The Commandments from Mount Laurel: New Route to the Unpromised Land

Among those who would reform land use controls to achieve greater equity in urban development there has existed some disagreement between advocates of litigative and legislative approaches. The latter have looked to the Massachusetts Zoning Appeals Law, the A.L.I. Model Land Development Code, statutorily mandated housing planning, revisions of zoning enabling legislation or some variant of these, as the best way to the unpromised land. They have also noted that after almost a decade of litigation in which many victories were won for specific clients, litigators have little to show in the way of housing actually provided; although the educational impact of the case law on federal legislation and other legislative proposals has been significant.     

‘The Synthesis is in the Machine’: An Interview with Silvia Federici

ABSTRACT

In this interview Marxist feminist theorist Silvia Federici discusses the following: the relationships between accumulation and reproduction; biotechnology; the recent resurgence of social reproduction theory as exemplified by work in Endnotes and Lies; the mystification of gendered labour; the disciplining of productive bodies; the sites and technologies of primitive accumulation in the present; and the reproduction of feminism and other social movements in the twenty-first century.     

The impact of private security companies on Somalia's governance networks

The article discusses the use of private security contractors to support coastguard forces in the Somali substate entities of Puntland and Somaliland. Neither of these entities is sufficiently robust to raise and maintain an effective maritime security force without external assistance, hence they have had recourse to the private sector for training, logistical and operational support and high-level consultancy with respect to their coastguards. The article makes some general observations about the international private security industry and Somali politics in order to provide a context for the three case studies. The case studies, each of which covers the engagement of one security contractor in support of a coastguard, assess the roles played by the contractors, making particular reference to sustainability and influence on governance networks. The analysis establishes a matrix of security company typologies and potential roles and then uses this matrix to suggest which types of company might be best employed for which functions. The article has current pertinence, as two of the three case studies concern efforts by substate entities to hire private security to enhance anti-piracy capability.     

Level of lung function required to use the Camic Datamaster breath alcohol testing device.

In the UK a person who, without reasonable excuse, fails to provide a breath specimen when required to under the 1988 Road Traffic Act, is guilty of an offense. In the past many suspects claim to have experienced difficulty providing breath samples for evidential machines. This paper describes experiments carried out on human subjects, both healthy and suffering a variety of respiratory illness. The experiments were designed to assess the level of respiratory performance required to provide a satisfactory breath sample for the Camic Datamaster. In this study it was found that both actual spirometry values and the percentage of predicted values were both important indicators.     

THE BOOK SHELF

Books Reviewed in this Article: 1. Bach, George R., and Peter Wyden. The Intimate Enemy . 2. Berne, Eric. Principles of Group Treatment . 3. Deutch, Ronald M. The Key to Feminine Sexual Response In Marriage . 4. Lederer, William J., and Don D. Jackson. The Mirages of Marriage . 5. McCary, James Leslie. Human Sexuality . 6. Peterson, James A. Married Love in the Middle Years .     

Analyzing How Local Governments Establish Service Priorities

Resource limitations and increasing citizen expectations are causing decisionmakers to reexamine existing approaches to establishing priorities in the funding of governmental services. Using local governments as a contextual example, this article investigates the decision making processes used by Texas cities The research seeks to understand the role different budgetary frameworks, i.e., incremental, performance and community values, play in resource allocation. Factors such as the budget sequence, the participants and the reference sources are considered to better understand local budget deliberations. This research indicates that a mixed or hybrid framework (any combination of the incremental, performance and community values approaches) dominates decision making in Texas cities. That is, most cities attempt to incorporate the politicalness of incrementalism, the results orientation of the performance framework, and the utility maximization desired under the community values framework. Results from this research indicate that Texas cities are moving away from a single framework orientation as a rule and are incorporating more rational and participative aspects into their budget process. This refutes common wisdom on this topic and suggests a more complicated approach to decision making that emphasizes the injection of more objective performance-related data, as well as the subjective perceptions of non-traditionally dominant participant groups.