SELF-CONSCIOUS INTEREST AND THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS: The Case of Citizens, Regulatory Agencies, and Federal Courts

Federal courts play an increasingly overt role in the American policy process. The implications of this judicial activism have attracted considerable scholarly attention, with recent literature casting doubt on the capacity of courts to be productive in this role. This article draws out some of these concerns as well as posits a few counterpoints.
After raising both sides of the issue, the article focuses on one complex Supreme Court decision, United States v. Students Challenging Regulatory Agency Procedure (SCRAP I, 1973) and its sequel, Aberdeen and Rockfish Railroad v. SCRAP (SCRAP II, 1975), as vehicles for illustrating and evaluating major questions posed by an active judiciary.     

Nuclear Assessment

In President Barack Obama's State of the Union address in January 2009,he called for the building of "a new generation of safe,clean nuclear power plants" This was followed by his highprofile speech in Prague in April 2009,in which he noted the need "to harness the power of nuclear energy on behalf of our efforts to combat climate change."In December 2009 in Copenhagen,he pledged the United States will reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.     

1981 Review—Current Criminal Justice Projects Here and Abroad

The study of transnational environmental harm demands appreciation of specific methodological and conceptual issues that impinge upon the data collection process. Some of these issues include the ethics and politics of ‘outsiders’ researching other people's territory, the differential availability and types of data in different jurisdictions, the ways in which state denial and corporate resistance impede the research process, and the importance of utilising a wide range of data sources as a means to substantiate claims about harms and the causes of harms. The paper presents an exploration of methodological issues in the study of harms that are global, cross‐national, and/or localised, but which are intrinsically transnational in nature regardless of scale and scope. By understanding the challenges presented to those working in this area, we are also able to identify directions for future methodological development.     

Crime and Justice in Japan: Implications for the United States

Examining official statistics from the United States since the mid-1960's, we see rapidly increasing rates of crime. Japan, on the other hand, has experienced rates that have dramatically declined during this same period. In fact, Japan is the only industrialized non-communist nation where crime has been decreasing. This paper summarizes the structural/cultural and justice related reasons for this phenomenon. Implications for the United States are specified.     

How Unusual is the United Kingdom Coalition (and What are the Chances of It Happening Again)?

This article draws upon insights from theoretical and empirical studies of coalition behaviour in multiparty politics to examine the formation of the United Kingdom coalition following the general election of 6 May 2010. It argues that the formation of the Conservative‐Liberal Democrat coalition is not unusual in historical terms or in the context of contemporary European politics; and that although it is a break from the more recent pattern of postwar British politics it nevertheless does conform to expectations in the light of the coalition literature. The article also provides a comparative analysis of the impact of Britain's ‘First‐Past‐The‐Post’ (FPTP) electoral system on party competition and an examination of the performance of the Alternative Vote (AV) system and argues that if the United Kingdom retains FPTP then a return to single‐party government in 2015 is highly likely; and it is not inevitable that the introduction of AV would significantly advantage the Liberal Democrats.     

CREDIBLE RESEARCH PRACTICES TO INFORM DRUG LAW ENFORCEMENT

Chairing the recent National Research Council Committee on Data and Research for Policy on Illegal Drugs, I learned that our nation has invested little in research on drug law enforcement and that the limited available research does not provide a credible basis for formation of drug control policy. This commentary conjectures reasons for the distressing status quo and recommends changes in research practices that may improve matters.     

MORALITY,SELF‐CONTROL,AND CRIME*

This paper offers evidence to specify further Self‐Control Theory by investigating its predictive strength relative to morality and its interconnections with morality in accounting for criminal probability. Using random sample household survey data from Lviv, Ukraine, we confirm that self‐control is an important predictor of criminal probabilities in an unusual cultural context. However, morality is also shown to be a strong independent predictor with strength that seems to exceed substantially that of self‐control. In addition, taking morality into account significantly reduces the coefficients for self‐control, sometimes eliminating them entirely, and morality shows little interaction with self‐control in its predictions of the measures of criminal probability. The results suggest that the recently formulated Situational Action Theory, which features (weak) morality as the prime cause of criminal behavior and questions the relative importance of self‐control, should be taken seriously. Overall, the results confirm the importance of self‐control as a factor in misbehavior; yet, they also provide a mandate for greater attention to morality as a potent variable in understanding misconduct.