Diplomats in Robes: Judicial Career Paths and Free Speech Decision-Making at the European Court of Human Rights

A substantial body of scholarly research has examined decision-making in domestic high courts, but international judicial behavior remains relatively poorly understood. Building on research that uses judges’ career background as a proxy for their motivations at the European Court of Human Rights, we deploy a new measure of judicial career backgrounds and a new dataset of the Court’s free expression decisions. We combine quantitative analysis of judicial votes with qualitative analysis of judges’ signed dissenting opinions to advance existing understandings of the Court’s decision-making. We show that former diplomats are less likely to support contested free expression claims than their colleagues with different career backgrounds. In their published opinions, former diplomats are more likely to voice concerns about the objectionable nature of particular speech acts and to call for broad judicial deference to state restrictions on such speech. By contrast, judges with prior service in domestic government roles, as well as judges with career backgrounds outside of government, exhibit greater tolerance of objectionable speech, greater willingness to impose European-wide standards, and more frequent invocation of extra-European legal standards. Our findings contribute to broader debates about the influence of individual-level preferences on judicial behavior in international courts.

Common pathways to Dean of Medicine at U.S. medical schools

Purpose We sought to evaluate common leadership experiences and academic achievements obtained by current U.S. Medical School Deans of Medicine (DOMs) prior to their first appointment as Dean in order to elucidate a common pathway for promotion. Methods In April-June 2019 the authors requested a curriculum vitae from each of the 153 LCME-accredited U.S. Medical School DOMs. The authors abstracted data on prior appointments, demographics, and achievements from CVs and online databases. Differences by gender and institutional rank were then evaluated by the Fisher’s exact and Wilcoxon rank sum tests. Results CVs were obtained for 62% of DOMs (95 of 153), with women comprising 16% of the responding cohort (15/95). Prior to appointment as DOM, 34% of respondents had served as both permanent Department Chair and Associate Dean, 39% as permanent Department Chair but not Associate Dean, and 17% as Associate Deans but not permanent Department Chair. There was a non-significant trend for men to have been more likely to have been a permanent Department Chair (76% vs 53%, p = 0.11) and less likely to have been an Associate Dean (48% vs 67%, p = 0.26) compared to women. Responding DOMs at Top-25 research institutions were mostly male (15/16), more likely to have been appointed before 2010 (38% vs 14%, p = 0.025), and had higher H-indices (mean (SD): 73.1 (32.3) vs 33.5 (22.5), p<0.01) than non-Top-25 Deans. Conclusions The most common pathway to DOM in this study cohort was prior service as Department Chair. This suggests that diversification among Department Chair positions or expansion of search criteria to seek leaders from pools other than Department Chairs may facilitate increased diversity, equity, and inclusion among DOM overall.

Variants of design of shooting results self monitoring diaries of the students of educational institutions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia

The research subject is the algorithm of students self monitoring of their shooting training results and the scope of theoretical knowledge in firearms training which are recorded in a self monitoring diary. Students are offered to fill in the sections and columns of a self monitoring diary in accordance with the conditions and standards of exercises of the Firearms training guidelines of internal affairs agencies of the Russian Federation approved by the decree of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia of November 21, 2017 No 880. The research object is the fire discipline of persons being trained in internal affairs bodies of Russia with no prior service. Based on the results of the research of the peculiarities of professional training of internal affairs officers with no prior service, the authors formulate the main sections of a self monitoring diary and offer the variant of a diary design. A shooting results self monitoring diary was tested at firearms training and firearms grenade throwing skills improvement lessons in the course of professional training programs for privates, junior, middle and senior commanders of internal affairs bodies of the Russian Federation.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Beyond the Plantation

Betty’s Hope functioned as a civic and military space as much as an economic space in the early Codrington years. As governors, Christopher Codrington II and Christopher Codrington III doubled as war leaders, employing their prior service and experience and funneling it into military construction. This chapter examines the role that the Codringtons played in fortifying Antigua in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The intersection of civic, military, and economic leadership expected of the Codringtons, are foregrounded by how local politics dominated the placement and funding of Antigua’s fortifications rather than as part of an imperializing project directed from Britain. Using the lens of locality, Waters shows how fortification of Antigua demonstrates how early planation society formed, as well as reinforcing the autonomy of the Antiguan government within the colonial system.

Resistance Assessment of Service-Proven Aging Bridges Incorporating Deterioration-Load Dependency

The historical vehicles passed through an existing bridge can be regarded as proof-loading tests for the bridge, and, as a result, are evident of the bridge’s performance. Such service history information has been utilized to update the estimate of bridge resistance in previous studies with the help of a Bayesian method, where the resistance deterioration process was assumed to be independent of the vehicle load process. This assumption is, however, untenable in many cases where the deterioration stochastic process is statistically correlated with the load process (e.g., a greater load intensity may affect/accelerate the deterioration of structural resistance and the accumulation of structural fragility). With this regard, this paper investigates the effect of correlation between the resistance deterioration and load processes on updating the resistance of aging bridges with prior service load information. The copula function is employed to model the joint distribution of the correlated deterioration and load processes, with which the correlation is measured by the Kendall’s tau. A new method is developed in this paper to assess the updated bridge resistance taking into consideration the deterioration-load dependency in an explicit form. The applicability of the proposed method is illustrated using an existing RC beam bridge. The sensitivity analysis is conducted to examine how the deterioration-load dependency affects the updated resistance of service-proven aging bridges.

US Military Service and Racial/Ethnic Differences in Cardiovascular Disease: An Analysis of the 2011-2016 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System

Objective: To determine: 1) rates of cardio­vascular disease (CVD) among individuals with and without prior US military service; and 2) variation in CVD outcomes by race/ ethnicity.Methods: We performed a cross-sectional study of the 2011-2016 Behavioral Risk Fac­tor Surveillance System during 2018-2019. Groups with (n=369,844) and without (n=2,491,784) prior service were compared overall, and by race/ethnicity. CVD odds were compared using logistic regression. Rate-difference decomposition was used to estimate relative contributions of covariates to differences in CVD prevalence.Results: CVD was associated with military service (OR=1.34; P<.001). Among non- Hispanic Blacks, prior service was associ­ated with a lower odds of CVD (OR=.69; P<.001), fully attenuating the net differ­ence in CVD between individuals with and without prior service. Non-Hispanic Whites who served had the highest odds of CVD, while Hispanics with prior service had the same odds of CVD as non-Hispanic Whites without prior service. After age, smoking and body mass index status were the largest contributors to CVD differences by race/ ethnicity.Conclusions: Results from this study sup­port an association between prior military service and CVD and highlight differences in this association by race/ethnicity. Knowledge of modifiable health behaviors that contrib­ute to differences in CVD outcomes could be used to guide prevention efforts. Ethn Dis. 2019;29(3):451-462; doi:10.18865/ ed.29.3.451

Clearing the Pipeline? Gender and the Review Process at the American Political Science Review

ABSTRACTIs the peer-review process at academic journals gendered? The answer to this question has important implications for the advancement of women in the political science profession. However, few studies have had access to data that can evaluate whether the peer-review process is gendered. We investigate this for papers submitted to the American Political Science Review across two editorial teams to identify trends over time. We evaluate overall differences across gender, but we also present more fine-grained data to evaluate gender differences across subfield, methodology, and submitting author’s institutional affiliation and academic rank. Furthermore, we show that prior service as a reviewer is associated with a higher acceptance rate for first-time submitters. We demonstrate that the review process is not gendered. Women’s share of submissions and acceptances has risen but remains lower than their presence in the discipline.

A Cause in the Caucasus

In December 2007, Damon wilson returned to the White House to take a position as senior director for Europe in the National Security Council of George W. Bush. Having spent the previous year in Iraq, Wilson was back working on an issue he was passionate about: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) enlargement. Prior service in the State Department, the NATO secretary general’s office, and the White House gave Wilson familiarity with Euro-Atlantic divisions on the subject. Thrust into preparation for the forthcoming NATO summit in Bucharest, he was surprised that no internal policy process had yet generated a formal presidential decision on whether the United States was willing to offer a path to NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine. Both states underwent “color revolutions” that saw fraudulent election results overturned and new elections sweep dynamic Westernizing leaders into power, events many Russian officials viewed as Western-fomented coups. Three years later in 2007, things were not looking so positive in either state. In Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili’s government had violently suppressed antigovernment demonstrations a few weeks earlier, while Ukraine’s pro-Western leadership had descended into internal factionalism. Wilson, however, knew how strong the president’s instincts were on support for fledgling young democracies in post-Soviet space. Bush had announced his commitment at the outset of his presidency in a speech at Warsaw University where he declared: “No more Munichs, no more Yaltas.” During Bush’s tenure, NATO had admitted seven new member states, including the Baltic Republics, tacitly acknowledged as part of the Soviet Union at Yalta in 1945. Approaching his last NATO summit, Bush had a legacy opportunity to push enlargement farther east and south, to large strategic territories that were part of the original Soviet Union. Secretaries Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates were skeptical but others such as U.S. ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland, were supportive. After a “deep dive” into the question by White House staff, Bush decided in late February that the United States should mobilize all its diplomatic power to offer a Membership Action Plan (MAP), a first step toward NATO membership, to both Georgia and Ukraine at Bucharest.

Intentions to Move from Homelessness to Social Inclusion: The Role of Participation Beliefs, Attitudes and Prior Behaviour

A key aim of homelessness services is not only to ensure that homeless people attain a secure home, but that this is a pathway to wider social inclusion. However, relatively little is known about the psychological elements that are essential for homeless people to engage with these pathways, nor whether these elements combine in ways that are predictable from previous research. In the present work, we examined both demographic and behavioural precursors, and contemporaneous psychological predictors, of a set of 49 homeless men’s intentions to engage with a programme to move them toward long-term housing and social inclusion. Contrary to predictions based on subjective utility and rational choice theories, we found that normative pressure and did not directly predict the men’s intentions. Instead, we found that intentions were predicted by their attitudes towards the services, and their specific beliefs about the benefits of particular courses of action (efficacy beliefs), and to a more restricted extent their experience (sociodemographics); and in those with high prior service use histories, only participatory beliefs guided future service use intentions. These findings suggest that it is important to focus on intentions as a highly relevant outcome of interventions, because beliefs about interventions can break the link between past behaviour or habitual service use and future service use. Such interventions may be particularly effective if they focus on the evaluative and efficacy-related aspects of behaviour over time and better understand the benefits the men evaluated the services as offering them.