Attentive Surveillance: A Preliminary Study of Prioritizing Mothering Standards in the Face of Intimate Partner Violence

A retrospective qualitative constant comparative analysis of the stories of English speaking women (N==22) who mothered children age 6 or under, while experiencing abuse at the hands of a male partner, was conducted. The emergent theory of Attentive Surveillance (AS), a vital, proactive, complex process of monitoring and prioritizing, was identified. Two non-linear and interrelated stages emerged. One, Understanding Circumstances (UC) is a gradual increase of awareness that the family environment and a woman’s ability to achieve her mothering standards are affected by her partner’s behavior. The second stage, Prioritizing Standards (PS), is a deliberate or a subconscious balancing act of assessing needs, adapting, and ranking mothering standards while still mothering as close to the original standards as possible. Recommendations for professionals, based on AS, in supporting mothers existing capacities to foster mother-child relationships and healthy child outcomes in the context of intimate partner violence are provided.     

Tinkering with the Machinery of Death: An Analysis of Juror Decision-Making in Texas Death Penalty Trials During Two Statutory Eras

The Texas death penalty statute originally approved by the United States Supreme Court in Jurek v. Texas (1976) was legislatively amended as a result of the Court’s decision in Penry v. Lynaugh (1989). The changes were intended to focus on increasing jurors’ ability to give mitigating effect to evidence in sentencing. Using data from the Capital Jury Project, we compared juror comprehension of sentencing guidelines, punishment responsibility, and deliberations in sentencing among a sample of 123 Texas jurors who deliberated under the Jurek and Penry statutes. In each area, we found that the amended statute failed to guide capital juror decision-making as intended.     

Survival of the Fairest: Examining HUD Reviews of Assessments of Fair Housing

ABSTRACT

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule, arguably the most significant federal effort in a generation to address place-based disparities in access to opportunity and to advance fair housing. In 2018, HUD suspended the rule, it said in part because of the resources it was expending to implement it and in part because of the large share of municipal plans that HUD determined had failed to meet the rule’s requirements. In this article, we present the first analysis of the fair housing plans that HUD did not accept, examining how municipalities failed to meet the rule's requirements, what those failures imply about advancing fair housing, and the extent to which HUD’s enforcement strategy was working before the suspension. Our analysis shows that HUD engaged in detailed reviews of municipalities’ Assessments of Fair Housing and provided constructive feedback. The most common issue with which municipalities struggled was setting realistic goals that would actually advance fair housing and creating measurable metrics and milestones to gauge progress. Several municipalities neglected to conduct thorough regional analyses or analyses of all relevant disparities in access to opportunity. Both shortcomings reflect broader challenges municipalities face in advancing fair housing, particularly in identifying strategies that address interconnected causes of disparities in access to opportunity and in building regional support to address those causes.     

Teachers' Duty to Report Child Abuse and Neglect and the Paradox of Noncompliance: Relational Theory and “Compliance” in the Human Services

Based on in‐depth interviews with thirty‐eight individuals on the front line of child welfare (educators, mothers, and child protection workers) this study analyzes the attitudes behind educators' acknowledged noncompliance with mandatory reporting of child abuse and neglect by teachers. Regulatory theory posits that “compliance” is affected by a mix of sanctions, capacity, motivation, and the perceptions of legitimacy and moral purpose associated with particular rules. Paradoxically, while the educators in this study were knowledgeable and supportive of the rule in principle, their accounts of reporting decision making were highly contextualized and ambivalent. The interview data suggests that existing theories of compliance may be usefully supplemented with an explicitly relational approach that better accounts for decision making in the contexts of care and dependency that characterize regulatory fields of human services such as education and child welfare.     

Noncompliance with Parental Leave Provisions in Korea: Extending Institutional Research to a New Legal Context

We investigate Korean organizations' noncompliance with parental leave provisions. A survey of 1,750 organizations reveals that 19 percent are fully noncompliant (i.e., no policy in place) and 29 percent are partially noncompliant (i.e., acknowledged failure to implement policy). We examine whether organizational characteristics and conditions that predict responsiveness to US employment law are relevant in Korea and apply to a concrete parental leave requirement. Our results show that the predictors of full and partial noncompliance differ, suggesting different motives or processes among noncompliant organizations. Sector and size reduce the odds of full noncompliance but are unrelated to implementing parental leave policies. Having a human resources department predicts that only implementing adopted policies and gender traditionalism increase the likelihood of noncompliance. This is the first theoretically informed investigation of noncompliance with Korean parental leave laws and provides new evidence of the value of institutional perspectives on employment law beyond the US context.     

Romalpa and Contractual Innovation

Socio‐legal studies have given relatively little attention to the mechanisms by which change occurs to the boilerplate that constitute modern contracts. Contrary to the impression left by neo‐classical contract theory (and its descendant, Chicago School law and economics), contracts are not routinely revised to provide an optimal solution. As recent empirical studies show, change is sporadic, even within high‐value contracts drafted by expert practitioners. Improvements to contractual form only arise after some external shock, which reveals the weakness in the prior norm. In the first application of this principle within the United Kingdom, the article considers the reputed rapid change in ‘retention of title’ clauses in sales transactions in the mid‐1970s, and identifies the factors, and personalities, that led to such rapid legal innovation and change.     

LEGAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL MANAGEMENT OF CASES WITH AN ALIENATED CHILD

Cases entering the family court with an alienated child require intensive and coordinated case management to intervene effectively. It is critical to link the authority of the court with the delivery of mental health services to address the complex systemic factors that may entrench a chilďs unwarranted rejection of a parent. This article provides principles of legal and psychological case management for families with an alienated child, followed by various structural interventions, including sample court orders, for managing these cases as they progress through the family court process. Finally, criteria for making custody recommendations in the most severe cases of child alienation are provided.     

USING CHILD DEVELOPMENT RESEARCH TO MAKE APPROPRIATE CUSTODY AND ACCESS DECISIONS FOR YOUNG CHILDREN

Decisions regarding custody and access are most often made without reference to the research on child development, although this literature can be useful in conceptualizing children's needs after separation and divorce. Research on attachment processes, separation from attachment figures, and the roles of mothers and fathers in promoting psychosocial adjustment are reviewed in this article. It concludes with a discussion of the implications for young children's parenting schedules.