Vicarious Trauma in Judges: The Personal Challenge of Dispensing Justice

Symptoms of vicarious trauma, coping strategies, and prevention suggestions were investigated with 105 judges. Participants completed a self‐report measure developed for this study. The majority of judges (63%) reported one or more symptoms that they identified as work‐related vicarious trauma experiences. Female judges reported more symptoms, as did judges with seven or more years of experience. In addition, female judges were more likely to report internalizing difficulties, while judges with more experience reported higher levels of externalizing/hostility symptoms. Coping and prevention strategies were multi‐domain (i.e., personal, professional, and societal) and underscored the need for greater awareness and support for judges.     

Church,State, Resistance1

This article problematizes a separation of Church and State that is nevertheless identified as constitutive of politics. Democracy has come to manifest a tension between the ‘autonomy’ of the political and a ‘heteronomy’ that, exceeding rationalist or social contractarian accounts of our co‐existence, is here presented as an irreducible affect of our being together. Autonomy, it is argued, resists heteronomy through all representations of democracy; yet, by contrast, heteronomy resists autonomy, and does so with the force of this affect. So if civil religion is impossible – and if we know only too well where its realizations lead: by default, to republican celebration, or by excess, to fascism – then we must take up again, and from scratch, the question of the affect according to which we co‐exist.     

Making decentralization work: The view from City Hall

The success of decentralization experiments depends ironically on central government—and, in particular, on the character of City Hall initiatives, designs, and administrative organization. Urban administrators were forced to experiment in the dark with decentralization, and their initiatives often traced an erratic, evolutionary course marked by false steps and by serendipity. In particular, programs that looked promising from a City Hall perspective often failed because they were insensitive to street-level behavior. City Hall initiatives have also been hampered by problems of cooperation between citizens and public employees and by coordination within government. Seen in this light, successful decentralization requires a learning process in which citizens and public employees develop strategies for working together on focused neighborhood problems.This article is based on Chapter 8 of my book, Neighborhood Democracy: The Politics and Impacts of Decentralization (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1973).