Globalization and legal change: The “Americanization” of European law?

Intensified global economic competition, economic liberalization, and the rise of EU governance have led some observers to argue that there has been a trend toward the “Americanization” of the European “way of law.” This article addresses that contention, focusing on legal change in European member states. It first describes ways in which the American legal tradition has differed most sharply from the national legal systems of Western Europe (including Great Britain) and the political and economic factors that account for this “American legal distinctiveness.” Similar political and economic factors currently are at work in Europe, the article acknowledges, creating incentives for legal convergence. But it also argues that European legal culture and the political organization of European national states generate path‐dependent forces that impede European movement toward American ways of law, and it discusses six important differences between European and American law that remain entrenched and are unlikely to disappear.     

Explaining legislators’ positions on outside income limits: Voting on honoraria ceilings in the U.S. Senate, 1981–1983

This article examines roll-call voting by members of the U.S. Senate on three proposals to limit members’ outside income in the 1980s. I find that several factors influenced legislators’ votes on outside income limits legislation (OILL). First, financial self-interest was an important constraint on members’ willingness to support OILL. Members who earned more honoraria were less likely to vote yes, but this opposition was neutralized when limits were attached to the compensating mechanism of a pay raise. Senators from poorer states were generally more likely to support honoraria limits alone but less likely to support limits linked to a pay raise, suggesting a responsiveness to constituent interests in both cases. Finally, when OILL was linked to a pay raise, electoral considerations became prominent in legislators’ vote decisions, with electorally vulnerable members less likely to vote yes.     

School choice,racial segregation,and test‐score gaps: Evidence from North Carolina's charter school program*

Using panel data that track individual students from year to year, we examine the effects of charter schools in North Carolina on racial segregation and black‐white test score gaps. We find that North Carolina's system of charter schools has increased the racial isolation of both black and white students, and has widened the achievement gap. Moreover, the relatively large negative effects of charter schools on the achievement of black students is driven by students who transfer into charter schools that are more racially isolated than the schools they have left. Our analysis of charter school choices suggests that asymmetric preferences of black and white charter school students (and their families) for schools of different racial compositions help to explain why there are so few racially balanced charter schools. © 2006 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

When is Growth Not Growth? The Curious Case of Mental Health Budgeting in New York

This article argues that the adverse impact of Medicaid on state budgets alleged in various public debates has been overstated, in some measure because of the inaccurate and misleading manner in which Medicaid expenditures are appropriated in state budgeting systems. Data on Medicaid and mental health spending in the state of New York is used for analysis. The first section provides a Medicaid spending and budgeting background. The second section discusses Medicaid and mental health in New York. The third section describes actual budgeted spending for mental health in New York, and the final section provides a discussion and concluding comments.     

Is racial separation inevitable and legal?

Her major publications include Dilemmas of Black Politics: Issues of Leadership and Strategy(1993) and The Making of Energy and Telecommunications Policy(1995).     

Guilty by disassociation (and innocent by association): The impact of relevant and irrelevant analogies on political judgments

We investigate how associative (X is similar to Y) and disassociative (X is different from Y) analogies may affect judgments of political target stimuli they are employed to embellish. In an experimental study it was hypothesized that the judgmental relevance of the analogy-target relation is an important determinant of the effect of the analogy on subsequent judgments. It was reasoned that for irrelevant analogies the (dis)associative relation would be less efficiently encoded and utilized than the evaluative tone of the analogy itself, resulting in relative assimilation to the connotation of irrelevant analogies, even where the analogy was actually disassociated from the target. Where the analogy-target relation was relevant to judgments of the target, these judgments were predicted to follow the specified analogy-target relation for both associative and disassociative analogies. The predictions were supported. The relation of these results to social judgment models and to the rhetorical devices used to influence political judgment is discussed.