Frontier Justice: Legal Aid and UNHCR Refugee Status Determination in Egypt

Where UNHCR conducts refugee status determination (RSD), itsreactions to legal aid for asylum-seekers have been mixed. Statisticalevidence collected from Egypt in 2002 indicates a correlationbetween receiving some form of legal aid service and an asylum-seeker'sincreased chances of gaining refugee protection from UNHCR.Unconventional forms of legal aid, including limited servicesby supervised non-lawyers (including volunteers from the refugeecommunity) showed a positive impact on first instance cases,while traditional legal aid models showed an impact at the appealstage. Legal aid should form an essential part of UNHCR's RSDprocedures, and NGOs should work to expand both traditionaland innovative forms of legal aid for asylum-seekers.     

Understanding a Period of Policy Change: The Case of Hydraulic Fracturing Disclosure Policy in Colorado

This paper investigates the beliefs and framing strategies of interest groups during a period of policy change and the factors explaining policy change. We develop propositions to explore questions concerning policy change primarily from the advocacy coalition framework as well as from other theorie. The propositions are tested by examining the promulgation of a Colorado regulation requiring the disclosure of chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing. Using coded data of documents published by organizations involved in the rulemaking process, we find divergence between industry and environmental groups on their beliefs concerning hydraulic fracturing, as well as their portraying themselves and each other as heroes, victims, and villains, but some convergence on their more specific beliefs concerning disclosure of chemicals. Interviews point to the importance of policy entrepreneurs, timing, a negotiated agreement, and learning for explaining policy change. The findings provide both theoretical and methodological insights into how and why policy changes.     

The Great Powers and Regional Conflicts: Eastern Europe and the Balkans from the Post–Napoleonic Era to the Post–Cold War Era

The objective of this article is to provide an analytical framework for addressing the sources of great power regional involvement and its effects on regional conflicts. The thesis of the article is that variations in the degree of intensity of conflicts and the likelihood of successful conflict resolution in different regions are affected by the character of great power involvement in these regions. Our argument is that although great power involvement or noninvolvement cannot cause or terminate regional conflicts, it can either intensify existing local conflicts or mitigate them. We will propose causal linkages between balances of great power capabilities and interests, types of great power involvement in regional conflicts, and patterns of regional conflicts. The study will distinguish among four types of great power involvement in regional conflicts: competition, cooperation, dominance, and disengagement. The empirical section will examine the application of these propositions in seven historical illustrations, representing the four patterns of great power involvement in regional conflicts. All the illustrations will deal with one conflict-ridden region-Eastern Europe and the Balkans, in successive historical periods from the post-Napoleonic era to the post-Cold War era. Because of the variety of patterns of great power involvement in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, this region is uniquely suited to examine the propositions derived from the theoretical framework. Drawing on both the theoretical deductions and the historical illustrations should make it possible in the last section to discuss briefly the implications of the proposed framework for regional conflict management or mitigation in the Balkans in the post-Cold War era.     

American State Supreme Court Justices, 1900-1970

What are the paths that lead to the state supreme court bench? If we can identify these paths, can we then determine that they produce distinctive patterns in a court3 decision making? Based on a study of 694 judges who sat on 16selected American state supreme courts between 1900 and 1970, this article finds that the appellate judiciary was drawn from a variety of legal and political backgrounds rather than from any single career line. The judges came from both non-elite and elite law schools. About half had no substantial lower court judicial experience. Over one-third had been public prosecutors, another third had held other elective political office, and only a small minority had practiced in multilawyer big-city law firms. The article reports changes over time in these and other judicial characteristics (such CIS age, turnover, political party affiliations) and describes interstate differences. Few significant statistical relationships are found, however, between the background characteristics of judges and selected characteristics of state supreme court opinions.     

Real Life Heroes in Residential Treatment: Implementation of an Integrated Model of Trauma and Resiliency-Focused Treatment for Children and Adolescents with Complex PTSD

Real Life Heroes (RLH) engages children and caregivers to rebuild (or build) emotionally supportive relationships, develop self-regulation and co-regulation skills, reduce traumatic stress reactions, and integrate a positive self-image through conjoint life story work. RLH includes psychoeducation, a life story workbook, multi-modal creative arts, and a toolkit to help practitioners implement National Child Traumatic Stress Network recommended components of treatment for Complex PTSD as a child and family transition from residential treatment to home and community-based programs. A case study and results from pilot studies highlight utility of the model for residential treatment and how RLH can help residential treatment programs implement evidence-supported trauma and resiliency-focused treatment including incorporation of NCTSN curricula to provide an integrated framework for practitioners, residential counselors, county case managers, educators, resource parents, home-based counselors, mentors, and other caring adults.     

Social License and Environmental Protection: Why Businesses Go Beyond Compliance

This article examines the concept of the corporate "social license," which governs the extent to which a corporation is constrained to meet societal expectations and avoid activities that societies (or influential elements within them) deem unacceptable, whether or not those expectations are embodied in law. It examines the social license empirically, as it relates to one social problem–environmental protection–and as it relates to one particular industry: pulp and paper manufacturing. It shows try the social license is important, the circumstances in which it may encourage companies to go "beyond compliance" with regulation, how its terms are monitored and enforced, and how it interacts with what we term the regulatory and economic licenses. Overall, this research demonstrates that corporate environmental behavior cannot be explained purely in terms of instrumental threats and moral obligations to comply with the law, and that the increasing incidence of "beyond compliance" corporate behavior can be better explained in terms of the interplay between social pressures and economic constraints.     

Explaining Corporate Environmental Performance: How Does Regulation Matter?

How and to what extent does regulation matter in shaping corporate behavior? How important is it compared to other incentives and mechanisms of social control, and how does it interact with those mechanisms? How might we explain variation in corporate responses to law and other external pressures? This article addresses these questions through an study of environmental performance in 14 pulp and paper manufacturing mills in Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, and the states of Washington and Georgia in the United States. Over the last three decades, we find tightening regulatory requirements and intensifying political pressures have brought about large improvements and considerable convergence in environmental performance by pulp manufacturers, most of which have gone “beyond compliance” in several ways. But regulation does not account for remaining differences in environmental performance across facilities. Rather, “social license” pressures (particularly from local communities and environmental activists) and corporate environmental management style prod some firms toward better performance compliance than others. At the same time, economic pressures impose limits on “beyond performance” investments. In producing large gains in environmental performance, however, regulation still matters greatly, but less as a system of hierarchically imposed, uniformly enforced rules than as a coordinative mechanism, routinely interacting with market pressures, local and national environmental activists, and the culture of corporate management in generating environmental improvement while narrowing the spread between corporate leaders and laggards.