Partisan Stacking on Legislative Committees

One aspect of the partisan model for legislative committee development that is rarely studied is the degree to which the majority party seeks to control legislative committees—and, thereby, chamber decisions—via numerically “overproportional” majority party representation on standing committees. This form of “party stacking” is often mentioned in the literature but has received little systematic examination and hypothesis testing. Using data from state legislative committees for all 49 partisan legislatures in the 2003–04 and 2005–06 sessions, we found support for the partisan model: majority party stacking is associated with a slim majority party advantage in a state legislative chamber.     

Balancing Power: Committee System Autonomy and Legislative Organization

The most recent explanations for the existence of committee systems in legislative chambers have posited that committees are the agents of one of three very different principal actors: (1) individual members (distributive theory), (2) the full chamber (informational theory), or (3) the major political party (partisan theory). In addition to defining and operationalizing the concept of institutional committee system autonomy, I put forth and test several hypotheses linking these three explanations to committee system autonomy. In the end, the results show empirical support for the informational theory over the distributive and partisan theories.     

Amicus Curiae and the Public Interest: A Search for a Standard1

Despite the widespread and influential presence of an increasingly partisan amicus curiae brief, the role of the "friend of the court" brief remains controversial. Changing rules of access and diverging recommendations for its behavior are associated with two distinct views of jurisprudence. A traditional understanding of adversarial proceedings emphasizes the individual interests of the litigants, and correspondingly excludes consideration of non-parties and the general public. An alternative to the traditional, individual-based, liberal jurisprudence (and its skepticism toward public interest arguments) is a recognition of the need to integrate individual and public interests and to find a coherence between them.
The skeptical view of the public interest can be avoided by adopting a post-empiricist view, which recognizes a plurality of interpretations of the public interest. The amicus curiae role, if given wide access, can serve as a tool of inclusive pluralism, which recognizes a diversity of views regarding the public interest and the impact of legal decisions on the public.     

A Visit to China＇s ＂Arctic Village＂

Beiji Village is the highest geographical point in China by latitude.With an annual mean temperature of -4.29 °C, the region is only just warm enough to avoid continuous permafrost.     

THE COLLATERAL CONSEQUENCES OF INCARCERATION REVISITED: A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTS ON CAREGIVERS OF CHILDREN OF INCARCERATED PARENTS*

While policy makers have long extolled the benefits of incarceration, criminologists have expended considerable effort demonstrating the harmful collateral consequences of incarceration. Sampson (2011) recently challenged researchers to move beyond this dichotomy and to assess the “social ledger” of incarceration, where both the potential benefits and harms associated with incarceration are examined. To shed light on the variation in the collateral consequences of incarceration, we focus on the experiences of a valuable group of individuals directly impacted by imprisonment: those caring for children of incarcerated parents. Drawing from in‐depth interviews with a diverse group of caregivers (N= 100), we examine the various consequences (both positive and negative) that occur in their lives as a result of incarceration, as well as the causal processes responsible for the outcomes we observe. Our findings reveal marked variation in the effects of incarceration on caregivers. Such effects are shaped by (1) the prisoner's prior parental involvement, (2) the interpersonal relationship between caregiver and prisoner, and (3) the caregiver's family support system. These findings have important implications for future work conducted on the collateral consequences of incarceration for caregivers, children, and families.     

The Problem That Is Global Warming: Introduction

Global warming poses significant challenges to society at every level, evading easy definitions that would make the usual instrumental approaches to policymaking and regulation a relatively straightforward task. The embeddedness of the carbon economy in contemporary methods of industrialization and development means that climate protection is at once a problem of environment, the global economy, and human rights. It requires us to understand the strengths and limitations of a regulatory approach, to tease apart the intricacies of international law and governance to find ways to turn economic, legal, and cultural norms toward creating climate justice. Sector specific approaches to dealing with human rights and refugees, as well as international relations based on interstate relations, also have limitations. These include insufficient capacity to appreciate the differentiated responsibility of various actors in the creation of this ecological crisis as well as creating obstacles in finding appropriate ways to motivate those with the most ability to reduce our impact on the climate. Mutual reinforcement and “virtuous” arbitrage across fragmented regulatory regimes might create new synergies with potentially positive transformative effects for climate protection. To achieve this, the development and maintenance of legitimacy is central. The articles in this edition tackle these issues and, taken as a whole, provide a springboard for future scholarship.