Temporal,Spatial and Functional Governance of China's Reform Stability

Governance is a hot topic in China, as well as among political scientists. Ways of thinking about it can be improved. This essay offers a ‘neo-functionalist’ method to test for successful or unsuccessful governance of reform stability in China. It takes account of the need for participation in effective governance. Steering a state (or any part of a state) requires attention to multiple sizes of polity—especially several medial sizes in a country as large as China. Governance has varied over time during the ‘reform’ era, when anti-reform conservatives have remained important in many nested political networks. The paper shows variation of governance over time, over sizes of polity and over four sample governance functions: managing the economy, maintaining orderly stability, linking ‘social’ parts of the polity to the government, and choosing cadres. It shows how these categories exhaust a logical field that is at least implicit in any analysis of governance roles, and it suggests the value of a ‘circulation of elites’ paradigm when thinking about governance success or failure.     

Forgetting the First Amendment: How Obscurity-Based Privacy and a Right to Be Forgotten Are Incompatible with Free Speech

The privacy of personal information on the Internet has received special attention recently in both the United States and the European Union, and legislative and regulatory proposals regarding the reform privacy law abound. This article examines several prominent theories that undergird the American First Amendment and attempts to demonstrate that the concept of a privacy interest arising out of the obscurity of information, as a social normative principle, and the right to be forgotten, as a legal mechanism concerned with the European idea of dignity-based privacy, are fundamentally at odds with the right of freedom of speech.     

A Viewpoint on Research for Social Business Entrepreneurship

This Viewpoint essay outlines key considerations for research on entrepreneurship, and for social business entrepreneurship specifically, considering the wide range of forms and essentially heterogeneous nature of this broad set of businesses. Themes related to practical research and key questions are outlined, along with considerations for researchers as the social business entrepreneurship space continues to evolve.     

Colombia's cocaine syndicates

Colombia's main drug trafficking coalitions — the Medellín and Cali syndicates — constitute powerful illegitimate interest groups. Traffickers (especially the Medellín coalition) exert political influence partly through violence and intimidation; yet the drug lords' political arsenal also includes non-coercive means-bribery, contributions to political campaigns and even open lobbying in the media. Conventional law enforcement strategies have been ineffective against the cocaine mafia, which is well entrenched in Colombian society. Wide domestic opposition to the drug war has prompted Colombia to opt for an unconventional strategy-to negotiate the voluntary withdrawal of major traffickers for the cocaine trade. A negotiation approach is extremely risky; yet, under tightly-controlled conditions, such an approach could allow U.S. and Colombian authorities to make significant progress in disrupting the cocaine multinationals and reducing the flow of Colombian cocaine into international markets.     

Toward Judicial Comity: Certification in the Courts

Certification is a procedure whereby federal courts may askstate courts of last resort to clarify an ambiguous provisionof state law. This increasingly popular device of deferenceoperates as an alternative to abstention and to the casual predictionof the meaning of state law. Certification is a permissive anddiscretionary mechanism; as such, it is neither universal inits usage nor uniform in its application. The thirty-eight statesthat authorize the procedure differ on which federal courtsmay participate and whether the answer to the certified questionmust determine, or resolve, the lawsuit. Our survey resultsindicate that federal and state judges alike praise certificationfor its contributions to intersystem harmony. It conserves judicialresources, advances litigant interests, minimizes interpretivemisguesses, and avoids repetitive litigation.