Divided Selves: Professional Role Distancing Among Law Students and New Lawyers in a Period of Market Crisis

In the terms of Erving Goffman's classic role‐distancing analysis, newly admitted law students often aspire to an “embraced” lawyer role that directly expresses their personal and political values. Empirical research has suggested that during law school these students are instructed in an amoral and apolitical vision of professionalism. The literature has paid less attention to how students internally experience these norms within their continual processes of self‐construction. This article takes an exploratory micro‐dynamic look at professional identity formation drawing on longitudinal interviews and identity mapping with three student cohorts. Over the course of their legal education, students bound for large corporate law firms tended to report increasing professional role distancing. In contrast, students who pursued jobs in the public‐interest sector tended to sustain a more proximate conception of professional identity, overlapping with racial, gender, political, and other centrally constitutive roles. The article concludes with normative and theoretical implications.     

Cohort Effects and the Incumbency Advantage

The literature on the incumbency advantage in U.S. House elections has focused mostly on political variables, such as competition and incumbent resources. For this article, I identify an important sociological variable: a cohort effect that separates older generations from younger ones. Younger generations have been more likely to vote for incumbents, and the difference has endured over time, even as the political environment itself has changed and become more partisan. Moreover, the results hold even when one controls for partisan identification and general time‐period effects. The incumbency advantage may be a broader and more‐enduring part of American politics than has previously been recognized.     

MPs' Issue Attention in Parliament: Evidence of a Stick–Slip Process of Attention Allocation in the French National Assembly

Until now, political science has focused mainly on institutions or political actors and much less on the content of politics, the issues political actors and institutions deal with. Based on the seminal work of Jones and Baumgartner ((2005), The politics of attention: How government prioritises problems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press), the article will study MPs' issue attention in Parliament and will investigate the source of punctuation in attention allocation. Even if a growing literature is dedicated to this issue, the two main sources of friction – cognition and institution – have not yet been directly tested. Based on an exhaustive database of the parliamentary questions in the French National Assembly between 1988 and 2007, the paper will focus on the dynamics of issue attention in the parliamentary questions at three levels to show that: the general punctuation hypothesis is valid for the parliamentary question agendas; the comparison between the levels of punctuation of the institutionally unconstrained written question agenda and the institutionally constrained question to government agenda is consistent with the idea that higher institutional friction induces higher punctuation in attention allocation; and the dynamics of issue attention in the parliamentary question agendas at the individual level exhibit strong patterns of cognitive friction.     

CORRELATES OF VIOLENT POLITICAL EXTREMISM IN THE UNITED STATES*

Although research on terrorism has grown rapidly in recent years, few scholars have applied criminological theories to the analysis of individual‐level political extremism. Instead, researchers focused on radicalization have drawn primarily from political science and psychology and have overwhelmingly concentrated on violent extremists, leaving little variation in the dependent variable. With the use of a newly available data set, we test whether variables derived from prominent criminological theories are helpful in distinguishing between nonviolent and violent extremists. The results show that variables related to social control (lack of stable employment), social learning (radical peers), psychological perspectives (history of mental illness), and criminal record all have significant effects on participation in violent political extremism and are robust across multiple techniques for imputing missing data. At the same time, other common indicators of social control (e.g., education and marital status) and social learning perspectives (e.g., radical family members) were not significant in the multivariate models. We argue that terrorism research would benefit from including criminology insights and by considering political radicalization as a dynamic, evolving process, much as life‐course criminology treats more common forms of crime.     

GMOs in the Internal Market: New Legislation on National Flexibility

In an area where until now national autonomy has been tenaciously resisted, new EU legislation provides Member States with ‘flexibility to decide whether or not they wish to cultivate GMOs on their territory’. This forces attention on to the subtle, and not so subtle, ways in which internal market law constrains political actors in the EU. But it is similarly suggestive of how political actors might contribute to the evolution of the internal market. As well as exploring this relationship between the new legislation and internal market law, this article reflects on the ways in which lessons from the past have been addressed by legislators. Whilst it takes somewhat seriously the politics of GMOs, the new legislation simultaneously reinforces some of the limitations of our dominant models for generating knowledge, including the EU's problematic dichotomy between facts and values, risk assessment and risk management.     

New Governance,Chief Privacy Officers,and the Corporate Management of Information Privacy in the United States: An Initial Inquiry

While the turn from traditional regulation to more collaborative, experimentalist, and flexible forms of governance has garnered significant academic focus, far less attention has been paid to the effects of such “new governance” approaches on regulated firms' understanding of the laws' demands, and on the structures employed within business organizations to meet them. This article targets this analytic gap by examining internal corporate practices regarding consumer privacy, an arena in which the Federal Trade Commission and the states have adopted new governance models. Using data from qualitative interviews with leading corporate Chief Privacy Officers, as well as internal corporate documentation, it examines the way privacy practices have been catalyzed in the shadow of new privacy governance approaches and the combination of regulatory, market, and stakeholder forces they seek to harness. Specifically, it suggests the convergence of a set of practices adopted by privacy officers identified as “leaders,” regarding both high‐level corporate privacy management and the integration of privacy into entity‐wide risk management goals through technology, decision‐making processes, and the empowerment of distributed expertise networks throughout the firm.     

Democratic accountability and the changing European political order

This article is about democratic accountability and a Europe struggling to find viable answers to the questions of who and what shall constitute “Europe” and how to develop legitimate political institutions for governing it. The article is, nevertheless, first and foremost about political order and change, rules for living together, the role of democratic politics in society and the relations between political organization and civilized coexistence, and the study of the political. Modern democracies live with unresolved conflict, and accountability regimes are part of an institutional arrangement for preserving order and continuity and also for creating dynamics and change. Accountability processes take place within settled and unsettled orders, and they affect and are affected by existing orders. Without denying the importance of contending interests, power struggles, strategic behaviour, non‐cooperative games, and (re)distributional battles, attention is directed towards the search for unity, political cohesion and solidarity based upon the informed voluntary consent of the people through reflection and reasoned deliberation among individuals with different values, interests, understandings and resources.     

The Design of Environmental Regimes: Social Construction, Contextuality, and Improvisation

While much of the literature on environmental regimes has focused on effectiveness, this article takes a new look at a lesser-studied topic, the evolution of regime design. Understanding how regimes differ in design, and how various factors and processes shape such design, is important if we are to more carefully craft these regimes. We should also pay close attention to the formative role of social construction and context. Focusing on transboundary marine programs, we see that their designs basically follow a common template, namely that of the UNEP (United Nations Environmental Programme) Regional Seas Programme. However, the action of context (i.e., local actors and political processes) can modify these designs away from the common template. The extent to which these programs begin to differentiate from each other may be an important sign of program maturity and responsiveness to context. In this article, we examine a set of transboundary marine programs to uncover what the important dimensions of differentiation are. Then, we focus on one specific program, the SSME (Sulu-Sulawesi Marine Ecoregion) and closely trace how its specific form and organization came about. The analysis is informed by a model of institutional coherence that portrays institutions as the product of multiple generative mechanisms (e.g., social construction, ecological fit, and others). While it is premature to make definite judgments about the relative merits of competing regime designs, the work provides us with a new mode of analysis that can provide helpful directions for institutional assessment.     

Private thoughts of public representatives: assisted death, voluntary euthanasia and politicians

Assisted death and voluntary euthanasia have received significant and sustained media attention in recent years. High-profile cases of people seeking assistance to end their lives have raised, at least in the popular press, debate about whether individuals should be able to seek such assistance at a time when they consider their suffering to be unbearable or their quality of life unsatisfactory. Other recent developments include a number of attempts to legislate on the issue by the minor parties in Australia and the successful enactment of legislation in a few overseas jurisdictions. However, despite all of the recent attention that has focused on assisted death and voluntary euthanasia, a discussion of the adequacy of existing laws has not made it onto the political agenda of any of the Australian State or Territory governments. This is in spite of the fact that the private views of the majority of our elected Members of Parliament may be supportive of reform. This article explores the role of politicians' views and, as a case study, considers the opinions expressed by a number of Queensland Members of Parliament. In light of the views of these politicians and those of members of the public, as well as considerations arising from current medical practice, the article argues that there is a need for open political debate on assisted death and voluntary euthanasia. The article also suggests ways that such a debate may be achieved while minimising any political impact on governments that are prepared at least to consider this issue.     

Singapore's Culture War over Section 377A: Through the Lens of Public Choice and Multilingual Research

The 2007 debate over the retention of Singapore's male sodomy law provision set off a vigorous and passionate public debate reminiscent of the US culture war. However, the Singapore government's final decision reflects an interesting compromise. The law was retained, but its moral content was severely curtailed. This article critically examines this episode and explores the political dynamics driving the compromise. Enriching public choice theory on interest group capture, this article argues that the ruling party's political dominance coupled with limited but real political competition is surprisingly effective in aligning the government's position with the preference of the majority despite concerted pressure from well‐mobilized minority interest groups. Current legal scholarly work on this debate has focused on the “vigorous debate” in the English‐language forums. In this article, the examination of the contemporaneous discourse in Chinese and Malay newspapers enables a more accurate and comprehensive appreciation of this culture war episode.     

Swaying the Hand of Justice: The Internal and External Dynamics of Regime Change at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia

This article develops a conflict approach for studying the field of international criminal law. Focusing on the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, we draw on Burawoy's (2003 ) elaboration of reflexive ethnography to determine how external political changes affect the work of an international legal institution. We explore how political frameworks of legal liberalism, ad hoc legalism, and legal exceptionalism result in internal office, organizational, and normative changes within this Tribunal, thereby linking national political transformations with the construction of the global. Drawing on rolling field interviews and a two-wave panel survey, we conclude that the claims to universals that underwrite transnational legal fields cannot be understood solely through an analysis of external political forces, but must be combined with attention to how these are refracted through internal organizational change within international institutions.     

PARTISAN POLITICS,ELECTORAL COMPETITION AND IMPRISONMENT: AN ANALYSIS OF STATES OVER TIME*

The now well‐documented explosion in prison populations over the last 30 years has spurred significant attention in the literature. Early research focused primarily on economic explanations. More recently it has focused on political explanations of prison growth. Here we extend research on political explanations of imprisonment by drawing on the literature on state politics and public policy. We argue that the effect of partisan politics on punishment is conditional on how much electoral competition legislators face. We test this hypothesis using annual state level data on imprisonment from 1978 to 1996. Our findings show that the effect of Republican state legislative strength on prison admissions depends on time and the level of competition in state legislative elections. We argue that these findings suggest the need for a more nuanced understanding of the link between partisan U.S. politics and imprisonment.     

Judicial Interpretation or Judicial Activism? The Legacy of Rationalism in the Studies of the European Court of Justice

During the last two decades, law as a factor in European integration has attracted great scientific interest. Numerous studies and theoretical analyses have been published that have undertaken the task of examining and explaining the role of law in the progress of integration. The European Court of Justice (ECJ) in particular, as Europe's judiciary body, draws much attention in this context. However, the inflexible, mechanistic and universalistic notion of rationality that these works employ leads to serious misinterpretations and unjustified criticism regarding the role the ECJ takes in the course of integration. Within the frameworks of contemporary approaches, the Court is perceived as just one more political player among other actors and institutions, able to shape the EU in the pursuit of its own rational interests. By outlining the theoretical concept of context rationality, this article shows that the logics of law and judicial lawmaking are based on a non‐trivial and non‐political rationality and cannot be understood appropriately without paying attention to the context of European law.     

Determinants of attitudes toward police of Latino immigrants and non-immigrants

Though much attention has been given to the effect of ethnicity on perceptions of the police, few studies had focused on Latino immigrants. Using research conducted in an immigrant rich area, this study examined the possibility that determinants of attitudes toward the police differ across immigrants and non-immigrants. Using several statistical techniques, this article explores the impact of the most commonly used variables (e.g., age, gender, contact with the police) as well as those most associated with immigrants (e.g., language proficiency, religiosity, residential stability). Other variables used to assess various social processes (e.g., social cohesion, informal social control, neighboring and civic behavior) were also included. The findings revealed variations in determinants of attitudes toward the police between immigrants and non-immigrants, and suggest distinct social processes may account for these differences. These findings suggest that both researchers and policymakers must expand their breadth to more fully understand immigrant attitudes toward the police.     

Political Constitutionalism and the Question of Constitution‐Making

The debate on political constitutionalism has entirely neglected the constitution‐making dimension. This is probably due to the fact that constitution‐making usually brings with it undesirable outcomes such as the entrenchment of rights or structures. These outcomes do not respect reasonable disagreement among citizens because they violate the only fair system for settling disagreement: majority rule and equal voting rights. This article argues that political constitutionalists may regret the absence of any claim about constitution‐making. Either they are overlooking certain problems inherent to the electoral process that is supposed to tackle disagreement or, even worse, they are downplaying the entrenching effect of ordinary political processes by ignoring the redemptive properties of constituent power. In both cases, their claims undermine the political dimension of constitutionalism.     

Post‐Sovereignty and the European Legal Space

The political constitution of the European polity has become strained in recent years by insistent pressures on its institutional capacity to resolve social problems. The article examines the EU's polity crisis in the context of the development of a distinctive modern conception of secular constitutional authority, focused on the ideal of sovereign self‐determination. As the work of Neil MacCormick illustrates, the EU provides a radical challenge to the on‐going capacity of the concept of sovereignty to provide a framework to address problems of legitimacy. The article explores the nature of this challenge, its historical context and its consequences with reference to debates over the nature of constitutional pluralism. It sets out a path to the renewal of the European constitutional debate through a re‐consideration of secular constitutional authority and the necessity of its connection to the idea of sovereignty. The article seeks to re‐engage in the task of ‘questioning sovereignty’.     

Of Mandarins,Legal Consciousness,and the Cultural Turn in US Legal History: Robert W. Gordon. 1984. Critical Legal Histories. Stanford Law Review 36:57–125

This article traces the impact of Robert Gordon's “Critical Legal Histories” on scholars writing at the intersection of law and history. While Gordon's central claim about the constitutive character of the law has come to serve as a working assumption in the field, the case he made for the intellectual history of doctrine as articulated by legal mandarins has proven less influential in the twenty‐five years since the article was published. Instead, legal historians have focused their attention on the interaction between official and lay forms of law‐making with a decided emphasis on popular legal consciousness. For precisely this reason, the time may be ripe for reconsideration of mandarin materials, not only for what they have to tell us about the dynamics of cultural change, but also as sources of insight into basic puzzles of the human condition that have tended across time to be expressed in and through legal forms.     

E‐government and developing countries: an overview

E‐governance is more than just a government website on the Internet. The strategic objective of e‐governance is to support and simplify governance for all parties; government, citizens and businesses. The use of ICTs can connect all three parties and support processes and activities. In other words, in e‐governance electronic means support and stimulate good governance. Therefore, the objectives of e‐governance are similar to the objectives of good governance. Good governance can be seen as an exercise of economic, political, and administrative authority to better manage affairs of a country at all levels. It is not difficult for people in developed countries to imagine a situation in which all interaction with government can be done through one counter 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without waiting in lines. However to achieve this same level of efficiency and flexibility for developing countries is going to be difficult. The experience in developed countries shows that this is possible if governments are willing to decentralize responsibilities and processes, and if they start to use electronic means. This paper is going to examine the legal and infrastructure issues related to e‐governance from the perspective of developing countries. Particularly it will examine how far the developing countries have been successful in providing a legal framework.     

PRECOCIOUS ROLE ENTRY AS A MEDIATING FACTOR IN WOMEN'S METHAMPHETAMINE USE: IMPLICATIONS FOR LIFE‐COURSE AND PATHWAYS RESEARCH*

Precocious adoption of adult roles and responsibilities at an early age often has been linked to substance abuse and criminal behavior. Yet, much of the existing research suggests that early offending behaviors induce precocious movement into adulthood; less attention has focused on the way in which early adoption of adult roles and responsibilities might itself contribute to the onset of offending. In the following article, we examine the cumulative impact of early transitions into adult roles and responsibilities on the onset of methamphetamine (MA) use. Through inductive analyses of interviews with women methamphetamine users, we identified a range of adult roles and responsibilities that women described as facilitating their initiation into MA use, including family caretaking, motherhood, independent living, and peer and romantic associations with adults. Such findings have theoretical implications for both life‐course perspectives and feminist pathways research. They highlight the importance of attending to the timing and sequencing of experiences as well as highlight the gendered nature of these processes.     

Police Cooperation across the Irish Border: Familiarity Breeding Contempt for Transparency and Accountability

This article critically examines the practice, methods, and regulation of cross‐border police cooperation between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Despite legal and political divisions, police cooperation has survived and flourished in recent years especially among police officers on the ground. By comparison, the development of transparent regulatory and accountability structures and processes has been disappointing. While there have been domestic initiatives at the intergovernmental and legislative levels, these have tended to emphasize the centrality of direct engagement between the police chiefs and senior civil servants at the expense of formal transparent procedures. EU instruments have been marginalized as the police forces and their administrations prefer informal networks and force‐to‐force agreements which, it is argued, shield cross‐border police cooperation from standards of transparency, oversight, and accountability which are essential to its legitimacy. They also highlight the limitations of the current EU legislative approach to cross‐border police cooperation.