Professional regulation

Recent years have witnessed an increase in interest in professional regulation. The extent to which the professions should control professional regulation and the provision of professional services is the issue at stake. The strengthening of societal forces and attitudes on either side has intensified matters. Forces on the side of professional dominance include tradition, expertise, and politics. Opposed are individual liberty and individualism, theories of free enterprise, and egalitarianism. The controversy has also been influenced by recent political developments involving the emergence of two antiregulatory movements: the “control” movement, and the “antigovernment” movement. The former involves an attempt to control government regulatory power. The latter is a more broad-based political attack on regulation aimed at less government in general. The most significant impact of the current controversy is that professional regulation has become an important public issue.     

Juror decision making,attitudes, and the hindsight bias

This study examines juror decision making in civil suits against police officers alleged to have engaged in illegal searches, using simulated case materials and mock jurors drawn both from adults called for jury service and a student subject pool. The experiment assesses the impact of a cognitive process (thehindsight bias) and of individual attitudes on awards and finds that both are related to juror decisions. We test a theoretical model that specifies that both attitudes and outcome knowledge exercise their influence upon the damage award decision by means of their impact on interpretation of testimony. Causal models of the decision-making process appear to support the role played by interpretation of evidence as a mediator between individual attributes and juror decisions.We are indebted to Reid Hastie, Tom Tyler, Phoebe Ellsworth, Jack Heinz, Robert Nelson, Rayman Solomon, and Bonnie Fisher for assistance with various aspects of the design, data collection, and analysis reported here. Financial support was provided by the American Bar Foundation, and the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research and the Dispute Resolution Research Center, both at Northwestern University.John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.     

Is East Asia under-represented in the International Monetary Fund?

East Asian countries perceive that their individual and collectivepositions in the world political economy are not fairly representedin existing international institutions, which have yet to fullyadjust to the region's rapid economic ascent over the last severaldecades. This problem seems especially acute in the InternationalMonetary Fund (IMF), wherein each country's participation inthe organization's weighted voting scheme is supposed to reflectthe following logic: relative weight in world economy sizeof quotas number of votes. Are Asian countries' IMF quotasincommensurate with their relative economic weight and, if so,by what margin? And if Asian countries are indeed under-representedin the IMF, which other country, group of countries or regionis correspondingly over-represented? This paper examines thesequestions from several perspectives. It first discusses thepurpose of quotas and how they are determined. It then turnsto the question of whether Asian perceptions concerning under-representationare empirically corroborated. The first data analysis sectioncompares current quotas to relative measures of economic weightin the world economy. The following section compares four quotavalues: past quotas, current quotas, calculated quotas and quotascalculated using the method of the IMF's external quota reviewboard. In short, the data demonstrate that Asia does have astrong claim for a greater share of IMF quotas. We concludewith a brief consideration of possible alternatives to the IMF'scurrent use of quota to determine voting weights, and arguethat the problem of Asian under-representation will probablynot be corrected unless the IMF's quota-determination processis overhauled.     

New report profiles syringe access in California

A case study conducted by Human Rights Watch in California reveals that counties have to declare a local health emergency if they want to set up a needle exchange program. Even where such programs have been established, police harrassment of the needle exchange clients is widespread.