The ordinary and the extraordinary in institutional litigation

Institutional litigation, in which courts are requested to oversee the operation of large public institutions, has been frequently attacked as a departure from the traditional model of litigation. In this Article, Professors Eisenberg and Yeazell argue that the procedures and remedies employed in institutional litigation are not unprecedented but have analogues in older judicial traditions. Nor, they assert, do the doctrines of separation of powers and federalism present any obstacles to institutional litigation. They conclude that the novelty lies in the newly created substantive rights which courts are asked to enforce.     

Experiments in filtering political opinions

Changes in the wording of core measures of political attitudes in the American National Election Studies have generated a good deal of controversy about artifactual sources of change in the U.S. electorate. This research, based on several field experiments and replications, investigates the effects of using or not using various types of opinion filter questions that have appeared in the SRC/CPS series over the years. The analysis shows that the use of a filter interacts significantly with a respondent's level of education and interest in politics, particularly the latter, in determining whether a respondent will offer an opinion on a given public policy issue. But the study also demonstrates that such an interaction occurs primarily when the question about interest in politics is askedafter, rather thanbefore, a set of political issue items. In interpreting these order-and-context effects the authors develop a self-perception model of how respondents infer their interest in politics from information that isavailable in memory about their own behavior in the survey interview.     

Evaluation of automobile safety regulations: The case of compulsory seat belt legislation in Australia

A basic tenet of the new conservatism in political economy is that government policies frequently lead to unintended consequences which may offset the benefits of the policy. Auto safety legislation may be a case in point. As the first country to make the wearing of seat belts compulsory, Australia is highly suitable as a case study. Traffic accident casualties were regressed on six independent variables for the pre-seat belt period 1949–71. The equations were then used to predict casualties for the period 1972–77, using the actual values of the independent variables. In the aggregate, predicted occupant casualties were higher than the actual rates, whereas non-occupant casualties were underpredicted by the equations. An additional test, using a dummy variable to predict the effect of seat belts, supported these conclusions. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that drivers respond to a reduction in risk by increasing driving intensity, shifting some of the welfare cost of auto safety legislation on to non-occupants, whose casualty rates are higher than they would have been in the absence of seat belt legislation.I am grateful to Chris Adam and to an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Local planners — global constraints

A number of reports have been published over the past few years documenting the evidence of decline in the northeastern U.S.A. and the simultaneous migration of industry to the U.S. Sunbelt. (Academy for Contemporary Problems, 1977; Sale, 1975; Sternlieb and Hughes, 1975). In developing appropriate recommendations to planners, such studies invariably urge that localities or regions facing industrial out-migration arrest this activity by making themselves more suitable and attractive (Council for Northeast Economic Action [CNEA], 1977a) within the framework of a number of characteristic strategies. We propose to examine critically some of the traditional strategies recommended by these reports.