefore, is crucial to the design of optimal and fair algorithms. My research focuses on characterizing the inherent tradeoff between fairness and accuracy in machine learning, and developing algorithms that can achieve both fairness and optimality. In this article, I will discuss our recent work on designing post‐processing algorithms for fair classification, which can be applied to a wide range of fairness criteria, including statistical parity, equal opportunity, and equalized odds, under both attribute‐aware and attribute‐blind settings, and is particularly suited to large‐scale foundation models where retraining is expensive or even infeasible. I will also discuss the connections between our work and other related research on trustworthy machine learning, including the connections between algorithmic fairness and differential privacy as well as adversarial robustness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of defendants in criminal proceedings are bringing their diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder ('ASD'), a neurodevelopmental condition, to courts' attention. Where an offender with ASD is found guilty of committing a crime, the sentencing court may need to take their condition into account in order to ensure it reaches an outcome that is fair to the defendant and achieves sentencing objectives. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of the potential for an offender's ASD symptoms to influence sentencing decisions in three jurisdictions: the State of Victoria in Australia; the federal jurisdiction of the United States of America; and England and Wales in the United Kingdom. The article focuses on whether courts are able to apply factors relevant to the sentencing process in light of a defendant's ASD impairments and if those symptoms can have an impact on the types of sanctions that courts impose. It recommends approaches for courts to adopt in sentencing offenders with ASD and highlights features of the examined jurisdictions that would best guide judges to follow them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research relevance was determined by the need to create an effective mechanism for enforcing judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in the context of their systematic non-enforcement by Ukraine and the existing threat of weakening the guarantees of observance and safeguarding the fundamental freedoms and rights. Consequently, the research endeavour focused on examining the challenges and barriers present within the mechanisms responsible for implementing to the rulings issued by the ECHR as well as the judgments rendered by domestic courts operating at the national level. The methods used in the study include historical, statistical, legal hermeneutics and others. The core findings and central conclusions drawn from the research investigation are to reveal the prerequisites for Ukraineʼs integration to the European supranational judicial protection system, the impact of this event in the context of guaranteeing basic human entitlements; focus on data regarding Ukraineʼs participation as a defending party in international legal disputes. The author examined which rights are most often violated in the context of lawsuits against the Ukrainian state before the ECHR, in particular, the right to free movement and personal integrity, as well as facts related to the duration of proceedings, fair trial, etc. The author also pointed to two major pilot judgments delivered by the Court – Case No. 40450/04 and Case No. 46852/13, which point to a systematic and structural issue of inaction to properly implement the judgments of the ECHR and national courts. This analysis delved into the underlying factors that contribute to the challenges in enforcing judgments, which include imperfect legislation and insufficient funding. The author pointed out the need for a comprehensive approach to improving this area through the development of effective remedies and alternative ways of paying compensation. This studyʼs outcomes serve as a springboard for further research by sociologists, legal professionals, political scientists, and policymakers, paving the way for a more dependable court enforcement framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpretation of administrative policies is of great importance in contemporary public law. The correct approach to policy interpretation has, however, been subject to insufficient academic scrutiny. The effect of policies is to provide guidance: not only to decision-makers, but also to stakeholders in the decision. Obvious stakeholders include the applicant or the individual who is the subject of the administrative decision, but the scope of potential legitimate stakeholders may go far beyond this. In matters of general interest, the broader public may be guided by policy (for instance, whether to object to a proposal during a consultation exercise, or on what basis to object). When considering how policy should be interpreted, the court should have regard to the extent of the appropriate audience of the policy, specifically considering how the least expert reader of the policy would interpret it. This 'least expert reader principle' will assist in answering difficult questions, such as whether the court should have regard to the underlying evidence base when interpreting a policy. The courts should rely upon, and express their reasoning by reference to, the least expert reader principle, in order to increase the transparency of judgments in the field of policy interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annuals of the Administration & Law / Roczniki Administracji i Prawa is the property of Oficyna Wydawnicza Humanitas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This document is a book review of "The impact of plain language on legal English in the United Kingdom" by Christopher Williams. The book offers a unique perspective on plain legal English and its effects. The author, a retired professor, aims to encourage further research on the topic rather than disappoint those who already have expertise in plain language, legal matters, or linguistics. The book covers various aspects, including the history of plain language in the UK, the language of legislation, and the language of court judgments. The author presents interesting details and provides references for further exploration. The text also discusses the use of plain language in legal judgments and online terms and conditions. In the analysis of legal judgments, it is found that sentence length has decreased in criminal cases but increased in civil cases. The length of judgments has also increased over time, particularly in civil cases. The use of Latinisms and first-person pronouns has decreased, while the use of passive verbs remains high. Regarding online terms and conditions, they are often too lengthy and complex for consumers to read. The use of unfamiliar pro-forms and pronominal adverbs varies across different types of contracts. The text concludes that plain language is gradually becoming more common in legal writing, but there is still more work to be done. The author suggests further research in areas such as wills and the impact of plain language on law students' education. [Extracted from the article]

The No. 147 guiding case of the Supreme People's Court set a precedent for the crime of intentionally destroying scenic spots and historic sites in Article 324 (2) of the Criminal Law to protect scenic resources. Its significance lies not only in the innovation of judgment thinking, but also in the reconfirmation of the criminal law protection of scenic resources. In order to further define the trial philosophy of guiding case No. 147, resolve the dilemmas in the judicial determination of crimes of intentionally destroying scenic spots and historic sites, and clarify the boundaries of power and rights in the field of ecological environment, administrative violations, and criminal crimes, this paper adopts the three-stage analysis framework of ' object - transgression - legal interest' to construct the paths of the criminal law protection of scenic resources. In terms of the definition of the objects involved, ' scenic resources' in the crime of intentionally destroying scenic spots and historic sites should be defined as the ecological landscape rather than the ecological scenic spots so as to maintain the coordination of criminal protection between natural reserves, national parks, and scenic spots. When identifying ' damaging behaviors,' we propose the concept of ' nested regulation theory' with ' destroying' scenic resources as the main standard, supplemented by ' value reduction' to clarify the boundary between illegal and criminal behaviors and to avoid excessive severity of criminal identification. In the restatement of legal interest value, the ' 1+X' model is adopted to summarize the legal interest value characteristics of scenic resources: ' 1' refers to the basic and original ecological legal interest characteristics of these resources; 'X' refers to the legal interest attributes of cultural relics contained in scenic resources as natural and humanistic heritage, which can be further divided into biological legal interest value, enlightening legal interest value, aesthetic legal interest value, and economic legal interest value. Different types of legal interest value are endowed with different meanings for the criminal identification of ' serious damages. ' The ' destruction' of ecological legal interests, biological legal interests, and scientific research value is the condition under which the criminal law initiates the protection of scenic resources; however, the 'value reduction' of popular science value and aesthetic legal interests is the condition under which the criminal law initiates the protection of scenic resources. The economic legal interests of scenic resources do not affect the judgment of criminal illegality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on recent court practices in Ukraine regarding insolvency-related judgments and war-related claims. It delves into the challenges of defining insolvency-related judgments under the Model Law on Recognition and Enforcement of Insolvency-Related Judgments, examining how a landmark court decision in Ukraine, allowing compensation for damages caused by Russia's war against Ukraine within an insolvency case, might potentially qualify for recognition and enforcement abroad.

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) is an essential component of legal assistant systems, which aims to automatically predict judgment results from a given criminal fact description. As a vital subtask of LJP, researchers have paid little attention to the numerical LJP, i.e., the prediction of imprisonment and penalty. Existing methods ignore numerical information in the criminal facts, making their performances far from satisfactory. For instance, the amount of theft varies, as do the prison terms and penalties. The major challenge is how the model can obtain the ability of numerical comparison and magnitude perception, e.g., 400 < 500 < 800, 500 is closer to 400 than to 800. To this end, we propose a judicial knowledge-enhanced magnitude-aware reasoning architecture, called NumLJP, for the numerical LJP task. Specifically, we first implement a contrastive learning-based judicial knowledge selector to distinguish confusing criminal cases efficiently. Unlike previous approaches that employ the law article as external knowledge, judicial knowledge is a quantitative guideline in real scenarios. It contains many numerals (called anchors) that can construct a reference frame. Then we design a masked numeral prediction task to help the model remember these anchors to acquire legal numerical commonsense from the selected judicial knowledge. We construct a scale-based numerical graph using the anchors and numerals in facts to perform magnitude-aware numerical reasoning. Finally, the representations of fact description, judicial knowledge, and numerals are fused to make decisions. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets and select several competitive baselines. The results demonstrate that the macro-F1 of NumLJP improves by at least 9.53% and 11.57% on the prediction of penalty and imprisonment, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criminal law interpretation in China faces two primary challenges in terms of value judgments. Normative interpretations often fall into circular and inadequate reasoning, while judges, the key figures in applying interpretive principles, frequently lack the necessary value judgment engagement and proficiency. Traditional criminal law interpretation is ensnared in a subjective-objective dichotomy, resulting in a misalignment with the aim of "legitimate and rational" interpretation practices in China. To rectify this, a philosophical shift is required to allow intersubjective value judgments while maintaining subjectivity-objectivity as the prerequisite. Criminal law interpretation ensures the completeness of value judgments through a combination of specialized knowledge and public discourse. This involves the creation of systematic criteria for value judgments and adherence to legal principles. The former necessitates defining the internal and external standards of value judgments, formulating rules for the resolution of conflicting standards, and underlining the practical importance of criminalization under law, or "no crime or punishment without law" (the principle that only the law can define a crime and prescribe a penalty) and "Where no law applies, it is permissible to redefine a crime as non-criminal or minor" (decriminalization). The latter involves three perspectives: logical reasoning and theoretical arguments; positive and negative judgments; and formal and substantive rationality. Moreover, it should be approached from four dimensions: normative orientation, individual case promotion, reverse exclusion, and constitutional guidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Praxis der Rechtspsychologie is the property of Hogrefe Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Payment of substitute money is an additional crime imposed by the panel of judges to recover state financial losses, as in Decision Number 51/Pid.Sus-TPK/2020/PN. Smg. The verdict is interesting to examine, what is the result of the panel of judges imposing additional penalties in the payment of substitute money by the purpose of the law, as well as how the view according to Islam. The study aims to analyze the consequences of the panel of judges imposing an additional criminal judgment on the payment of substitute money in Decision Number 51/Pid. Sus- TPK/2020/PN. Smg and his views according to Islam. The research is normative legal research, with a statutory approach and a conceptual approach, legal materials in the form of primary, secondary, and non-legal, the object of research is Decision Number 51 / Pid.Sus-TPK / 2020 / PN. Smg. Techniques for collecting legal materials with literature studies, with deductive analysis methods. The results of the study, as a result of which the judge's consideration did not clearly outline the calculation of state money used by the convict, imperfect defects, and non-achievement of legal objectives. Additional penalties for payment of substitute money according to Islam can be imposed on the convict because the property of Allah SWT is a mandate that must be accounted for its use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Abgaben-, Finanz- und Steuerrecht is the property of Verlag Oesterreich GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Much ink has been spilt criticising the ICC's Ongwen trial judgment for its failure to grasp the cultural context in which the accused Ongwen and the Acholi community were embedded. Some scholars blame this on the poor quality of translation services, others attribute it to the 'binarism' of judgments. We offer another explanation for the Ongwen judgment's deficiencies: its purely textual format. The judgment shows that the continued preference for textual judgments in international criminal law sterilises victims' experiences, decontextualises evidence, and muffles objectivity. This ties into the historical preference for text over senses, a colonially engineered decision aimed at suppressing non-Western epistemologies. In this paper, we call for the international criminal law judgment to embrace 'the opportunities of the wider sensory field'. Drawing on the pervasive sensory dimensions of international criminal law, we argue that a sensory reimagination of judgments would better serve international criminal law's affective potential by empowering survivors and achieving a more reparative and reconstructive justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past, empirical research findings from psychosciences contributed to avoiding erroneous judgments and decisions in criminal proceedings. However, for some time now, developments have arisen that threaten to reverse the achievement at the turn of the millennium that introduced a clear scientific orientation into sex offense proceedings. This article highlights five retrograde developments and uses three examples to illustrate how these developments can interact and, in particular, offer a purported explanation for a lack of memory of experienced abuse. This creates a breeding ground for the formation of false memories that cause suffering in both psychotherapy and criminal proceedings, and it significantly increases the risk of erroneous decisions in criminal proceedings on sex offenses in German-speaking countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child abuse has negative impacts on the well-being of children and often leads to adverse consequences, such as suicide, alcohol addiction, depression, and substance abuse. To better understand domestic child abuse in Taiwan, this study analyzed 73 criminal judgments (open-access documents) in which the victims of domestic child abuse were children below the age of 12 from the "Judicial Yuan Law and Regulations Retrieving System" database. There were 73 victims and 91 perpetrators involved. The results indicated that younger children were more likely to be victims of physical abuse, and the majority of death cases were committed by biological parents and cohabiting partners. The perpetrators tended to be young males with lower education. Male cohabiting partners appeared to be a high-risk population for child abuse. Approximately 63% of perpetrators experienced poverty, and 24.7% suffered from marital discord. In the 73 cases, 61.6% of the victims died, 21.9% were mildly injured, and 16.5% were severely injured. The sentencing was related to the level of injury, with perpetrators of mild injury sentenced to less than one year while perpetrators with victim death were sentenced to a longer period of imprisonment. It is suggested that parents at higher risk require greater financial and social support and should be educated on appropriate disciplinary techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The worldwide proliferation of TikTok revealed the shifting interests of users from text-and-image-based content to short-form videos (SVs). Short-form Video Platforms (SVPs) have been further acknowledged as mainstream life-sharing platforms and novel learning resources for informational and practical needs. Surprisingly, increasing evidence from China's judicial practices unfolded that, offenders were motivated and learned criminal skills by interacting with and imitating from the SVPs' uploaders. Previous literature has focused on harmful contents and its negative impact on traditional social media platforms, limited has drawn attention on SVPs nor its shared SVs which may potentially spread criminal intentions or even skills to the audience. To fill these gaps, this article for the first time focused on SVP, intended to investigate the criminal motivations and skills identified in China's major SVPs, explored the rationales behind crime learning behaviors, and proposed feasible regulatory solutions for the SVPs to facilitate the prevention of crimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Adab Al-Kufa is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Scholars have proposed that incarceration rates might be reduced by a requirement that judges justify incarceration decisions with respect to their operational costs (e.g., prison capacity). In an Internet-based vignette experiment (N = 214), we tested this prediction by examining whether criminal punishment judgments (prison vs. probation) among university undergraduates would be influenced by a prompt to provide a justification for one's judgment, and by a brief message describing prison capacity costs. We found that (1) the justification prompt alone was sufficient to reduce incarceration rates, (2) the prison capacity message also independently reduced incarceration rates, and (3) incarceration rates were most strongly reduced (by about 25%) when decision makers were asked to justify their sentences with respect to the expected capacity costs. These effects survived a test of robustness and occurred regardless of whether participants reported that prison costs should influence judgments of incarceration. At the individual crime level, the least serious crimes were most amenable to reconsideration for probation. These findings are important for policymakers attempting to manage high incarceration rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criminal juries make decisions of great importance. A key criticism of juries is that they are unreliable in a multitude of ways, from exhibiting racial or gendered biases, to misunderstanding their role, to engaging in impropriety such as internet research. Recently, some have even claimed that the use of juries creates injustice on a large scale, as a cause of low conviction rates for sexual criminality. Unfortunately, empirical research into jury deliberation is undermined by the fact that researchers are unable to study live juries. The indirect sources of evidence used by researchers suffer from various problems, the most important of which is dubious levels of ecological validity. Real jury research—studying live jury deliberation—is controversial. However, as I argue, the objections to it are unconvincing. There is in fact a moral imperative to facilitate real jury research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development of digital finance has changed all aspects of human life and has also had a deep impact on the social governance system. This paper constructs an unbalanced panel of data of the theft crime rates for 289 cities in China during 2014–2019 based on the theft criminal judgments published on China's Judicial Documents website and explores the impact of digital financial inclusion on urban theft crime. It shows that there is a significantly negative correlation between digital financial inclusion and the urban theft crime rate, indicating that the development of digital financial inclusion can effectively reduce urban theft crime, which is also confirmed by instrumental variable analysis based on the spherical distance between cities and Hangzhou, and that digital financial inclusion mainly reduces theft crime committed by more serious and highly educated individuals. In addition, mechanism analysis shows that digital financial inclusion can reduce the expected benefits of theft by enhancing payment convenience and raise the opportunity cost by promoting employment. Therefore, in the Internet era, it is essential for China to continuously improve social governance tools that adapt to the development of new technologies to achieve high-quality urban development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The journal "GesR: Health Law" publishes various articles on current topics in health law in its issue of July 20, 2024. One article deals with recent care structures in the outpatient sector, another focuses on outpatient services provided by hospitals. Other articles address constitutional and social legal considerations regarding cross-sectoral healthcare facilities, as well as various judgments in medical criminal law. The journal "medstra" also publishes articles on medical criminal law topics, including a discussion on the legislative failure of a regulation on assisted suicide and the criminal risks associated with algorithms and negligence. The article provides information on various court judgments and topics in the field of medical criminal law. It covers judgments on psychiatric treatment and liability for an unprevented suicide attempt, an accusation of billing fraud against a pharmacist, and the rejection of opening main proceedings against a mayor in a "vaccination scandal". The central information platform for medical criminal law, medstra-online.de, is also mentioned. Various focal points of medical criminal law are mentioned, including billing fraud, traditional medical criminal law, corruption in the healthcare sector, euthanasia, reproductive medicine, and the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. [Extracted from the article]

Fundamental challenges in human decision-making pose a serious threat to fair evidence evaluation, verdicts in court proceedings, and the administration of justice. Drawing on cognitive psychology, we examined whether a consider-the-opposite approach can assist police officers with positive guidance on how to implement crucial legal thresholds such as the presumption of innocence. In an experiment with sworn police officers (N = 100), we compared a consider-the-opposite condition and a control condition (with no further instructions) and measured the formulated alternative hypotheses. The results show a promising debiasing effect of the consider-the-opposite approach which may strengthen fundamental principles of criminal law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Angle Health Law Review is the property of Angle Publishing Co., Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Ibero-Latinoamericana de Seguros is the property of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Derecho Penal y Criminologia is the property of Editorial UNED and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Apart from the existing sentences, syariah courts could also impose alternative sentences. This study aims at analyzing the implementation of alternative punishments in khalwat cases by syariah courts in Selangor. This study adopts qualitative method in analysing related issues. This study focuses on the forms of judgment in khalwat criminal cases passed by all syariah lower courts in the state of Selangor by looking at the justification of judgment whether punitive or rehabilitative. Data is collected using library research method. Primary and secondary data related to alternative sentences in khalwat cases is cumulated in identifying research problems and questions. Interviews are also conducted on syariah lower court judges and syarie prosecutors in Selangor, Malaysian prison officers and Malaysian correctional center officers in the form of structured and semi-structured interviews. The study finds lacuna in the provisions in the Syariah Criminal Enactment and the Syariah Criminal Procedure Enactment related to application of alternative punishments. This study suggests that the implementation of these related are to be refined and streamlined. It is hoped that this research analysis is capable of addressing problems related to the implementation of alternative sentences in syariah courts. Hopefully this study will also strengthen the implementation of alternative sentences in syariah courts in assisting the court in making judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Ciencia Jurídica is the property of Universidad de Guanajuato and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Emojis are increasingly being used as digital evidence in courts due to the miscommunication and misinterpretation arising from the high variability of their usage and interpretation. Emojis in courts have been extensively researched in extant studies, but relatively little attention has been paid to the emoji variation phenomena in Chinese courts. Through an empirical qualitative content analysis of the court judgments in China and the United States and some supplementary materials, this study posits that an emoji's meaning in courts can be subject to the following six categories of variations: i. variation across platforms, including devices, operating systems, software programs and clients; ii. temporal variation; iii. variation in court cases under different rules of evidence; iv. variation in individual participants; v. variation across social groups; and vi. linguistic-cultural variation. From a social semiotic perspective, emojis as dynamic signs have great meaning potentials, making their meanings context-dependent and interpreter-dependent. For this reason, it is suggested that legal professionals untangle and weave historical, social, cultural and legal contexts into the interpretation of an emoji's meaning. Moreover, a probe into the contextualized configuration of emojis can offer practical insights into the interpretation of emoji-bearing texts in judicial decision-making as well as the admissibility and investigation of digital evidence in courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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" I Criminalizing Sex i ,"[1] Professor Stuart Green's comprehensive new book, is as impressive as it is important. In other offenses, such as theft and rape, consent is used as an offense element. With this clarification in mind, I agree with Green's conclusion with respect to the inculpatory role consent plays in the offense of rape. This alternative definition (or other similar alternatives) can, in my opinion, establish a coherent norm of the rape offense because it surely expresses a wrongdoing of this kind of offense. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Journal Of the College of Law /Al-Nahrain University is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Neue Kriminalpolitik is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Child abuse has negative impacts on the well-being of children and often leads to adverse consequences, such as suicide, alcohol addiction, depression, and substance abuse. To better understand domestic child abuse in Taiwan, this study analyzed 73 criminal judgments (open-access documents) in which the victims of domestic child abuse were children below the age of 12 from the “Judicial Yuan Law and Regulations Retrieving System” database. There were 73 victims and 91 perpetrators involved. The results indicated that younger children were more likely to be victims of physical abuse, and the majority of death cases were committed by biological parents and cohabiting partners. The perpetrators tended to be young males with lower education. Male cohabiting partners appeared to be a high-risk population for child abuse. Approximately 63% of perpetrators experienced poverty, and 24.7% suffered from marital discord. In the 73 cases, 61.6% of the victims died, 21.9% were mildly injured, and 16.5% were severely injured. The sentencing was related to the level of injury, with perpetrators of mild injury sentenced to less than one year while perpetrators with victim death were sentenced to a longer period of imprisonment. It is suggested that parents at higher risk require greater financial and social support and should be educated on appropriate disciplinary techniques.

Food has an impact on everyone's daily life, the long-term stability of the nation, human survival and development, people's lives and health, and the steady advancement of society. A food safety criminal judgment is a legal document used to record the trial of food-related offences. It primarily contains the case's history, information about the parties involved, and the verdict. In order to identify defendants, their charges in court documents, and other important court information, this paper proposes a method for extracting key information from food safety criminal conviction documents based on deep learning. It builds and analyses a hidden Markov model (HMM) based on the corpus of crime-related components, and uses the model trained by a DL neural network to determine the trend of a given data set. In the test result classification task, the results demonstrate that the Transformer model can achieve macro accuracy rates of roughly 0.963, macro recall rates of 0.932, and macro F1 scores of 0.958. Experiments demonstrate the model suggested in this paper's performance and effectiveness in extracting abstract information from food criminal trial documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce here a new critical judgments project: the Anthropocene Judgments project. The project is intended to be an interdisciplinary, collaborative, visionary initiative, a collective effort on the part of legal scholars, writers of speculative fiction, literary scholars and climate scientists to anticipate what may lie ahead. Participants will engage in futuristic modelling and write judgments of, and for, the future – constructing innovative pathways of legal reasoning to address the novel, socio-legal and environmental challenges of the Anthropocene. In this article, we develop our ideas for the project, canvass possible directions for future judgment writing and explain the importance of this ambitious endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the engagement system in Appraisal Theory and taking 100 Chinese criminal judgments as data, this paper analyzes the distribution features and interpersonal functions of engagement resources in Chinese criminal judgments. The findings are as follows. First, in Chinese criminal judgments, dialogic contractive resources outnumber dialogic expansive ones. Of the nine types of engagement resources, Deny takes the largest proportion. Entertain, Acknowledge, Pronounce, and Endorse are also favored by judges, while Counter, Endorse+Pronounce, Concede, Endorse+Acknowledge, and Distance are much less favored. Second, the dialogic space is adjusted in different parts of judgments due to different engagement strategies, narrowing down in the Head, Fact, and Reason parts, then nearly closing up in the Result part, and finally opening up in the Ending part. Third, Deny, Pronounce, Endorse+Pronounce, Endorse, and Distance are used to show that criminal judgments are just, authoritative, persuasive, and compulsory. By acknowledging the arguments and submissions that have been presented, judges are showing respect for the litigation rights of the various parties, while the featured strategies of Counter, Concede, and Entertain increase the acceptability of the judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The judgment in Ntaganda constitutes a landmark decision in which the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the first time accepted an accused's criminal liability based on indirect co-perpetration. And yet, the concept of indirect co-perpetration continues to remain heavily contested. In this article, I use the Ntaganda Trial and Appeals Chamber judgments as a starting point for disentangling the control theory. I argue that the concept of control is a multidimensional theory. It is based on both empirical and normative considerations and constitutes a mixture of individual and collective liability. The meaning of control is not uniform: it varies along several dimensions that are applied depending on the facts of the case. The ICC's flexible application of the notion of control does not fit well with the uniform framework it has drawn up in establishing the liability of indirect co-perpetrators. There is a gap between the law in the books and the law in action, which triggers questions about the possibilities and limitations of judicial creativity at the ICC. To enable better public accountability, transparency and legal certainty, I propose a model of factor-based reasoning at the ICC that can streamline and better justify what currently is a very fluid liability theory generating problematic case law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: This study aimed to identify whether clinicians’ gender, clinical experience, and personal attitudes influenced their perception of criminality of specific sexual behaviours, their judgments about criminal liability if mentally disordered, and the need for treatment as part of criminal settings for those having ICD-11 paraphilic disorders. Method: In a secondary analysis of data only vignettes with the least (do not meet paraphilic disorder diagnostic requirements) and most extreme (met paraphilic disorder diagnostic requirements) descriptions of ICD-11 frotteuristic, coercive sexual sadism, and exhibitionistic arousal patterns and related behavior were randomly presented to participants. A total of 1,101 clinicians rated one to three vignettes (a total of 1,884) answering questions regarding diagnosis, criminal features, and their own attitudes. Results: The ICD-11 diagnostic guidelines were adequately used to distinguish paraphilic disorders from non-pathological arousal patterns. Vignette severity was the most important predictor for clinicians’ determination that a crime was committed. Results showed an interaction of the classification of paraphilic disorders, clinicians’ gender, and personal attitudes with judgments about concepts associated with criminality, criminal liability if a diagnosis was indicated, and the need for treatment in forensic settings. Conclusions: Increased formal education, clinical training about these disorders, and evidence-based treatment guidelines are required to avoid biases that may come from preconceived ideas and personal attitudes. Laws and policies that unnecessarily restrict the treatment of these patients in non-forensic settings—for example, when the individual is distress about the arousal pattern but no crime has been committed—should be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In 2016, China introduced an 'Admission of Guilt and Acceptance of Punishment' system (known as 'plea leniency') premised primarily on the ideal of punishing crime efficiently while advancing the protection of human rights. In this article, I challenge this official rationale by critically examining the legitimacy of plea leniency as a rights-based approach to crime. Drawing on procedural justice theory, I use extant research data and online criminal judgments from the courts in Shanghai to unravel manifold mismatches between the plea leniency process and a procedurally just decision-making process that respects individual rights. My contention is that the operational dynamics of plea leniency is weighed heavily towards efficacy with little regard for the fundamental norms of due process and fairness in which the procedural legitimacy of this new form of summary dispositions is grounded. By tying the expedition of criminal proceedings to guilty pleas, plea leniency represents a discursive continuity of China's broader criminal justice culture, and as such, it fails in operating on a more just, respectful, and communicative basis to accommodate defendants' interests which stand at the core of its operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]