PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITY LAWS REVIEWED

Imposing legal responsibility on parents for the antisocial behavior of their children has long been tempting to legislators. The serious problems inherent in such laws are presented in the following appraisal, excerpted with permission from the Pittsburgh Law Review, Volume 30 No. 3.     

Rallying in fear? Estimating the effect of the UK COVID-19 lockdown with a natural experiment

We use a natural experiment to study how the announcement of the UK COVID-19 lockdown affected citizens' attitudes towards the pandemic and the government's response to it. On the day of the lockdown announcement, YouGov ran a survey that captured responses before and after the announcement. Comparison of these responses suggests that the lockdown announcement made people more supportive of the government's response to the crisis but also (perhaps surprisingly) more concerned about the pandemic. Analysis of heterogeneous treatment effects suggests that the announcement narrowed gaps in perceptions of the crisis, increasing support for the government's response especially among those who had been least supportive and increasing concern about the pandemic especially among those who had been least concerned. Overall, the findings highlight a tension inherent in governing during times of crisis: actions that increase people's confidence in government and induce compliance with government directives may also tend to increase anxiety among the population.     

Assaults Against Inspectors: The Dangers in Enforcing Corporate Crime

This survey of regulatory inspectors reveals a surprising number of threats and assaults being made against inspectors in the course of enforcing regulatory provisions. Contrary to conventional images of regulatory enforcement, inspectors in some agencies face violent resistance from regulatory offenders that is similar to the violent resistance encountered by police officers. These findings provide support for the contention that regulatory enforcement and policing should be conceptualized as overlapping forms of law enforcement rather than as distinct governmental activities.     

Ozone Partnerships,the Construction of Regulatory Communities,and the Future of Global Regulatory Power*

This article describes our effort to understand the Montreal Protocol as an unconventional approach to regulation, one that encourages the construction of volunteer partnerships, episodic networks, and regulatory communities comprised of public and private actors criss-crossing institutional and national boundaries. We examine three provisions of the Protocol that give official governments and private global corporations latitude to create temporary arrangements that leap beyond their typical institutional constraints. The provisions that promote collaboration are the use of trade sanctions as an incentive to cooperate; the creation of the Interim Multilateral Ozone Fund (IMOF), the funding mechanism that links the fate of developed and developing nations; and, the establishment of an international clearinghouse to share technology for reducing ozone depleting substances. Singly and together these mechanisms of coercion, exchange, and normative pressure permit individual actor's interests to be pursued, bind them into ephemeral but replicable networks of action, and result in the creation of the very meaning of regulatory compliance and effectiveness. The discussion draws out the implications of a transcorporate definition of power and global problem solving as it relates to democratic reliance on the political sovereignty of individual actors and nations.