Academics have traditionally associated capital punishment most closely with authoritarian regimes. They have assumed an incompatibility between the death penalty and the presumably humane values of modern liberal democracy. However, recent scholarship on the United States by David Garland has suggested that a considerable degree of direct democratic control over a justice system actually tends to favor the retention and application of the death penalty. The reason why the United States has retained capital punishment after it has been abolished in other Western nations is not because public opinion is more supportive of the death penalty in America than in Europe or in Canada. Rather, it is because popular control over the justice system is greater in the United States than in other countries and this strengthens the influence of America's retentionist majority. However, the experience of the United States in this regard has not been unique. The same link between democratic control and retention of the death penalty can be seen in the history of the effort to abolish capital punishment in France. In 1908, a bill in the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the French Parliament) to abolish capital punishment was defeated, in large part because of strong opposition from the public. In 1981, majority public opinion in France still favored retention of the death penalty, but in that year, the nation's Parliament defied popular sentiment and outlawed the ultimate punishment. Historians have so far provided little insight into why abolition succeeded in 1981 when it failed in 1908. The explanation for the different outcome appears to have been the greater degree of influence public opinion exerted over the nation's justice system at the turn of the twentieth century than at its end.

Martin Jones has criticized my account of the methodology of experimental economics on three points: the impossibility of testing external validity claims in the laboratory, my reconstruction of external validity inferences as analogical arguments, and the distinction between laboratory and non-laboratory sciences. I defend my account here and try to eliminate some misunderstandings that may have prompted Jones’s criticism.

This article describes the processes that led the Irish Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to develop a National Inspection Plan for domestic waste water treatment systems, following intervention from European Union institutions. The discussion focuses on two issues: the role of transnational institutional settings in galvanizing innovation and regulatory reform, and the practical challenges of dealing with lower risks. It is argued that multi-level transnational regimes have considerable potential to stimulate high-level reviews of regulatory strategy. As a result, lower risks present challenges that cannot be ignored in favour of policies that focus on the most severe risks. Traditional risk regulation theories, it is contended, do not provide much assistance in selecting intervention strategies in the face of such pressures, but the example of the Irish EPA shows how regulators can address these issues.

The academic discourse regarding welfare policy has generally been dominated by views focused on the distribution of resources and welfare. In recent years, another school of thought, known as “relational egalitarianism,” has emerged and shifted the focal point of social welfare policy from traditional redistribution to other aspects of social status. In this article, I will analyze a similar paradigm shift that occurred in the fashioning of the institution of the second tithe in the classical sources of Jewish law. The institution of the second tithe is ostensibly irrelevant to social welfare policy both from the internal perspective of Jewish law and from the external general-theoretical perspective. From the Jewish law perspective, it is not normally conceived of as an institution with a social-welfare goal, and from the general theoretical perspective, it seems to be an anachronistic institution that cannot enrich the modern theoretical discourse. In this article, I will try to expose the social role that was imbued in this institution through its reconstruction by the Sages. I argue that the concealed and indirect mechanism for the promotion of social goals may promote the social status of individuals in society more effectively than conventional social welfare mechanisms. In this respect, the reshaping of the second tithe may provide inspiration for enriching the arsenal of possible relational egalitarian social policy prescriptions.