Character-building and freedom in education

Educators, parents, and policy-makers in the United States, as in other countries, are concerned about the apparent inability of many schools to contribute to the development of character and civic virtue in their pupils. The answer, experience shows, is not for government to require a pedagogy of state-defined character education which, in a pluralistic society, would inevitably create new conflicts. Instead, education policy should take advantage of the growing interest on the part of educators in creating autonomous, distinctive schools, and the continuing interest, on the part of parents, in being able to choose what school their children will attend. Schools which exhibit a distinctive character based upon a shared understanding of the goals of education are effective not only in teaching academics but also in developing positive character traits in their pupils. Charter schools and educational vouchers are two means of encouraging and supporting such coherent schools. The article concludes with a series of policy recommendations designed to balance the autonomy of schools against the need for public accountability. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

When courts and experts disagree: Discordance between insanity recommendations and adjudications

Discordance between state examiner recommendations of culpability and subsequent insanity adjudications was investigated. The discordant group was compared with groups of defendants where concordance occurred between recommendation and adjudication. Data were collected from casefile materials (totalN=80) and comparisons were made on defendant's background, the offense, and the forensic evaluation. To determine how purposeful and goal directed the offense was, offenses were rated on a rationality scale. Results indicated that defendants in the discordance group committed emotionally charged or unusual offenses, were likely to have a psychiatric history (65%) and were more likely to have been found incompetent to stand trial than defendants recommended and adjudicated culpable. The discordant group was dissimilar to defendants recommended and adjudicated insane in frequency of prior felony arrest (65%), alcohol/drug use at time of offense (55%), paucity of psychosis (20%) and higher frequency of claimed amnesia (35%). On the rationality scale, discordant defendants were intermediate between those defendants recommended and adjudicated insane, who typically committed irrational offenses, and those defendants recommended and adjudicated culpable, who typically committed purposeful and goal directed offenses.     

Democracy’s effect on economic growth: A pooled time-series analysis, 1951–1980

The relationship between democracy and economic growth has concerned social scientists since the 17th century, but recent democracy movements make this question especially important today. Do poor countries face a cruel trade-off between democracy and growth? Do democracy and growth go together as a “win-win” proposition? Or is democracy irrelevant to growth? Using pooled annual time-series data from 1951–1980 for 106 countries, including 88 non-core countries, we explore long-term and short-term direct and indirect effects of democracy on growth. Little or no direct effect emerges, but positive indirect effects appear via two mechanisms: a marginally significant effect via investment and a robust effect via government expenditure. Democracy also has a robust non-linear effect on economic growth via social unrest, inhibiting growth under non-democratic regimes and furthering it in highly democratic ones. Combining these findings, we conclude that democracy does not significantly hamper economic growth, and under many circumstances slightly boosts it.     

Of Medicine, Race, and American Law: The Bubonic Plague Outbreak of 1900

In March of 1900 several cases of bubonic plague were discovered in San Francisco's Chinatom. In response the health authorities, at the instance of the Surgeon General of the United States, sought to implement a series of extraordinarily coercive measures aimed at the city's Asian inhabitants. The measures provoked an uproar among the Chinese, and they determined to challenge them in the federal Circuit Court for the Northern District of California. This essay, based on extensive research in court records, the archives of the U.S. Public Health Service, and press accounts in English and Chinese, documents the complex events that gave rise to the cases of Wong Wai v. Williamson and Jew Ho v. Williamson and the cases themselves as they unfolded in the courts. The cases raised new and dificult questions of fact and of law and tested as few other cases have before or since a court's capacity to act as arbiter between individual rights (and the rights of an ostracized minority at that) and the public interest in a period of acute health emergency.     

A Public-Choice View of Swiss Liberty

This article compares the provisions of the American and Swissconstitutions from a public-choice perspective. Accordingly,the Swiss Constitution is seen as one designed to bring abouta transmission of citizens' desires into political action, whereasthe U.S. Constitution is designed to prevent the misuse of grantedpower. The specific level of analysis employed here is the principal-agentmodel, which is used to examine collective decisionmaking atthe constitutional, legislative, and para-constitutional levels.The article then considers the role of the courts as arbiterof constitutional questions and conflicts.     

Dangerousness

Saleem Shah played a major role in the development of both policy and research concerning the prediction of dangerousness to others over two decades. During that period his commitment to the welfare of people with mental illness led him first to challenge the legitimacy of such predictions and later to support research to improve them. His ideas were central to most of the research that has been done in this area. This article suggests a direction for future research concerning the prediction of dangerousness to others that elaborates and extends his thinking by focusing on the research necessary to help individuals with mental illnesses to minimize their involvement in violence.