Revisiting the duty of care of the nonprofit director

The current corporate responsibility environment has prompted interested stakeholders, including legislators and state charity law officials, to more closely evaluate what constitutes the proper exercise of the "duty of care" by the director of a nonprofit corporation. The authors review recent developments affecting duty-of-care obligations and conclude that corporate responsibility and related concepts are likely to require directors to give greater consideration to the exercise of their "oversight" obligations as subsumed within the duty of care. The Article identifies a number of recent instances in which state charity law officials and other third parties have raised issues associated with the proper exercise of directors' oversight obligation, and concludes that directors of nonprofits will require greater counseling on their duty-of-care obligations in order to reduce their liability profile in an increasingly contentious environment.     

The presence of counsel at forensic psychiatric examinations

In virtually all situations involving forensic psychiatric assessments, the patient is represented by counsel. But does this fact entitle the lawyer to be present at the clinical evaluation? In a series of New York cases spanning a generation, judges have allowed presence of counsel at the psychiatric examination. The most common reason given for such a conclusion is to assure better cross-examination of the expert witness. Psychiatric evaluations mandated by law necessitate several guidelines different from those of the usual doctor/patient relationship. While we may have to accept the presence of attorneys in our consulting rooms, they should be observers only. To allow active intervention would distort the clinical process.     

The Effect of Breakfast in the Classroom on Obesity and Academic Performance: Evidence from New York City

Participation in the federally subsidized school breakfast program often falls well below its lunchtime counterpart. To increase take‐up, many districts have implemented Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC), offering breakfast directly to students at the start of the school day. Beyond increasing participation, advocates claim BIC improves academic performance, attendance, and engagement. Others caution BIC has deleterious effects on child weight. We use the implementation of BIC in New York City (NYC) to estimate its impact on meals program participation, body mass index (BMI), achievement, and attendance. While we find large effects on participation, our findings provide no evidence of hoped‐for gains in academic performance, or of feared increases in obesity. The policy case for BIC will depend upon reductions in hunger and food insecurity for disadvantaged children, or its longer‐term effects.     

Using Adjusted Performance Measures for Evaluating Resource Use

Public service organizations are looking for ways to improve the evaluation of performance and resource allocation. One of the approaches is to use adjusted performance measures, which attempt to capture factors that affect the organizational performance but are outside of the organization's control. This article illustrates the construction and use of adjusted performance measures to assess the performance of public schools, and reports findings from a study of school-based budgeting in Chicago that relates adjusted performance measures and patterns of budget allocations.     

"Won't You Please Help Me Get My Son Home": Peonage, Patronage, and Protest in the World War II Urban South

During World War II, young African Americans from southern cities left their homes for what appeared to be patriotic job opportunities harvesting sugar cane in Florida. When returning workers described peonage and slavery instead, parents worried about their children's safety. After attempting to contact their children directly, the parents appealed to the federal government. Their decision to mobilize the federal government and the strategies they used to do so reveal important aspects of wartime African American protest that historians have previously overlooked. This article focuses on families instead of atomized individuals, revealing the importance of families, neighborhoods, and communities to the emergence of rights consciousness. It also complicates the historiographical dichotomy between rights consciousness and patronage relationships. Patrons sewed as liaisons with law enforcement agencies and provided links to a law-centered rights consciousness. For many historians, until protest exits the realm of patronage ties, it is not really protest, and once interactions with government themselves become bureaucratized they cease to be protest any longer. The efforts of the peons' families challenge both ends of this narrow category of protest; they both used patronage relations to lodge their protests and also forged rights consciousness within the legal process itself.     

Expert testimony on decision processes in employment cases

The 1991 Civil Rights Act and recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have modified standards applicable to psychometric or statistical proof of discrimination in employment cases. Changes in the legal standards have increased the role for psychological experts to prove or rebut allegations of disparate impact of hiring or promotional criteria, whether those criteria caused the observed disparities in the workforce, and whether the legitimate needs of the employer were substantially served by the employer's selection criteria. Three different methods or approaches to meet the legal standards are discussed: (a) reliance on traditional psychometric validity analyses; (b) regression analysis or the policy-capturing method; and (c) the survey data approach. These techniques are illustrated by reference to three cases in which experts successfully presented this evidence. While the application of the 1991 Civil Rights Act remains somewhat unclear, these approaches may prove useful in future employment discrimination cases.The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission or any other government agency.