Book Review

Andrea Dworkin. Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant. New York: Basic Books, 2002.     

Labour and Place: The Contours of Freedpeoples' Mobilization in Reconstruction South Carolina

Important advances in scholarship on the post-emancipation South have made possible a new synthesis that moves beyond broad generalizations about African American agency to identify both the shared elements in black life across the region and the varying capacity of freedpeople to assert their interests in the face of white hostility. Building on a number of recent studies of Reconstruction this article seeks to demonstrate that the varying capacity of freedpeople in South Carolina to shape and defend the new society that would emerge after the end of slavery was rooted in their relative strength at work and in their communities. In Charleston and its lowcountry rural hinterland, demographic strength combined with deeply-rooted traditions of collective assertion to sustain a remarkably vibrant grassroots movement that persisted beyond the overthrow of Reconstruction. From very early on, by contrast, former slaves dispersed across the rural interior found their freedom severely circumscribed by a bellicose and heavily-armed white paramilitary campaign.     

Why Do Foundations Follow the Law? Evidence from Adoption of the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act

Employing a large panel of over one million firm‐years, I find evidence consistent with widespread compliance with law among U.S. private foundations despite the absence of many formal deterrence mechanisms. The research design exploits rolling state adoption of the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act, which lifted some existing limits on firm spending for a fraction of firms within each state. This allows the use of triple‐difference estimates that control for changes in local norms and economic conditions. UPMIFA increases firm spending, on average, implying that firms were complying with the pre‐UPMIFA regime. Interacting the triple‐difference factors with other predictors of compliance reveals no correlation between compliance and enforcement intensity, but some evidence that compliance is correlated with firm culture and reliance on accountants. These findings have potentially important implications for the governance of charitable organizations, and may speak more generally to drivers of compliance among other organizational forms.     

Perceptions of coercion in interrogation: comparing expert and lay opinions

ABSTRACT

When confessions are entered into evidence in criminal courts, issues of coercion and voluntariness are important and often contested matters. Occasionally, defense attorneys proffer expert witnesses to testify about the coercive pressures of an interrogation and the risk of a false confession. Such testimony is often ruled inadmissible on the grounds that it does not inform the jury beyond its common knowledge. In our effort to test this judicial assumption about common knowledge, we surveyed jury-eligible laypeople (n?=?67) and social scientists specializing in interrogation and confessions (n?=?54) regarding their opinions about the coerciveness of prohibited interrogation tactics, maximization techniques, minimization techniques, and suspect risk factors and compared their ratings with a set of independent t tests. Laypeople gave lower ratings to the coerciveness of all sets of items representing interrogation techniques, and lower ratings to the vulnerabilities associated with suspect risk factors, as compared to social science experts. The disparities between laypeople’s and experts’ perceptions of coercion in interrogations demonstrate that such issues are not fully within the common knowledge of prospective jurors, and suggest the need to provide jurors with expert witness guidance when tasked with evaluating confession evidence.     

Guilty Property: A quantitative analysis of civil asset forfeiture

The objective of this article is to explore how property seized under the federal civil-judicial forfeiture laws for drug law violations is proceeded against by the government. The methodology is primarily exploratory. A sample of federal civil-judicial drug forfeiture cases is described and then analyzed in regard to the relative importance of the cases’ characteristics. The findings raise serious questions about the use of this policy and the government’s intent behind forfeiture. Implications and suggestions for future research are also presented.