Out of Place and Out of Line: Positioning the Police in the Regulation of Financial Markets

In November of 2003, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police launched a major initiative to combat securities fraud in Canada. Spurred by the Enron scandals in the United States, this involved the establishment of a series of specialized white-collar crime units with the express mandate of investigating serious cases of securities fraud and protecting investors from the worst of the market's abuses. After four years of activity, these units have produced little in the way of tangible results and have been widely criticized in legal, financial, and regulatory communities. Drawing on thirty-five interviews with members of these units, as well as outside stakeholders including Crown Attorneys and private litigators, this article examines the activities of these Integrated Market Enforcement Teams and highlights a number of barriers to the successful execution of their designated mandate. While factors such as procedural restrictions and limited expertise are certainly relevant, this analysis reveals that the IMET teams are more fundamentally constrained by their position in a broader regulatory field. Understanding this field, and its unique structure and politics, is essential in coming to terms with both the possibilities and limitations of securities enforcement in an increasingly complex financial world.     

HISTORICAL CONTINGENCIES AND THE EVOLVING IMPORTANCE OF RACE,VIOLENT CRIME,AND REGION IN EXPLAINING MASS INCARCERATION IN THE UNITED STATES

This article combines insights from historical research and quantitative analyses that have attempted to explain changes in incarceration rates in the United States. We use state‐level decennial data from 1970 to 2010 (N = 250) to test whether recent theoretical models derived from historical research that emphasize the importance of specific historical periods in shaping the relative importance of certain social and political factors explain imprisonment. Also drawing on historical work, we examine how these key determinants differed in Sunbelt states, that is, the states stretching across the nation's South from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific, from the rest of the nation. Our findings suggest that the relative contributions of violent crime, minority composition, political ideology, and partisanship to imprisonment vary over time. We also extend our analysis beyond mass incarceration's rise to analyze how factors associated with prison expansion can explain its stabilization and contraction in the early twenty‐first century. Our findings suggest that most of the factors that best explained state incarceration rates in the prison boom era lost power once imprisonment stabilized and declined. We find considerable support for the importance of historical contingencies in shaping state‐level imprisonment trends, and our findings highlight the enduring importance of race in explaining incarceration.     

Congressional Delegation of Spending Power to the Defense Department in the Post‐9–11 Period

The advantages of increased delegation of resource management authority by Congress have long been argued by defense leadership. It is an important issue because of its relevance to congressional assessment of defense management, budget priorities, and how to enforce policy preferences. This paper investigates the series of supplemental appropriations for the war on terrorism to determine (a) under what conditions, and how and why Congress delegates budget authority to defense, (b) what happened with respect to the degree of delegation after appropriation during budget execution, and (c) what this case teaches us about the evolving budgetary relationship between Congress and the Defense Department.     

THE DEMISE OF THE DISPARATE IMPACT THEORY

Books reviewed in this article: Book Reviewed in this article: Shortly after this article was completed and accepted for publication, Congress passed the 1991 Civil Rights Act. In order to understand and appreciate the significant implications of the new legislation, it is first necessary to review the legislative and litigation history of disparate impact discussed here. Immediately following is a legislative update entitled “The Resurrection of the Disparate Impact Theory?”