Compliance costs,regulation, and environmental performance: Controlling truck emissions in the US

When explaining regulatory policymaking and the behavior of regulated business firms, scholars have supplemented economic models by emphasizing the role of public‐regarding entrepreneurial politics and of normative pressures on firms. This article explores the limits of such entrepreneurial politics and “social license” pressures by examining regulation of emissions from diesel powered trucks in the US. We find that the economic cost of obtaining the best available control technology – new model lower emissions engines – has: (i) limited the stringency and coerciveness of direct regulation of vehicle owners and operators; (ii) dwarfed the reach and effectiveness of the governmental programs that subsidize the purchase of new less polluting vehicles; and (iii) elevated the importance of each company’s “economic license”– as opposed to its “social license”– in shaping its environmental performance. The prominence of this “regulatory compliance cost” variable in shaping both regulation and firm behavior, we conclude, is likely to recur in highly competitive markets, like trucking, that include many small firms that cannot readily either afford or pass on the cost of best available compliance technologies.     

Detection of amitriptyline, citalopram, and metabolites in porcine bones following extended outdoor decomposition

Skeletal remains of a domestic pig were assessed for relative distribution of amitriptyline, citalopram, and metabolites. Following acute exposure and outdoor decomposition for 2 years, drugs and metabolites were analyzed in 13 different bones. Bones were pulverized following a simple wash procedure, and drugs were extracted by passive incubation in methanol, followed by solid-phase extraction. Samples were analyzed by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography (UHPLC) and confirmed with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. The Kruskall-Wallis test showed that bone type was a main effect with respect to drug level for all analytes, with levels varying from 33- to 166-fold. Ratios of levels of drug to that of the corresponding metabolite were less variable, varying roughly one- to eightfold. This suggests limitations in the interpretive value of drug measurements in bone and that relative levels of drug and metabolites should be further investigated in terms of forensic value.     

Observed Characteristics of Suicidal Hangings: An 11-year Retrospective Review

Many studies have been published regarding suicidal hanging deaths, and most forensic pathologists and coroners are very familiar with such causes of death. Forensic pathologists are challenged over their rulings regarding manner of death in part because the general public has a limited scope of knowledge. One such challenge centers on the question of whether a hanging can be a suicide if the individual is not fully suspended. The authors designed a retrospective study to review suspension in hangings and to analyze other criteria used to help in deciding manner of death. We examined 229 suicidal hanging deaths over an 11-year period (1997 through early 2009) using the data from two separate jurisdictions in Ohio. In conclusion, we found that the vast majority (83.4%) of people who hanged themselves were found partially suspended. Among other criteria analyzed, only the presence of petechial hemorrhages and acute neck injury was statistically significant.     

Race,Care Work,and the Private Law of Inheritance

Hartog, Hendrik. 2012 . Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age . Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 353. $29.95 cloth. In Someday All This Will Be Yours, Hendrik Hartog (2012) examines how private inheritance law structured the strategies people used at the turn of the twentieth century to induce relatives to care for them as they aged. Reading it as a book about social inequality and the family reveals how wealth, gender, and race not only worked to deny claims of marginalized caregivers but also to hide the way these social hierarchies affect family life. Although race does not figure in Hartog's analysis, highlighting its latent presence illustrates the often unspoken yet fundamental role race plays in legal regulation of families.     

Dialectic of Domesticity: Homemaking and ITS Discontents in 1920s American Drama

In the 1920s, homemaking was presented for the first time to American women by advertisers and educators as a putative career, combining art, science, economics, and a rhetoric of fulfillment. This essay considers how Broadway plays promoted, challenged, debated, and sold versions of this idea across a spectrum of genres.     

Performance-Based Government Models: Building A Track Record

Governments across the country have embarked on performance-based government efforts. Typical goals of these efforts are to clarify the mission and priority objectives of government with an emphasis on the expected results, to develop mechanisms for monitoring and reporting the achievement of those objectives, and to use this information to make decisions about government activities, including making government more accountable Although many governments have reported success in establishing their performance-based programs, we found ourselves wondering whether any of these programs are showing signs that they can be sustained over time. Are performance-based reports or budgets being used by managers and policy makers? Are the performance programs maintained after implementation? If so, what are the factors critical to success? To answer these questions, we reviewed performance-based government efforts in progress throughout the country with a focus on the initiatives of five states.1 This discussion begins by describing the efforts in those five states: the stated need, the approach, and the results to date. We then discuss the elements of success and the lessons learned from these performance-based government pioneers.     

SOCIAL JUSTICE AND FAMILY COURT REFORM

Creating a unified family court, or any type of family court reform, may have only a minimal impact if it simply changes the structure of how judges do business rather than addresses the structure of the child welfare system itself. The authors argue that family court reform must place social justice at its center. First, they discuss profound flaws in the child welfare system that make poor and minority families especially vulnerable to coercive state intervention. Second, they describe two approaches to child welfare cases–family systems theory and therapeutic justice–that can help to guide reform efforts directed at addressing these structural flaws. Finally, they suggest ways in which family law scholarship can assist in creating a social justice agenda for family court reform.