The Duty to Take Care: President Obama,Public Administration,and the Capacity to Govern

President Barack Obama inherited many challenges as he entered the White House. One of the most important obligations he faced was the constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Meeting that commitment has been rendered more difficult because Obama seems not to have recognized that the people and organizations of the executive branch are facing a crisis in the capacity to govern. This essay argues that no matter how talented President Obama may be in public policy or on the stump, he likely will not accomplish his constitutional duty unless he engages that capacity crisis.     

Length variation in HV2 of the human mitochondrial DNA control region.

Hair samples were typed from three individuals who exhibited length heteroplasmy in the homopolymeric cytosine stretches (C-stretch) in hypervariable region 2 (HV2). The study demonstrated that for different hairs within an individual, the HV2 C-stretch region can vary with respect to the number of cytosines and/or proportion of C-stretch length variants. Length heteroplasmy may occur regardless of the prominent length variant present in this region. Differences in the number of cytosines at the C-stretch region, or a variation in the relative amounts of heteroplasmic length variants, cannot be used to support an interpretation of exclusion.     

Jobs and buy local programs: expected employment effects of public-sector import-substitution in Chicago

This article uses a modelling approach to project the effects of a public sector urban import-substitution program called Buy Chicago. The City of Chicago would redirect its non-local procurement back to Chicago firms to reach a 90 percent local-buying goal with the intention of creating jobs, revenue and economic growth. The employment generated from Buy Chicago was projected by a computer-driven simulation and forecasting model developed by Regional Economic Models Incorporated which simulates the structural and behavioral characteristics of the Chicago region. Six alternative behavioral scenarios for Buy Chicago were developed, and employment projections were developed for each. Under the worst case scenario, the program would create substantial numbers of jobs, be substantially self-financing, and increase imports as a function of induced economic growth.     

Ricketson and Ginsburg: Berne baby, Berne...

‘A book may be good for nothing; or there may be onlyone thing in it worth knowing; are we to read it all through?’(Samuel Johnson) This section is dedicated to the review ofideas, articles, books, films and other media. It will includereplies (and rejoinders) to articles, the evaluation of newideas or proposals, and reviews of books and articles both directlyand indirectly related to intellectual property law.

International Copyright and Neighbouring Rights: The Berne Conventionand Beyond 2nd Edition By Sam Ricketson and Jane Ginsburg, 2006,Oxford University Press Price: £225, Hardback, ISBN: 0-19-825946-8pp lxxxvii + 1540, 2 Volumes   The praise     

Machiavelli,marketing and management: ends and means in public affairs

• Niccolo Machiavelli is introduced and used as a guide to some of the key issues facing modern business and government. Machiavelli's morality and philosophy is explored and reflected upon. Insights into the realities of power and decision making are used to reflect on the emergence of the modern public affairs industry. Key lessons are suggested for success.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

SELF-DEFENSE,CULPABILITY, AND DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE

This paper has a threefold purpose: to question the adequacy of two familiar proposals for explaining the permissibility of harming others in self-defense, to suggest an alternative explanation, and to answer some objections to this latter explanation. By and large, discussions of the proposals whose adequacy I will question focus on what they imply about the permissibility of self-defense in controversial cases. I will argue here that the proposals themselves contain large and significant theoretical gaps. Accordingly, examining their implications for controversial cases is premature, since they don’t adequately explain permissible self-defense in even the clearest cases—that is, those in which people defend themselves against “culpable attackers”.     

Bringing the Spoken Words Back In: Conversationalizing (Postmodernizing) Police-citizen Encounter Research

In prior police-citizen encounter research, the words citizens and suspects articulate were used as the primary representation of their demeanor toward the police. Despite its central role in prior works, language has been presupposed into the analysis as a formalistic assumption, and unanalyzed in its own right. Realizing this deficiency, Mastrofski and Parks (1990) advocated changes in methods of observing police work. In this article, a discourse analytic method of capturing the neglected details of the encounter between police and citizens is proffered by using a reality based TV show about police work as data. The article provides the theoretical and methodological framework for overcoming deficiencies in existing police research. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Prime Minister and the Bomb: John Gorton,W.C. Wentworth and the Quest for an Atomic Australia

The efforts of the Liberal government led by John Gorton to acquire a locally built nuclear deterrent stretch back into the 1950s when Robert Menzies preferred to rely on the American or British nuclear umbrella for protection. Gorton took a different view and the advocates of an independent Australian nuclear capability rejoiced upon his elevation to the Liberal leadership. We argue that Gorton's ambitions advanced as far as they did in the latter 1960s due to the support, or urgings, from an informal coalition of scientists (particularly Philip Baxter) and discontented fringes of the parliamentary Liberal Party. In particular, the maverick backbencher, W.C. Wentworth, played a key role in mobilising support for Gorton's controversial quest to acquire an independent nuclear capacity.