Men and Women of Elite Law Firms: Reevaluating Kanter's Legacy

This paper tests the effects of minority partner representation on minority associate representation in a sample of 97 law firms from 1980 to 1990. We perform separate analyses for women, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, and we consider both within-group and cross-group effects. We find that minority partner representation has a positive effect on minority associate representation, which is statistically significant in the case of women and Asian Americans. Our findings are consistent with lawyers'own accounts, which emphasize the impact of partner composition on the distribution of rewards within law firms. We also show how our findings clarify previous studies about the effects of minority representation on the distribution of organizational rewards, focusing particularly on Kanter's work and subsequent related research.     

Executive Environmental Law

The Draft Environment (Principles and Governance) Bill published by DEFRA in late 2018 is part of a process of reimagining environmental law in light of Brexit. The Draft Bill creates frameworks for policy statements on environmental principles and environmental implementation plans, as well as creating a new enforcement body – the Office for Environmental Protection. This Draft Bill is, at the very least, an ineffectual response to the challenges of environmental law post-Brexit. More alarmingly, it raises the possibility of a legal future in which the executive dominates how the norms, ambitions, and accountabilities of environmental law are defined. These are matters of concern for environmental and public lawyers alike.     

Post-disaster reconstruction: lessons from Nagapattinam district,India

As disaster losses continue to rise around the world, it has become increasingly important to understand the long-term outcomes of post-disaster recovery programmes. Often, disaster recovery projects have an abbreviated planning period, involve multiple NGOs, and lack long-term plans for evaluation. This article describes outcomes of the shelter reconstruction programme following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Nagapattinam, India. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected to assess the effect of the programme on housing, community infrastructure, and livelihoods. The study provides useful lessons for future reconstruction programmes and demonstrates the importance of evaluating post-disaster recovery programmes after projects end.     

Sara Baartman and Andries Stoffels: Violence,Law and the Politics of Spectacle in London and the Eastern Cape, 1809–1836

This article contrasts the well-known display of Sara Baartman, exhibited in London and Paris under the rubric the “Hottentot Venus,” with the 1835–36 visit to Britain for political ends of Andries Stoffels, a Khoekhoe Christian convert who testified before the House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines (British Settlements). It places both visits in the context of legal reform and violence in the Cape Colony in the early nineteenth century. Both visits can be fruitfully re-read as reflecting South African struggles over control of the Khoekhoe body, the rule of colonial law, and emerging ideas of human rights. Baartman was displayed as an iconic body in a legal context in which (mostly white) masters coerced Khoekhoe labourers and claimed the right to control their bodies. Stoffels displayed himself as a Christian convert to eager evangelical audiences, in a context in which legal reform depended on the putative erasure of difference, even as racial tension persisted in significant ways. The article suggests that the history of human rights is closely tied to the history of colonialism. It also, however, argues that members of Baartman's community responded to, and fought, the conditions that led to her display and that Baartman should not be understood in isolation from that community.     

Field Theory,Cultural Capital,and the First Amendment: Two Paradoxes in the Legitimation of News

Does law influence the legitimation of news? I examine legitimations offered during ethics debates about news stories in which private people are thrust into the media spotlight. When navigating the space between what can be published lawfully and what should be published, journalism organizations offer legitimations that vary in ways that reflect the hierarchy of legal frameworks for decision. According to field theory, the cultural capital of the juridical field is constitutive of status hierarchies in the journalism field, even though the First Amendment leaves journalism to structure itself. This structuring leads to two paradoxes. First, in the performance of negative legitimation, news organizations justify ethics violations by converting the minimum standard of lawful speech into claimsmaking about laudable speech. Second, in acts of displacing legitimation, reporters suggest that more publicity is the remedy for invading privacy, translating the valorization of speech rights over privacy rights into a puzzling norm.     

Poverty and Divine Rewards: The Electoral Advantage of Islamist Political Parties

Political life in many Muslim‐majority countries has been marked by the electoral dominance of Islamist parties. Recent attempts to explain why have highlighted their material and organizational factors, such as the provision of social services. In this article, we revive an older literature that emphasizes the appeal of these parties’ religious nature to voters experiencing economic hardship. Individuals suffering economic strain may vote for Islamists because they believe this to be an intrinsically virtuous act that will be met with divine rewards in the afterlife. We explore this hypothesis through a series of laboratory experiments in Tunisia. Individuals assigned to treatment conditions instilling feelings of economic strain exhibit greater support for Islamist parties, and this support is causally mediated by an expectation of divine compensation in the hereafter. The evidence suggests that the religious nature of Islamist parties may thus be an important factor in their electoral success.     

School Starting Age and Cognitive Development

We present evidence of a positive relationship between school starting age and children's cognitive development from ages 6 to 18 using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and large‐scale population‐level birth and school data from the state of Florida. We estimate effects of being old for grade (being born in September vs. August) that are remarkably stable—always around 0.2 SD difference in test scores—across a wide range of heterogeneous groups, based on maternal education, poverty at birth, race/ethnicity, birth weight, gestational age, and school quality. While the September‐August difference in kindergarten readiness is dramatically different by subgroup, by the time students take their first exams, the heterogeneity in estimated effects on test scores effectively disappears. We do, however, find significant heterogeneity in other outcome measures such as disability status and middle and high school course selections. We also document substantial variation in compensatory behaviors targeted towards young‐for‐grade children. While the more affluent families tend to redshirt their children, young‐for‐grade children from less affluent families are more likely to be retained in grades prior to testing. School district practices regarding retention and redshirting are correlated with improved outcomes for the groups less likely to use those remediation approaches (i.e., retention in the case of more affluent families and redshirting in the case of less affluent families.) Finally, we find that very few school policies or practices mitigate the test score advantage of September‐born children.