Law's Allure and an Interbranch Perspective on Law and Politics

This essay views Gordon Silverstein's book Law's Allure: How Law Shapes, Constrains, Saves, and Kills Politics (2009) from the perspective of the burgeoning interbranch literature on law and courts, which seeks to place judicial decision making within the context of ongoing political and policy-making processes. It argues that Law's Allure reflects the strengths and weaknesses of this literature. On the plus side, it compellingly reinterprets the concept of legal precedent in political terms, showing how the content of judicial decisions serves as an iterative framing mechanism within and across various policy areas. On the downside, it struggles to provide a rigorous framework for analyzing the risks of the juridification of American politics. Despite any weaknesses, its attempt to map different pathways of legalistic court-based policy development in diverse settings represents a useful step for those interested in bringing the study of law and courts back into the core of analyzing American politics and policy making.     

Extricating the state: The move to competitive capture in post-communist Bulgaria

This article uses the Bulgarian case to analyse movement from a situation of what appeared to be a ‘Partial-Reform Equilibrium’ to an ‘Equilibrium of Competitive Capture’. In such a process, elections are important forces for change, but not because they bring reformist parties to power or lead to completed economic liberalisation. Instead, especially in the first several electoral cycles in a new democracy, they can bring to power new leaders who are not beholden to existing captors, but rather to other clients that would like to capture the state for their own interests. Over time, the country experiences a parade of captors, eventually leading to a system where no single group owns the state, but where it is still not insulated. Instead, several competing groups fight with each other to raid it for their own benefits.     

Making Way: Legal Mobilization,Organizational Response,and Wheelchair Access

Questions of how and why organizations respond to legal rights are analyzed in several sociolegal research traditions, including studies of legal mobilization, regulation, and neo‐institutionalist accounts of the diffusion of organizational structures. Using original qualitative and quantitative data, this article examines the responses of ten organizations to wheelchair access rights that are found in various provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and related state laws. We find that concepts from each of the research traditions are useful in understanding the sources of variance in response among the organizations in our sample. We focus on four key variables: legal mobilization, commitment, professionalization, and routinization. We contend that these variables offer a relatively parsimonious language for studying organizational responses to the law and for aggregating insights from competing approaches in the literature, both of which are essential to advancing our understanding of the conditions under which law changes society.     

Housing instability is as strong a predictor of poor health outcomes as level of danger in an abusive relationship: findings from the SHARE Study

Advocates, clinicians, policy makers, and survivors frequently cite intimate partner violence (IPV) as an immediate cause of or precursor to housing problems. Research has indicated an association between homelessness and IPV, yet few studies examine IPV and housing instability. Housing instability differs from homelessness, in that someone experiencing housing instability may currently have a place to live but faces difficulties with maintaining the residence. We present baseline findings from a longitudinal cohort study of 278 female IPV survivors with housing as a primary concern. Our analysis indicates the greater the number of housing instability risk factors (e.g., eviction notice, problems with landlord, moving multiple times), the more likely the abused woman reported symptoms consistent with PTSD (p < .001), depression (p < .001), reduced quality of life (p < .001), increased work/school absence (OR = 1.28, p < .004), and increased hospital/emergency department use (OR = 1.22, p < .001). These outcomes persist even when controlling for the level of danger in the abusive relationship and for survivors' drug and alcohol use. Importantly, both housing instability and danger level had stronger associations with negative health outcomes than other factors such as age, alcohol, and drug use; both make unique contributions to negative health outcomes and could contribute in different ways. Housing instability is an important and understudied social determinant of health for IPV survivors. These findings begin to address the literature gap on the relationship between housing instability, IPV, and survivors' health, employment, and utilization of medical care services.