The Rule of Law in Fragile States: Dictatorship,Collapse, and the Politics of Religion in Post-Colonial Somalia

The fate of the rule of law in fragile states rests in religious politics. Three defining periods of Somali politics illustrate this argument. First is the authoritarian regime of Mohamed Siad Barre in Somalia (1969–1991). This dictatorship used religion to rule by law. The regime executed religious leaders for disagreeing with the government's interpretation of Islam. Second is the rise of Islamic courts in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital city (1991–2007). The Islamic courts apprehended criminals, expelled warlords, and provided spaces for Somalis to resolve disputes peacefully. Third is the breakaway of Somaliland (1991–present). Somaliland has advanced Islamic legal principles to build peace and constitutional law. Taken together, these three periods demonstrate how religious politics transform law and society.     

THE STRUCTURAL COVARIATES OF URBAN HOMICIDE: REASSESSING THE IMPACT OF INCOME INEQUALITY AND POVERTY IN THE POST-REAGAN ERA*

Numerous studies have explored the relationship between rates of homicide and income inequality and poverty. However, a general consensus on the theoretical and empirical connections among these variables has yet to be reached. This article reports the findings of a city-level analysis of this relationship, using 1990 data for the 190 largest cities in the United States. In order to address several methodological and theoretical concerns in prior literature, three separate measures of inequality and three categories of disaggregated homicide rates are analyzed. The results suggest that both inequality and poverty have significant and independent positive effects on rates of homicide in U.S. cities following the largest increase in the economic gap between rich and poor in our nation's history.     

THE FEDERAL JUDICIAL SYSTEM

Since Chief Justice Taft's highly activist tenure, many people have looked to the Supreme Court for leadership in efforts to modernize federal judicial administration. This article reviews the role of the Chief Justice of the United States in federal judicial administration. as well as organizational and procedural improvements in court management at all three tiers of the federal court system, as seen by one trained in public administration Although improvement is apparent. other needed steps include less emphasis on the number of judgeships and more careful long-range planning and experimentation with new techniques     

CITIZEN CRIME STEREOTYPES—NORMATIVE CONSENSUS REVISITED

This paper examines the extent of agreement about complex perceptions of crime—crime stereotypes. The literature addresses crime seriousness. Crime perception is a complex phenomenon including much more than judged seriousness. Crime stereotypes are shown to be coherently organized around a few basic perceptions such as level of violence, amount of property harm, level of sex relatedness, and perhaps a few others. While the data affirm that there is agreement about judged seriousness, it suggests significant disagreement regarding crime stereotypes. Different people adopt different crime stereotypes. These differences are related to social variables. The most important theoretical conclusion is that agreement about any single crime perception, including seriousness, does not imply agreement about other features.     

Political Trust and Judicial Retention Elections

Retention elections are that part of the merit selection plan designed to hold judges accountable to the public. While more than one scholar has concluded that votes cast in a retention election are often not informed evaluations of the judge's qualifications and/or conduct on the bench, the few existing systematic empirical studies have failed to explain why people vote for or against retention. This study fills part of this void by testing the hypothesis that political trust is a major cue in judicial retention voting. In contrast to most previous work which was either limited to the appellate level or to elections in a single state, the data set consists of 1,864 retention elections held from 1964 through 1984 for major trial court judges. The national trends in political trust in the last two decades are found to be reflected in the trends in the mean vote for retention.     

ADMINISTERING BRITAIN'S ARMS TRADE

This article examines the administration of Britain's overseas arms trade through a consideration of the role of the main government departments concerned with its control and regulation - the Department of Trade and Industry, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence. Additionally it examines the activities of 'arms-length' public agencies such as the Defence Export Services Organisation and International Military Services whose job it is to promote arms sales. It concludes that while the promotion function may (but does not have to) run counter to that of control, the latter is comprehensively and competently administered. If it fails - and it has done so recently - it is because of political intervention and not administrative shortcomings.