New Titles from Ashgate

Decisions to Imprison
Court Decision-Making Inside and Outside the Law
Rasmus H. Wandall

$99.95
February 2008, 218 pages, Ashgate
Hardback: 0 7546 7157 7 | 978-0-7546-7157-2 • $99.95 / £55.00

Description: Rasmus Wandall uses quantitative and qualitative methods from studies carried out in Denmark, to address the formal and informal norms and ideologies that are used to generate decisions to imprison. Focusing on the operations of the courtroom participants, his work investigates how court decision-making is organized to allow the sentencing procedure to be open to more than its formal legal framework, while at the same time keeping the sentencing within the boundaries of law and legal validity. The author uses the theory of law's operational closure, developed by Niklas Luhmann. The theory provides an advantageous point of departure to capture the close and subtle interactions between law's need for validity and for contextual openness in every legal operation - including court decision-making.

How to Get Research Published in Journals, 2d ed.
Abby Day

$49.95
February 2008,  154 pages, Ashgate
Paperback: 0 566 08815 0 | 978-0-566-08815-5

Description: Now in its second edition, this internationally best-selling book has been revised and updated. It focuses on helping people overcome some of the most common obstacles to successful publication. Lack of time? An unconscious fear of rejection? Conflicting priorities? In this, the first book to address the subject, Abby Day explains how to overcome these obstacles and create publishable papers for journals most likely to publish them.

She shows how to identify a suitable journal and how to plan, prepare and compile a paper that will satisfy its requirements. She pays particular attention to the creative aspects of the process. As an experienced journal editor and publisher, Dr Day is well placed to reveal the inside workings of the reviewing procedure - and the more fully you understand this, the greater the chance that what you submit will be accepted and published.

For academic and research staff, in whatever discipline, a careful study of Dr Day's book could be your first step on the road to publication.