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A deferred prosecution agreement, or DPA, allows a corporation, instead of proceeding to trial on a criminal charge, to settle matters with the state by acknowledging the facts on which any charge would be based, pay a reduced fine, and agree to change the way they conduct business. Critics of DPAs have suggested that, because the defendant corporation must pay a fine and submit to structural reform without having been found guilty at trial, DPAs violate the Presumption of Innocence. This paper argues that they do not. The paper appeals to the role of civic trust in a liberal political community. The obligations a corporation assumes in a DPA can be framed as a reasonable retributive response to a breach by that corporation of the community's laws, and an appropriate reassurance by that corporation to the community that such breaches will not reoccur. This framing is sufficient to deny that DPAs violate the Presumption of Innocence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a process for locating civic action, in its varied forms, wherever it may appear. First, develop a clear, a priori definition of the qualities of action you consider "civic." Simultaneously, observe actors' varied "typifications (Schutz 1962, 1970; Cicourel 1991, 1993; Cefaï 1994)" that include action that you would call "civic." We illustrate how to use this approach, using the case of "empowerment projects (Eliasoph Journal of Civil Society, 12(3), 247–265, 2016):" Observe the typifications that actors themselves experience in empowerment projects, by observing the dilemmas they experience. You will see that actors' typical patterns of navigating those typical dilemmas often have typical unintended consequences, both for their own emotions, and for the researcher's aspirations for civic action. In empowerment projects, typical patterns of navigating typical dilemmas tend to make important kinds of politically oriented civic action difficult to conduct. This kind of back-and-forth examination reveals the "civic landscape (Grubb and Henriksen 2018)" in the making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Although decades of economic growth in many parts of the world have created materially abundant societies, their ability to meet the subjective well-being needs and decrease the psychological distress of people is far from reality. Given that a greater emphasis is being placed on the social, environmental, and governmental factors that promote well-being and decrease distress, and considering that Taiwan is not an exception in this regard, this research project made use of the data from the national survey to investigate the role of social, civic, and governmental aspects in the life satisfaction and psychological distress of people in Taiwan. In addition to suggesting significant correlations, regression analyses indicated that the predictor variables significantly contributed to life satisfaction and psychological distress. Confidence in the government was the strongest predictor of life satisfaction, whereas the lack of healthy relationships was the strongest contributor to distress. These significant results suggest the importance of the role of both social dimensions and democratic government in mitigating distress and enhancing the life satisfaction of its citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though many socio-legal scholars have criticized those measures that deny convicted felons the right to vote, few have challenged the statutes that withhold a convicted felon's opportunity to sit on a jury. A majority of US jurisdictions bar felons from jury service permanently, creating a class of citizens defined and punished by the criminal justice system but unable to impact its function. This essay considers the invisibility of felon jury exclusion, notes its unlikely supporters, and asserts that by preventing convicted felons from taking part in civic processes, authorities work against reentry initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promotion of adult civic engagement is one of the primary goals of public schools. And the putatively negative effects of private schooling on civic engagement provide one of the most fundamental motivations for publicly provided schooling. In this study, I examine the comparative effects of Catholic and public high schools on adult voter participation and volunteering in the United States. I find that students who attended Catholic high schools are actually more likely to vote, though not volunteer, as adults. These estimated effects are robust to conditioning on a rich set of individual, family and community traits. I also present two-stage least squares estimates, which provide suggestive evidence that these results are not due to selection biases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]