FSC430 Seminar in Forensic Science (Capstone Course)

The number of civil and criminal trials in which there is presented at least one piece of scientific evidence—by which we mean the analysis and interpretation of physical evidence derived from the so-called hard sciences (thus excluding the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and the social and behavioral sciences)—is constantly increasing. Yet the fact finders, be they judges or juries or the attorneys arguing the cases, have limited scientific education.

Forensic anthropology (or “forensic physical anthropology,” some may argue) can be defined as the application of physical anthropology (its principles, theory, and methods) to the forensic or medico-legal context. This medico-legal context and its legislative framework will vary among countries. A forensic anthropologist (FA) will tend to assist the police, other forensic scientists, and forensic pathologists in cases of decomposed or skeletal remains where identification is challenging. Forensic anthropologists tend to be based, depending on the country, within police forces, institutes of legal medicine, universities, or museums; within private forensic science providers (i.e., companies); or other institutions (e.g., NGOs).

Forensic psychology is an increasingly popular subset of psychology that broadly speaks to the intersection of psychology and the law. This broad view of forensic psychology encompasses legal and police psychology, some social psychology, and clinical and nonclinical psychological principles that are relevant to this intersection of psychology and law. This bibliography specifically focuses on clinical forensic psychology, the area of forensic psychology that deals directly with the assessment and treatment of those involved in the criminal, civil, and juvenile justice systems.

Any science used to assist the adjudication of a civil litigation or a criminal case becomes, de facto, a forensic science, the term forensic merely referring to the fact that it is used in a judicial context. It follows from this that the literature on forensic science is potentially unlimited.

The field of psychology and law involves the application of scientific, clinical, and policy aspects of psychology to issues that arise in the legal system. Diverse perspectives are encompassed within psychology and law, including most of the major subdivisions in psychology (e.g., cognitive, developmental, industrial/organizational, and clinical).

“Wrongful conviction,” an ambiguous term, has come to refer to the convictions of factually innocent persons and is used in this way in this article. This definition excludes persons who have committed the act and mens rea of crimes but whose convictions were obtained in violation of constitutional or other procedural rights in a manner not deemed harmless error by appellate courts. A better term might be “false conviction.”

International migration has reached historic highs, with more than 240 million people currently residing in a country other than where they were born (United Nations, 2019). Migration is not random, and there are noteworthy migration flows from specific sending countries to specific destination countries. In most cases, migrants settling in postindustrial, Western nations in the “Global North” (North America, Western Europe, and Oceania) come from non-Western nations in the “Global South” (Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East).

Several thousand drug courts operate in jurisdictions throughout the United States. Similar courts have been established in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. The first drug court appeared in Dade County, Florida, in 1989. This initial effort and other first-generation drug courts helped to establish a model for subsequent problem-solving courts focused on substance use disorders, mental illness, domestic violence, and other circumstances that frequently co-occur with criminal justice system involvement.

The field of criminology has been guided by theories that emphasize the role of social factors such as delinquent peers, subcultures, and parental socialization in the explanation of crime and criminality. These theories, and the empirical research used to test them, have highlighted the importance that certain environments play in the etiology of antisocial behaviors.

NOTE THE ANTHROPOLOGY FOCUS: The term global health encompasses a variety of meanings, including the impact of globalization on health as well as threats to health around the globe. In use since the early 20th century, the term has proliferated widely since the 1990s. Most broadly, the term refers to ways of understanding and intervening into health problems and health disparities as they are conceptualized at a global level.

NOTE THE ANTHROPOLOGY FOCUS: Studies of social stratification and health have pursued a wide range of scalar analyses, from examining the impacts of global neoliberal policies or humanitarian interventions to observations of the micropolitics of drug use and clinical interactions. In addition to producing an expanding literature on social stratification and health, many medical anthropologists have also sought to make their work useful for challenging inequalities by engaging in collaborative advocacy with their interlocutors as well as with public health researchers and policymakers.

NOTE THE MIXED SUCCESS WITH INTEGRATING LATEST ISSUES: Although migration has been a human phenomenon from time immemorial, international migration in the contemporary sense is usually dated from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which created a state system and the concept of state sovereignty with the associated power to control borders. Migration is usually divided into two categories, “forced” and “voluntary.” This is a useful dividing line, even though it is widely acknowledged that migrants have multiple reasons for moving and that there is often no clear dividing line to distinguish “forced” versus “voluntary” migrants.

Since the turn of the 21st century, scholars have examined the technological advances and associated social implications related to the measurement and analysis of unique biological characteristics such as hand geometry and fingerprints, otherwise known as biometrics. Leading scientific journals like IET Biometrics have explored the scientific understandings and practical applications of biometric devices, such as the introduction of facial recognition technology into mass-market cell phones.

Official crime statistics from around the globe suggest that violent and property crime rates have steadily decreased since the early 1990s. At the same time, it seems that the volume of cybercrime incidents against individuals and organizations, both public and private, has dramatically increased according to the FBI in 2018. In an effort to mitigate online users’ potential victimization to cybercrime, government, private, and public organizations have embraced a wide range of policies aimed at regulating users’ behaviors in cyberspace.

The international regulation of the Internet may be understood in two different ways. From a narrow point of view, it may be conceived as equivalent to Internet governance, i.e. comprising exclusively the institutional arrangements that enable the Internet to function. From a comprehensive point of view, it may be interpreted more widely, including all sectors and areas where international law rules that intersect or interact with the Internet may be found. The Internet is a pervasive network that nowadays touches upon the lives of public and private actors. This article aims to present an account of the many domains in which international regulation may be found or may be needed if universal or community interests are to be protected.

Developed as a provisional formulation (and working concept) in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, austerity urbanism refers to the localized effects of the significant retrenchment and restructuring of public expenditures and services in the ensuing period, particularly in Europe and North America. Originating as a banking crisis, the Wall Street crash of 2008 was rapidly translated into a much wider crisis for the (social and welfare) state, for public-sector financing, and for (local) government service delivery, as the widely adopted policy of austerity involved expenditure cutbacks, often devolved to subnational or municipal tiers of government, along with a renewed emphasis on public-sector downsizing, privatization, outsourcing, and fee-for-service arrangements.

NOTE THE FOCUS ON AFRICA: Anthropology has a long and complicated history in Africa, and its study of economic life is no exception. In the early days of the discipline, in the 1930s and 1940s, anthropologists like Audrey Richards, Meyer Fortes, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard all departed for Africa to conduct fieldwork. In general, early British social anthropology was committed to holistic studies of small-scale societies, and thus what counted as “economic anthropology” was subsumed within broader studies of kinship and sociopolitical organization.

While many disciplines have begun to take the environment, its inhabitants, ecosystems, biotic diversity, and future stability more seriously, it falls to philosophy to flesh out the organizing concepts and principles of a viable environmental ethic. An ethic is a defensible way of life grounded in the wherewithal to address the anthropogenic causes of environmental crises like climate change.

Debt and crises have become defining features of the contemporary global economy. Geographic scholarship on debt and crises is typically subsumed within economic geography and the geography of finance. Geographers have helped increase our understanding of the spatial dynamics of finance, debt, and crises by demonstrating their network linkages and uneven geographies and by highlighting the importance of scale in understanding financial crises and systems. Much geographic work on debt and crises has drawn on the Marxist political economy framework of David Harvey.

NOTE THE FOCUS ON AFRICA: Globalization is a contested concept and phenomenon. At its most basic it refers to increased interconnection between places or the increased stretching of social relations over distance, as mediated through, for example, flows of goods, finance, people, ideas, and forms of social organization. However, the precise content, nature, and impacts, of this phenomenon are highly debated. Africa is often conceived of as a recipient of globalization, rather than a source region of the phenomenon.

Replication is one key component toward a robust cumulative knowledge base. It plays a critical function in assessing the stability of the scientific literature. Replication involves closely repeating the procedure of a study and determining if the results are similar to the original. For decades, behavioral scientists were reluctant to publish replications.