Deconstructing jurisprudence: An experiential feminist critique

Feminist legal scholars continue to raise questions concerning the nature of jurisprudence in its treatment of women. Central to this debate are issues of knowledge, truth, and power founded on the patriarchal code of justice. This article argues that the essentialism of the masculine system alone is entirely inadequate in speaking for the voice of women and/or for the feminine in consciousness. By disrupting Freudian and Lacanian constructions of female sexuality through a psycho-linguistic analysis, these insights are then applied to the works of both Carol Gilligan and Catharine MacKinnon. In doing so, it is discovered that an uncultivated feminine discourse is grounded in experience, gatherings, consciousness-raising, and interpersonal truth. Constituting an unadulterated code of feminine justice requires a return to imaginative discourse; a process whereby metaphors, symbols, and myths for and about women are re-constituted and freed from misogynous language and culture.     

The will to win: Determinants of public support for the drug war in Belize

The premise of this paper is that the drug war cannot be won without the public's full commitment. Based on a random sample of households (n=532) in Belize City, public attitudes are analyzed to assess the degree of support for drug enforcement. The findings show strong support for drug education as well as for increasing criminal sanctions and the size of the police force. Support fades, however, as drug enforcement is militarized. The significant determinants of public support are education, gender, attitudes toward the police, fear of property crime, and neighborhood crime prevalence. The paper closes by offering two concrete ways to build public support for drug enforcement.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Conference in Nashville, Tennessee, March 1991.     

Rural Community Responses to a National Mandate: An Assessment of Floodplain Land-Use Management

Rural governments face a difficult task in complying with theNational Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which requires detailedplanning, land use ordinances, and effective enforcement provisionsto reduce flood losses. This study analyzes responses from anational sample of officials in 852 nonmetropolitan NFIP communitiesand flood management officials in all fifty state governments.Rural officials perceive their overall floodplain managementprograms to be relatively effective in protecting future developmentbut less effective in protecting existing structures. Whileflood hazard mitigation is not a high priority in rural government,the national program appears to have spurred local activity.State assistance in developing local regulations and providinginformation is correlated with rural officials' perceptionsof meeting NFIP goals. Programs rated most effective are incommunities with local regulations in force, although technicalproblems and local political opposition are widely acknowledgedas obstacles to the development of land use measures.     

Testing Gottfredson and Hirschi’s “low self-control” stability hypothesis: An exploratory study

In Gottfredson and Hirschi’s (1990)A General Theory of Crime, criminal and analogous behaviors are argued to be the result of a stable individual psychological trait referred to as “low self-control.” In this article, we test the proposition that low self-control is a stable characteristic. We conduct a two-wave panel study that measures the self-reported self-control of college students at two relatively close time points. Our test of the stability hypothesis includes conducting four separate analyses of the data (t-tests, correlations, individual change scores, and HLM analyses). In general, we find that most of the dimensions of self-control, and the overall self-control construct, appear to be relatively stable across this short period of time. However, given that the measurements were taken closely together and that we do not find correlations as strong as might be expected, at points the strength of the stability is somewhat unclear. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, Chicago, November 1996.     

Antitrust actions and the budgeting process

The author expresses appreciation to Dan Benjamin, Charles Knoeber, C.M. Lindsay, M.T. Maloney, William Shughart II, and John Warner for comments and criticisms. The usual caveat applies.