Trust and legitimacy across Europe: a FIDUCIA report on comparative public attitudes towards legal authority

FIDUCIA (New European Crimes and Trust-based Policy) seeks to shed light on a number of distinctively ‘new European’ criminal behaviours which have emerged in the last decade as a consequence of both technology developments and the increased mobility of populations across Europe. A key objective of FIDUCIA is to propose and proof a ‘trust-based’ policy model in relation to emerging forms of criminality – to explore the idea that public trust and institutional legitimacy are important for the social regulation of the trafficking of human beings, the trafficking of goods, the criminalisation of migration and ethnic minorities, and cybercrimes. In this paper we detail levels of trust and legitimacy in the 26 countries, drawing on data from Round 5 of the European Social Survey. We also conduct a sensitivity analysis that investigates the effect of a lack of measurement equivalence on national estimates

Trust in justice and the legitimacy of legal authorities: topline findings from a European comparative study

Issues of public trust in justice and institutional legitimacy are becoming increasingly salient in debate about criminal justice across Europe. Legitimate authority can be defined as having three interlinked elements: (a) legality (acting according to the law); (b) shared values (values that are shared by those with authority and those subject to that authority); and (c) consent (the sense amongst the policed of a moral obligation to obey the authority). According to this definition, legitimacy is present not only when individuals recognise the authority of institutions and feel a corresponding duty of deference to them (consent); it is also present when individuals believe that justice institutions have a proper moral purpose (shared values), and that justice institutions follow their own rules as well as the rules that govern everyone in society (legality). With this definition in mind, we analyse in this chapter data from the fifth European Social Survey on relationships between public trust in justice institutions and public perceptions of the legitimacy of these institutions

Conceptualization of Legal Terms in Different Fields of Law: The Need for a Transparent Terminological Approach

Researchers often use subject-specific terminology in order to facilitate communication within a given field of law. Difficulties may arise when they must use scientific information that does not belong to their field. The transfer of information from one subject area to another is restricted by the technical vocabulary used in the particular field. If this is so, what happens when lawyers in one field of law use terms from another? Is the concept in question couched in the same term within another field of law as well? The process of conceptualizing one and the same legal term in different legal fields does not always proceed smoothly. As will be illustrated in this paper, the problem of conceptualizing legal terms in different fields of law calls for a transparent terminological approach. While it is true that legal concepts cannot be fully conveyed by terminology, a transparent terminological approach can contribute to the understanding of these concepts and facilitate their use in legal comparisons, thus making such an approach a conditio sine qua non of legal translation

Health promoting prisons: an overview and critique of the concept

The notion that prisons should become more ‘health promoting’ is a policy agenda that is gaining increasing momentum, particularly in England and Wales1 , Scotland2 and across other European nations. The political strides made in this regard have been recognised globally, especially in the United States, where penal health reformers are attempting to replicate successful policy initiatives in Europe3 . Despite the favourable rhetoric, the extent to which the concept of a ‘health promoting prison’ is fully understood and implemented ‘on the ground’ by prison staff and managers in England varies4 . The primary aim of this article, therefore, is to open up and stimulate discussion on the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) concept of a health promoting prison, as the extent to which this idea has been critically considered and debated is minimal. To encourage this wider discussion, the paper has three primary aims. It will first seek to introduce the origins and principles underpinning the health promoting prison; it will then set the health promoting prison within a political context. The paper will go on to explore some drawbacks to the approach, including the underlying conceptual and practical challenges

Fairness Testing: Testing Software for Discrimination

This paper defines software fairness and discrimination and develops a testing-based method for measuring if and how much software discriminates, focusing on causality in discriminatory behavior. Evidence of software discrimination has been found in modern software systems that recommend criminal sentences, grant access to financial products, and determine who is allowed to participate in promotions. Our approach, Themis, generates efficient test suites to measure discrimination. Given a schema describing valid system inputs, Themis generates discrimination tests automatically and does not require an oracle. We evaluate Themis on 20 software systems, 12 of which come from prior work with explicit focus on avoiding discrimination. We find that (1) Themis is effective at discovering software discrimination, (2) state-of-the-art techniques for removing discrimination from algorithms fail in many situations, at times discriminating against as much as 98% of an input subdomain, (3) Themis optimizations are effective at producing efficient test suites for measuring discrimination, and (4) Themis is more efficient on systems that exhibit more discrimination. We thus demonstrate that fairness testing is a critical aspect of the software development cycle in domains with possible discrimination and provide initial tools for measuring software discrimination.Comment: Sainyam Galhotra, Yuriy Brun, and Alexandra Meliou. 2017. Fairness Testing: Testing Software for Discrimination. In Proceedings of 2017 11th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), Paderborn, Germany, September 4-8, 2017 (ESEC/FSE'17). https://doi.org/10.1145/3106237.3106277, ESEC/FSE, 201

Synonymy and Polysemy in Legal Terminology and Their Applications to Bilingual and Bijural Translation

The paper focuses on synonymy and polysemy in the language of law in English-speaking countries. The introductory part briefly outlines the process of legal translation and tackle the specificity of bijural translation. Then, traditional understanding of what a term is and its application to legal terminology is considered; three different levels of vocabulary used in legal texts are outlined and their relevance to bijural translation explained. Next, synonyms in the language of law are considered with respect to their intension and distribution, and examples are given to show that most expressions or phrases which are interchangeable synonyms in the general language should be treated carefully in legal translation. Finally, polysemes in legal terminology are discussed and examples given to illustrate problems potentially encountered by translators

Defining Law Terms: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

The translation practice trends towards legal definitions seem to be more and more informed by the globalization and ‘Europeanisation’ processes now constituting a still broader context of legal communication rather than confined to the text of a legal instrument itself