Family Law

THE HOME FRONT: NOTES FROM THE FAMILY WAR ZONE. By Louise Armstrong JUSTICE, EQUAL OPPORTUNITY, AND THE FAMILY. By James S. Fishkin

Book Review: Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform. by James S. Fishkin.

Book review: Democracy and Deliberation: New Directions for Democratic Reform. By James S. Fishkin. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 1991. Pp. viii, 133. Reviewed by: Michael Fitts

Vers une démocratie délibérative : L'expérimentation d'un idéal : Extrait de Citizen competence and democratic institutions, sous la direction de Stephen L. Elkin et de Karol Edward Soltan, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999, chapitre XII, p. 279-290

Le texte de Fishkin que nous publions ici montre qu'une filiation étonnamment claire l'unit à James Bryce et à George Gallup. Comme ses deux prédécesseurs, James S. Fishkin accorde un intérêt particulier aux mécanismes favorisant la manifestation des opinions, l'expression des préférences et la production des décisions collectives, dans une relation critique et distanciée avec les procédures électorales (...)

The Effects of Deliberative Polling in an EU-wide Experiment: Five Mechanisms in Search of an Explanation

Deliberative Polls simulate public opinion in a given policy domain when members of the relevant mass public are better informed about the issues involved. This article reports on the results of a three-day Deliberative Poll, conducted before the June 2009 European Parliament elections, to evaluate the effects of deliberation on a representative sample of EU citizens. Findings show that, compared with a control group, deliberators changed their views significantly on immigration (becoming more liberal), climate change (becoming greener) and the EU itself (becoming more pro-European). Five different explanations of why deliberation appears to work are tested: sampling bias, increased political knowledge, discussion quality, small group social conformity pressure and the influence of other Deliberative Poll actors, but none is satisfactory.</jats:p

Scaling Up Deliberative Democracy as Dispute Resolution in Healthcare Reform: A Work in Progress

Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) denotes the problem of jointly localizing a moving platform and mapping the environment. This work studies the SLAM problem using a combination of inertial sensors, measuring the platform's accelerations and angular velocities, and a monocular camera observing the environment. We formulate the SLAM problem on a nonlinear least squares (NLS) batch form, whose solution provides a smoothed estimate of the motion and map. The NLS problem is highly nonconvex in practice, so a good initial estimate is required. We propose a multi-stage iterative procedure, that utilises the fact that the SLAM problem is linear if the platform's rotations are known. The map is initialised with camera feature detections only, by utilising feature tracking and clustering of  feature tracks. In this way, loop closures are automatically detected. The initialization method and subsequent NLS refinement is demonstrated on both simulated and real data

James S Fishkin (21st June 2018) Democracy When the People are Thinking: Revitalising our Politics through Public Deliberation

The UK has been subjected to years of political uncertainty and turmoil as a consequence of the majority public decision to leave the European Union in the 2016 Referendum. ‘Brexit’ is described by politicians as ‘the will of the people[i].’ It would, politicians argue, undermine democracy not to deliver this decision. Do we really know the will of the people, however, when the public is subject to hugely expensive campaigns of persuasion which promote false information and are funded by individuals who have an interest in the outcome of the vote; when they are denied access to robustly-researched, accurate information; and when a fully representative public have not properly deliberated the reasons for and against the competing alternatives in conditions which ensure everyone’s views can be meaningfully expressed and equally counted? &nbsp; [i] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/election-2017-40140983/may-delivering-on-will-of-the-peopl

Aging, Equality, and Confucian Selves

Liberal democracy aims to treat all adult citizens as politically equal, at least in ideal cases: Once a citizen is over the age of majority, she is deemed a full-fledged member of the community and in theory has equal standing with all other adult citizens when it comes to making policy and participating in the political realm in general. I consider three questions: (1) Is there any plausible alternative to a standard "all adult citizens have equal political standing" model of democracy that could be drawn from a specifically Confucian valuing of elder members of the community? (2) Insofar as there is a plausible alternative, what might it reveal about differences between how liberalism and Confucianism think of human selves as located in time? (3) What sort of difference would it make if the Confucian valuing of age were implemented via informal social norms, on the one hand, or via explicit institutional mechanisms and procedures, on the other