PRESIDENTIAL POLICY PREFERENCES AND SUPREME COURT APPOINTMENT SUCCESS

Presidential appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court are major constitutional events. Few studies assess whether this political process benefits presidents with appointment opportunities. This article estimates the policy success of presidents since Eisenhower in appointing favorable justices on the racial equality issues. Previous research uses the president's party affiliation as an indirect measure of presidential preferences. This research examines the president's policy stance more directly by using presidential public statements on racial equality issues. An issue specific measure of presidential preferences shows that presidents have been more successful in appointing like-minded justices than reliance on presidential party would suggest. Regression estimates of the justices aggregate voting record on racial equality cases are robust even in light of other controls. The implications for democratic theory and future research are discussed.     

Presidents,Supreme Court justices,and racial equality cases: 1954–1984

This research assesses the policy success of presidents since Eisenhower in their appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court in racial equality cases from 1954–1984. The research examines presidential preferences in a much more detailed and sensitive manner than previous research. While past research has used presidential party as a measure of the policy preferences of presidents, we examine policy preferences in a very direct manner. Specifically, the preferences of presidents on racial equality issues are gauged by their public policy statements. These statements serve to tap the degree of liberalness, the level of attention, and the level of concern with judicial actions in racial equality matters. The results demonstrate that presidents have been much more successful in appointing like-minded justices than is suggested by the existing literature. In addition, it is shown that prior judicial experience is not related to presidential success. This is discussed in terms of the perennial debate over the political control of the Supreme Court and the congruence of Court policy making with majoritarian values.     

Working Capital Fund Pricing Policies: Lessons from Defense Finance and Accounting Service Expenditure and Workload Data

This article analyzes how service-providing government agencies should set the prices they charge to other governmental customers. Current Defense Working Capital Fund (DWCF) rules generally prescribe use of expected average cost transfer pricing. However, analysis of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS), as an example, suggests DFAS has considerable fixed costs. These fixed costs are problematic under present DWCF pricing rules. If customer demand levels fall short of expectations, DFAS revenues fall commensurably, but costs almost certainly do not. It would be more consistent with DFAS's cost structure if DFAS could utilize nonlinear pricing. Such a pricing approach would give DFAS customers more appropriate incentives with respect to how much workload to give DFAS (versus trying to do it themselves or turning it over to contractors). We hypothesize that insights from DFAS may be applicable to other governmental working capital fund entities as well.     

Values in Economic Decisions and Policymaking

The authors argue that values influence decisions taken by policymakers and that decision and policymakers can follow one or the other of the two distinct paths — altruism and egoism. However, the main purpose of this article is to investigate outcomes of government and corporation policies formulated in accordance with theories espoused in economic rationalism or neoclassical economics. These show that they generally follow the path of egoism. The occasional result is that although multinational enterprises and other corporations contribute to the relief of natural and economic problems, they may in fact be contributing simply out of corporate self-interest. The recent collapse of financial markets in the United States and throughout the globe is identified as a result of business activities designed to seek higher corporate profits and higher executive payouts, which are motivated by self-serving values linked to the ideologies of neoclassical economics or economic rationalism. The article argues for a just and fair redistribution of incomes, possibly best achieved through the taxation system and opens the way for further research on the alternative path—the path of altruism.     

The cultural labor of surveillance: video forensics,computational objectivity,and the production of visual evidence

This essay argues that the status of video evidence as an index of real events—a sign or representation that offers a direct, empirical connection to material reality—is the result of an intentional process of production. This process involves the repurposing of new technologies borrowed from the domain of creative media production in order to transform a chaotic field of raw surveillance video into useable evidence. In addition to the exchange in technologies, an unavoidable epistemological and interpretive exchange takes place between evidentiary uses of surveillance video on the one hand, and the now prevalent forms of surveillant narration found in both fictional and reality-based storytelling. But despite this exchange in meanings and technical systems, considerable effort has gone in to establish formal standards for the evidentiary uses of surveillance video that distinguish the discovery of video evidence from the production of creative content. Building on Daston and Gallison's historical study of the prevailing “epistemic virtues” that have defined objectivity over time, I argue that what we see emerging in the field of forensic video analysis, as a means of establishing its scientific and legal status, is a commitment to a new epistemic virtue of “computational objectivity.”     

Adhesive tape analysis: establishing the evidential value of specific techniques

This study investigated the evidential value of specific methods of analysis for packaging tapes and clear adhesive tapes available in Australia. Fifty-eight adhesive tapes were analyzed using a wide range of optical, physical, and chemical techniques. The results were collated for the purpose of creating an Australian database of adhesive tapes, which would be of assistance in criminal investigation. Each technique was evaluated for its discriminating power, both for comparative purposes and for the identification of adhesive tapes by comparing unknown samples with the database. The combined discriminating power of the techniques applied is very high. It is possible to individually identify the source of an unknown adhesive tape sample in many instances by searching the database. It is also possible to form an opinion on the significance of a failure-to-discriminate result in comparative casework. Further work is still needed to expand and update the database, as well as compiling data on the relative market share of various products.