Volume 25, Issue 1

The article reports findings of comparative research about the prestige first year law students attribute to lawyers. Special emphasis lies on media effects. Respondents from Bochum / Germany stated that lawyers have a high prestige and that they deserve their incomes. However, the law students were skeptical on the question of honesty and ethicality of lawyers. Further analysis reveals that the first two measures are positively related to the consumption of TV lawyer shows and lawyer movies. Respondents having lawyers in their family or among their friends tended to rate them more positively. Students with a German family background were more optimistic on lawyers than students with a foreign background.

In the early 1980s, a high number of HIV transmissions were caused by infected blood products. As a consequence of this, since 1983 a guideline issued by the federal State Medical Board of Registration has banned blood donations from high-risk groups, including gay men. Since 1985, mandatory testing off all donations has been required, and the rate of HIV transmission by blood products has dropped to practically zero. Although the exclusionary guidelines have been retained under the Law of Transfusion 1994, there has been no research performed to justify this policy. The present report shows that there was little thought behind the retention of this policy. The assumption that blood safety is reliant upon excluding gay people is inherently false, as it is impossible to exclude gay people from donating. Therefore the polities of exclusion do not work in practise, although it is a fact that current blood supplies are HIV free, proving that there is another combination of factors ensuring the safety of the blood supply.

Questions concerning the function and meaning of creative capacities such as imagination and fantasy seem generally to be restricted to the domain of literary theory. Although the relevance of imaginative techniques has not yet been discussed in works concerning legal theory or the practise of legal judgment, a close study of a case of rape demonstrates the significant role that imagination plays in judgmental processes in German juris-prudence. According to the axiom of „free assessment of evidence“, a judge is supposed to form a conviction and finally pronounce a sentence after achieving personal certainty. In the process through which a judge arrives at his or her personal conviction about a case, the faculty of imagination serves as a means of closing the narrative gap between objective proof and subjective conclusion. This article attempts to describe the function of imagination in legal discourse and to discuss it in the context of literary concepts of „truth“, „reality“, and „fiction“.

Problems relevant to victim-offender-reconsiliation-schemes (VOR) and supported by empirical evidence are established through an analysis of the conditions for the validity of legal norms in a functionally differentiated society. These conditions (the positivity of the legal order, the professionalisation of law enforcement and the contingendes in sanctioning), found at the heart of modernity, pose serious challenges to every VOR-scheme. Furthermore, as a part of the penal system, VOR has had to be integrated into the legal system, transforming into just another form of penal sanction and preventing the hoped for paradigm shift towards a real alternative to the procedure and sanctions of the criminal law. As a result, VOR simply represents the discovery of the offender as a possible resource for the self-validation of norms. His involvement in the sentencing process and his final agreement to the sentence in contrast to being sentenced by somebody else is probably likely to reduce the social and economic costs of sanctioning. Yet VOR is neither more voluntary than nor morally superior to the standard reactions of the criminal law and can only work in a small minority of cases compared to the totality of the judicial caseload.