EDUCATION FOR PARENTS DIVORCING IN CALIFORNIA

This article describes the variety of educational programs found in courts throughout California. It is the product of a 1-year study of these programs, and the article catalogues the effects of one state in providing educational programs for families going through divorce. The article describes the range of possibilities for courts to select the program best suited to their needs.     

Striking back at the empire: A brief survey of problems in Dworkin's theory of law

Conclusion In Law's Empire Dworkin remains committed to carving out a middleground between natural law and legal positivism. But natural law andlegal positivism are best viewed as complementary answers to differ-ent questions, There is no middle ground between them. Nor is thequestion that Dworkin's Integrity asks one that could be coherentlyanswered i f it were an important question. Fortunately, it is not.     

Decision games applied to police decision making -an exploratory study of information usage-

An analysis of police decision making is presented using the decision board technique developed by Leslie Wilkins. This method assumes that decision making can be measured by observing a subject's response to stimuli presented in the form of pieces of information. A board was created and employed with fifty municipal police officers. Findings suggest that police demonstrate individualized preferences for varying amounts and kinds of information. The nature of the offense was considered most frequently. The attitude of the offender was also an important determinant of the decision outcome; and the offender's attitude then influenced the amount and type of information subsequently used.     

The Gautreaux Legacy: What Might Mixed‐Income and Dispersal Strategies Mean for the Poorest Public Housing Tenants?

Abstract

The current transformation of public and assisted housing reflects the legacy of the Gautreaux case, which created the first mobility and scattered‐site programs. Mixed‐income and dispersal strategies now dominate federal housing policy, although their focus has shifted. Drawing on evidence from two preliminary studies of public housing transformation in Chicago, we argue that these new strategies seem to offer benefits for distressed public housing communities but also involve risks for the most vulnerable current tenants. Increased screening and/or the need to compete with private market tenants may force these families out of the assisted housing market.

Addressing the complex needs of the most troubled public housing tenants will call for a more comprehensive solution. The intent of the Gautreaux case was to increase opportunity and enhance quality of life for public housing tenants; policy makers should take steps to ensure that current programs reflect these fundamental goals.     

External Validity in Policy Evaluations That Choose Sites Purposively

Evaluations of the impact of social programs are often carried out in multiple sites, such as school districts, housing authorities, local TANF offices, or One‐Stop Career Centers. Most evaluations select sites purposively following a process that is nonrandom. Unfortunately, purposive site selection can produce a sample of sites that is not representative of the population of interest for the program. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model of purposive site selection. We begin with the proposition that a purposive sample of sites can usefully be conceptualized as a random sample of sites from some well‐defined population, for which the sampling probabilities are unknown and vary across sites. This proposition allows us to derive a formal, yet intuitive, mathematical expression for the bias in the pooled impact estimate when sites are selected purposively. This formula helps us to better understand the consequences of selecting sites purposively, and the factors that contribute to the bias. Additional research is needed to obtain evidence on how large the bias tends to be in actual studies that select sites purposively, and to develop methods to increase the external validity of these studies. © 2012 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

'Fundamentalism', modernity and the new Jacobins

This paper offers an interpretaion of 'Islamic fundamentalism', especially the Iranian Revolution, in the context of sociological debates about 'modernity'. The problematic nature of both these terms is acknowledge. It criticizes explanations of 'fundamentalism' that begin from the assumption of a dichotomy between fundamentalism and modernity, arguing instead for a more nuanced understanding of both Islamic revivalism and the modern. The paper begins by offering a model of modernity as a set of bi-modal tensions within which Islamic 'fundamentalism' could be understood as a form of modernist revolutionary populism. This argument is then developed through a comparison betwen the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution. It argues that there are parallels between the idea of Islamic revolution and the Jacobin revolutionary imagination, which demonstrate with some observations on Islam, and the closure of the Jacobin revolutionary project.