The Confrontation between the Big Five and Big Law: Turf Battles and Ethical Debates as Contests for Professional Credibility

This article uses interviews and comparative professional histories to explore the stakes of the battle- pre-Enron and seen in reactions to the Enron crisis - between the organized bar and the multidisciplinary practices (MDPs) associated with the Big Five accounting firms and their law firms. The paper examines modes of professional practice - family, Continental corporate law, and the Cravath model – to describe the tensions and potential solutions to maintaining professional legitimacy without appearing too close to business or economic power. The paper then seeks to explain preliminarily why the MDP debate became so strong in the United States despite the fact that the actual threat to U.S. corporate lawyers appeared relatively small. It suggests that the interjection of the Big Five potentially threatened a relatively precarious professional legitimacy with different impacts for different sectors of the bar.     

Framing the Oxymoron: A New Paradigm for Intelligence Ethics

Despite some arguments to the contrary, I argue that because ethics benefit, rather than harm, the intelligence profession they should be considered an inherent part of intelligence studies. The literature largely presents intelligence ethics as a two-sided debate between teleologists and deontologists. I propose that ethical justifications should instead be considered along a progressive spectrum drawn from the work of moral psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. Such a spectrum has numerous applications for gauging the moral arguments of individual practitioners of intelligence. I illustrate this using the dilemma of targeted political assassination – first in a hypothetical context, and finally using examples from the investigations of the 1975 Church Committee.     

Examining the “CSI-effect” in the cases of circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony: Multivariate and path analyses

As part of a larger investigation of the changing nature of juror behavior in the context of technology development, this study examined important questions unanswered by previous studies on the “CSI-effect.” In answering such questions, the present study applied multivariate and path analyses for the first time. The results showed that (a) watching CSI dramas had no independent effect on jurors' verdicts, (b) the exposure to CSI dramas did not interact with individual characteristics, (c) different individual characteristics were significantly associated with different types of evidence, and (d) CSI watching had no direct effect on jurors' decisions, and it had an indirect effect on conviction in the case of circumstantial evidence only as it raised expectations about scientific evidence, but it produced no indirect effect in the case of eyewitness testimony only. Finally, implications of the present study as well as for future research on the “CSI-effect” on jurors are discussed.     

Considerations on the use of transgenic crops for insect control

The adoption of agricultural technologies, whether developed through biotechnology or other methods, depends on social, political, regulatory and biological parameters. This article first presents an example of a low-input, non-biotechnological method of pest control that, while seemingly reasonable to researchers and extension agents, was not adopted by farmers. It then analyses a method for insect management developed through biotechnology that is becoming widely adopted: transgenic plants expressing insecticidal proteins from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). Globally increasing adoption of Bt plants, by small and large farmers in both low- and high- income countries requires explanation in terms of biological properties of cropping systems and insect populations, alternative control techniques and social policy considerations.     

Review article

Janusz Bugajski and Maxine Pollock, East European Fault Lines: Dissent, Opposition, and Social Activism. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989. 332 pp., index, paper: $42.50.

H. Stuart Hughes, Sophisticated Rebels: the Political Culture of European Dissent, 1968–1987. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988. 171 pp., index, cloth: $20.00.

H. Gordon Skilling, Samizdat and an Independent Society in Central and Eastern Europe Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989. 293 pp., index, cloth.     

Legislative budget cycles

Recent literature suggests that electoral budget cycles are a phenomenon of new rather than established democracies. What part of the democratization process explains the amelioration of the political budget cycle? We argue the answer lies (in part) in the development of a strong party system. We extend the classic Rogoff-Siebert model to show that political budget cycles are possible in a legislative context with rational voters. We then demonstrate that the development of a strong party system can restrain political budget cycles in a majoritarian electoral system. Finally, we follow prior work in using vote share volatility as a measure of the institutionalization of the party system. Using newly collected vote-share data for 433 elections for 90 democracies from 1980–2007, we calculate a measure of party institutionalization. We then use this data to demonstrate that institutionalized party systems are associated with mitigated political budget cycles, especially in majoritarian electoral systems.