Packing Heat in the Classroom: Public Support for “Armed Teacher” Policy

ABSTRACT

Recently, states have enacted teacher-carry laws. While controversial, little scholarship has tapped public attitudes toward such reforms. Because public opinion shapes policy, the public is an important stakeholder in this debate. Thus, we investigated three questions. First, how supportive is the public of arming teachers? Second, what demographic and social divides exist, if any, for reform approval? Finally, do crime-related perceptions, concerning views about public safety, and criminogenic influences shape policy preferences? We test these questions using a 2018 poll of Virginia residents (N = 521). Overall, approval for teacher-carry is split. Crime-related perceptions mediate some of the initial social and demographic divides in opinion but other correlates, such as parental status, remain salient predictors of views. Implications are discussed.     

Responses to Financial Crises: An Evolutionary Perspective

As the world currently faces the ever-deepening sub-prime crisis, we are reminded that the process of globalisation can cause significant disruptions in global markets and political systems. This article focuses on the evolution of financial crisis responses to gain a better understanding of the dynamics affecting current responses. By using a focused comparison of case studies it argues that the development of crisis response and the dominance of the current multilateral actors is a result of an evolutionary process. This process privileges learning and innovation within a complex political economic system. The crises of each era, born of many of the same problems, generate a variety of responding actors, a few of which are adopted. These actors help to address the immediate problems and even work well for a while. Eventually, they are overwhelmed by the tendency of financial interactions to grow. Another set of crises generates another round of actors and mechanisms. As time goes on, crisis response requires more formal institutions that can deal with more complex systems. The article concludes that response actors are becoming more public, multilateral and global in scope. Understanding this pattern of response should help to shed light on the potential for reform of the financial architecture and help to explain the dominance of multilateralism as a crisis response.     

Family Law,Parents with Disabilities,and the Americans with Disabilities Act

Parents with disabilities contend with bias within the family law system, often threatening their custody and visitation rights. The overarching goal of this article is to explore the experiences of parents with disabilities involved in custody and visitation disputes and the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in these cases. This article begins with an overview of parents with disabilities and their interactions with the family law system. Next, the article examines the ADA and its applicability to custody and visitation disputes. Finally, the article offers thoughts about strategies that can be utilized by attorneys to ensure that the rights of parents with disabilities are protected.     

Understanding juror perceptions of forensic evidence: investigating the impact of case context on perceptions of forensic evidence strength

The most widely accepted model of juror decision making acknowledges the importance of both the case-specific information presented in the courtroom, as well as the prior general knowledge and beliefs held by each juror. The studies presented in this paper investigated whether mock jurors could differentiate between evidence of varying strengths in the absence of case information and then followed on to determine the influence that case context (and therefore the story model) has on judgments made about the strength of forensic DNA evidence. The results illustrated that mock jurors correctly identified various strengths of evidence when it was not presented with case information; however, the perceived strength of evidence was significantly inflated when presented in the context of a criminal case, particularly when the evidence was of a weak or ambiguous standard. These findings are discussed in relation to the story model, and the potential implications for real juries.