Understanding Culture in Kentucky's Courtrooms: An Essential Tool for Management and Long‐Range Planning

Though the “old conventional wisdom” explained delay as the product of too few resources and staff, the “new conventional wisdom” posits court efficiency is largely due to the cultural makeup of the court. Adapting the Court Culture Assessment Instrument developed by Dr. Ostrom and colleagues at the National Center for State Courts, this research study examines judicial perceptions of culture in the Kentucky Court of Justice general and family circuit court. Results indicate circuit courts are predominantly autonomous but desire to be more structured (hierarchical). In addition, bivariate analyses showed a significant, but weak, inverse relationship exists between perceptions of a predominantly hierarchical culture orientation and the presence of delay. In other words, judges who perceived their circuit to be predominantly hierarchical in nature were less likely to perceive delay as a problem.     

(Anti) Queer: Introduction

Thumbnail images depicting the face of a social actor were the most common type of image used in hard-news stories on the home page of the Sydney Morning Herald online (smh online), a high-circulation Australian daily broadsheet, between 2002 and 2006. While not all online newspapers use such images to the same extent as the smh online, close-up thumbnails of faces are commonplace on online newspaper home pages in general. This paper examines the use of these “thumbnail faces” on the smh online home page. Over four years (and across four page-design periods), these images were used more frequently, despite the fact that they function in a very different way to traditional hard-news images. Thumbnail faces cannot “tell stories”, nor “provide evidence”, but they play an important interpersonal role in individual news stories, collectively on the home page, and over time in the discursive relationship between the smh online and its readership.     

Resistance in hopeles’: Assimilating queer theory

This paper seeks to assimilate Queer Theory, i.e. to bring it within the gambit of a ‘mainstream’ or ‘dominant’ space: the academy. It does so by historicising Queer Theory, and investigating, if not what it is, then at least what it has been. This makes it possible to engage critically with Queer Theory, Suggesting that Queer Theory has often employed tropes of assimilation, the paper turns to another cultural site at which such language is popular—science fiction—in order to investigate the assumption of these metaphors. It goes on to suggest some of the assumptions about cultures which underlie these metaphors. Finally, it points to other sites in Queer Theory which undermine these assumptions, and provide other ways—quite uninterested in assimilation—in which to think Queer.     

Another permanency perspective:Family Drug Court

Because a staggering percentage of criminal court caseloads are intrinsically related to drug or alcohol abuse, general jurisdiction courts with rehabilitative “Drug Court” programs have experienced notable success. A similarly large number of juvenile and family court cases also involve substance abuse. The establishment of a “Family Drug Court” is allowing parents involved in abuse and neglect litigation to benefit from the juvenile justice system's social service mode of rehabilitation.     

Political competition and the Roman Catholic schools: Ontario,Canada

I would like to thank E.G. West and an anonymous referee for their careful criticism of an earlier draft of this paper. The usual disclaimer applies.