STATE AND LEGAL AUTHORITY

The idea of authority lies at the conceptual heart of much legal policy analysis. This essay discusses three perspectives on state and legal authority—the liberal-constitutional, the corporatist, and the technocratic—as a broad political framework for understanding major issues of judicial policy-making in the United States today. The essay examines recent literature on judicial legitimacy and capacity within the context of the three perspectives and raises research questions which derive from this approach to judicial policy. This framework provides a theoretical basis for seeing not only a decline, but changes in patterns of judicial authority and their relationship to any existing crisis of authority in the state in general.     

PENALITY AND THE PENAL STATE

The sociology of punishment has developed a rich understanding of the social and historical forces that have transformed American penality during the last 40 years. But whereas these social forces are not unique to the United States, their penal impact there has been disproportionately large, relative to comparable nations. To address this issue, I suggest that future research should attend more closely to the structure and operation of the penal state. I begin by distinguishing penality (the penal field) from the penal state (the governing institutions that direct and control the penal field). I then present a preliminary conceptualization of “the penal state” and discuss the relationship between the penal state and the American state more generally.     

THE STATE OF CRIMINOLOGICAL THEORY*

After nearly 20 years of ferment in criminology, the reactive conception of criminality is the most intractable issue. It can be circumvented only if criminologists use official data to compute crime rates and to identify criminals or delinquents. That proposed strategy does not necessarily entail acceptance of the reactive conception, especially in light of an argument about etiological theories that purport to answer two of the four major criminological questions, those having to do with variation in the crime rate and with individual differences as regards criminality. Any such theory will be empirically indefensible unless it encompasses (1) some etiological condition as the independent variable; (2) the frequency of some type of behavior as an intervening variable; (3) an official criminality variable (for example, an official crime rate); and (4) a reactive variable, one which pertains to the behavior of legal officials and supposedly determines the connection between the intervening variable and the dependent variable. The argument bears on Marxist and conflict criminology only insofar as advocates of those perspectives genuinely pursue etiological theories about crime. Finally, apart from any substantive consideration, criminological theories will remain defective until criminologists adopt formal theory construction. The more general and important point is that some 20 years of ferment will not culminate in a new theory without some special strategy—if not the one proposed here, then another.     

DEFINING PARENTING COORDINATION WITH STATE LAWS

Parenting coordination is a new trend in defining ADR interventions to help reduce parenting conflicts between court‐involved parents. This writing identifies core elements of parenting coordination as defined by various current state statutes and the AFCC Guidelines for Parenting Coordination. Exploration of the formalization of parenting coordination provides heuristic reading for those initiating statutory regulations in other states as well as the possibility for development of a uniform law.     

STATE LAW AND THE TERMINATION OF PARENTAL RIGHTS

This paper presents the findings from a content analysis of state laws authorizing the termination of parental rights. The analysis yielded a taxonomy of termination criteria and it identified those criteria that were most widely adopted by the states. State termination criteria were compared to those listed in the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) of 1997. The comparison shows that state laws identify more types of termination criteria than are listed in ASFA. In addition, criteria related to neglect and “parental failure” were often ambiguous and lacked detail. The study identifies possible directions for research on state termination law.