Environmental Insurance: A Risk Management Tool for Real Estate

Traditional risk management tools including contract allocation and reliance upon statutory defenses or government releases can be incomplete, contentious, and costly solutions to address risks associated with environmental liability and cleanup obligations in real estate transfer and property ownership. Such traditional methods leave environmental risk for the interested parties in the real estate transaction to bear over time and bring added new risks to the parties. Environmental insurance transfers all or part of the risk to a third-party insurance company (insurer) that is not a participating party in the transaction, thereby taking insurable environmental risk out of the transaction. Further, environmental insurance can add positive value to the transaction by bringing necessary risk identification and validation, and loss minimization and claims handling expertise to the transaction by virtue of the underwriting and claims management process, and add the financial strength and expertise of a qualified insurer. Insurance is often perceived by lenders, investors, developers, contractors, tenants, and future purchasers as a positive assurance against environmental risk associated with the property, allowing business relationships and financing to proceed more smoothly. In this way, environmental insurance serves as a more comprehensive and complete risk management tool for the real estate transaction and property ownership.     

The Intent Behind the Cryptic Concurrence That Provided a Reporter's Privilege

Justice Lewis Powell wrote a concurrence in Branzburg v. Hayes that, despite a majority opinion to the contrary, eventually provided room for journalists to claim a privilege against testifying in grand jury proceedings. For decades, scholars and judges have questioned what Justice Powell meant by his concurrence and whether he, in fact, supported a reporter's right to refuse to reveal confidential information. Justice Powell's personal papers and case files, as well as those of his fellow justices, observations of one of his former law clerks, and oral arguments shed light on the reasoning behind Justice Powell's enigmatic concurrence. This article concludes that Justice Powell supported a qualified reporter's privilege, applied on a case-by-case basis.     

Comparison of the analytical capabilities of the BAC Datamaster and Datamaster DMT forensic breath testing devices

The State of Michigan uses the Datamaster as an evidential breath testing device. The newest version, the DMT, will replace current instruments in the field as they are retired from service. The Michigan State Police conducted comparison studies to test the analytical properties of the new instrument and to evaluate its response to conditions commonly cited in court defenses. The effects of mouth alcohol, objects in the mouth, and radiofrequency interference on paired samples from drinking subjects were assessed on the DMT. The effects of sample duration and chemical interferents were assessed on both instruments, using drinking subjects and wet-bath simulators, respectively. Our testing shows that Datamaster and DMT results are essentially identical; the DMT gave accurate readings as compared with measurements made using simulators containing standard ethanol solutions and that the DMT did not give falsely elevated breath alcohol results from any of the influences tested.     

Urban African American youth exposed to community violence: a school-based anxiety preventive intervention efficacy study

This study evaluated the efficacy of a school-based anxiety prevention program among urban children exposed to community violence. Students who attended Title 1 public elementary schools were screened. Ninety-eight 3rd-5th-grade students (ages 8-12; 48% female; 92% African American) were randomized into preventive intervention versus wait list comparison groups. Students attended 13 biweekly one-hour group sessions of a modified version of FRIENDS, a cognitive-behavioral anxiety intervention program. Results indicated that both intervention and control groups manifested significant reductions in anxiety symptomatology and total exposure to community violence, along with improved standardized reading achievement scores. Additional gains observed only in the intervention group were increased standardized mathematics achievement scores, decreased life stressors, and reduced victimization by community violence. The intervention was equally efficacious for both genders and for children exposed to higher, compared to lower, levels of community violence. Implications for comprehensive, culturally and contextually relevant prevention programs and research are discussed.     

Short Term Change in Attitude and Motivating Factors to Change Abusive Behavior of Male Batterers after Participating in a Group Intervention Program Based on the Pro-Feminist and Cognitive-Behavioral Approach

The Domestic Abuse Education Project (DAEP), in Burlington, Middlebury, and St. Albans, Vermont, is a group based domestic abuse intervention program, based in a pro-feminist and cognitive-behavioral approach for domestic violence intervention and prevention. A pre and post-test instrument was developed and implemented to determine short-term change in attitude of participants and motivating factors to change behavior, after completing the twenty-seven session program. After the program, participants reported a positive change in attitudes regarding their abusive behavior and stereotypical beliefs about women. Participants were also more motivated to change their behavior by the effect abuse has on their family relationships. However, many participants continued to agree that insecurity, jealousy, and alcohol and drug use can cause violence. The positive changes in attitude and motivational factors show that this is an effective model in changing underlying batterer attitudes that provide rationale for abusive behavior.     

Collusion and Facilitating Practices: A New Perspective in Antitrust Analysis

A systematic revision of the notion of facilitating practices is put forward in this paper, with the purpose of relaxing the long-debated tension between economic and legal perspectives on oligopoly. Whereas the law knows of just one collusive illegal conduct, namely agreements, in economic theory the focus on internal enforcement makes the distinction between agreements and other behaviour resulting in the collusive outcome irrelevant. However, the tension may be relaxed, at least in a number of relevant circumstances, provided the focus of competition law shifts from straightforward co-ordination on market strategies to the firms' concerted efforts in the design and implementation of given organisational arrangements of the oligopolistic industry, to which an anticompetitive object can be attached. The theoretical analysis is extensively supported by examples drawn from some recent decisions of the European Commission and the Italian Competition Authority.     

‘Don’t become a lost specimen!’: polygyny and motivational interconnectivity in Kyrgyzstan

ABSTRACT

Why would a woman agree to wed a legally married man when the state would neither recognize her marriage nor grant her alimony, child support or inheritance rights? Although the Communist Party curtailed the rate of openly acknowledged polygynous marriages among the Kyrgyz, its work was undone by glasnost and perestroika, which ushered in a permissive environment. This article highlights constructions of gender as a driver of polygyny in Kyrgyzstan from the perspective of women who voluntarily become second wives. The Kyrgyz case suggests that the cultural value of marriage and motherhood – traditions that grant women communal identities, power and prestige – might lead a woman to consent to second-wife status. I employ the concept of motivational interconnectivity, defined as two or more related reasons women make important personal decisions that have societal repercussions, to explain a woman’s decision to become a second wife.     

The Equality of Public School District Funding in the United States: A National Status Report

For over 30 years, the distribution of educational opportunities and the equality of education funding across communities has generated considerable interest among policy makers, the public, and the courts. This article takes advantage of national data sets to examine funding equality across school districts in 49 states for fiscal years 1992 and 1995. It presents rankings of each state's funding equality and explores factors that may be related to the level of equality within states and to changes across years.
The analyses suggest that, overall, within-state equality improved slightly between 1992 and 1995, although most states' relative rankings changed little during the period. States with fewer school districts relative to students tended to have a more equal distribution of education dollars than states with more districts. States with higher proportions of revenues provided by state governments generally showed a more equitable distribution of resources than states in which districts were more dependent on local revenues.