Closing the Gaps: Plaintiffs in Pivotal Sexual Harassment Cases

When he wrote Debtors in Court almost 30 years ago, Herbert Jacob laid the foundation for the legal mobilization research that has flourished in recent years. In arguing that litigants were political actors, Jacob showed that their social identities and Communications networks influenced their decisions to use the power of the law to vindicate their interests. This paper builds on Jacob's original insights to analyze the origins of the claim for sexual harassment as a Title VII violation. By focusing on the women who filed those claims, the paper examines the interaction of class, gender, and race that created social distance between the women and their harassers and employers. This distance made informal resolution of their disputes impossible, requiring the intervention of third parties. In addition, their Communications networks led them to attorneys able to generate and expand the new claim for sexual harassment. This analysis of a particular moment in legal history reveals the potential political significance of private litigation.     

The prison in economics: private and public incarceration in Ancient Greece

Recent histories of Ancient Greece describe a transition from customary law to public criminal justice between 800 and 400 B.C. This narrative contains three pieces of evidence against the presumption that prisons are a public good and government must provide incarcerations. First, before the rise of a formal government, Ancient Greece had a functioning system of criminal law enforcement. Second, the timeline surrounding the rise of government institutions in Ancient Greece originated with Solon’s penal reforms. Lastly, the rise of a government system was more the result of private rather than public interest.     

Problem Drinking, Jealousy, and Anger Control: Variables Predicting Physical Aggression Against a Partner

Alcohol use and intimate partner violence (IPV) are significantly related, but only a subset of individuals who drink are aggressive and relatively little is known about what moderates this relationship in community samples. Two risk factors, anger control and jealousy, were hypothesized to moderate the relationship between IPV and problem drinking in a sample of 453 community couples. A significant three-way interaction indicated that men with jealousy problems, but not anger control problems, were most likely to show the strongest association between problem drinking and IPV. In accord with the multiple threshold model of IPV, specific combinations of risk factors appeared to represent different thresholds in which problem drinking influenced the likelihood of IPV.     

Marriage patterns among unwed mothers: Before and after PRWORA

The promotion of marriage and two‐parent families became an explicit public policy goal with the passage of the 1996 welfare reform bill. Marriage has the putative effect of reducing welfare dependency among single mothers, but only if they marry men with earnings sufficient to lift them and their children out of poverty. Newly released data from the 2002 cycle of the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), along with data from the 1995 cycle, allow us to compare pre‐ and post‐PRWORA differences in (1) cumulative marriage rates among unwed mothers, and (2) patterns of marital choice (that is, differences in characteristics of the men these mothers marry, such as their education and employment status). Overall, our results show that unwed childbearing is associated with lower marriage rates and marital quality. Difference‐in‐difference models show that welfare reform was not strongly associated with pre‐ and post‐welfare reform changes in marriage among nonmarital birth mothers, even among the most disadvantaged mothers. Compared with other women, nonmarital birth mothers also were less likely than other women to marry “economically attractive” men in the post‐welfare reform period. The success of marriage promotion initiatives may depend heavily on whether women themselves are “marriageable” and whether potential spouses have the ability to support a stable family life. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Book Reviews

Book Reviews in This Article:
America's Health Care Revolution. Who Lives? Who Dies? Who Pays? By Joseph A. Califano, Jr.
American Medicine: The Power Shift . By Eli Ginzberg
Health Services in the United States, 2d ed. By Florence A. Wilson and Duncan Neuhauser
The U.S. Health Care System. A Look to the 19905 . Edited by Eli Ginzberg.
Handbook of Health Care Risk Management . By Glenn T. Troyer and Steven L. Salman
Health Care Risk Management: Organization and Claims Administration . By Gary P. Kraus
Medicolegal Aspects of Critical Care . Edited by Katherine Benesch, Norman S. Abramson, Ake Grenvik, and Alan Meisel
Ethics and Critical Care Medicine . Edited by John C. MosLop and Loretta Kopelnian
The mentally disabled and the Law , 3d ed. By Samuel Jan Brakel, John Parry, and Barbaa A.     

The Effect of Distributive Justice on Willingness to Pay for Municipality Child Care: An Extension of the GEF Hypothesis

Public-goods dilemmas are characterized by conflicts between self-interest and the welfare of a group or society at large. Research has identified several factors that enhance cooperation in such dilemmas. However, less is known about how concern for distributive justice affects willingness to contribute in asymmetric public-goods dilemmas. To test the hypothesis that contributions to a common resource is related to perceived fairness, experiments were performed to investigate willingness to pay to the social service of child care in hypothetical societies. Experiment 1 aimed at replicating a previous survey study (Biel et al., 1997). Experiments 2 and 3 were extensions. In all three experiments subjects were asked to indicate how fair they considered different distributions of the quality of child care provided by their municipality. These distributions corresponded to the principles of equality, equity, and need. University students (32, 48, and 32 in the three experiments, respectively) served as subjects. Ratings of perceived fairness were positively related to willingness to pay. Other factors also positively related to willingness to pay included ability to pay, personal need, expected payment from others, and the number of households who had to contribute in order to maintain the quality. Furthermore, decreasing municipality size increased willingness to pay.