MDPs May Be Dead After Enron/Andersen, But Subsidiary Businesses Thrive

While some commentators believe that the Enron and Arthur Andersen affair that came to light in 2001 is responsible for the demise of multidisciplinary practices (MDPs), the notion of law firms engaging in MDPs lost most of its momentum during the American Bar Association (ABA) debate of 1999 and 2000. Enron and Andersen weakened whatever support remained for MDPs after the ABA defeat, during which MDP opponents raised legitimate concerns. But Enron and Andersen did not derail all models in which law firms successfully provide nonlegal services. In fact, the law-related services ancillary business model (as referred to by the ABA's Commission on Multidisciplinary Practice) is much more relevant post-Enron. Ancillary businesses, or subsidiary businesses as they are referred to at the authors' law firm of Bingham McCutchen LLP, are not MDPs. When structured and managed in compliance with fundamental principles and regulations, subsidiary businesses give progressive law firms the ability to deliver a comprehensive bundle of integrated services in response to client needs .     

The quality of doctoral programs in deviance,criminology, and criminal justice: An empirical assessment

While information regarding the doctoral programs in any discipline is of obvious and considerable relevance both to those in the discipline and to those seeking access to the best possible sites for graduate training, our knowledge about the quality of doctoral programs continues to be based on little more than speculation and highly ambiguous measures of institutional or departmental prestige. This study attempts to fill this gap for those who have special interests in the related fields of deviance, criminology, and criminal justice by ranking the thirty-six most significant doctoral programs in the nation by means of data derived from the Social Science Citation Index. Perhaps the most striking of our findings—and certainly to us the most distressing finding—is that those departments ranked by our measures as being the highest quality are consistently those which exist within the broader structure of departments of sociology. Given our firm conviction that the discipline of criminology is far, far more than that aspect of it which is closely related to issues of substantive significance to the field of sociology, we can only speculate that those in leadership positions in the growing number of independent schools or departments of criminology or criminal justice are not meeting their obligations to the discipline whose vitality and prospects depend so heavily on the quality of their judgment.     

The importance of modeling spatial spillovers in?public?choice analysis

It is frequently assumed that regional observations on local government behavior, voters, regional taxes, etc. can be analyzed using ordinary least-squares (OLS) methods. We discuss spatial regression models in empirical studies of public choice issues using impacts arising from population migration on the provision of county-level government services as an illustration. Spatial regressions allow an examination of the direct and indirect (spatial spillover) effects which taken together determine the total impact (on the dependent variable) arising from a change in the explanatory variables. This decomposition should be quite useful in empirical public choice studies.