Development of the lost pleasure of life scale

The concept of hedonic damages for loss of pleasure of life has been developed by forensic cases up to and includingMolzof v. United States (1992). One instrument available for assessment in this area, the Lost Pleasure of Life (LPL) scale, was refined through development of a rating matrix consisting of 37 behavioral anchors which experts had categorized into progressive levels of loss. Using brief instructions and case examples, mental health clinicians rated 15 written vignettes for loss of pleasure of life resulting from physical injuries. Results indicated moderate reliability (ICCR=.65 to .70) and moderately high correlation (r.86) between rank orderings of the case vignettes based on LPL ratings given by the clinicians and on financial awards for each case given by undergraduate students.This article is based on the first author's dissertation for which the second author served as chair.     

Lawyers and Embedded Legal Activity in the Southern Civil Rights Movement

We introduce the concept of embedded legal activity to capture the ways in which lawyers and legal organizations can become intertwined in the ongoing activities of social movements. Embedded legal activity is characterized by diverse issues and venues and comprises legal activities that help support movement infrastructure, close coordination between movement lawyers and other activists, and responsiveness to constituent needs. Investigating a comprehensive data set on legal activity during the southern civil rights movement, we identify forms of legal activity beyond the typical focus of legal mobilization, including defense for movement participants charged with misdemeanors and other crimes, movement assistance on organization‐level legal matters, and general legal aid to movement constituents. These were by far the more common types of legal activity and emerged from the embeddedness of lawyers in a mass movement. We argue that embedded legal activity is likely where movements prioritize grassroots leadership and community organizing and face significant countermobilization, hostile legal and political opportunity structures, and substantial social and economic inequality.     

Wakeup Call: Strategic Management,Network Alarms,and Performance

New empirical evidence suggests that service performance is shaped by the strategies adopted by public organizations and the networking behavior of public managers. Strategy captures two central behavioral aspects of public organizations: the way in which objectives and actions are selected (processes), and an organization’s approach to service delivery (content). Networking is similarly concerned with the behavior of public managers as they interact with others. These twin themes are linked in an integrated study that explores the relationship between strategy, networking, and service performance within a sample of English local governments. The results show that strategy processes based on rational planning offer long‐run positive effects on public services, as does a strategic proactive stance.     

Alternatives to the constitution of Cádiz in New Spain: republicanism and the insurgent constitutional decree of Apatzingán (1814)

This article compares the Decreto Constitucional para la libertad de la América Mexicana, published in Apatzingán by the insurgents of New Spain in 1814, with the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz which established a constitutional monarchy in the Spanish Empire. It argues that the Decreto Constitucional cannot be understood as simply a product of Hispanic political thought and a reflection of the Cádiz text. Rather, it contends that the decree published in Apatzingán represents an alternative republican response to the dissolution of the Spanish monarchy. This alternate constitutional settlement drew on the debate of constitutional ideas that had taken place in New Spain since 1808 and was grounded in many of the same ideas as those present in the Pennsylvanian Constitution of 1776 and the first French republican constitutions of 1793 and 1795.