Principles and prejudice: The erosion of fairness in admissibility determinations relating to historic child sexual abuse trials in Ireland

This thesis interrogates the construction of fairness to the accused in historic child sexual abuse trials in Ireland. The protection of fairness is a requirement of any trial that claims to adhere to the rule of law. Historic child sexual abuse trials, in which the charges relate to events that are alleged to have taken place decades previously, present serious challenges to the ability of the trial process to safeguard fairness. They are a litmus test of the courts’ commitment to fairness. The thesis finds that in historic abuse trials fairness to the accused has been significantly eroded and that therefore the Irish Courts have failed to respect the core of the rule of law in these most serious of prosecutions. The thesis scrutinises two bodies of case law, both of which deal with the issue of whether evidence should reach the jury. First, it examines the decisions on applications brought by defendants seeking to prohibit their trial. The courts hearing prohibition applications face a dilemma: how to ensure the defendant is not put at risk of an unfair trial, while at the same time recognising that delay in reporting is a defining feature of these cases. The thesis traces the development of the prohibition case law and tracks the shifting interpretations given to fairness by the courts. Second, the thesis examines what fairness means in the superior courts’ decisions regarding the admissibility of the following kinds of evidence, each of which presents particular challenges to the ability of the trial to safeguard fairness: evidence of multiple complainants; evidence of recovered memories and evidence of complainants’ therapeutic records. The thesis finds that in both bodies of case law the Irish courts have hollowed out the meaning of fairness. It makes proposals on how fairness might be placed at the heart of courts’ decisions on admissibility in historic abuse trials. The thesis concludes that the erosion of fairness in historic abuse trials is indicative of a move away from the liberal model of criminal justice. It cautions that unless fairness is prioritised in historic child sexual abuse trials the legitimacy of these trials and that of all Irish criminal trials will be contestable.

The Ford administration, Angola and the perception of Post-Vietnam US credibility, 1974-1976

This thesis is a study of how the Gerald Ford administration struggled to address a perceived loss of US credibility after the collapse of Vietnam, with a focus on the role of Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the formulation, implementation and subsequent defence of US Angolan policy. By examining the immediate post-Vietnam period, this thesis shows that Vietnam had a significant impact on Kissinger’s actions on Angola, which resulted in an ill conceived covert operation in another third world conflict. In 1974, Africa was a neglected region in Cold War US foreign policy, yet the effects of the Portuguese revolution led to a rapid decolonization of its African territories, of which Angola was to become the focus of superpower competition. After South Vietnam collapsed in April 1975, Kissinger became fixated on restoring the perceived loss of US prestige, Angola provided the first opportunity to address this. Despite objections from his advisors, Kissinger methodically engineered a covert program to assist two anti-Marxist guerrilla groups in Angola. As the crisis escalated, the media discovered the operation and the Congress decided to cease all funding. A period of heated tensions ensued, resulting in Kissinger creating a new African policy to outmanoeuvre his critics publicly, while privately castigating them to foreign leaders. This thesis argues that Kissinger’s dismissal of internal dissent and opposition from the Congress was influenced by what he perceived as bureaucrats being affected by the Vietnam syndrome, and his obsession with restoring US credibility. By looking at the private and public records – as expressed in government meetings and official reports, US newspaper and television coverage and diplomatic cables – this thesis addresses the question of how the lessons of Vietnam failed to influence Kissinger’s actions in Angola, but the lessons of Angola were heavily influential in the construction of a new US-African policy.

La ruptura de una economía moral y las deslegitimación de las deudas hipotecarias

In Spain, during the recent housing bubble, purchasing a home seemed the most advantageous strategy to access housing, and there was a wide social consensus about the unavoidability of mortgage indebtedness. However, such consensus has been challenged by the financial and real-estate crisis. The victims of home repossessions have been affected by the transgression of several principles, such as the fair compensation for effort and sacrifice, the prioritisation of basic needs over financial commitments, the possibility of a second chance for over-indebted people, or the State's responsibility to guarantee its citizens' livelihood. Such principles may be understood as part of a moral economy, and their transgression has resulted in the emergence of a social movement, the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), that is questioning the legitimacy of mortgage debts. The article reflects on the extent to which the perception of over-indebtedness and evictions as unfair situations can have an effect on the reproduction of the political-economic system, insofar the latter is perceived as able or unable to repair injustice.

Overcoming health inequalities: A participative evaluation framework fit for the task

Aims: Healthcare providers are confronted with the claim that the distribution of health and healthcare provision is inherently unfair. There is also a growing awareness that the tools and methodologies applied in tackling health inequalities require further development. Evaluations as well as interventions usually focus on population-based indicators, but do not always provide guidance for frontline service evaluation and delivery. That is why the evaluation framework presented here focuses on facilitating local service development, service provider and user involvement, and the adequate representation of different population groups. Methods: A participative evaluation framework was constructed by drawing on six common success characteristics extrapolated from the published literature and policies on health inequalities. This framework was then applied to an intervention addressing women’s psychosocial health needs in order to demonstrate its utility in practice. Results: The framework provides healthcare professionals with an evidence-based tool for evaluating projects or programmes targeting health inequalities in ways that are responsive to local contexts and stakeholders. Conclusion: This participative evaluation framework supports the identification of meaningful psychosocial and contextual indicators for assessing the diverse health and social needs of service users. It uses multi-dimensional indicators to assess health and social care needs, to inform local service development, and to facilitate the exchange of knowledge between researchers, service providers, and service users. The inherent responsiveness enables rigorous yet flexible action on local health inequalities.

Nonmarket Capabilities and the Prosecution of Trade Remedy Cases in the United States

The study investigates the prosecution of US trade remedy cases as examples of administrative government agency investigations and seeks to identify key capabilities for effective corporate political strategy targeting these institutions. Trade remedy cases are important policy tools, designed to protect domestic firms from ‘unfair’ import competition. The research contributes to the growing literature on corporate political activity and its links with superior outcomes in the marketplace. Three capabilities are identified: the capability to collect market/non-market intelligence, the capability to build and shape the administrative record, and the capability to align business practice with the US trade remedy institutions.

The determinants of performance appraisal systems: A note (Do Brown and Heywood's results for Australia hold up for Britain?)

This article offers a replication for Britain of Brown and Heywood's analysis of the determinants of performance appraisal in Australia. Although there are some important limiting differences between our two datasets - the Australia Workplace Industrial Relations Survey (AWIRS) and the Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) - we reach one central point of agreement and one intriguing shared insight. First, performance appraisal is negatively associated with tenure: where employers cannot rely on the carrot of deferred pay or the stick of dismissal to motivate workers, they will tend to rely more on monitoring, ceteris paribus. Second, employer monitoring and performance pay may be complementary. However, consonant with the disparate results from the wider literature, there is more modest agreement on the contribution of specific human resource management practices, and still less on the role of job control.

The effects of job demands and low job control on work-family conflict: The role of fairness in decision making and management

The present study examined whether Perceptions of organizational fairness (the procedural and interactional components) were able to diminish the negative effects of high job demands and low job control on the balance between work and family. The study participants were 713 women working in long-term care for elderly people in Finland. The results showed that high job demands, low job control, and unfair decision making were associated with high levels of time-based work interference with family (WIF). Perceptions of organizational fairness were found to partially mediate the association between Job control and WIF In addition, fair treatment and management protected against WIF when demands were low but were unable to bluffer against the negative effects of high job demands. (C) 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

What now for the contact hypothesis? Towards a new research agenda

This article begins with a review of recent research on the Contact Hypothesis. It will be shown that the literature in this area has become essentially closed and self-referential where the core political and theoretical premises that underpin the Hypothesis have been taken for granted and the debates have therefore become restricted simply to how best to measure the influence of inter-group contact. One of the key reasons for this is the lack of critical engagement with the Contact Hypothesis from those of a more structuralist and/or ‘radical’ perspective. This may be because the individualistic focus of the Hypothesis is seen from such a perspective as largely irrelevant to addressing racial and ethnic divisions and/or because it may be felt that to engage with the concept is to give it undue legitimacy. It will be argued in this article, however, that the wholesale dismissal of the Contact Hypothesis is a little premature. Just as recent research on racial and ethnic divisions has drawn attention to the way in which such divisions exist at a number of layers within the social formation – from the structural, political and ideological through to the sub-cultural, interactional and biographical – so must any initiatives aimed at addressing these divisions be similarly ‘multi-layered’ in their approach. However, it will be argued that for research to help inform specific strategies at the interactional level, there needs to be a significant change in the way that inter-group contact, and the Contact Hypothesis more generally, is studied. The article will ‘model out’ one potentially fruitful way in which such research can develop through the use of an ethnographic case study involving a cross-community scheme arranged for Protestant and Catholic children in Northern Ireland.

Waterpower: Politics and the Geography of Water Provision

Access to potable water is frequently said to be the defining world crisis of the twenty-first century. The argument is usually framed in terms of either direct environmental constraints or various totalistic views of how the political determines outcomes. There is little or no scope for the agency of practical politics. Both physical and human geographers tend to be dismissive of the possibilities of democratic politics ever resolving crises such as those of the geography of water provision, in part because of views of scientific expertise that devalue popular participation in decisions about technical matters such as water quality and distribution. Such dismissal also has much to do with a more generalized denigration of politics. Politics (the art of political deliberation, negotiation, and compromise) needs defending against its critics and many of its practitioners. Showing how politics is at work around the world in managing water problems and identifying the challenges that water problems pose for politics provides a retort to those who can only envisage inevitable destruction or a totalistic political panacea as the outcomes of the crisis of the century.

Unveiling Fairness for the Consumer:The Law, Economics and Justice of Expanded Arbitration

In recent years, the US Supreme Court has rather controversially extended the ambit of the Federal Arbitration Act to extend arbitration’s reach into, inter alia¸ consumer matters, with the consequence that consumers are often (and unbeknownst to them) denied remedies which would otherwise be available. Such denied remedies include recourse to class action proceedings, effective denial of punitive damages, access to discovery and the ability to resolve the matter in a convenient forum.

The court’s extension of arbitration’s ambit is controversial. Attempts to overturn this extension have been made in Congress, but to no avail. In contrast to American law, European consumer law looks at pre-dispute agreements to arbitrate directed at consumers with extreme suspicion, and does so on the grounds of fairness. In contrast, some argue that pre-dispute agreements in consumer (and employment) matters are consumer welfare enhancing: they decrease the costs of doing business, which is then passed on to the consumer. This Article examines these latter claims from both an economic and normative perspective.

The economic analysis of these arguments shows that their assumptions do not hold. Rather than being productive of consumer surplus, the use of arbitration is likely to have the opposite effect. The industries from which the recent Supreme Court cases originated not only do not exhibit the industrial structure assumed by the proponents of expanded arbitration, but are also industries which exhibit features that facilitate consumer welfare reducing collusion.

The normative analysis addresses the fairness concerns. It is explicitly based upon John Rawls’ notion of “justice as fairness,” which can provide a lens to evaluate social institutions. This Rawlsian analysis considers the use of extended arbitration in consumer matters in the light of the earlier economic results. It suggests that the asymmetries present in the contractual allocation of rights serve as prima facie evidence that such arbitration–induced exclusions are prima facie unjust/unfair. However, as asymmetry is only a prima facie test, a generalized criticism of the arbitration exclusions (of the sort found in Congress and underlying the European regime) is overbroad.

Just a piece of cloth? German courts and employees with headscarves

On 10 October 2002, and on 24 September 2003, the German Federal Labour Court and the German Federal Constitutional Court each delivered a decision on the consequences of wearing a headscarf for employees. Both courts appeared to protect the individual rights of the woman in question. The Federal Labour Court invalidated the dismissal of a salesperson based on the wearing of a headscarf; the Federal Constitutional Court held that a school teacher must not be denied employment on grounds of wearing a headscarf. However, both courts also left some room for manoeuvre in favour of clothing policies or laicism principles which could be used to justify head-scarf bans. This note discussed the potential and drawback of these cases, especially as regards intersectional inequalities along the lines of gender, religion and ethnicity.

'Pues tanto se esconde': Elusion at (inter)play in Ana Caro's El conde Partinuplés

El conde Partinuplés (first published 1653) is one of only two extant plays written by the Sevillan poet/dramatist Ana Caro Mallén de Soto (‘la décima musa sevillana’). Despite McKendrick's dismissal of the play as ‘extremely bad’, it has been the object of substantial critical scrutiny since the 1970s, impelled in great part by the production of modern editions (Luna and Delgado) and by Kaminsky's bio-biographical study (1973). Two responses have dominated: analysis of the play's imaginative reconceptualization of source material (most notably the Classical myth of Cupid and Psyche as contained in Apuleius and transmitted via the anonymous French chivalric romance Portonopeus de Blois; and more contemporary models, such as Calderón's La vida es sueño); discussions of the play from a gender/feminist perspective. There is some inevitable entanglement in these approaches, areas of ideological concurrence, but also of contradiction. This article will offer a critical synthesis of these lines of enquiry around an analysis of the play's patterns of non-identical repetition and, following Hubert's theory of ‘double movement’, will move beyond these to consider the generative and potentially transcendent nature of the interplay of inscription (text) and transcription (interpretive performance). A subversive strategy of elusion underpins this interference, a dynamic, mobile frame within which ‘envidia’ (‘celos’) functions as a prominent dramatic catalyst, directed outwards, and mobilized both as a potent catalyst for the female dramatist's artistic creativity and as an antagonistic interrogation of broader socio-cultural forms of inequality. The play's (new) marvellous versions and inversions expand the functions of the sign beyond Renaissance resemblance and repetition, challenging its promotion of unity and stable identity, and opening up an interactive space between the represented (world/product) and the representing (stage/process). The power of authorities, as figured in/through the dramatic and rhetorical devices of the play, is self-consciously precarious, but it is this very anxious articulation that challenges the very authority of power.

Avaliação do desempenho docente e supervisão pedagógica: um estudo de caso num agrupamento de escolas

A introdução de novas exigências na Avaliação do Desempenho Docente (ADD) em Portugal (Decretos-Lei 15/2007 e 75/2010; Decretos Regulamentares 2/2008 e 2/2010) tem gerado nas escolas e nos professores, desde 2008, situações organizacionais complexas, que urge analisar e compreender. As políticas educativas têm vindo a apontar para a necessidade de um maior investimento nos processos de avaliação de professores, dando relevância ao papel a desempenhar pela supervisão pedagógica nesse contexto. A supervisão da prática letiva passou a ser considerada procedimento fundamental, na medida em que se tornou difícil conceber uma avaliação dos docentes que não incluísse sessões de observação em sala de aula. Fruto destas novas políticas de avaliação de professores, a ADD apresentou-se, do ponto de vista normativo, com base em duas funções: sumativa e formativa. Estas funções exigem maiores investimentos, novas práticas e uma reflexão sobre o papel do professor ancorada numa perspetiva holística, transformadora e emancipatória do seu desenvolvimento profissional. O principal objetivo do nosso estudo consiste em compreender as perceções e práticas desenvolvidas pelos docentes face às alterações introduzidas no sistema da ADD no geral, e, em particular, o papel desempenhado pela supervisão pedagógica (SP) na avaliação entre pares, no segundo ciclo avaliativo (2009-2011). A investigação empírica tem por base um estudo de caso desenvolvido num Agrupamento de escolas do Distrito de Aveiro. A recolha de dados foi concretizada através da administração de um questionário a todos os docentes do Agrupamento e da condução de entrevistas a 26 informadores privilegiados do processo avaliativo. Os principais resultados do estudo de caso apontam para: i) a opinião desfavorável dos professores face ao atual modelo de ADD, dada a sua natureza burocrática, complexa, injusta e a sua escassa utilidade prática, preenchendo apenas requisitos legais e de controlo; ii) um processo de SP, concretamente, a observação de aulas, que não contribui para o desenvolvimento profissional dos professores e tem impacte negativo no trabalho docente, acentuando a artificialidade dos procedimentos e aumentando o clima de competição e de conflito; iii) a sensação de desconforto entre os intervenientes, fazendo emergir sentimentos de injustiça, insegurança e ansiedade que, em seu entender, constituem constrangimentos à melhoria das aprendizagens dos alunos e à qualidade da escola; iv) uma escassa implicação na melhoria das práticas futuras e do desenvolvimento profissional dos docentes. Estes resultados constituem um desafio colocado aos investigadores no sentido de identificarem alternativas de ação para poderem lidar com a complexidade inerente ao processo de avaliação na sua relação com a supervisão pedagógica, com vista à melhoria de desempenho das escolas e dos professores.

A cessação de contrato de trabalho : uma análise jurídico-económica

Dissertação de Mestrado, Ciências Económicas e Empresariais, 18 Dezembro de 2015, Universidade dos Açores.

Análise comparativa entre a promoção para arrendamento e venda de imóveis de habitação

Dissertação para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Civil na Área de Especialização de Edificações