Institute for Legal Studies

Cuando la deserción es producto de la ruptura de la conexión de intereses que unen a un estudiante con una institución educativa o por la ausencia de políticas que favorezcan la permanencia de estudiantes en las instituciones, el costo económico y social de una deserción es mayor porque se deteriora la calidad de vida del estudiante y por ende afecta el crecimiento de un país, más cuando la educación es considerada como un factor esencial en el crecimiento económico y la reducción de la pobreza. El proyecto analiza el fenómeno de la deserción en el Centro de Servicios Empresariales y Turísticos del SENA Regional Santander CSET, teniendo en cuenta que esta regional se ubica en cuarto lugar entre las 33 regionales del país por los altos niveles de deserción que presenta en los últimos periodos, con índices de deserción por encima del promedio nacional. De igual manera motivaron el presente estudio, el procedimiento no estandarizado para registrar novedades a la matrícula, el desconocimiento de las causas que inciden en la deserción y el análisis de indicadores que muestran incremento en las cifras; al leer estas situaciones con una mirada holística, se visualizó el problema sobre la ausencia de estrategias efectivas, direccionadas por una política unificada para la gestión del fenómeno de la deserción que contrarreste los efectos generados por estas causas. Con el desarrollo de este proyecto se presenta la oportunidad para reorientar una política integral para el CSET y porque no, todos los centros de formación con el objetivo de fidelizar al aprendiz y un manejo efectivo de los índices de retención. Con el fin de obtener resultados en los objetivos planteados, el estudio se estructuró en dos fases con un enfoque de Investigación mixta, de carácter no experimental de corte transversal. En el diseño de la estrategia se basó en la metodología del marco lógico por su alta exigencia de participación interactiva de los interesados durante todas sus fases. 
\nLa primera etapa corresponde a la fase de diagnóstico que incluye los tres primeros objetivos, iniciando con el ejercicio de retrospectiva de los casos de deserción del período 2015-2018, mediante técnicas de estadística descriptiva, estos datos se analizaron para conocer las causas que motivaron la deserción de aprendices en ese período; la información de las características socioeconómicas de los aprendices activos en formación y los factores que inciden en la deserción de aprendices, se correlacionaron usando el software de análisis cuantitativo IBM SPSS . En la segunda etapa los resultados del diagnóstico son utilizados para contextualizar y sensibilizar a los participantes de un grupo focal con 15 funcionarios de diferentes niveles de la entidad, propuesto para recoger experiencias y conceptos, frente a una serie de preguntas relacionadas con aspectos pedagógicos e institucionales que impactan el fenómeno de deserción. La información obtenida se agrupó y analizó con el apoyo del software Atlas ti, para determinar los elementos estratégicos que fueron el insumo principal en la construcción de la estrategia. A partir de los hallazgos encontrados fue posible el diseño de la estrategia de gestión para disminuir la deserción de aprendices del CSET, que motive su permanencia hasta garantizar que culmine el ciclo de formación, certificación y futura vinculación laboral.

OBJECTIVE: To establish the safety, short term outcome, and theatre costs of transabdominal laparoscopic repair of inguinal hernia performed as day surgery. DESIGN: Randomised controlled trial. The control operation was the two layer modified Maloney darn. SETTING: Teaching hospital and district general hospital. SUBJECTS: 125 men randomised to laparoscopic or open repair of inguinal hernia. OUTCOME MEASURES: Morbidity, postoperative pain and use of analgesics, quality of life, and theatre costs. Outcome was assessed by questionnaires administered to patients daily for 10 days and at six weeks postoperatively and by outpatient review at six weeks. Return to normal activity was assessed by questionnaire at three months. RESULTS: One vascular complication (2%) occurred in the group that had open repair. Seven complications (12%) including vessel injury and early recurrence arose in the group that had laparoscopic repair (difference in complication rate 10% (95% confidence interval 4% to 18%; P = 0.02). Pain scores and quality of life assessed by the short form 36 showed a significant benefit to the group that had laparoscopic repair in the early postoperative period. Return to normal activity was not significantly different between the two groups. Total theatre costs were higher in the group that had laparoscopic repair (mean cost for laparoscopic repair 850 pounds (622 pounds to 1078 pounds); mean cost for open repair 268 pounds (245 pounds to 292 pounds)). CONCLUSIONS: Because of the greater complication rate and higher theatre costs for laparoscopic repair and the patient outcome preferences expressed, the results of larger trials of clinical and cost effectiveness using recurrence as the primary outcome measure should be known before laparoscopic herniorrhaphy is widely adopted.

Abstract This article argues that the way EU competences are defined plays an important role in the social legitimacy problems of the EU . The fact that its powers are purposive compels the EU to privilege narrow functional goals and act in a highly focused way. This has the consequence that politics cannot be meaningful within the EU , since essential choices of direction are pre‐empted. It also has the consequence that EU law is over‐instrumental and lacks expressive qualities, alienating the public. Now that EU law is so broad, the same defects are being imposed increasingly on M ember S tates. Without another form of conferred power, the legitimacy of the EU , and of law and government in E urope, will be increasingly undermined. The constitutional DNA , which has been a functional success for E urope, may also be its political nemesis.

Direct or “command‐and‐control” regulation has had limited success in dealing with occupational health and safety and with environmental regulation. This lack of success has led policymakers to experiment with self‐regulation as an alternative means of achieving the goals of social regulation. The economic subsystem fails to acknowledge its social identity and, therefore, appears to be blind to its negative performance regarding the environment and the workplace. The authors of this paper argue that moving beyond command‐and‐control can be feasible and desirable, at least to a certain extent, but that pitfalls are omnipresent. “Regulatory dilemmas” need to be solved, sound empirical studies need to be conducted, and a guiding theory needs to be drafted. To achieve these goals, the authors suggest use of the key concept of “reflexivity,” which refers to the economic organization’s relationship with itself. The practical usefulness of this theoretical concept is explored against the background of regulatory practice in the areas of occupational safety and health and the environment. It is concluded that a mode of reflexive administrative law requires a “negotiating government,” which adopts a mixture of strategies and learns to cope with issues like third‐party interests, access to information, and enforcement.

The COVID-19 epidemic has taken the world by surprise. Initially, it was seen as a Chinese, and later South-East Asian, problem. Decision-makers around the world apparently believed that the disease could be contained and controlled within the region, following a pattern that was evident in previous outbreaks, such as SARS. However, due to a combination of different factors of natural, political and regulatory character, 1 the epidemic has quickly spread to other parts of the world and has been eventually recognised by the World Health Organization as a pandemic. The existing interconnectedness among countries obviously facilitated that expansion.

1. The preliminary reference 2. Which bodies may refer questions? 3. What questions can be referred? 4. When can a reference for a preliminary ruling be made? 5. When are national courts obliged to refer? 6. When ought a reference for a preliminary ruling to be made? 7. The form and content of a reference 8. Proceedings before national courts after making a reference 9. Procedure before the Court of Justice 10. The preliminary ruling 11. The effects of preliminary rulings 12. Costs and legal aid Table of cases Literature Index

In a prospective study of 150 health care workers in the United Kingdom who had been accidentally exposed to the human immunodeficiency virus no evidence of transmission was found. Larger studies in the United States and anecdotal accounts in publications from other countries confirm that the risk of occupational infection is very low. Health care workers must adopt safe procedures at all times, however, to avoid exposure to infection.

This paper reports the findings of a study that estimated the socioeconomic costs, both direct and indirect, of Alzheimer's Disease in England by using a 'burden of illness' framework. The burden of illness was calculated for all main areas of provision: hospital and residential care, general practice, day care, home care and informal care, including the calculations of costs by age-group and by service provider. The results show that the cost of this care amounted to around 1,039m pounds in 1990/91, establishing that spending associated with Alzheimer's Disease is a major area of care expenditure. Such burden of illness data should help those involved with health care decision-making, planning and priority setting, especially for health districts and social services establishing base plans for care in the community.

Abstract What is the impact on and influence of the researcher in socio‐legal studies? Drawing in part on my empirical research and professional experience, this article investigates the benefits and burdens of positionality. Positionality is the disclosure of how an author's racial, gender, class, or other self‐identifications, experiences, and privileges influence research methods. A statement of positionality in a research article can enhance the validity of its empirical data as well as its theoretical contribution. However, such self‐disclosure puts scholars in a vulnerable position, and those most likely to reveal how their positionality shapes their research are women, ethnic minorities, or both. At this stage of the field's methodological development, the burdens of positionality are being carried unevenly by a tiny minority of researchers. I conclude by inviting socio‐legal scholars to redress this imbalance by embracing expressions of positionality.

The present study addressed the question of whether deviant sexual preferences for children can be considered a taxon, utilizing data from a multimethod assessment battery. The test battery comprised direct self-report as well as indirect latency-based measures (Implicit Association Tests, viewing time) of deviant sexual preferences for children. In a mixed sample of adult men (N = 304, including sex offenders against children, sex offenders against adults, and controls who were either nonsexual offenders or nonoffenders), 27% of the offenders convicted for child sexual abuse or child pornography charges were identified as a homogeneous and distinct latent class. Additional taxometric analyses corroborated the notion of a pedophilic subgroup. Individuals in this pedophilic group showed elevated scores on measures of deviant sexual preference for children over adults. The offense histories of the individuals from the pedophilic cluster indicated an increased likelihood of pedophilic preference as assessed by a file-based summary index. We interpret the results as evidence for pedophilic sexual preference as a distinct and taxonic clinical construct.

In recent years, risk has become a proxy and a parameter characterizing EU regulation of digital technologies. Nonetheless, EU risk-based regulation in the digital age is multi-faceted in the approaches it takes. This article considers three examples: the General Data Protection Regulation; the proposal for the Digital Services Act; and the proposal for the Artificial Intelligence Act. These three instruments move across a spectrum, from a bottom-up approach (the GDPR) to a top-down architecture (the AI Act), going through an intermediate stage (the DSA). It is argued, however, that despite the different methods, the three instruments share a common objective and project: they all seek to guarantee an optimal balance between innovation and the protection of rights, in line with the developing features of European (digital) constitutionalism. Through this lens, it is thus possible to grasp the “fil rouge” behind the GDPR, the DSA and the AI Act as they express a common constitutional aspiration and direction. risk-based approach, EU law, constitutional law, digital constitutionalism, digital technologies

If the ECJ delivers politically unwelcome judgments, can the legislature override these by adopting new laws? The question goes to the balance of power between legislators and courts, and to which organs are capable of steering the integration process. The answer in the EU context is distinctive, because the Union is so highly constitutionalized: most important legal questions are reducible to Treaty interpretation, which apparently excludes the legislature from their resolution. Drawing on American scholarship which advocates co-interpretation of the constitution by both legal and political branches, and using actual and hypothetical examples of situations where the legislature and the ECJ have wished to take different directions (e.g. citizenship, general principles, non-discrimination) this article examines three Court techniques to avoid legislative constraints: annulment, emasculatory interpretation, and avoidance. It also considers the ways in which legislation can be drafted to maximize its influence upon the Court.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN AUSTRALIA is an insightful treatment of the various trends and tensions that exist within the individual regimes devoted to particular forms of intellectual property, and in the subject as a whole.

Making Rights a Reality? explores the way in which disability activists in the United Kingdom and Canada have transformed their aspirations into legal claims in their quest for equality. It unpacks shifting conceptualizations of the political identity of disability and the role of a rights discourse in these dynamics. In doing so, it delves into the diffusion of disability rights among grassroots organizations and the traditional disability charities. The book draws on a wealth of primary sources including court records and campaign documents and encompassing interviews with more than sixty activists and legal experts. While showing that the disability rights movement has had a significant impact on equality jurisprudence in two countries, the book also demonstrates that the act of mobilizing rights can have consequences, both intended and unintended, for social movements themselves.

Practices of immigration detention are largely resistant to conventional forms of legal correction because contemporary liberal democracies justify these practices with an appeal to their territorial sovereignty, a concept that thwarts the very communicability of individual interests in modern constitutionalism. However, this book argues that human rights in the specific context of immigration detention can function as “destabilisation rights”, subjecting to full legal scrutiny those claims that the national state presents as predominantly based on its territorial sovereignty. The resulting destabilisation of territorial sovereignty in both domestic and international constitutionalism will have ramifications for a number of instruments of migration control, the perceived necessity and legitimacy of which is almost exclusively based on the self-referential notion of territorial sovereignty.

Despite the increasing availability of direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing, it is currently unclear how such services are regulated in Europe, due to the lack of EU or national legislation specifically addressing this issue. In this article, we provide an overview of laws that could potentially impact the regulation of DTC genetic testing in 26 European countries, namely Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Emphasis is placed on provisions relating to medical supervision, genetic counselling and informed consent. Our results indicate that currently there is a wide spectrum of laws regarding genetic testing in Europe. There are countries (e.g. France and Germany) which essentially ban DTC genetic testing, while in others (e.g. Luxembourg and Poland) DTC genetic testing may only be restricted by general laws, usually regarding health care services and patients' rights.

Many environmental law scholars perceive environmental law scholarship as immature. We discuss why this self-perception has arisen and argue that a common theme is methodology. We argue that the subject can only mature when we face its methodological challenges head on, and we identify four particular issues that have given rise to these challenges: the speed and scale of legal/regulatory change, the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, the heavy reliance in environmental law on a diverse range of governance arrangements and the multi-jurisdictional nature of the subject. We argue that there is a need for debate in the face of these challenges and identify some starting points for that debate.

UNLABELLED: Pulmonary polymethylmethacrylate embolism is a rare but potentially fatal complication of percutaneous vertebroplasty. Clinical signs are typical for pulmonary embolism: they include respiratory distress, hypotension, and decreases in end-tidal CO(2). We report a case of fatal pulmonary polymethylmethacrylate embolism during percutaneous vertebroplasty that initially presented with hypertension (arterial blood pressure 190/90 mm Hg), normocardia, and hypercapnia (PaCO(2) 96 mm Hg), along with loss of consciousness. Several pieces of polymethylmethacrylate were found in the pulmonary vasculature at autopsy. IMPLICATIONS: Osteoporotic spine fractures are increasingly treated by injection of bone cement into the vertebral body. Polymethylmethacrylate embolism is a rare but potentially fatal complication. We report on a case of polymethylmethacrylate embolism that was at first unrecognized because of uncharacteristic signs and symptoms.

We have recently described an IL-2/IL-4-producing CD8+CD25+ non-regulatory memory T cell population that occurs in a subgroup of healthy elderly persons who characteristically still have a good humoral response after vaccination. The present study addresses this specific T cell subset and investigates its origin, clonal composition, Ag specificity, and replicative history. We demonstrate that CD8+CD25+ memory T cells frequently exhibit a CD4+CD8+ double-positive phenotype. The expression of the CD8 alphabeta molecule and the occurrence of signal-joint TCR rearrangement excision circles suggest a thymic origin of these cells. They also have longer telomeres than their CD8+CD25- memory counterparts, thus indicating a shorter replicative history. CD8+CD25+ memory T cells display a polyclonal TCR repertoire and respond to IL-2 as well as to a panel of different Ags, whereas the CD8+CD25- memory T cell population has a more restricted TCR diversity, responds to fewer Ags, and does not proliferate in response to stimulation with IL-2. Molecular tracking of specific clones with clonotypic primers reveals that the same clones occur in CD8+CD25+ and CD8+CD25- memory T cell populations, demonstrating a lineage relationship between CD25+ and CD25- memory CD8+ T cells. Our results suggest that CD25-expressing memory T cells represent an early stage in the differentiation of CD8+ cells. Accumulation of these cells in elderly persons appears to be a prerequisite of intact immune responsiveness in the absence of naive T cells in old age.

China shapes transnational data governance by supplying digital infrastructure to emerging markets. The prevailing explanation for this phenomenon is “digital authoritarianism” by which China exports not only its technology but also its values and governance system to host states. Contrary to the one-size-fits-all digital authoritarianism thesis, this Article theorizes a “Beijing Effect,” a combination of “push” and “pull” factors that explains China’s growing influence in data governance beyond its borders. Governments in emerging economies demand Chinese-built digital infrastructures and emulate China’s approach to data governance in pursuit of “data sovereignty” and digital development. China’s “Digital Silk Road,” a massive effort to build the physical components of digital infrastructure (e.g., fiber-optic cables, antennas, and data centers), to enhance the interoperability of digital ecosystems in such developing states materializes the Beijing Effect. Its main drivers are Chinese technology companies that increasingly provide telecommunication and e-commerce services across the globe. The Beijing Effect contrasts with the “Brussels Effect” whereby companies’ global operations gravitate towards the EU’s regulations. It also deviates from US efforts to shape global data governance through instruments of international economic law. Based on a study of normative documents and empirical fieldwork conducted in a key host state over a four-year period, we explain how the Beijing Effect works in practice and assess its impact on developing countries. We argue that “data sovereignty” is illusory as the Chinese party-state retains varying degrees of control over Chinese enterprises that supply digital infrastructure and urge development of legal infrastructures commensurate with digital development strategies.