Lawyers' Perceptions of the U.S. Supreme Court: Is the Court a “Political” Institution?

Do legal elites—lawyers admitted to federal appellate bars—perceive the Supreme Court as a “political” institution? Legal elites differentiate themselves from the mass public in the amount and sources of information about the Court. They also hold near‐universal perceptions of Court legitimacy, a result we use to derive competing theoretical expectations regarding the impact of ideological disagreement on various Court perceptions. Survey data show that many legal elites perceive the Court as political in its decision making, while a minority perceive the Court as activist and influenced by external political forces. Ideological disagreement with the Court's outputs significantly elevates political perceptions of decision making, while it exhibits a null and moderate impact on perceptions of activism and external political influence, respectively. To justify negative affect derived from ideological disagreement, elites highlight the political aspects of the Court's decision making rather than engage in “global delegitimization” of the institution itself.     

Genomic research and incidental findings.

The Human Genome Project showed that there is significant genetic variation within the population. Current research is accumulating large databases that may reveal genetic variations associated with disease or health risks, even if not intended as part of the study design. These incidental findings create legal, ethical, and financial challenges for researchers. Current federal and international guidelines are not adequate. Plans for dealing with incidental findings need to be established in the study design and reviewed and approved by the Institutional Review Board.     

The impact of the right to refuse treatment in a forensic patient population: six-month review

In December of 1987, the Wisconsin supreme court held that all involuntarily committed mental patients in the state had the right to refuse psychotropic medication unless a court held that they were incompetent to make treatment decisions. The authors studied the effects of this decision in a 165-bed forensic hospital over the first six months after implementation of the decision. They found that 29 percent of patients already on psychotropic medication initially refused further treatment as opposed to 75 percent of newly admitted patients. Of refusers, 32 percent eventually resumed taking medication voluntarily; courts overturned the refusals of all the 51 percent who maintained their refusals, after an average delay of over a month. The length of procedural delays actually increased over the six months of the study as the courts learned of the decision. The authors compare their findings with other reported studies of implementation of right to refuse treatment decisions and discuss differences between the right to refuse treatment for civilly and criminally committed patients.     

Corruption and Political Culture in America: An Empirical Perspective

Political culture helps define the boundaries of permissiblepolitical action. Thus, it should affect the amounts and typesof political corruption occurring in political systems, as wellas responses to corruption when it is discovered. This articlecompares the distribution of corruption convictions among federaljudicial districts over a three-year period to social and politicalcharacteristics of the districts, and to scaled measures ofElazar's moralistic, individualistic, and traditionalistic politicalsubcultures. Nationally, strong moralistic subcultures and highvoter turnouts are associated with numerous convictions, bothbefore and after district population is controlled. Analysisof regional patterns reveals a different model in the South,however, one suggesting ideas about the dynamics of traditionalisticpolitics. Corruption, and the impact of federal laws againstit, are best understood within their political and culturalsettings. ^* I am indebted to George Calafut and Philip Sidel of the SocialScience Computer Research Institute, University of Pittsburgh,who gave me many hours of assistance in assembling data. LeonardKuntz and William Nelson of the Universitys Office of Research,Father Bernard Quinn of the Glenmary Research Center, and WilliamNewman of the University of Connecticut helped me locate religiouscensus results. The County and City Data Book is published ontape by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and SocialResearch. Daniel J. Elazar, Michael Margolis, Bert A. Rockman,and two anonymous referees gave me extremely helpful commentson this study.     

Spatial continuity and individual variability: A review of recent work on the geography of electoral change

Analyses have shown that the results of a series of general elections display considerable stability in the geography of voting patterns over time. Further, it has been suggested that the change between two electrons is similar in all places. This paper challenges the latter findings, using data from Great Britain and New Zealand. It is shown that even if there were a pattern of uniform swing, this would be produced by spatial variations in voter transition matrices. A review of analyses of those variations suggests the important roles of the neighbourhood effect, campaign spending, tactical voting, sectional effects, and migration as influences on voter behaviour.     

Routes and paths of comparison and choice

This paper studies aspects of sequential choice (and elimination) through the ‘routewise’ application of choice. (A choice is a mapping of the subsets of a set X into their respective subsets.) This approach sheds some further light on the ‘path-independence’ of choice, as well as on the logical structure of several rationality criteria for choice, as expressed through the properties of the comparison (or preference relation) revealed by a choice. The results bear particular relevance to the theory of collective choice.