Prestige,Networks, and Social Mobility Among Lawyers: A View from California of Woeste's book,Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech

Woeste, Victoria Saker. 2012 . Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech . Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press. Pp. 424. $48.95 cloth; $24.95 paper; $24.95 e‐book. In Henry Ford's War on Jews and the Legal Battle Against Hate Speech (2012), Victoria Saker Woeste raises provocative questions for students of the legal profession. Aaron Sapiro, an Eastern European, Jewish immigrant to California, rose to international prominence through his corporate specialization in agricultural cooperatives. Our understanding of the social structure of the legal profession, based on studies of the East and Midwest, shows that for most of the twentieth century, the structure of the bar was highly stratified around markers of ethno‐religious status. The trajectory of Sapiro's career does not fit this story. A focus on the West generally or California in particular complicates our understanding of how factors such as ethno‐religious background, social networks, career mobility, and prestige interact.     

Course and Severity of Maternal Depression: Associations with Family Functioning and Child Adjustment

Number of lifetime episodes, duration of current episode, and severity of maternal depression were investigated in relation to family functioning and child adjustment. Participants were the 151 mother–child pairs in the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D) child multi-site study. Mothers were diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder; children (80 males and 71 females) ranged in age from 7 to 17 years. Measures of child adjustment included psychiatric diagnoses, internalizing and externalizing symptoms, and functional impairment. Measures of family functioning included family cohesion, expressiveness, conflict, organization, and household control; parenting measures assessed maternal acceptance and psychological control. Children of mothers with longer current depressive episodes were more likely to have internalizing and externalizing symptoms, with this association being moderated by child gender. Mothers with more lifetime depressive episodes were less likely to use appropriate control in their homes.

Evaluation of cast methods for estimating age from the os pubis.

Age-related changes of the pubic symphysis have gained wide acceptance among physical anthropologists as one basis for estimating adult skeletal age. However, these methods have not been tested by independent observers on large samples with known ages at death that represent contemporary populations. In this study 202 female and 116 male pairs of pubes collected at autopsy were blindly evaluated for age using the McKern-Stewart or Gilbert-McKern and Suchey-Brooks methods. Performance of the methods was measured by mean absolute deviation of true age from scored interval means and frequencies of true age falling within +/- 1 and +/- 2 standard deviations from the mean. The results suggest that the Suchey-Brooks methods are superior in forensic applications and that the racially specific refinement for males should be used. Age estimates should include +/- 2 standard deviations, and chances of error should be considered, especially when advanced age or debilitation is suspected.     

Polarization and ideological congruence between parties and supporters in Europe

The relationship between parties and their supporters is central to democracy and ideological representation is among the most important of these linkages. We conduct an investigation of party-supporter congruence in Europe with emphasis on the measurement of ideology and focusing on the role of party system polarization, both as a direct factor in explaining congruence and in modifying the effects of voter sophistication. Understanding this relationship depends in part on how the ideology of parties and supporters is measured. We use Poole’s Blackbox scaling to derive a measure of latent ideology from voter and expert responses to issue scale questions and compare this to a measure based on left–right perceptions. We then examine how variation in the proximity between parties ideological positions and those of their supporters is affected by the polarization of the party system and how this relationship interacts with political sophistication. With the latent ideology measure, we find that polarization decreases party-supporter congruence but increases the effects of respondent education level on congruence. However, we do not find these relationships using the left–right perceptual measure. Our findings underscore important differences between perceptions of left–right labels and the ideological constraint underlying issue positions.     

The First Shot was the Last Straw: The Sinking of the T.S.S. Athenia in September 1939 and British Naval Policy in the Second World War

On 3 September 1939 the passenger liner Athenia, sailing from Liverpool to Montreal, was sunk by the German submarine U-30 with a loss of 112 lives. This action, while not intended by the German government, was in violation of Germany's commitments under the London Naval Treaty and it complicated its desire to keep hostilities confined to Poland. The British government and Admiralty, confronted with an attack on an unarmed passenger liner within nine hours of the declaration of war, and several freighters shortly thereafter, concluded that the German Navy intended to wage unrestricted submarine warfare. This article shows that as a result of the sinking of the Athenia, the government and the Admiralty implemented convoys within the first week of the war, sooner and more completely than had been intended. Naval ship building priorities were also subsequently adjusted to quickly provide escort vessels for the newly organized convoys.     

Ecstasy and suicide

Deaths due to the ring-derivative amphetamines are not common and are usually accidental involving dehydration and hyperthermia. Suicides from 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) and related ring-derivative amphetamines overdose are rare. A 15-year-old female who had a history of depression and previous suicide attempts was found dead with a suicide note. Toxicology demonstrated lethal serum concentrations of MDMA (9.3 mg/L), with 34 mg/kg of MDMA in the liver, 2.4 mg/L in the urine, and 530 mg/kg in the stomach. The cause of death was MDMA toxicity, the manner suicide. While MDMA may be detected in victims in other drug-related or traumatic deaths, it is only rarely used in isolation in suicide, with a predominance in the 21- to 25-year-old range. Despite the rarity of such events, the possibility of a nonaccidental manner of death should be considered when high levels of MDMA and associated amphetamines are found at autopsy.     

Fifty Years of the OECD and Forty Years of Australian Membership

The Country Party leader Jack McEwen said that Australia would join the OECD “over my dead body” and it did not do so until 1971, the year he retired from politics. Since then Australia has taken part in what is a complex “network of networks” linking over 40,000 senior public servants from many of the most influential states via some 200 committees spanning a wide range of policy areas. Yet Australian scholars have paid little attention to the OECD and to its effect upon Australia. Our essay is a first step in remedying this gap. Using both archival sources and interviews with public servants, we examine Australia's reasons for taking up OECD membership and assess its impact on policymaking since, the most obvious of which has been upon policy learning. We also ask about Australia's impact on the OECD.     

Differences between multisite postmortem ethanol concentrations as related to agonal events

In a study of postmortem ethanol concentrations, blood was withdrawn from the right atrium, ascending aorta, and inferior vena cava. These samples, vitreous humor, and gastric fluid were analyzed in 307 autopsies, where a minimum blood ethanol concentration of 0.05% weight/volume (w/v) was present. Premortem, agonal, and postmortem events were reviewed in an attempt to account for differences in blood ethanol concentrations between sites. The agonal aspiration of vomitus having at least 0.80% w/v ethanol appears to be associated with an increase in aortic ethanol concentrations. We conclude that valid interpretation of postmortem ethanol concentrations must take into consideration the possible entry of ethanol into the pulmonary venous circulation via the respiratory system.     

Fighting back: Lethal responses to predatory attacks

Each year millions of Americans become victims of predatory crimes. The way victims respond to these attacks varies from complicance with offenders' requests to physically challenging offenders. In some cases, the physical defense of self and property has lethal consequences for the initial offender. While much is known about felony murder victims and typical homicide offenders, little is known about individuals who fight back against predatory attack by using lethal violence. In this paper, we use data from the Homicides in Chicago, 1965–1995 study to describe the characteristics of defensive homicide offenders and to determine how they compare with felony murder victims and defensive homicide offenders. Our results indicate that defensive homicide offenders are more similar to typical homicide offenders than felony murder victims, and are even more likely to have violent criminal histories and to use firearms than typical homicide offenders. Our results challenge the common perception that individuals who fight back against predatory attack are simply “law-abiding citizens.” We conclude the paper with a discussion of the implications of our study for additional research and police practice. Authors' Note: The authors thank editor Dennis Stevens and James Black for their helpful comments on earlier draft of the paper.     

The effects of multiple objectives in the theory of public sector supply

This paper incorporates objectives of both legislators and bureaucrats in a model of public sector decisionmaking. Existing models assume that either bureaucrats control production information and decisions, (Niskanen-type models) or legislators control production decisions (legislative models). My model explicitly incorporates imperfect agent behavior and corresponding preferences of both legislators and bureaucrats to reflect the bilateral nature of appropriations. The analysis shows that output levels generally differ from politically and socially efficient levels and depend on the relative weights of legislative and bureaucratic interests. Accordingly, Niskanen-type and legislative models are viewed as special cases of this more general approach.