Funding the Cause: How Public Interest Law Organizations Fund Their Activities and Why It Matters for Social Change

Most of the work of public interest law organizations does not make money. How do these organizations survive, given the economic realities of law practice? Drawing on survey data from a national random sample of public interest law firms, we investigate how funding models vary across public interest organizations and how funding sources affect these organizations’ activities. We find funding structures have, over time, shifted away from foundation support toward government grants. Compared to other organizations, however, conservative organizations draw significantly less of their budget from federal and state grants, and significantly more of their budget from private contributions. Conservative organizations are significantly less likely than other organizations to rely on funding that prohibits engaging in class actions, receiving attorney's fees, or lobbying. Respondents reported that funding restrictions hamper their ability to negotiate favorable settlements, bring about systemic change, and represent vulnerable client communities. We close with a comparative institutional analysis of different funding models.     

Co-Evolution of a University Department and a Dance Company: Creation of Value of Art in a Community

In Korea, arts and culture in the provinces are at a disadvantage in many aspects. We examine the difficulties of being a provincial dance organization. We analyze the strategies to overcome these difficulties and the resulting process of the co-evolution of a department of dance at a provincial university and its offshoot dance company. In their endeavor for survival, these dance organizations seek to be a part of the community with community dance programs that induce the participation of residents. The resulting values created in the community of the Western District of Daejeon City and the success factors of these organizations are also analyzed. Some implications of the co-evolutionary process to other provincial dance organizations are discussed.     

Uniform administrative requirements for grants and agreements with institutions of higher education, hospitals and other non-profit organizations, and with commercial organizations, foreign governments, organizations under the jurisdiction of foreign governments, and international organizations--DOL. Final rule

The Department of Labor is issuing these regulations pursuant to the requirements of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Circular No. A-110 (Revised), which provides standards for obtaining consistency and uniformity among Federal agencies in the administration of grants and agreements with institutions of higher education, hospitals, and other non-profit organizations. This rule also applies to the Department of Labor's grants to commercial organizations, foreign governments, organizations under the jurisdiction of foreign governments and international organizations. OMB issued Circular A-110 in 1976 and, except for a minor revision in February 1987, the Circular remained unchanged until revised in 1993. To update the Circular, OMB established an interagency task force to review the Circular. The task force solicited suggestions for changes to the Circular from university groups, non-profit organizations and other interested parties and compared for consistency the provisions of similar provisions applied to State and local governments. The revised Circular and these regulations reflect the results of these efforts.     

VOLUNTARY ORGANIZATIONS AND NEIGHBORHOOD CRIME: A DYNAMIC PERSPECTIVE*

Although numerous theories suggest that voluntary organizations contribute to lower crime rates in neighborhoods, the evidence for this proposition is weak. Consequently, we propose a dynamic perspective for understanding the relationship between voluntary organizations and neighborhood crime that involves longitudinal analyses and the measurement of the age of organizations. By using longitudinal data on a sample of census blocks (N = 87,641) located across 10 cities, we test the relationship between age‐graded measures of different types of voluntary organizations and neighborhood crime rates. We use fixed‐effects negative binomial regression models that focus on change within neighborhoods of the relationship between voluntary organizations and neighborhood crime. Our results show that although each type of voluntary organization is found to exhibit crime‐reducing behavior in neighborhoods, we find that many of them are consistent with what we refer to as the “delayed impact scenario”—there is a pronounced delay between the placement of a voluntary organization and a neighborhood subsequently experiencing a reduction in crime. With protective effects of organizations typically not demonstrated until several years after being in the neighborhood, these patterns suggest a need for long‐term investment strategies when examining organizations.     

Semiformal Organizations and Control During the COVID-19 Crisis in China

Scholars often compare China and Western societies in terms of dichotomous forms of control—formal and informal. Recent research indicates a nuanced form of social control—semiformal. Using a survey data collected during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in China, this study investigated the prevalence and importance of semiformal organizations, formal organizations, and informal groups participating in social control and social service and the predictors of the perceived importance of these three forms of social control mechanisms. Findings from this study revealed that formal organizations, the semiformal organizations, and informal groups all participated in community control and service. Semiformal organizations had the highest level of participation. This study found that education and age are the two major predictors of the views on the importance of formal, informal, and semiformal control and control mechanisms.

     

Audit requirements for institutions of higher education and other nonprofit organizations--Department of Commerce. Interim final rule with request for comments

The Department of Commerce is implementing Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance provided in Circular A-133, "Audits of Institutions of Higher Education and Other Nonprofit Organizations." As a result of this interim final rule, institutions of higher education and other nonprofit organizations that receive Federal assistance are required to periodically perform audits and submit the audit reports to the Federal government. This interim final rule establishes uniform audit requirements applicable to these organizations and defines the Department's responsibilities for implementing and monitoring these requirements.     

Implementing the principle of policy integration: institutional interplay and the role of international organizations

The implementation of the sustainable development principle of integration implies that economic laws should not be designed solely for the purpose of maximizing financial profits, but also with the object of improving human well-being, and addressing social and environmental concerns. International organizations, in which international treaties are being negotiated and created, will have to support this type of cross-disciplinary approach. International institutions, however, were not originally designed to cope with such a cross-disciplinary effort. Rather, most international institutions have emerged in line with the premise of ‘functionalism’, according to which their role is limited to supplying specialized services, usually as a solution for emerging needs and as a result of historical events. These specialized institutions have thus emerged with little coordination or common planning and have resulted in a global structure that has been referred to as an ‘accident of history’. The role that international organizations should and do fulfil with respect to the implementation of the principle of integration is reviewed in this paper. This paper concentrates on trade and investment organizations (the World Trade Organization and the Energy Charter Treaty); it reviews the channels through which non-trade/investment considerations may, or may not, penetrate the decision-making processes of these organizations; the ways these International organizations engage with interdisciplinary issues and how the objectives of other institutions are reflected in their work.     

Waiver of certain membership requirements for certain health maintenance organizations (HMOs), and state option for disenrollment restrictions for certain HMOs under Medicaid--HCFA. Final rule

These regulations revise current Medicaid rules to bring them into conformity with statutory changes that (1) expanded the waiver authority of the Secretary to permit certain health maintenance organizations (HMOs) meeting specified requirements to exceed the composition of enrollment limit, (2) permitted certain organizations to contract on a risk basis, (3) permitted continuation of benefits to recipients enrolled in certain organizations after they have lost entitlement to Medicaid, and (4) granted States the option of restricting a Medicaid enrollee's right to disenroll from certain types of risk HMOs and other organizations. The statutory changes that are reflected in these regulations were enacted in section 2364 of the Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, as amended by section 9517 of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 and section 4113 of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1987. We are also making a technical correction concerning HMO and PHP contracts.     

One for you and two for me: revenue sharing arrangements in charitable healthcare organizations

Charitable healthcare organizations have often borrowed from the methods of their for-profit counterparts in compensating physicians and other business partners. This is done in order to provide needed services to their communities, and to protect their charitable assets by sharing risk and preserving limited capital. One of the most controversial compensation methods in use by such organizations is the revenue sharing arrangement. In use for over thirty years, these arrangements have received close scrutiny and inconsistent treatment by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and have been the subject of critics' ire as an impermissible transgression of the fundamental line between charities and commercial enterprises. The author, however, concludes that revenue sharing arrangements serve an important purpose in enabling charitable healthcare organizations to fulfill their missions, that the IRS and the Treasury have now made clear that there is not a higher standard governing their use, and that these arrangements are consistent with charitable operation when an appropriate process and safeguards are in place to prevent payment of unreasonable compensation.     

我国民间组织的合法性困境及立法思路探讨

民间组织的大规模兴起反映出我国公民社会建设过程中社会领域改革的功能性需求,但现行立法指导思想的偏差和法规体系的严重滞后,不仅制约了民间组织快速、健康发展,难以满足社会对公民结社自由权行使的迫切要求,也导致了民间组织出现严重的合法性困境。解决这一困境,既要明确立法指导思想,解决好立法原则的适时性、稳定性和连续性问题,更要兼顾民间组织培育与社会发展的良性互动关系,尊重民间组织成长的自身规律。     

An approach to minimizing legal and reputational risk in Red Team hacking exercises

Robust cyber-resilience depends on sound technical controls and testing of those controls in combination with rigorous cyber-security policies and practices. Increasingly, corporations and other organizations are seeking to test all of these, using methods more sophisticated than mere network penetration testing or other technical audit operations. More sophisticated organizations are also conducting so-called “Red Team” exercises, in which the organization tasks a small team of highly skilled and trained individuals to try to gain unauthorized access to physical and logical company assets and information. While such operations can have real value, they must be planned and conducted with great care in order to avoid violating the law or creating undue risk and reputational harm to the organization. This article explores these sometimes tricky issues, and offers practical risk-based guidance for organizations contemplating these types of exercises.     

The Privatization of Public Legal Rights: How Manufacturers Construct the Meaning of Consumer Law

This article demonstrates how the content and meaning of California's consumer protection laws were shaped by automobile manufacturers, the very group these laws were designed to regulate. My analysis draws on and links two literatures that examine the relationship between law and organizations but often overlook one another: political science studies of how businesses influence public legal institutions, and neo-institutional sociology studies of how organizations shape law within their organizational field. By integrating these literatures, I develop an "institutional-political" theory that demonstrates how organizations' construction of law and compliance within an organizational field shapes the meaning of law among legislators and judges. This study examines case law and more than 35 years of California legislative history concerning its consumer warranty laws. Using institutional and political analysis, I show how auto manufacturers, who were initially subject to powerful consumer protection laws, weakened the impact of these laws by creating dispute resolution venues. The legislature and courts subsequently incorporated private dispute resolution venues into statutes and court decisions and made consumer rights and remedies largely contingent on consumers first using manufacturer-sponsored venues. Organizational venue creation resulted in public legal rights being redefined and controlled by private organizations.     

Gangs as contractors: the social organization of American Taiwanese youth gangs in Southern California

This paper examines the organizational structure and operations of Taiwanese organized crime and youth gangs in Southern California. In-depth interviews were used as the principle method of research. In contrast to transnational criminal conspiracy claims and the La Cosa Nostra model of vertically integrated organizations, our findings suggest that these criminal groups consist of discrete local Taiwanese youth gangs which operate as largely independent economic units that show no substantive and operational ties to criminal organizations in Taiwan. The formation of Taiwanese criminal organizations and gangs in Southern California is primarily governed by the availability of financial opportunities. Furthermore, both the inter-gang relations and intra-gang structures exhibit a distinct form of contractor arrangement which consists of market-like weak ties that are simultaneously circumscribed by the criminal embeddedness. We argue that that these economic weak ties, which seem to render conventionally understood criminal organizational boundaries administratively less meaningful, still function as an operationally significant governance mechanism of the organizational structures of American Taiwanese youth gangs. In addition, the paper discusses the implications that the embeddedness has on the somewhat paradoxical and incoherent organizational structure.     

Medicare Program; establishment of the Medicare+Choice Program--HCFA. Interim final rule with comment period

The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (BBA) establishes a new Medicare+Choice (M+C) program that significantly expands the health care options available to Medicare beneficiaries. Under this program, eligible individuals may elect to receive Medicare benefits through enrollment in one of an array of private health plan choices beyond the original Medicare program or the plans now available through managed care organizations under section 1876 of the Social Security Act. Among the alternatives that will be available to Medicare beneficiaries are M+C coordinated care plans (including plans offered by health maintenance organizations, preferred provider organizations, and provider-sponsored organizations), M+C "MSA" plans, that is, a combination of a high deductible M+C health insurance plan and a contribution to an M+C medical savings account (MSA), and M+C private fee-for-service plans. The introduction of the M+C program will have a profound effect on Medicare beneficiaries and on the health plans and providers that furnish care. The new provisions of the Medicare statute, set forth as Part C of title XVIII of the Social Security Act, address a wide range of areas, including eligibility and enrollment, benefits and beneficiary protections, quality assurance, participating providers, payments to M+C organizations, premiums, appeals and grievances, and contracting rules. This interim final rule explains and implements these provisions. In addition, we are soliciting letters of intent from organizations that intend to offer M+C MSA plans to Medicare beneficiaries and/or to serve as M+C MSA trustees.     

HIPAA privacy: the compliance challenges ahead

This Article reviews the HIPAA Privacy Standards' impact on healthcare organizations. It discusses whether a healthcare organization is a "Covered Entity" under the regulations, what information the Privacy Standards protect, what restrictions the regulations place on the use and disclosure of protected health information, what individual rights the Privacy Standards create, and what agreements they require between healthcare organizations and their business associates. The author provides relatively extensive guidance to organizations that are embarking upon their voyage of compliance with these broadly applicable regulations, but notes that the full extent of necessary compliance remains unclear, pending DHHS issuance of the next iteration of the rulemaking in this area. The Article was finalized in January 2002, before HHS issued any modifications to the Privacy Standards.     

论仲裁机构与法院的关系

仲裁机构和法院作为解决民商事争议的两个最重要的机构,既存在着支持和协作关系,又存在着一定的对立关系。正确认识和处理二者的关系,对于充分发挥仲裁在解决民商事争议中的积极作用具有十分重要的意义。     

Public Interest Law Organizations and the Two‐Tier System of Access to Justice in the United States

Public interest law organizations (PILOs) are important institutions for providing access to justice in the United States. How have political, economic, and institutional factors shaped PILOs? How do PILOs vary in the services they offer and in their geographical location relative to poverty and population in the United States? This article investigates these questions by combining original survey data from a representative sample of public interest law organizations with GIS data on population and poverty. We find that the presence of a PILO is positively related to political progressiveness and population at the county level, but negatively related to the concentration of poverty. Our analysis reveals a two‐tier system of public interest representation in which national organizations engage in a variety of social change strategies, whereas local and regional organizations utilize more limited strategies and depend more on governmental funding. These patterns have implications for access to justice in the United States today.     

The Institutional Dimensions of Fisheries Stock Assessments

Coastal states were granted ample authority to conserve and manage resources within their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) as a result of the codification of 200-mile exclusive economic zones at the Third Law of the Sea Convention. With this authority came the responsibility to acquire a scientific understanding of these resources sufficient to inform sustainable policies. Two decades later, it would appear that the transmission of scientifically sound advice into long-term sustainable policies has proved more difficult than anticipated. This paper examines the linkage between fisheries stock assessments and fisheries policy and argues that institutional structure affects perceptions of salience, credibility and legitimacy and, as a result, the influence of fisheries stock assessments on fisheries policy. More specifically, I argue here that fisheries stock assessment processes that are embedded within policymaking organizations are more influential within those organizations than outside of them. Conversely, autonomous assessments are more influential than embedded assessments with a broad range of stakeholders affected by fisheries policies but less influential within the policymaking organizations themselves. The empirical illustrations of these points include an examination of fisheries stock assessments in Canada, the United States and Australia.     

Researching Private Security Consumption

This paper has two objectives: to provide an exploratory analysis of the rationalities and constraints that shape consumption of private security within organizations and to discuss some of the issues and questions that need to be addressed in future empirical studies of private security use by organizations. It is based largely on seven semi-directed interviews conducted with security managers, six of whom work in the private sector. While these security managers distanced themselves from responsibility for actual security consumption, arguing that they lack the capacity to make such decisions, they exercise considerable influence over the demand for private security within their organizations. Although all participants noted the relative ease with which they can convince their superiors to invest in security, they also indicated that security must have a demonstrated value-added component for the organization (often in money terms). Furthermore, executives expect security to be minimally intrusive and/or disruptive. This paper reports preliminary results of research on an under-investigated topic; it also builds on the methodological decisions and findings in this research to provide useful information to scholars interested in researching private security consumption in organizations.     

The Process Model of Closure and Nonprofits: The Exit of Exit Art

Experts think of arts nonprofits as fragile organizations, prone to closure. Despite these predictions, little research has been completed on the process of closure within these organizations. I leverage a comprehensive organizational database and seventeen in-depth interviews with staff and board members to understand the process of closing New York's Exit Art. I explore the value of Sutton's (1987) process model, and its application to nonprofits by Duckles et al. (2014), to analyze the case. This study offers novel insights into management practices that may benefit nonprofits in the future, and interest scholars who study management transitions and organizational closure.