Friendship, Identity, and Solidarity. An Approach to Rights in Plant Closing Cases

Abstract. My focus is on the problem of plant closings, which have become increasingly common as the deindustrialization of America has proceeded since the early 1980s. In a well‐known article, Joseph William Singer proposed that workers who sued to keep a plant open in the face of a planned closure might appropriately be regarded as possessing a reliance‐based interest in the plant that merited some protection. I seek to extend this sort of argument in two ways. In the first half of the paper, I point to the way in which “tacit obligation” emerges in friendship between persons in the absence of explicit commitments. Employers and employees are of course not as such friends. But I argue that the development of tacit obligations binding friends provides a useful analogy for understanding the growth of similar tacit obligations binding plant owners to workers and local communities. In the second half, I draw on Margaret Radin's work on property and identity to ground a related argument. I suggest that the potential contribution of plants—and the traditions and networks of relationships they help to create and sustain—to the identities of workers and communities provides reason for at least some legal protection of employee and community interests.     

Some reflections on Undercover: recent developments and enduring issues

She [jury member] was extremely liberal. She was a sociologist, and I don't like sociologists. They try to reason things out too much. (Florida Prosecutor [after losing case involving the undercover purchase of a 2 Live Crew album])I have no sympathy for those who are crybabies about the fact that police officers are selling to those who want to buy drugs. We use every legal means that we can. We want everybody to know that the next drug buy may be from a police officer. (Mayor Marion Barry, News Conference 1988)This paper expands on remarks delivered at the American Society of Criminology meetings, Reno, 1989. Some of these ideas were initially presented in 1988 to the qualitative methods discussion group at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, with the support of NSF grant no. BNS 8700864. I am particularly indebted to Elliot Eisner and Barry Schwartz for their critical comments and friendship.     

The feasibility of a brief evaluation of mental state at the time of the offense

If psychological evaluations of criminal defendants could be performed in the community on an outpatient basis rather than in a distant state hospital on an inpatient basis, substantial savings could result and defendants' rights to speedy trial, bail, and the least restrictive alternative would more likely be respected. The authors thus developed a protocol, the mental state at the time of the offense screening evaluation (MSE), designed to enable outpatient evaluatiors to “screen out,” in the course of a brief interview, those defendants whose alleged criminal conduct clearly was not caused by “significant mental abnormality.” They tested the validity of the MSE by having pairs of mental health professionals use the MSE to evaluate 36 criminal defendants. The professionals' conclusions were then compared with the conclusions of state hospital professionals who performed a comprehensive evaluation of each defendant. They were also compared to court adjudications of the defendant's criminal charges. They found that the MSE screened out a large proportion of defendants (sufficient to suggest an improvement in cost-efficiency) without prejudice to those defendants who might have a valid legal defense.     

Community juvenile arbitration: An alternative in judicial administration

Congestion in trial courts continues to create a dilemma in judicial administration. In Florida, an effort to address this problem in the juvenile justice system emerged with legislative authorization of community arbitration programs. Implementation came in a joint endeavor of a community and a university to develop a juvenile arbitration program. Assessment of the program in reduction of caseload, cost efficiency, recidivism, reduction of delay prior to hearing, and volunteer participation suggests that community arbitration can be a viable alternative.     

Contagion or intervention: Two views on ‘wider wars’

This article reviews methodologically and substantively the large literature on conflict expansion. It compares and contrasts the two quite different approaches that have been used. One is based on a contagion/diffusion framework that sees war involvement coming from the outside environment. The second is a Realpolitik, rational actor approach that sees involvement in ongoing wars as a result of conscious actions to achieve foreign policy goals. The contagion/ diffusion framework is rejected as fundamentally flawed but which can provide needed modifications to a more Realpolitik perspective.