Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The empirical evidence has consistently shown that childhood aggression is a precursor of later delinquency (e.g., Brook et al., 1995; Harachi et al., 2006). However, few studies have examined whether ethnic/racial group membership moderates this association. The current investigation examined teacher reported child aggression (K-5th grade) on later referrals to the juvenile justice system by ethnic/racial group (American Indian, Caucasian, and Hispanic). Mean levels of children’s aggression were compared by official juvenile court status across groups. Furthermore, changes in mean levels of aggression were examined over time by racial/ethnic group in both the non-referred and referred groups. The sample included N = 4,622 ethnically diverse children (males and females) part of a large-scale violence prevention effort (Embry et al., 1996). Preliminary findings based on mean level comparisons over time by referral status provided evidence that levels of aggression remained largely stable over time across all three groups. Findings also indicated that for Caucasian and Hispanic children, mean levels of aggression were significantly different by referral status. However, this was not found for American Indian children. Additional analyses will focus on person-centered growth trajectories in aggression over time by referral status and across racial/ethnic groups.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of language organizes symbolic action along the poles of rhetoric, poetics, and hermeneutics. Symbolic action, for Ricoeur, has a referential force beyond that of literal denotation. In The Rule of Metaphor, he articulates a “metaphorical reference” that arises from the ashes of an impossible literal reference. In Time and Narrative he expands his notion of metaphorical reference, identifying the “interweaving reference” of narrative that makes temporality comprehensible in language. These two poetic references are the work of the productive imagination and are recognized through the hermeneutic reconstruction of the semantics of the sentence and the discourse of the text. Poetics and hermeneutics are the source of creative innovation in language through metaphorical and interweaving reference.
The rhetorical dimension, however, never receives rigorous treatment by Ricoeur: it is either the “reduced” rhetoric of tropology or the Aristotelian combination of doxa, enthymeme, and persuasion. The only “rhetorical reference” we might find is the doxastic stock of pre-existing opinion. Utopia, “living” metaphor, and emplotment are fundamentally poetic forces, while rhetoric is saddled with ideology, the “dead” metaphors of doxa, and logical arrangement.
This paper attempts to expand Ricoeur’s conception of the productive imagination such that it can be seen as operative in rhetorical action. Doxa is not a static construct, but rather an imaginative re-construction by the speaker (or other agent of symbolic action, including the rhetorical critic). Rhetoric operates by means of a dialectic of doxa and innovation, wherein the interpretation of doxa by the rhetorical agent is itself an act of the productive imagination. This interpretive act transforms the symbolism of action in what Ricoeur calls the practical field. The result is a kind of “rhetorical reference” that is parallel to Ricoeur’s notions of “metaphorical reference” and the “interweaving reference.” Rhetorical reference can help critics think about the materiality and specificity of rhetoric, especially insofar as it constantly re-works the collective meaning through its capacity to literally re-create doxa. This reference will help us understand the ways in which common sense is constituted and contested as rhetorical discourse.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The discussion about a methodology of legal decision making is mostly one about how to construct and justify normative expectations. These normative expectations are,with the exception of procedural law, focused on the environment of the legal system, e.g. on the family in family law, on the economy in commercial law.

This paper tries to analyze the second aspect of second order observation within the legal system, that is the construction of and argument about cognitive expectations in the form of legal risks ( including chance ).These legal risks are. unlike e.g. political and economic risks , transitory risks. The risk assessment ( e.g. by law firms or lower courts ) is done both inside the functional system (assessing what the product of a legal decision making process look like ? ) and outside it (assessing what will be the, inter alia , political or economic outcomes , i.e.how resources will be changed by the product of the legal process? ) ‘Legal products’, with minor exceptions , do not affect any legal resources but constitute transitory risks to be judged after the event from politics , the economy and in other environments of the legal system.

The THEORETICAL question will be: How can the analysis of legal risks be integrated into a Luhmann-like theory that, unlike a Bourdieu-like one , does not focus on resources ( What is at stake? Bourdieu: forms of capital ?) when constructing functional spheres of the social .

The EMPIRICAL questions will result in one hypothesis and a multi case-study to test it.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: American public policy with respect to private corporations is without doubt “exceptional.” Scholars from Alexis de Tocqueville to James S. Coleman have noted Americans’ unusual propensity for “associating,” or organizing privately, without the assistance of the state. Most explain this particular feature of American social behavior as the result of either the unique “norms and habits” of the American people or the absence of state-regulated bodies that might otherwise have performed necessary public functions. These perspectives overlook the role of corporate law in the history of American associationalism in general and the pre-revolutionary origins of American corporate law in particular. This paper explores the colonial origins of American corporate law and seeks to relate them to the 19th century proliferation of both for-profit and non-profit private corporations. Incorporation is, by definition, a legal privilege granted and protected by the state. Post-colonial American legislatures created the legal norm of “freedom of incorporation” in light of their forebears’ frustration with an English system in which corporate charters were rarely granted and in which colonial assemblies’ right to grant such charters remained ambiguous. Two brief examples are discussed: the early colonial struggle to charter America’s first universities and the post-Revolutionary fight over the incorporation of state and national banks. The former case — the colonial fight over the issuance of college charters, represents a key “turning point” in the political development of the United States. In an effort to construct a new explanation of the long-standing differences between American and Canadian political culture, counter-examples from the history of Canadian legal and economic development are discussed as well.