Global custody of endowment funds

This article explores the law relating to the global custodianship of funds, notably as managed for endowed charities such as universities and independent schools. Is global custody based on the legal concept of bailment or of trusts? Just how secure are the legal underpinnings of this financial mechanism? The conclusions are that the legal foundations to the concepts of custodianship, and especially on a global level with the appointment of sub-custodians, is surprisingly uncertain and confused in English Law, providing rather less reassurance to charity trustees concerning the security of the financial assets for which they are accountable than they might reasonably have expected.     

Making Sense of COMPSTAT: A Theory-Based Analysis of Organizational Change in Three Police Departments

COMPSTAT, the latest innovation in American policing, has been widely heralded as a management and technological system whose elements work together to transform police organizations radically. Skeptical observers suggest that COMPSTAT merely reinforces existing structures and practices. However, in trying to assess how much COMPSTAT has altered police organizations, research has failed to provide a broader theoretical basis for explaining how COMPSTAT operates and for understanding the implications of this reform. This article compares two different perspectives on organizations—technical/rational and institutional—to COMPSTAT's adoption and operation in three municipal police departments. Based on fieldwork, our analysis suggests that relative to technical considerations for changing each organization to improve its effectiveness, all three sites adopted COMPSTAT in response to strong institutional pressures to appear progressive and successful. Furthermore, institutional theory better explained the nature of the changes we observed under COMPSTAT than the technical/rational model. The greatest collective emphasis was on those COMPSTAT elements that were most likely to confer legitimacy, and on implementing them in ways that would minimize disruption to existing organizational routines. COMPSTAT was less successful when trying to provide a basis for rigorously assessing organizational performance, and when trying to change those structures and routines widely accepted as being "appropriate." We posit that it will take profound changes in the technical and institutional environments of American police agencies for police departments to restructure in the ways anticipated by a technically efficient COMPSTAT.     

Empire and Its Alternatives

The most ferocious debates are about whether the United States should be described as imperial, but in practice other countries also try to influence other countries’ domestic policies, to propagate their visions, to exert power and to stabilize areas beyond their borders that are perceived as a source of threats. While in the 1990s the winners of globalization were seen as small open states, since the turn of the millennium big powers appear to be gaining because of their ability to project political power: the United States, but also China, Russia, India, and Brazil. This makes for a greater instability and leads to the formulation of theories of realism or neo-realism. The essay concludes with an examination of alternatives to empire and the neo-imperial vision, in particular the importance of elaboration of common or shared values in helping to build a safer and more peaceful international order.