The Assessment of Gain-Based Damages for Breach of Contract

This article argues that there are two different measures of gain-based damages for breach of contract: the Wrotham Park measure and the Blake measure. The former is assessed by reference to the objective value of the benefit received by the defendant and the latter by reference to the defendant's subjective gain. In assessing Wrotham Park damages the courts apply a fixed formula, determining the price that a reasonable person in the position of the claimant might have demanded from the defendant at the time of breach for relaxing its rights under the contract. The Blake measure is different; it requires the defendant to disgorge the actual net profit received from the breach. Unlike the Wrotham Park measure, it deals only with positive and not negative gains. It is also limited by the doctrine of causation so that only those gains that are 'directly occasioned' by the breach are recoverable.     

Multilevel Longitudinal Impacts of Incivilities: Fear of Crime, Expected Safety, and Block Satisfaction

Several aspects of the incivilities thesis, or the role of social and physical disorder in encouraging crime and fear, deserve further testing. These include examining individual- and streetblock-level impacts on reactions to crime and local commitment over time, and testing for lagged and co-occurring impacts at each level. We model these four types of impacts on three reactions to crime and community satisfaction using a panel study of residents (n = 305) on fifty streetblocks, interviewed two times a year apart. At the individual level, incivilities showed unambiguous, lagged impacts on satisfaction, fear, and worry; furthermore, changes in perceived incivilities accompanied changes in resident satisfaction and fear. At the streetblock level: incivilities failed to demonstrate expected lagged impacts on either of the two outcomes where data structures permitted such impacts; changing incivilities, however, were accomp-anied by changing community satisfaction and changing perceptions of relative risk. Before we conclude that lagged ecological impacts of incivilities are weaker than previous theorizing suggests, we must resolve some outstanding theoretical and methodological issues.     

I'd like to be ethical,but they won't let me

To be ethical, the member of a modern organization must know what. the work requires of him (or her), what the organization requires of him, and what others require of him. But modern organizations put doing one's job before doing one's work and before one's duty to one's fellow man. Because they do so structurally, the individual usually cannot know what the effect of doing one's duty is on doing a good piece of work or on other human beings. This article attempts to make a beginning to show how far removed the structure of knowledge in modern organization is from constituting the basis for ethical behavior. The means chosen is a phenomeno-logical reconstruction of the ethical field that links the individual to objects, others, and self.     

Implementation evaluation: A future direction in project evaluation

The problem of implementation failure is an important component in the evaluation of criminal justice projects. In general, the issue of project implementation has been neglected by organizational researchers and evaluation specialists as well as by policymakers and program developers. In direct contrast to the existing pattern, we stress the importance of organizational factors and the relationships between individuals and organizations for the successful implementation and institutionalization of criminal justice projects.     

On the Success of AmeriCorps Programs in Strengthening Communities: Evidence from Florida

In 1993 President Clinton signed into law the National and Community Service Trust Act, the centerpiece of which was a new national service initiative—AmeriCorps. The overall purpose of AmeriCorps was to promote community building through volunteer service. AmeriCorps was one high-profile program established in part to highlight government-nonprofit partnerships and their capacity to improve communities and service delivery to the most vulnerable in communities—poor children, frail elderly, and teenagers who are at risk of dropping out of school or getting into serious juvenile delinquency problems. AmeriCorps' programs nationally work to achieve three goals—Getting Things Done, Member Development, and Strengthening Communities. Few of the studies on AmeriCorps have explicitly studied their impact on community strengthening. This article reports on a two-year study of twenty two AmeriCorps programs in Florida from 1997–2000, emphasizing their objectives and success in community strengthening. Program results are limited. The programs increased the number of volunteers delivering their services and developed one or more community partner organizations at each site. Nearly all of the program staff and community partners believed that the AmeriCorps programs positively influenced the community's self-help capacity to some extent. However, data indicating broader community strengthening impacts were hard to find and difficult to track. Reasons for this relatively modest impact on broader community strengthening goals are articulated based on surveys, interviews, and site visits.