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I test how the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, promulgated by the United States Sentencing Commission, affected district court decision making from 1999 to 2003. Policymakers effectively used legal regulation to constrain judicial discretion by specifying (a) the sentencing ranges applicable to certain factual patterns, (b) the departures from these ranges allowed for prosecutors, or (c) the departures allowed for judges. My results establish significant differences in how judges make decisions depending on whether or not they were constrained by guideline ranges. When the guidelines curtailed judges' discretion, judges followed these guidelines but overwhelmingly sentenced defendants to the minimum sentence possible under the guidelines. Conversely, when guidelines allowed judges to depart from the sentencing ranges and instead to exercise broad discretion, they used this authority, and case sentences, although widely varying, were right censored at a point at or below the guideline minimum. Finally, the lowest sentences arose from prosecutors' motions rather than judges' own initiatives.

Drinking alcohol, a normative behavior during adolescence in the United States, has significant consequences for health and well-being in adolescence and beyond. Highly social in nature, it is also a domain in which to assess the implications of the assimilation of immigrant youth into American peer culture. Using a Mexican American sample drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (N = 1,034), this study found generational differences in adolescent drinking behaviors, with more recent immigrants less likely to drink or binge drink. It also found generational differences in the social ecology of friendship groups, with first- and second-generation youth in friendship groups with higher concentrations of coethnic and other immigrant youth who engaged in less party behaviors. These differences did not explain generational differences in adolescent drinking behaviors but did condition the drinking behaviors of second-generation Mexican Americans. More specifically, second-generation youth with more White friends and friends who engaged in more party behaviors were more likely to binge drink than all others.

ABSTRACT**:  This study identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the the new regulatory framework for railways in Spain. We offer a description of the present situation of the railway industry in Spain, following the coming into force of the new Railway Industry Law in January 2005. We also analyse the international experience in light of the principles underlying the liberalization of the railway industry in Europe and, in particular, the cases of the United Kingdom and France. These two models are suitable for our purposes based on these main items: the degree of effective competition, the similarity to the Spanish case, the rail market growth and the geographical location. Our conclusions are that Spain has overcome some mistakes made by the countries mentioned above, like leaving infrastructure investment or security aspects in the hands of the private sector, however others have been committed, such as the excessive influence of the government on the basic actors of the industry or defining a complex system without well defined responsibilities.

AbstractProperty is an important part of modern economies with significant social and environmental consequences. As a result, practitioners and scholars have begun focusing on the social responsibility and sustainability of property investors. This paper expands that work by examining Responsible Property Investing among investment organizations in the United States. Responsible Property Investing is defined as efforts that go beyond compliance with minimum legal requirements to better manage the environmental, social, and governance issues associated with property investing. A survey of senior American executives finds that most organizations are going beyond compliance, implementing management strategies and investing in properties that are consistent with Responsible Property Investment principles. Most executives also place their organization beyond compliance in a Responsible Property Investing stage model. Business concerns are the leading drivers and impediments. Among the various types of organizations studied, pension funds, foundations and endowments lag behind others in implementing Responsible Property Investing. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

The conduct of war is among the most important acts of the state. In the last century alone, failure in this undertaking has toppled governments and imposed hostile occupation under a conqueror's rule for hundreds of millions from Paris to Warsaw and Tokyo to Jakarta. Military failure in World War I destroyed the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires and created a host of new states in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in their stead. Allied military victory in World War II made global superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union, and split Germany into two countries; the success of Soviet arms ended Latvian, Lithuanian, and Estonian independence, and resulted in a generation of subjugation under Soviet satellite rule for the peoples of Eastern Europe. Pyrrhic victory in two world wars exhausted Britain and brought an end to its global economic hegemony. Failure in internal war has toppled governments from Afghanistan to Vietnam; variations in the conduct of such wars can mean the difference between decades of misery in grinding stalemates as in Lebanon or in a rapid, decisive conclusion as in Rwanda's.

This article analyses exchanges of support between the elderly and adult generations and by gender, based on data from the United Nations household survey in Mexico City (SABE, 2000), and the National Study of Ageing and Health (ENASEM, 2001). Results indicate that in Mexico both generations — elderly parents and adult children — provide support, such as money, services, care or gifts for grandchildren, according to gender roles and the generation's resources. Men provide monetary support and reproduce their role as family providers, but this role depends on having an income from work and, in later years, a pension, a more common situation among men than among women. Women develop their female domestic role as caregivers. They do not have a formal income, but receive informal economic support and offer services and care to their relatives, reproducing their invisible and unpaid work during their life course. Both types of support are widely exchanged between elderly parents and adult children and children-in-law.

ABSTRACTThis essay reflects upon post‐World War II and post‐Cold War admissions of low‐skilled temporary foreign workers to North America and Europe. The author's hope is that lessons from history can help Polish (and other new European Union immigration states) develop well‐informed labour migration policy. The lessons from North America and Europe suggest that admissions of low‐skilled temporary foreign workers lead to short‐term economic benefits and long‐term economic, political, and social costs. This, in turn, makes coherent and humane statecraft difficult to achieve.Considering the complexity of temporary foreign worker admissions, Polish policymakers would be better off avoiding them like the United States, France, and Switzerland have largely done in the post‐Cold War period after learning the lessons from the post‐war era. The alleged labour shortages and illegal migration pressure could be addressed through settlement‐oriented policies which are more likely to prevent unexpected outcomes since they allow greater economic, social, and political integration of admitted immigrants.

The recent publication of the fifth (revised) edition of the Digest of decisions and principles of the International Labor Organization (ILO)'s Committee on Freedom of Association offers an apposite moment to critique a body of widely, but uncritically, referenced global labor norms. Reconstructed without their obscuring phraseology, these rules are easily seen as a code that regularizes the exercise of state violence against workers' associational activities, particularly those that transcend labor's "guerilla fights" with capital and pursue emancipatory objectives. Paradoxically, one of the few social spaces beyond their reach, and beyond the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state generally, is the very sphere in which they are produced, the meta‐bureaucracies of the United Nations (UN) system. The ILO and UN‐system workers, who constitute an often‐overlooked autonomous class formation, toil under unique structural conditions, notably the absence of a global state, which offer great potential as a site for emancipatory proletarian projects on a global scale.

AbstractThis article provides new calculations on the effects of demographic change on living standards in all 30 OECD countries using the latest demographic projections up to 2050 from the United Nations, World Population Prospects, 2004 Revision. The calculations include several potential dividends that could offset, at least in part, the costs of a lower working age population share. The effects of demographic change calculated here are mechanical in that there is no explicit optimising behaviour. In the worst case scenario, which assumes zero potential dividends and no increase in labour force participation rates, the negative effect of demographic change on living standards among OECD countries over the whole period from 2006 to 2050 ranges from zero to 28 per cent, with an average over all countries of 15.5 per cent. In the best case scenario the average effect is zero. About half of the difference between the best and worst case scenarios is accounted for by higher labour force participation and about half by the potential dividends from demographic change.

We discuss recent cases of Chinese buyout activity in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD; especially in the United States and European Union) in resource and manufacturing sectors. While most of the buyout attempts have been unsuccessful, they serve as a catalyst for a wider discussion on the implications for global arrangements for cross-border acquisitions. Three specific issues are raised. The first is subsidization through low- or no-interest loans by the Chinese Central Bank to companies investing abroad. The second is the transparency of entities involved in buyout attempts. Most Chinese companies have close ties to multiple levels of government and are not subject to the standard reporting required of OECD companies. The third involves national security concerns in OECD countries and the possibility of China acquiring sensitive technology when Chinese companies purchase companies abroad. These issues have not been addressed in existing OECD and World Trade Organization investment policy initiatives, and have yet to be discussed in the global forum.

Punk in England is usually thought of as being related to a critique of stadium rock or to the disillusionment of a generation that saw nothing in the future but drudgery. In this article I argue that punk has more profound connections. Punk in England was driven by two Jewish managers, Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes, but, more important, punk's general politics of nihilism express in a cultural context the shock and trauma of the Holocaust. After almost three decades of near-silence, by the late 1970s the Holocaust was beginning to be named and talked about. The horror of this event on not just Jews but Western society more generally, as the acknowledgment of the genocide began to undermine the historical acceptance of Enlightenment assumptions about progress, science, and the moral righteousness of Western civilization, led to an existential crisis best expressed in punk. Whereas in the United States many punk performers were Jewish, in England the Jewish connections are to be found in the managers and in the lyrics.

AbstractThe article examines and compares two recent judgments which provide some of the most valuable examples of the difficulties surrounding the application of international humanitarian law to the phenomenon of terrorism: the Hamdan judgment of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Targeted Killings judgment of the Supreme Court of Israel. Both judgments deal with the thresholds of applicability of the law of armed conflict, as well as with the concept of unlawful combatancy and the relationship between human rights law and humanitarian law. Both judgments are at times inconsistent and lacking in analysis, with the Hamdan judgment in particular misinterpreting the relevant international authorities, including the Commentaries on the Geneva Conventions. Despite these flaws, or because of them, both of these judgments remain instructive. The purpose of this article is to present the lessons for the future that these two decisions might bring to ongoing debates on the impact of global terrorism on the law of armed conflict.

Eggs and sperm are parallel bodily goods in that each contributes half of the reproductive material needed to create life. Yet these cells are produced by differently sexed bodies, allowing for a comparative analysis of how the social process of bodily commodification varies based on sex and gender. Drawing on interview and observational data from two egg agencies and two sperm banks in the United States, this article compares how staff recruit, screen, market, and compensate women and men donors. Results show how gendered norms inspire more altruistic rhetoric in egg donation than in sperm donation, producing different regimes of bodily commodification for women and men. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for debates in sociology of gender about biological differences among women and men and the cultural norms attributed to these differences; debates in economic sociology about how social factors shape the expansion of the market; and debates in medical sociology about the intersection of the market and medical practice.

This state-of-the-evidence review summarizes characteristics of intervention studies published from January 2000 through December 2005 in five psychiatric nursing journals. Intervention studies were defined as those evaluating the application of nursing strategies/procedures/practices for enhancing/promoting health or preventing disability/dysfunction. Of 486 research studies published in those journals, 77 were intervention studies, including 77% conducted in the United States. Interventions reflected psychological (57%), social (9%), and biological (12%) dimensions of the biopsychosocial model; 22% of the studies tested interventions with overlapping dimensions. Some studies included persons of various ages; however, 7 focused on adolescents, 36 on adults, and 10 on elders; 2 included children. The findings describe the current state of published intervention research in five psychiatric nursing journals and suggest the need for increased dissemination of intervention research, more rigorous testing of interventions, and more focused programs of research to build evidence for effective psychiatric nursing interventions across the lifespan and globally.

What do citizens need from the media, and how should this be regulated? Western democracies are witnessing a changing regulatory regime, from "command-andcontrol" government to discursive, multistakeholder governance. In the United Kingdom, the Office of Communications (Ofcom) is required to further the interests of citizens and consumers, which it does in part by aligning them as the citizen-consumer. What is meant by this term, and whether it captures the needs of citizens or subordinates them to those of consumers, has been contested by civil society groups as well as occasioning some soul-searching within the regulator. By triangulating a discursive analysis of the Communications Act 2003, key actor interviews with the regulator and civil society bodies, and focus groups among the public, the authors seek to understand how these terms ("citizen," "consumer," and "citizen-consumer") are used to promote stakeholder interests in the media and communications sector, not always to the benefit of citizens.