ATTORNEYS' OPINIONS REGARDING CHILD CUSTODY MEDIATION AND ASSESSMENT SERVICES

Family attorneys (N = 161) completed a questionnaire about mediation and assessment of child custody issues. Comparisons by gender, years of family law practice, and status as a mediator revealed more similarities than differences among attorneys. There were gender differences in the strength of conviction of the importance of attending to abuse issues in mediation and assessment, with female attorneys holding stronger views than did their male counterparts. There were few differences among the opinions of lawyers based on their years of experience or their training in mediation, although, compared to nonmediators, mediators rated the positive effects of mediation more highly.     

Chronique Bibliographique: Difficultés et pièges du langage juridique; Sébastien Bissardon,Guide du Langage Juridique — Les Pièges à Éviter

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique -     

Symbolic state-building in contemporary Russia

Vladimir Putin has made state-building a central goal of his presidency and recent scholarship has demonstrated that Russian formal institutions have indeed been deliberately reformed. Unlike studies that ass’ess state-building vis-à-vis a particular outcome, our research examines what kind of state Russian political elites seek to build, and focuses on symbolic state-building strategies. To capture symbolic state-building in the Putin era, we examine the Pryamaya Liniya broadcasts: annual, high-profile TV broadcasts in which citizens pose questions to the president. We find that a broad range of formal institutions appear to be central to Putin’s state-building project, a finding that runs counter to claims that governance is largely deinstitutionalized, informal and personal. We argue that symbolic state-building seeks to reconcile personalism and institutionalism, by conveying a dual image of a state in citizens’ everyday lives – emphasizing both formal institutions, while also affirming Putin as the personal guarantor of the state’s authority.     

Politics and the rescue of insolvent savings and loans before 1989

The results presented in this paper are consistent with those predicted by public choice economists who believe that regulatory agencies represent the interests of their controlling congressional committees. Membership on committees is not random; congressmen seek committee assignments where they can represent the interests of their constituency. Congressmen from states where financial institutions are significant will seek membership on their respective banking committees. Once on those committees, congressmen will seek to protect and promote their own constituency. In the case of the savings and loan industry, insolvent savings and loans received benefits from staying in operation. These savings and loans gained another chance to gamble for resurrection. Being shut-down or placed in a management consignment program did not give this option. The results presented in our paper indicate that participation in one of the rescue programs is not random. Savings and loans in states with political power (representation on the Senate banking committee) are less likely to be resolved.A previous version of this paper was presented at the Southern Economic Association Meetings, November 18–21 1990, New Orleans, Louisiana. The authors thank James R. Barth, Henry N. Butler, Gordon Tullock, Lawrence J. White, and an anonymous referee, for helpful comments. Financial support from the Summer Research Program of the College of Business, Boise State University, is gratefully acknowledged. We accept responsibility for any remaining errors.     

U.S. Governance: Not The Gold Standard

China has recently consolidated the theories and practices associated with its whole-process people's democracy, which was first named formally in 2019, and more clearly expressed this year. As a recent white paper on the subject clarifies, it reflects the longstanding effort to build and advance a socialist people's democracy in China, one century in the making.     

MISREADINGS AND MISATTRIBUTIONS

The Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee has concluded with a much anticipated resolution on the Party's history, the third such resolution since the Party's founding, amid expectation that a new assessment would appear this year. The session came at a time when China signaled it had entered a "new era" and celebrated the 100th anniversary of the Party's founding in tandem with achieving a xiaokang (moderately prosperous) society and after eliminating extreme poverty, while transitioning to a new development model, advancing the green revolution, recovering from the pandemic, and further bolstering sovereignty and national defense. Chinese media reports for the most part have focused on the 10 principles or lessons the report provides to help China tackle major challenges in coming decades.     

Peasant mobilization and anti‐colonial struggle in Vietnam: The rent reduction campaign of 1953

While Vietnam seems to present an unusually successful case of coordination of national liberation struggle and peasant revolution, the relationship between these two aspects of the movement has been very complex, and the national and class struggles have had contradictory as well as complementary aspects. Following a summary of two poles of a debate on the topic within the Vietnamese communist movement in the 1930s and 40s, the article analyses in detail the relationship between the independence struggle and social revolution during 1953, the year in which the Communist Party systematically introduced mass mobilization for class struggle for the first time during the national liberation war.