The Legislative Role of Juries

1984 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-634 ◽  
Author(s):  
James P. Levine
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Regional Differences ◽  
Jury Trial ◽  
Conviction Rate ◽  
Selective Service ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Public

Is it possible that jurors, in the process of evaluating the evidence against a defendant, act to some degree as legislators by assessing the soundness of policies they perceive the criminal law to be supporting? To test the hypothesis that jurors reflect public opinion in making such judgments, the author correlated changes in public opinion on war policy with fluctuations in the proportion of jury trial defendants found guilty of violating selective service laws.It was found that juries convicted those accused of draft evasion at a higher rate when a war was in progress than during peacetime and that during the Korean and Vietnam wars the conviction rate was directly correlated with public approval of American military actions. A breakdown of regional differences showed that the South was somewhat more supportive of the Vietnam War and more prone to convict in selective service cases than the rest of the nation was, but the results of this comparative analysis were inconclusive. Although the correspondence between public opinion and verdict tendencies was far from perfect (perhaps in part because of the skewed composition of juries), the study does support the notion that jurors draw on prevailing popular sentiments about laws and the public policies the laws further.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Horder
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Jury Trial ◽  
Members Of Parliament ◽  
Adequate Coverage

The criminal law has the resources to address corruption in politics, if prosecutors are willing to use it, and if courts are willing to interpret it so that it provides adequate coverage of wrongdoing, particularly wrongdoing in the form of personal corruption engaged in by Members of Parliament. There needs to be a greater willingness to expose the worst corrupt wrongdoers in high office to the risk of judgment at the bar of public opinion, in the form of jury trial. The offence of misconduct in office provides the most appropriate means of doing this. This is not just because it is likely to provide the most appropriate label, but because the offence highlights the constitutionally fundamental bond of trust between the citizen and the state that is broken when officials indulge in corruption.

Deep Structured Learning for Natural Language Processing

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Yong Li ◽  
Xiaojun Yang ◽  
Min Zuo ◽  
Qingyu Jin ◽  
Haisheng Li ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Food Safety ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Early Warning ◽  
Conditional Random Field ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Related Sequence ◽  
The Public ◽  
Network Public Opinion

The real-time and dissemination characteristics of network information make net-mediated public opinion become more and more important food safety early warning resources, but the data of petabyte (PB) scale growth also bring great difficulties to the research and judgment of network public opinion, especially how to extract the event role of network public opinion from these data and analyze the sentiment tendency of public opinion comment. First, this article takes the public opinion of food safety network as the research point, and a BLSTM-CRF model for automatically marking the role of event is proposed by combining BLSTM and conditional random field organically. Second, the Attention mechanism based on vocabulary in the field of food safety is introduced, the distance-related sequence semantic features are extracted by BLSTM, and the emotional classification of sequence semantic features is realized by using CNN. A kind of Att-BLSTM-CNN model for the analysis of public opinion and emotional tendency in the field of food safety is proposed. Finally, based on the time series, this article combines the role extraction of food safety events and the analysis of emotional tendency and constructs a net-mediated public opinion early warning model in the field of food safety according to the heat of the event and the emotional intensity of the public to food safety public opinion events.

10. The role of media and public opinion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piers Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Policy Process ◽  
War On Terror ◽  
Policy Formulation ◽  
Persuasive Communication ◽  
The Public ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The Media

This chapter examines the relevance of media and public opinion to our understanding of foreign policy and international politics. It first considers whether public opinion influences foreign policy formulation, as argued by the pluralist model, or whether the public are politically impotent, as argued by the elite model. It then explores whether the media can influence foreign policy formulation, as argued by the pluralist model, or whether the media are fundamentally subservient to the foreign policy process, as argued by the elite model. It also integrates these competing arguments with theoretical frames used in the study of international relations: namely, realism, liberalism, and critical approaches (including constructivism and post-structuralism). The chapter concludes by discussing contemporary debates concerning organized persuasive communication and the ‘war on terror’.

Role of Images in Constructing Public Opinion About Environmental Matters in Malaysia

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-130
Author(s):  
Mohamad Saifudin Mohamad Saleh ◽  
Harald Heinrichs ◽  
Nik Norma Nik Hasan
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Environmental Problems ◽  
Environmental Information ◽  
Quantitative Content Analysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Quantitative Content

This paper provides a discussion on the perception of Malaysian media and environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) on the role of images in shaping the public's mind about environmental matters. Two methods were employed for this study. First, a total of 24 participants from the Malaysian media and ENGOs were interviewed. Second, a total of 2,050 environmental articles on media newspapers and ENGOs newsletters from the period of 2012 to 2014 were collected for the quantitative content analysis. The findings from interview confirmed that pictures were labelled by journalists and ENGOs staff as the most important tool in presenting the reality of the environmental problems to the public. This is because, upon seeing the pictures accompanying environmental articles, readers will gain more trust of the environmental information. This was in harmony with the results of the quantitative content analysis, where more than 60% of pictures were found on environmental articles.

1. An introduction to the criminal law

2021 ◽  
pp. 3-25
Author(s):  
David Ormerod ◽  
Karl Laird
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Criminal Law ◽  
Common Law ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Eu Law ◽  
The Public ◽  
Moral Wrong ◽  
Public Nuisance ◽  
Harm To Others

It is neither easy to define crime nor identify the aims of criminal law but some characteristics may be universal to every crime, including that it involves public wrongs and moral wrongs. ‘Public wrongs’ reflect the important role of the public in punishing crimes. A crime incorporating a moral wrong implies that a ‘wrong’ is done or harm to others is involved but experience suggests that morality and criminal law are not coextensive. The chapter introduces students to thinking about criminalization and the need to guard against overcriminalization. It also examines the principal sources of criminal law: common law, statute, EU law, international law and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Problematically, important and serious offences and most defences in English law derive from common law rather than statute, and some offences—from public nuisance to gross negligence manslaughter—have been challenged recently on grounds of certainty and retrospectivity.

The Role of User Comments in Estimation of the Public Opinion Climate and Perceived Support for One’s Opinion

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 569-585
Author(s):  
Oren Soffer ◽  
Galit Gordoni
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Perceived Support ◽  
Online Experiment ◽  
Public Discussion ◽  
The Public ◽  
User Comments ◽  
Study Results ◽  
Negative Comments

Abstract This article examines how user comments influence assessment of public opinion climate and perceived support for one’s opinion. The effects of user-comment sentiment (positive vs. negative) and of user-comment content (with or without personal exemplification) were tested with an online experiment (n = 1,510). Results show that user-comment effects on estimates of public opinion depend mainly on the sentiment of the comments and not on their framing as opinions with or without personal exemplification. Negative comments significantly reduce readers’ estimation of public opinion support of the issue dealt with by the article and affect the perceived support of one’s opinion. Study results refer to the possible dangers in user comments deliberate manipulation in democratic public discussion.

Shaping Public Opinion and Community Mobilisation: The Role of Urdu Language Media in India

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 216-257
Author(s):  
Fahad Hashmi
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Community Mobilisation ◽  
Daily Newspaper ◽  
The Public ◽  
Democratic Practice ◽  
Indian State ◽  
The Public Sphere

Considering the role played by Rashtria Sahara, an Urdu daily newspaper that took recourse to the democratic practice of questioning and challenging the hegemonic formation of the maligned image of Islam and the faith community vis-à-vis terrorism in the discursive arena, that is, the public sphere, this article tries to understand the role of the Urdu language media in shaping the public opinion and mobilising people from within the community. To this end, first, the article seeks to comprehend the present configuration of the Indian public sphere keeping in view its colonial origin. Moreover, the ‘othering’ of Muslims in postcolonial India that has colonial roots, too, has been understood through the idea of ‘interior frontiers’. Second, the role and practices of the Indian state towards Muslims have been taken into account. And, the final section analyses strategies that were put to use by the newspaper to contest the hegemonic formation, which paved the way for social movement to emerge.

Circulation of the World War II / Holocaust analogy in the 1999 Kosovo intervention

2009 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin R. Bates
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
International Conflict ◽  
Military Intervention ◽  
World War ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Public ◽  
Military Involvement ◽  
The World ◽  
Rhetorical Force

This essay offers an analysis of the circulation of World War II and Holocaust analogies in discourses about American military involvement in Kosovo. The essay argues that the World War II/Holocaust analogy provided the public with a new vocabulary for understanding the situation in Kosovo. The essay uses Bill Clinton’s speeches about Kosovo during the first week of American intervention as a representative anecdote for discussing the analogy and its rhetorical force. The essay then probes the circulation of the analogy in other governmental, media, and public opinion outlets. By comparing Kosovo 1999 to Europe 1945, the analogy offers descriptive and prescriptive reasons for American involvement that encourage public approval of military intervention. The essay offers conclusions and implications of this analysis for the understanding of the relationships among rhetoric, public opinion, and international conflict.

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