Dilemmas in administering the death penalty

This article critiques ethical arguments against conducting forensic evaluations of capital defendants or condemned prisoners and against treating prisoners found incompetent for execution, and considers the impact of widespread professional abstention on the legal system. It concludes that arguments for abstention by forensic evaluators are grounded mainly in personal moral scruples against capital punishment, rather than in tenets of professional ethics, but that abstention would be ethically required if the evaluator's scruples preclude objectivity. It also concludes that treatment of incompetent prisoners known to want treatment is ethically permissible but that treatment for the sole purpose of readying the prisoner for execution is not.Editor's note: Adversary Forum is edited by Gary B. Melton. Stan Brodsky was asked to respond to Professor Bonnie's article, and Professor Bonnie was given an opportunity to reply.This article is based on a paper presented as the Keynote Address to the Annual Meeting of the     

PLANNING FOR POSTDIVORCE FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS

This article proposes that the focus of child custody evaluation and mediation needs to be broadened beyond custody arrangement to consideration of the range of factors that may impact on postdivorce relationships. A review of current social science literature shows that factors such as quality of parent-child relationships and level of parental conflict may be as important as residence schedule in influencing children's postdivorce adjustment. The article offers strategies for involving parents in drafting agreements to guide relationships with each other and with the children. The goal is for parents to thoughtfully tailor relationships and parenting practices to children's needs during the transition from a one-household family to a new family plan.     

The Howard Government: The Extent to which Public Attitudes Influenced Australia's Federal Policy Mix

This article focuses on the interaction between government policy and public attitudes in order to explain why the Howard government was reasonably pragmatic given that it maintained enough popular support to win four successive federal elections from 1996, and why such a relationship is crucial to evaluating policy trends in Australia's liberal democracy in terms of understanding both policy possibilities and limitations no matter how flawed or divisive certain policies may appear to be.     

Closing the Organ Gap: A Reciprocity-Based Social Contract Approach

Organ transplantation has become a proven, cost-effective lifesaving treatment, but its promise is contingent on the number of available organs. The growing gap between the demand and supply results in unnecessary loss and diminished quality of life as well as high costs for surviving patients and health insurers. Twenty years after the enactment of the National Organ Transplantation Act, it is time to rethink the moral basis and overall design of organ transplantation policy. We propose a national plan for organ transplantation insurance under which the federal government would assume responsibility for increasing the organ supply and would cover all costs associated with transplantation for patients not otherwise covered.     

Providing Rights for Whistleblowers: Would an Anti-Discrimination Model be More Effective?

This article begins by outlining the key requirements for adisclosure of information to be protected under the Public InterestDisclosure Act 1998. It goes on to show how anti-discriminationcase law has been applied to the assessment of compensationfor injury to feelings in a protected disclosure case. The authorthen considers the general implications of applying other anti-discriminationprinciples to whistleblowers. The article concludes by arguingthat there would be significant benefits to whistleblowers ifthey were placed under the umbrella of a new Commission forEquality and Human Rights.     

From pluralism to multiculturalism

Five of his many books have been published by Transaction Publishers, mostly recently the forthcoming paperback edition of Ideology and the Ideologists.He is at work on a sociointellectual and psychological biography of John Dewey.     

Policy sciences and the market

The most recent response of our universities to the challenge presented by the urban crisis—the domestic problems that show their dramatic symptoms in our cities—has taken the form of new graduate programs in the policy sciences. They are widely diverse in course content, teaching methods, measures to assure experiential inputs and devices for survival in the standard discipline-oriented university climate, but all have the common purpose of improving the quality and enlarging the quantity of both public policy practitioners and analysts.These pioneering activities are growing in an atmosphere of intense intellectual debate and self-examination. How best to design and conduct them with respect to these input parameters, appropriate overall roles for universities in policy science training, the nature of more rational decisionmaking as a process, and the roles of policy science-trained analysts and practitioners in it and in promoting it, are all under lively examination and discussion.What has thus far received relatively little attention is the nature of the decision universe in which the products of these programs, the graduates, will need to perform if they are to have impact. In this paper that universe and the relationship of the university to it are characterized in simple market terms. Doing so suggests that the most pressing problems for policy science lie on the demand, not the supply, side of the market. It will take the best efforts of policy scientists to address them successfully.