Claiming Citizenship: The Political Dimension of Welfare Fraud

This article exposes the political dimension of welfare fraud by investigating—in the context of the Israeli welfare reform of 2003—how forty‐nine Israeli women who live on welfare justify welfare fraud. I find that women's justifications cannot be fully explained by traditional noncompliance theories that view welfare fraud as an individual, private, criminal activity that solely reflects on the fraudster's moral character or desperate need. Instead, women's justifications for welfare fraud are better understood as a sociopolitical struggle for inclusion and deservedness—as a political act that reflects an alternative concept of citizenship with respect to women's unpaid care work.     

Development of impulsivity and risk‐seeking: Implications for the dimensionality and stability of self‐control*

In Gottfredson and Hirschi's self‐control theory, introduced in 1990, they contend that self‐control is a unidimensional construct that develops early in childhood and remains stable throughout the life span. According to findings reported in recent research, however, these arguments are now being challenged, with scholars pointing to ways in which self‐control may be multidimensional in nature and may change beyond the period of alleged stabilization. In this study, we draw on Steinberg's dual systems model, introduced in 2008, to consider this issue further. We examine that model's two key elements of low self‐control—risk‐seeking and impulsivity—to determine whether they are empirically distinguishable from one another and have differing developmental trajectories from childhood to early adulthood. We also consider the consequences of changes in risk‐seeking and impulsivity for within‐individual changes in crime. We examine these issues with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) for individuals from 10 to 30 years old. The results of our analyses show support for a multidimensional and dynamic conception of self‐control—from age 10 to age 30, risk‐seeking and impulsivity are empirically distinct and develop in divergent ways that are consistent with the dual systems model. Changes in risk‐seeking and impulsivity also affect changes in crime, but their effects vary with age and changes in the other element. We discuss these findings and their implications for self‐control and the development of life‐course criminology.     

The King County (Washington) Systems Integration Initiative: A First Look at the Kent District Dual System Youth Pilot Program

King County is one of five counties in Washington State participating in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Models for Change juvenile justice reform initiative. One key aspect of King County's Models for Change participation involves ongoing “systems integration” work intended to improve how youth who have cross‐over involvement in multiple systems—e.g., juvenile justice, child welfare, education, mental health, and/or others—are handled. These cross‐over cases often present a range of challenges to juvenile courts including substantial risk factors that increase their likelihood of continuing system involvement. This article provides a first look at an emerging pilot project in King County that is intended to improve how cross‐over cases are handled by child welfare and juvenile probation with the longer term goal of improving outcomes for these difficult cases.     

Mt. Laurel: A Major Transition in American Planning Law

American land use law in the late 1960's and early 1970's has been in a period of major and fundamental transition. It has seen a change in the basic policy of the law on one of its most important points as concerns exclusionary zoning, i.e., the attitude towards the three principal parties in interest in land use litigation-developer, neighbor, and excluded party. This entire change has been initiated not by the legislatures, but by the courts. The net result of this transition has been to strengthen the government's ability to impose (under the police power) certain types of regulations, primarily environmental in nature—while at the same time drastically reducing the power to impose regulations deemed exclusionary.     

Industrial application of a government laboratory's research — The SIROTECH experience

CSIRO — Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization — is a large federal government research body with a central role in generating technology for the country's industrial development in the broad. The Organization has recently developed and reoriented its policies, procedures and mechanisms to provide stronger technological support for Australia's manufacturing industries: industries which are generally accepted to be badly in need of technological innovation. This article discusses the background to the changes made and the alternative pathways that were available to the Organization to effect the changes. It concentrates on the decision to establish a free-standing technology transfer and commercial assessment company, SIROTECH Limited. The article identifies the steps taken to bring the company to be, even after only two years' operation, a vital and valued part of CSIRO's system for planning, pursuing and applying industrial research with, and for, Australian industry. The main principles underlying the apparent success of the SIROTECH experience are identified.     

The Indirect Influence of Politics on Tort Liability of Public Authorities in English Law

The scope of negligence liability of public authorities in English law has undergone significant changes in the Post‐World War II period, first expanding and then, from the mid‐1980s, retracting. This article tries to explain why this happened not by focusing, as is common in most commentary on this area of law, on changing doctrinal “tests,” but rather by tying it to changes in the background political ideology. My main contention is that political change has brought about a change in the law, but that it did so by affecting the scope of the political domain, and by implication, also the scope of the legal one. More specifically, I argue that Britain's Post‐War consensus on the welfare state has enabled the courts to expand state liability in accordance with emerging notions of the welfare state without seeming to take the law into controversial territory. When Thatcher came to power, the welfare state was no longer in consensus, thus making further development of legal doctrines on welfarist lines appear politically contentious. The courts therefore reverted back to older doctrines that seemed less politically charged in the new political atmosphere of the 1980s.     

The meaning of “the public interest” in communications policy—part II: Its implementation in early broadcast law and regulation

For more than a half‐century, as the cornerstone of federal broadcasting and telecommunications policy, the public interest standard has always been subject to some debate. Questions have regularly been raised about its meaning and the extent of the authority it implies for regulation, particularly in the deregulatory environment of the 1980s and 1990s. Part I of this study demonstrated how a deep reading of the pre‐broadcasting state and federal regulatory history reveals that interpretations of the public interest standard that have emphasized broad, diverse, public service programming have entailed a misunderstanding of its real, underlying meaning. This part of the study shows how another definition—i.e., that the public would be best served by protecting economic viability and technological advancement for private industry broadcasters—developed as the predominant doctrine before adoption of the Radio Act of 1927 and Communications Act of 1934, and how that theme came to be the applied interpretation of the public interest during the first two decades of broadcast regulation.     

Addressing Infant and Toddler Issues in the Juvenile Court: Challenges for the 21st Century

To achieve the goal of permanency for children in the child welfare system, it is critical that different disciplines work together, improve communication, and understand each other's role and expertise in the process. Through a case study, this article attempts to show the problems, conflicts, and solutions in working to ensure a child's best interests from three points of view: a children's attorney from New York City, a judge from Miami, Florida, and an infant mental health specialist and interdisciplinary trainer from Los Angeles. First, we propose that emotional caregiving is a fundamental right of all children and includes a stable, nurturing, and permanent long‐term relationship. Conflicts between the timing of children's needs, parents' needs, and the judge's legal duties are discussed as a tension with which we all must struggle to resolve if we are to successfully address children's “irreducible needs” (Brazelton & Greenspan, 2000). If the provision of custodial care shifts toward including emotional care as a goal for the growing number of infants entering the foster care system, the ensuing conflicts will provide opportunities for all parts of the foster care system—including the courts—to rethink how infants' needs are evaluated and factored into decision making.     

Building Bridges for Babies in Foster Care: The Babies Can't Wait Initiative

In 2001, the New York State Permanent Judicial Commission on Justice for Children, chaired by New York State's Chief Judge Judith Kaye, developed the Babies Can't Wait Initiative to maximize the well‐being and permanency prospects of infants in foster care. This court‐based innovation became a path to healthy development for babies in foster care, a bridge to unprecedented collaboration among the New York City Family Court, child welfare system, and service providers and merged knowledge about child development with court and child welfare practice. This article tells the story of the Babies Can't Wait Initiative—its creation, implementation, successes, and lessons.     

Technological Change,Globalization and the Europeanization of Rights

In contrast to civil and political rights, and to economic and social rights, which have been constructed and guaranteed within the framework of the nation-state, the new rights that aim to respond to opportunities and risks arising from new information and communication technologies, biotechnologies or, more generally, technology-based industrial development, are emerging in a context characterized by the strengthening of trans-national forces and dynamics (so-called 'globalization') and the erosion of state sovereignty. The state's loss of power and autonomy to regulate economic and social activity, as well as to protect individual rights, has been accentuated in the European Community (EC) as a result of a process that to a certain degree anticipated contemporary global tendencies. The EC appears, therefore, as a privileged observatory of the possible impact of globalization on the contents of rights, whether 'classical' rights or new rights, such as the rights of access to information, new forms of intellectual property or rights to be consulted or to participate in decision-making about environmental risk. My main objective in this article is to analyze recent developments in the EC's legal framework of informational and environmental policies with a view to evaluate how opportunities for individual and collective action and welfare, made possible by new information and communication technologies or claimed by environmentally alert citizens, are being defined in the form of rights recognized to individuals or social groups.     

Social Control and Emancipation ? Ambiguities in Child Welfare

Child welfare may be regarded either as a tool used by the authorities to exercise social control over family life, or as a weapon supporting the cause of children, striving to emancipate them from both parental and societal neglect or oppression. Research into Norwegian child welfare in the period since the Second World War reveals an ambiguous picture: the intervention of the state into family life signals both tightening social control of all family members and emancipation of the less powerful from patriarchal rule. As the rights and needs of children are considered more important, the control of parents, especially the mother, is increased. The central position of children and their interests have been strengthened in child welfare legislation. However, it is not the child, but the child welfare officials who define what is 'in the best interest of the child'. Post-war development has not granted children autonomy. Child welfare legislation is still mainly paternalistic. In child welfare casework, there is a danger that the lived experience of the child never emerges from the shadows cast by the interaction between adults. In relation to older children who came in contact with child welfare primarily because of their own problem behaviour, the ambiguity of emancipation and control has taken a somewhat different shape. The authorities wanted to keep these children out of prison. Humanitarian considerations, however, have been coupled with hopes of more effective crime prevention. In the postwar years, misbehaving children were also embraced by the increasing importance of 'the best interest of the child' as the main objective in child welfare decisions. In order to secure both emancipation and control, 'the best interest of the child' and the state's interest in preventing crime had to be understood as one and the same.     

On the Wrong Track: Andrei Marmor on Legal Positivism,Interpretation, and Easy Cases

Abstract. The paper argues for the following points: (1) Marmor's own understanding of “legal positivism” is different from the understanding defended, e.g., by Herbert Hart and Norberto Bobbio, and apparently misleads him into the wrong track of a theoretical inversion; (2) Marmor's two‐stages model of (legal) interpretation—the understanding‐interpretion model—provides no support for Marmor's own positivistic theory of law; (3) Marmor's concept of interpretation is at odds both with the basic tenets of Hartian and Continental methodological legal positivism, on the one hand, and with the actual practice of legal interpretation in the Western world, on the other hand; (4) Marmor's concept of an easy case is likewise objectionable.     

Local Governance and Redistributive Policy: Explaining Local Funding for Public Defense

In many American states, public defense is provided at the county rather than state level (Langton & Farole 2009 ). Local governments have discretion over implementing and funding the right to counsel, resulting in considerable variability in programs and funding levels. Placing this issue in the theoretical context of redistributive policies and politics, we investigate decisions on funding this service across upstate New York counties. Using as a point of departure Paul Peterson's classic explication of community politics, we first model variation in funding as a function of counties' fiscal capacity, need for services, and costs of supplying legal representation. We also test Peterson's prediction that local political factors will play little if any role in budget decisions. Second, through interviews with program administrators we explore the characters of twelve defender programs in which expenditures departed from the model's predictions. We find that three factors—which we term “influence,” “infrastructure,” and “ideas"”—also vary directly with levels of funding. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for theoretical thinking about due process policies and local politics, and for policy debate over how best to ensure adequate counsel in criminal court.     

Law's Allure and the Power of Path-Dependent Legal Ideas

Gordon Silverstein's Law's Allure (2009) advances a two-part thesis on the power of legal ideas. The first is that legal precedents establish the ideological baselines on which legislative and bureaucratic policies are developed. Silverstein amply demonstrates the validity of this thesis. The second is that by establishing ideological baselines, legal precedents contribute to a version of path dependency (or the idea that early choices determine long-term developments) that is significantly more constraining than other forms of institutional entrenchment. Put simply, law shackles creativity in politics. This thesis I do not find persuasive, in part because Silverstein offers little evidence for it and in part because a growing body of literature suggests the contrary: the cross-fertilization of ideas from one field to another—law to politics, for instance—contributes to, rather than retards, creative change. Nonetheless, while its broader ambitions are not satisfied, Law's Allure's narrow thesis—that precedent profoundly shapes policy development—is important and worthy of a major book in itself.     

Communication Law,Technological Change,and the New Normal

Our current debates concerning communication law and policy would have been unrecognizable to us twenty years ago. Few predicted in 1993, when the World Wide Web was just five years old, that in two decades, the functions of a word processor, camcorder, telephone, camera and pager could all fit within a single, palm-sized device — let alone that the same device could be connected to hundreds of millions of like devices and distribute text, photographs and video in milliseconds. Today's prognostications are often tomorrow's follies. But as the articles in this issue show, communication scholars continue the task of fitting current law into the changed communication spaces created by the digital revolution. After surveying these changes, this article argues that over the next two decades, communications-related technological change will be felt in two areas that have long been the province of state tort law: reputation and privacy.     

Freedom of Expression in the Dutch Constitution: Censorship and Sense Construction

Models of communication,frequently used in legal semiotics, offeran analytic framework for the relationshipbetween legal rules on the one hand andcorresponding behaviour on the other.Semiotic models seek to clarify(un)successful legal communication; theytry to reveal the processes ofinterpretation and sense construction. Theessence of these models is that thesubstantive meaning of a rule can (orcannot) be transmitted in a `flow model'of information. The models are based upona linear causality of ruleinformation. In this paper, the processesof sense construction are described,taking the freedom of expression, as laiddown in Article 7 of the DutchConstitution, as an example. Although thetext of Article 7 remained unalteredsince its first drafting in 1815, itssubstantive meaning has changedfundamentally. The transformation wascaused by complex processes that tookplace in social practice. These complexprocesses with respect to Article 7 arecompared with the transformation processesanalysed with respect to Article 96 of theDutch Constitution, published in anearlier paper. A comparison between bothArticles leads to the question: `Do weneed to construct an analytical model forlegal communication in whichreciprocal relations between legislatorand citizens are highlighted?' On thebasis of the two case studies, whichdescribe the influence of social practiceon the substantive meaning of the(textually unaltered) Articles, we have toanswer the question in the affirmative.     

The New Zealand Family Group Conference Confidentiality Protections: Lessons Learned and an Application in U.S. Child Welfare Systems

With the adoption of statutes, policies and administrative guidance since the late 1980s, statutory child welfare agencies around the world have been implementing practice approaches to resolving and addressing child abuse and neglect concerns that involve extended family systems in decision making and planning. One such approach is the family group conference (FGC), enshrined in New Zealand law. This article provides a historical context and describes numerous provisions of the family group conference that protect participants and the proceedings. It then describes applications of FGC‐like approaches in the United States where practice models and policies—not laws—guide the implementation of such approaches.     

Finkelhor's precondition model of child sexual abuse: A critique

Abstract

This paper critically discusses an extremely influential multi-factorial theory of child molestation, Finkelhor's Precondition Model. This model was one of the first comprehensive theories of the sexual abuse of children and represents a significant achievement. It provides a clear framework for approaching the study of men who have sexually abused children and has lead to both clear treatment goals and clinical innovations. It has rarely, however, been systematically critically examined and the cogency of its core constructs evaluated. Our analysis suggests that alongside its strengths, Finkelhor's Precondition Model has some conceptual problems. It suffers from vagueness; contains overlapping constructs; and a rich array of vulnerability factors that require teasing out and clarification. The model's attempts to provide a taxonomy highlight the diversity inherent in child sexual abuse, but it has not yet provided a structure to adequately inform treatment.     

The economy,crime and time: An analysis of recorded property crime in England & Wales 1961–2006

We seek to determine whether one of the unanticipated side-effects of social and economic changes associated with the adoption of neoliberal and monetarist economics during the 1970s/1980s was rising crime rates. Undertaking time series analysis of social and economic determinants of property crime (using official statistics on recorded crime for England and Wales from 1961 to 2006) we develop a model of the effect of changes in socio-economic variables (unemployment, inequality, welfare spending and incarceration) on property crime rates. We find that while three of these had significant effects on change in the property crime rate, income inequality did not. We conclude with a discussion of the extent to which neoliberal economic and welfare (and later criminal justice) policies can be held to have influenced the property crime rate since the early 1980s and what this tells us about the social and economic determinants of crime at the macro-level.     

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and the “Odd Consequence” of Progress

The Time Machine of H. G. Wells stands as one of the foundational works of science fiction. It is a true product of its time, a reflection of the fast pace of technological development and social change that makes a romance of the ideology of advancement for its own sake. But between the lines of its “adventure” plot, we find evidence of another, more complex story being told. Wells's work is plagued by ambivalence about the outcome of social and scientific progress—the selfsame progress that gave birth to the time machine in the first place. The Time Machine, in short, is preoccupied by an anxiety about a catastrophe just around the corner, not one born of global war or political turmoil but rather of the absence of turmoil, of need, of struggle. The idea and possibility of fiction itself becomes entangled in this problem of the everyday catastrophe, as it nearly suffocates under the conditions of the utopian society which it creates.