Retiree health and welfare benefits: controversy over their duration

As the cost of providing health-care benefits skyrockets, employers have begun to reduce or even to terminate health-care and life insurance benefits for retirees, often with little awareness of the possible repercussions. Retiree groups and unions have countered these actions with claims based on such theories as the "status benefits" argument--that retirement benefits should be viewed as earned compensation for years of service--or the "vested rights" view--that retirement rights may not be altered without the pensioner's consent. Crucial to these conflicts are the terms of the collective bargaining agreement. Case law indicates that employers can never feel themselves fully protected even if the agreement contains provisions explicitly stating the benefits' scope and duration. The authors demonstrate this point in their review of recent retiree benefits cases. They then explore in detail the problem of contract and document ambiguity, and offer guidelines for ascertaining intent. They conclude with a discussion of strategies for litigating retiree benefits cases.     

Optimal patrol routes: interdicting and pursuing rhino poachers

Interdiction patrolling (also known as hot spots policing) is a proactive police operation that depends on good planning. And the pursuit of fleeing suspects is a challenging operation that all police forces engage in on a regular basis. We give software tools that improve the effectiveness of both. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our tools by applying them to the case of rhino poaching in wildlife reserves. An interdiction patrol pre-emptively seeks out poaching parties within a reserve. Upon picking up the trail of a poaching party, a pursuit team needs a pursuit strategy that optimizes their chances of an interception. Our interdiction patrol route tool identifies optimal interdiction patrol routes to walk. This tool is based on a Stackelberg game and represents different types of poachers and their utilities. These utilities are updated (learned) each time new information on poaching party routes is added to the database. Our second tool provides a real-time sequence of team member moves that maximizes the team’s chances of apprehending a pursued party. We show that our tools perform well when applied to simulated and real data.     

The Diffusion of Rights: From Law on the Books to Organizational Rights Practices

How does law change society? To gain new leverage on this long‐standing question, this article draws on two lines of research that often ignore each other: political science research on the mobilization of law, and sociological research on the diffusion of organizational practices. Our insights stem from six case studies of diverse organizations' responses to the accommodation provisions in the Americans with Disabilities Act and related state laws. We found that different modes of exposure to the law combined with organizational attributes to produce distinct “rights practices”—styles of standard operating procedures and informal routines that reflect the understanding of legal requirements within an organization. The diversity of the organizational responses challenges simple dichotomies between compliance/noncompliance, change through deterrence/change through norms, and mobilization/nonmobilization, and it underscores the importance of combining political science and sociological perspectives on law and social change.     

The rhetoric of personal loyalty to superiors in criminal justice agencies

Nowhere in public law is the idea of personal loyalty to superiors mentioned, yet criminal justice practitioners suffer from a “personal loyalty syndrome.” This syndrome holds them responsible to an altogether different set of loyalty expectations. They are often compelled to offer personal loyalty to unworthy superiors and, as a result, violate constitutional provisions, legal requirements, or the public good. While no organizational rules require any such loyalty, criminal justice practitioners are invariably taught that issues of loyalty at the workplace are so important that one cannot survive without personal loyalty to superiors. They are also reminded that violating such a “commandment” is a cardinal sin that can destroy one's career. This article discusses the arguments for and against personal loyalty to superiors and the dangers inherent in such relationships. It explains the grammar of loyalty at the workplace, explores the paradoxes of personal loyalty to superiors, and suggests a duty-based model as an alternative to the current model.