Lochner redeemed: family privacy after Troxel and Carhart

At least since its 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, the Supreme Court has differentiated its review of abortion laws from its scrutiny of other intrusions on family privacy. Whereas abortion restrictions are reviewed under the middling "undue burden" standard, incursions on other family-related liberties, including marriage, kinship, and child rearing are said to be subject to the strict scrutiny ordinarily employed in the defense of fundamental rights. This Article contends that the Court's most recent decisions in this context give reason to reconsider both sides of that equation. Stenberg v. Carhart, striking down Nebraska's ban on "partial-birth" abortions, suggests that the Court's scrutiny in the abortion context will be more aggressive and rigid than most had supposed. At the same time, its decision in Troxel v. Granville, limiting states' authority to order grandparent visitation over the objects of a parent, suggest that there is more fluidity in the Court's review of other family liberties than is conventionally assumed. Together the cases signal a convergence in both sorts of family-privacy controversies toward a common standard of "reasonableness." That standard bears, for many, an uncomfortable association with the much-maligned "natural law-due process formula" of the Lochner era, but Professor Meyer argues that it is precisely the right approach in the context of family privacy. Although more rigid doctrinal formulae are sometimes preferred on the ground that they constrain judicial judgment, here they are undesirable precisely because they obscure the value judgments that are inevitably at the core of every family-privacy decision.     

New Public Management in Austria: Local Variation on a Global Theme?

This article tracks public sector reform in Austria with a focus on the influence of New Public Management (NPM) both as label and as specific set of reform ideas. We analyse to what degree current reforms have been influenced and shaped by this widely acclaimed international trend. In this empirical study we combine the different data sources of media coverage, reform documents and public sector executive survey to cover different levels of analysis. Although the reforms include NPM-features, we see no evidence so far for an archetype change in the Austrian public sector.     

The Impact of Nonprofit Collaboration in Early Child Care and Education on Management and Program Outcomes

The use of interorganizational relationships such as collaboration, partnerships, and alliances between public, private, and nonprofit organizations for the delivery of human services has increased. This article contributes to the growing body of knowledge on collaboration by exploring one kind of interorganizational relationship—interagency collaboration—in the field of early care and education. It examines variations within interagency collaborations and their impact on management and program outcomes. The findings show that interagency collaboration has a clear impact on management, program, and client outcomes: Specifically, the intensity of the collaborative relationship has a positive and statistically significant impact on staff compensation, staff turnover, and school readiness.     

Attracting private investment to contaminated properties: The value of public interventions

We employ a mail survey of private developers that uses conjoint choice experiments and Likert‐scaled attitudinal questions to examine preferences for policy instruments and incentives intended to encourage brownfield cleanup and redevelopment. Our analysis suggests that developers judge public hearing requirements at brownfield redevelopments unattractive, but that they place a relatively high value on liability relief—from both cleanup costs and claims by third parties. Reimbursement of environmental assessment costs is not particularly attractive. We also find considerable heterogeneity among developers in the value they place on these incentives, depending on their experience with contaminated sites. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management     

Of Values and Legitimacy – Discourse Analytical Insights on the Copyright Case Law of the Court of Justice of the European Union

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) increasingly faces societal value‐conflicts in EU law disputes. For example, in EU copyright law, in the digital age, diverse fundamental values, as well as cultural and societal developments, are at stake. This article discusses the role of the CJEU in the European value discourse, using copyright law as a case study. The methodological approach used, critical discourse analysis, is seldom applied in jurisprudential studies, but is well suited for teasing out value‐related aspects of case law. Exploratory research of seminal copyright cases suggests that the CJEU's discourse of the various values seems unnecessarily one‐sided and shallow. A lack of discursiveness in the jurisprudence would diminish the legitimacy of the Court's decisions, and would not offer adequate guidance to national courts or private decision‐makers, to whom the Court at the same time may be leaving more of the task of value reconciliation.     

Investigating perceptions of race and ethnic diversity among prospective police officers

Many have suggested police diversity will improve police-community relations, but research testing this hypothesis is inconclusive. We investigated perceptions of police race, ethnicity, and diversity in a heterogeneous sample of prospective police officers. Data are drawn from interviews with 42 criminal justice college students in the Southwestern United States, of which 15 were Hispanic, and who each wanted to become a police officer. Participants supported diversity in policing, and collectively expressed a belief that race plays a central role in policing today. Furthermore, participants expressed support for the ideals of both passive and active representative bureaucracy. Hispanics in the sample in particular anticipated they would positively affect police relations in Hispanic neighborhoods and encourage immigrants to cooperate with police.     

Experimenting with TripleCOPs: Productive innovation or counterproductive complexity?

The Basel, Rotterdam, and Stockholm Conventions are engaged in a path-breaking “synergies” initiative that coordinates and even integrates parts of their administration, operation, and implementation. This includes holding TripleCOPs during which their Conference of the Parties meet together in sequential and simultaneous sessions. This article provides a preliminary analysis of this unprecedented experimentation. We find several important positive and negative procedural, political, and policy consequences of the new format, including: countries with large delegations hold a variety of advantages; developing countries can potentially leverage negotiating strength in one convention to advance concerns in another; it is easier to address the environmentally sound management of chemicals and wastes holistically as well as specific technical issues that involve two or more of the treaties; and new opportunities exist for brinkmanship, obstruction, and cross-treaty negotiating that can make reaching agreement on some issues more difficult.