<Emphasis Type="Bold">Originalism</Emphasis><Emphasis Type="Bold">, Pragmatic Conservatism,and Living Document Judicial Philosophies: Explaining Variation in U.S. Supreme Court Votes in Criminal Procedure Cases for the 1994–2014 Terms of Court</Emphasis>

Prior research on U.S. Supreme Court justice votes and case outcomes has examined a variety of hypotheses to explain variation in voting and case decisions in criminal procedure matters. Largely ignored by prior work, however, is the notion that the effects of the measures used to examine these prior hypotheses may vary for the justices based on the judicial philosophy espoused and followed by the justice. This article identifies three distinct overarching judicial philosophies of law interpretation that have guided the justices for much of the Rehnquist Court and the entirety of the Roberts Court: Originalism, Pragmatic Conservatism, and Living Document. It contextualizes the Information, Affected Groups, and Legal Issue hypotheses in a framework that considers their potential effects across Originalist, Pragmatic Conservative, and Living Document justices on the Court for the 1994 through 2014 terms. The study finds that enhanced activity by special interest organizations (the Affected Groups Hypothesis) in support of the non-government other party impacts vote direction among Pragmatic Conservative and Living Document justices but not for the Originalist justices. It also finds more case type (Legal Issue) effects for Originalist justices than for Pragmatic Conservative and Living Document justices in that for Originalist justices a vote for the government is less likely in cases that concern statutory meaning (relative to constitutional meaning). Implications are discussed.     

Error Rates in Forensic Child Sexual Abuse Evaluations

When mental health, medical, and social work professionals and paraprofessionals make false positive or false negative errors in their judgments about the validity of allegations of child sexual abuse, the consequences can be catastrophic for the affected children and adults. Because of the high stakes, practitioners, legal decision makers, and policy makers should have some idea of the magnitude and variability of error rates in this domain. A novel approach was used to estimate individual error rates for 110 professionals (psychologists, physicians, social workers, and others) who conduct or participate in forensic child sexual abuse evaluations. The median estimated false positive and false negative error rates were 0.18 and 0.36, respectively. Estimated error rates varied markedly from one participant to the next. For example, the false positive error rate estimates ranged from 0.00 to 0.83. These estimates are based on participants’ self-reported substantiation rates and on their subjective frequency distributions for the probability of truth for the abuse allegations they evaluate.     

Public views of illegal migration policy and control strategies: A test of the core hypotheses

Illegal migration into the United States continues to be an important and contentious issue in the early stages of the twenty-first century. An important aspect of the contemporary migration debate is public opinion toward the various policy and control initiatives that have recently been discussed. This study used public opinion data from a 2006 study conducted by the Pew Research Center to test seven core hypotheses generated by prior academic research to explain variation in public support for cracking down on illegal migration into the United States (economic threat, culture threat, ethnic affect, core values, cultural affinity, contact, and group threat). The analysis found support for the economic threat, cultural threat, ethnic affect, core values, and cultural affinity hypotheses. The study found limited support for the contact hypothesis and no support for the group threat hypothesis. Semi-standardized coefficients were generated and suggested that the strongest predictors of support for enhanced controls on illegal migration were the cultural threat and cultural affinity measures. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Divergence in Community Participation Policy: Analysing Localism and Community Empowerment Using a Theory of Change Approach

The last two decades have witnessed a significant turn towards community participation in public policy around the globe, raising concerns that states are resorting to ‘government through community’, shifting responsibilities onto communities. In order to unpack the ambiguous rhetoric of policy statements, this article employs ideas from evaluation methodology to develop a generic theory of change for community participation policy. The model is then utilised to analyse and compare the UK Coalition Government’s Big Society/Localism agenda and the Scottish Government’s Community Empowerment approach, demonstrating the ways in which these represent a clear example of policy divergence, and potentially significant alternatives to state–community relations in the context of austerity. The article also demonstrates the potential wider applicability of ‘theories of change’ methodology for policy analysis.     

Comparison of Abuse Alleged by Same- and Opposite-Gender Litigants as Cited in Requests for Abuse Prevention Orders

Domestic violence is commonly portrayed as something male batterers do to their female victims. Much research excludes study of female-perpetrated violence. This study develops a two-gender measure of abuse as documented by requests for protection. All nonimpounded Abuse Prevention Orders (M.G.L. c. 209A) issued in Massachusetts' Gardner District Court in the year 1997 were analyzed by gender to examine the level and types of violence alleged by plaintiffs. The level and types of violence were categorized and measured by examining Abuse Claimed Checkboxes found on each Complaint for Protection and by applying quantitative scales to affidavits, or plaintiff statements, filed as part of each request for protection. Despite widespread misconceptions that tend to minimize female abuse, examination of these court documents shows that male and female defendants, who were the subject of a complaint in domestic relation cases, while sometimes exhibiting different aggressive tendencies, measured almost equally abusive in terms of the overall level of psychological and physical aggression.