Implementing Equal Justice for Parents in Washington: A Dual Approach

In many states, legal representation for parents of dependent children is inadequate and can be a source of delays in securing permanency for children and unnecessarily protracted court proceedings. Often, such parents also face barriers to accessing services and independent evaluators. These issues are being addressed in the state of Washington through two approaches. The first is a successful enhanced legal representation program that has substantially improved case outcomes. The second is a statewide committee using innovative means to examine systemic responses to the challenges of the Adoption and Safe Families Act.     

Chinese Oppression in Xinjiang,Middle Eastern Conflicts and Global Islamic Solidarities among the Uyghurs

Individuals in Xinjiang are not merely passive recipients of state representations and policies; they are also agents capable of finding subtle means of self-representation. These symbolic oppositions are necessarily fluid: they emerge, adapt and disappear in response to the changing political environment. Currently, some individuals are demonstrating symbolic resistance to the state through the vehicle of Islam itself: a return to the mosque and orthodox religious practice. This article explores the nature and source of the current Islamic renewal in Xinjiang, conceived (though not exclusively) as a vehicle of symbolic opposition to perceived Muslim oppression at national and global levels. In discussing the international dimension, I explore the role played by imported Islamic materials, pilgrimage, study abroad, and, above all, the national and global mass media.     

The Professionalization of Public Accounting: A Social Dilemma Perspective

This study uses a social dilemma model of auditing and a model of cooperative regulatory enforcement to provide a framework within which the evolution of self-regulation in the U.S. accounting profession is studied. From a social dilemma perspective, individual public accounting firms are best off, in a single period sense, by providing a low quality audit product, which is defined in terms of the degree of auditor acquiescence to managers' accounting method discretion. However, firms' collective welfare is maximized by high quality auditing. The cooperative regulatory model employed is premised on the existence of a plausible government threat of punishments and invasive regulations, which motivates self-regulation in an industry. We argue that prior to enactment of the securities acts, public accounting firms faced a social dilemma in which there were limited incentives for high quality auditing either voluntarily or through the establishment of self-regulation. The securities acts provided a plausible threat to which the accounting industry responded by implementing self-regulation in order to avoid invasive and costly government regulation. After the emergence of the accounting profession, there occurred a long period of cooperative regulation with the SEC. Management discretion over accounting methods increased during this time period and audit quality correspondingly decreased, suggesting possible inefficient capture of the SEC. Evidence of an evolution towards a tripartite form of regulation appeared in the 1970s when the SEC and public accounting began to be critically reviewed by Congress. From this time to the present, new regulatory threats have motivated a series of self-regulatory responses by public accounting to improve audit quality.