Improving juvenile dependency courts:Twenty-Three Steps

New federal support for improvement in the handling of child welfare cases has made it possible for juvenile and family court judges to assess how well courts are implementing the Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980. This article first describes the purposes of the Act, and then suggest 23 steps to consider in attempts to improve the court process.     

Social Movements and Social-Change Litigation: Synergy in the Montgomery Bus Protest

Two competing schools of thought have emerged to explain how the Montgomery bus protest of 1955–56 brought about changes on the city's Jim Crow buses. The dominant explanation attributes the changes to the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery Improvement Association. A second interpretation emphasizes the critical role of the Supreme Court's decision striking down the state and local bus segregation laws. This essay prooides a third explanation: that these two strategies–the boycott and the litigation–interacted, each shaping and reinforcing the other. Each strategy war a critical part of the struggle, but neither brought change by itself. This essay argues that the two strategies of the Montgomery protest created a synergy that was the key to bringing about changes on the buses.     

Attributions for episodes of marital aggression: The effects of aggression severity and alcohol use

This study examined attributions for husband to wife marital agression as a function of aggression severity and husbands' alcohol use. Subjects were a community sample of 117 wives and 109 husbands who reported an episode of serious physical aggression during a structured interview, conducted at one year of marriage. The results showed that husbands' attributions were influenced by both severity and alcohol use. In particular, sober husbands tended to blame their wives for severe aggression, but, unexpectedly, drinking husbands tended to assume responsibility for severe aggression. In contrast, wives' attributions were influenced mainly by severity. Wives also discriminated between the locus and stability dimensions of causal attributions, whereas husbands relied solely on the locus dimension. Specifically, wives held husbands' behavior more responsible for severe aggression than their own behavior and held husbands' character much more responsible than their own character. Additional findings with regard to relationship attributions were discussed.     

The demand for military expenditures: An international comparison

Earlier studies have explained inter-country variations in the share of GNP devoted to military expenditures by international spillovers and by differences in the threat of attack related to relative incomes. In this paper, we use the theory of public choice to explain these differences. We attempt to measure the importance of both international spillovers and relative incomes, along with two other factors: the tax-price elasticity of demand and economies of scale in the consumption of security. We find that international spillovers are significant and positive, that the income elasticity of demand is greater than unity, that the tax-price elasticity of demand explains part of observed inter-country differences, and that there are considerable economies of scale in the consumption of military spending. Finally, between 1960 and 1975, there was apparently a substantial increase in the value which each country derived from a dollar of military spending by its allies. This phenomenon, which seems related to the increased importance of deterrent weapons, has tended to induce individual alliance members to reduce the share of their national income devoted to defense.     

WILLIAM H. REHNQUIST AWARD ADDRESS

The William H. Rehnquist Award is one of the most celebrated judicial honors in the country. ¹ It is given each year to a state court judge who demonstrates the "highest level of judicial excellence, integrity, fairness, and professional ethics." ² The 2004 recipient, Judge Leonard Edwards, is the Supervising Judge of the Santa Clara County, California juvenile dependency court. ³ He is the first juvenile court judge to receive this prestigious award. During the 24 years he has held his position, Judge Edwards has worked extremely hard to improve how the juvenile court system serves troubled families. He has founded two organizations to achieve this end, the Juvenile Court Judges of California and the Santa Clara County Domestic Violence Council. ⁴ Judge Edwards serves as a lead judge in San Jose's Model Court, which is one of twenty-five jurisdictions in the country which utilizes new ideas and techniques to improve adoption rates for children in foster care. ⁵ Moreover, he has worked as president of the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. ⁶ Below is the speech he gave after accepting the award from U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. The speech notes the importance of the award to everyone working in America's juvenile courts.     

Housing Upkeep and Public Good Provision in Residential Neighborhoods

Neighborhood condition is a public good in part provided by neighborhood residents’ private property maintenance. Considering neighborhood condition as an impure public good provides a theoretical basis for understanding how the level of neighborhood quality may affect residents’ home maintenance decisions. Empirical results in a low-income neighborhood, where formulating public policy to improve neighborhoods is of significant concern, indicate a positive substitution effect. When neighborhoods improve, residents respond by increasing exterior home upkeep. This result is robust to both changes in the neighborhood condition generated by other neighbors’ increase in maintenance and exogenous public investment in the neighborhood.