How Capital Budgeting Helped a Sick City: Thirty Years of Capital Improvement Planning in Cleveland

During the 1970s, Cleveland's capital improvement plan (CIP) was scorned as a bad joke, and the city's roads, bridges, and public buildings fell into disrepair. The city's default on its fiscal obligation in 1978 seemed to cap the city's infrastructure problem; there was no comprehensive strategy for capital spending and in a bankrupt city, no money to spend in any event. Yet, during the 1980s, with support from the administration, the business community, and the innovations of a small group of dedicated urban planners, the CIP was restructured and hundreds of millions were systematically invested in public infrastructure. By the 1990s, most of the innovative changes of the 1980s seemed to be institutionalized, but there were ominous clouds on the horizon.     

Negotiation and Nonviolent Action: Interacting in the World of Conflict

Negotiation and nonviolent action are arguably the two best methods humanity has developed for engaging constructively with conflict. Both have played central roles in helping manage or resolve seemingly intractable conflicts, sometimes sequentially and sometimes in tandem. But experts and practitioners in both fields often underestimate the relevance and effectiveness of the other. This article explores the interface between the fields of negotiation and nonviolent action, their mutual commitment to engage constructively with conflict, and the concern both methods share for leverage, power, and strategic preparation and action. After examining the shared linkages, this article highlights how the two fields have synergistic qualities when utilized together in the same conflict. Using examples from a diverse set of conflicts, the overlap explored in this article lays an important foundation for the future convergence of the two fields.     

Trailblazers and Those That Followed: Personal Experiences,Gender, and Judicial Empathy

This article investigates one causal mechanism that may explain why female judges on the federal appellate courts are more likely than men to side with plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases. To test whether personal experiences with inequality are related to empathetic responses to the claims of female plaintiffs, we focus on the first wave of female judges, who attended law school during a time of severe gender inequality. We find that female judges are more likely than their male colleagues to support plaintiffs in sex discrimination cases, but that this difference is seen only in judges who graduated law school between 1954 and 1975 and disappears when more recent law school cohorts of men and women judges are compared. These results suggest that the effect of gender as a trait is tied to the role of formative experiences with discrimination.