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Governments and other agencies seeking to tackle racism have been calling for better empirical evidence, including complaint data based on reports by people who have experienced racism. This approach requires much of those who face racism, often while offering little effective support or redress for them. There is a need to understand reporting or not reporting experiences of racism as a result of a complex interplay between different factors – as a (non-) reporting journey, rather than as a singular moment of decision. Reporting is at risk of remaining an ineffective strategy for responding to racism where the reporting pathways and support services are not sufficiently aligned with the expectations and needs of those who experience racism. This article discusses the findings of three place-based community engagement and research projects across four local municipalities in Melbourne. The projects examined locally specific community perspectives and expectations in relation to reporting pathways and support services for those experiencing racism. The analysis of this community input resulted in anti-racism roadmaps specific for each local area, which were co-developed with local communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a well-established literature examining how perpetrators of child sexual abuse (CSA) neutralise the norms and beliefs that ordinarily prohibit such behaviours. However, there has been substantially less focus on how such techniques of neutralisation might also be applied by people and groups who were not directly involved in the abuse, who we might expect to be more supportive. Drawing on a thematic analysis of an open-ended survey (n=140) and semi-structured interviews (n=21) with adults who experienced childhood sexual abuse this paper examines societal responses to disclosure. Identifying three key techniques of neutralisation, it explores how families, professionals and institutions use wider discourses that deny the victim/survivor, deny or minimise harm and silence by appealing to loyalty. The results demonstrate how significant others can constrain, rather than support, the process of disclosure and recovering from CSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a theoretical model predicting that racially biased policing produces (1) more use of potentially lethal force by firearms against Black civilians than against White civilians and (2) lower fatality rates for Black civilians than White civilians. We empirically evaluate this second prediction with original officer-involved shooting data from 2010 to 2017 for eight local police jurisdictions, finding that Black fatality rates are significantly lower than White fatality rates and that this significance would survive an omitted covariate three times as strong as any of our observed covariates. Furthermore, using outcome test methodology and a comparability assumption, we estimate that at least 30% of Black civilians shot by the police would not have been shot had they been White. An omitted covariate would need to be at least three times as strong as any of our observed covariates to eliminate this finding. Finally, any omitted covariate would have to affect Black fatality rates substantially more than Hispanic fatality rates in order to be consistent with the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research suggests that religious service attendance, biblical literalism, images of God, and other measures of religion are related to moral beliefs (i.e., that certain behaviors are wrong or deviant). Given previous theory and research on spiritual appraisals (particularly demonization and desecration), we argue that belief in Satan should also predict moral beliefs. Using the first four waves of the Baylor Religion Survey, we tested the association between belief in Satan and belief in the wrongfulness of twelve different behaviors related to abortion, family matters, sexuality, and substance use. Although religious service attendance and biblical literalism were consistently related to moral beliefs, belief in Satan was significantly related to six of the twelve moral beliefs. Furthermore, there was a significant interaction effect between religious service attendance and belief in Satan for ten of the twelve moral beliefs, suggesting that religious service attendance has little or no effect on moral beliefs when people do not also believe in Satan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use the quasi-random assignment of cases to three-judge panels on the US Courts of Appeals to assess the consistency of adjudication of death penalty appeals. We find clear evidence that panels apply different standards depending on whether a majority of the panel was appointed by Democratic or Republican presidents. Unlike previous work on panel effects in the US Courts of Appeals, we show that these effects persist to the end of the process of adjudication. Since the early 1980s, the probability of ultimate execution has been increased for inmates when their first court of appeals case was assigned to a panel with a majority of Republican appointees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1987 Myra Hindley submitted a petition to the Home Office requesting permission to undergo hypnosis in an attempt to locate the grave of Keith Bennett. Whilst the request was initially declined, the issue continued to be an administrative challenge for the Home Office for the fifteen years that followed. Drawing on her 'prison records' currently held in The National Archive, this paper details the reasons for the request, how the policy response to it was developed, maintained, and then changed, and how it shaped broader orientations to the use of hypnosis in criminal investigations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the need to develop the range and scope of narrative criminology, this paper provides an empirical demonstration of how auto/biographical analysis can be used for criminological purposes. More specifically, the paper explores how British serial killer Myra Hindley sought to construct, (re)present and rehabilitate her own identity in the face of the 'mad, bad, or evil' discourse that she was typically associated with. Using her auto/biographical letter to The Guardian newspaper as the main source of data, supplemented with material taken from her prison files available in The National Archive, the paper examines how she sought to develop her own causation narrative in the face of massive public derision. It demonstrates how the 'normal happy girl' interrupted narrative which Hindley constructs is neither an accurate account of her life, nor an invention of her imagination. Instead, it is a product of the immediate local context which she found herself in; the conventions of criminal autobiography; the rules and regulations that govern prisoners; the redemptive requirements of the penal process; and, the generalized causation narratives of serial killers that were being reconfigured by various lay commentators for use in the 'Moors murders' story. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like other settler-colonial societies, Australia over the last half-century or so has been the site for a lengthy and involved discussion about the need for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples to reconstitute the relationship between them, recognising past injustices and forestalling future conflict. Unlike those other countries, however, Australia and its states lack a history of treaties and treaty law to ground that discussion. While the idea of treaty has been highly politicised over time, what such negotiations and agreements might mean in practice—what eventual treaties might do (in terms of recognition and reparation)—remains vague. This lack of certainty enables latent non-Indigenous attitudes to be activated in relation to any proposal for making treaties in Australia. Consequently, considering non-Indigenous attitudes to treaty is an important task as these sub-national initiatives move from discussion and planning to negotiation and implementation. This article begins to address a lacuna in understanding of non-Indigenous attitudes and considers whether these may be a potential, if volatile resource for policy advocates of treaty-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a thematic analysis of longitudinal qualitative data (ntotal = 118), this article takes a "whole student lifecycle" approach to examine how lower and higher income students at an English northern red brick university variously attempted to manage their individual budgets. It explores how students reconcile their income—in the form of loans, grants, and bursaries—with the cost of living. Four arenas of interest are described: planning, budgeting, and managing "the student loan"; disruptions to financial planning; the role of familial support; and strategies of augmenting the budget. In detailing the micro‐level constraints on the individual budgets of lower and higher income undergraduates, the article highlights the importance of non‐repayable grants and bursaries in helping to sustain meaningful participation in higher tariff, more selective, higher education institutions. It also supports an emerging body of literature that suggests that the continuing amendments to the system of funding higher education in England are unlikely to address inequality of access, participation, and outcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Mapping and ablation of fractionated electrograms is a common treatment for scar‐based ventricular tachycardia (VT). An automated algorithm has been developed for rapid "fractionation mapping." Methods: Electroanatomic maps from 21 ablation procedures (14 scar‐based VT and seven control idiopathic VT/premature ventricular contractions with normal voltage) were retrospectively analyzed using the Ensite Precision fractionation map (fMap; Abbott Laboratories; Abbott Park, IL, USA) algorithm. For each study, voltage maps and 30 fMaps were generated using combinations of parameters: width (5, 10, 20 ms), refractory time (15, 30 ms), sensitivity (0.1, 0.2 mV), and fractionation threshold (2, 3, 5). Parameter sensitivity was assessed by overlap of fractionated areas (fArea) with successful VT ablation sites (defined by entrainment and/or pace mapping). Specificity was assessed by presence of fractionated areas in control patients. Results: Of the 30 fMap parameter sets tested, seven identified >50% of scar‐based VT ablation sites, and 26 contained <5 cm2 fractionation on control fMaps. Three combinations of fMap width/refractory/sensitivity/threshold parameters met both of the above criteria, and 20/30/0.1/2 identified the most VT ablation sites (79%) and generated 42.3 ± 28.2 cm2 of fArea on scar‐based VT maps compared with 4.9 ± 3.2 cm2 on control maps (P = .001). None of the control patients and 23% of the scar‐based VT patients had VT recurrence at mean 15 month follow‐up. Conclusion: Careful selection of signal processing parameters optimizes sensitivity and specificity of automated fractionation mapping for scar‐based VT. Real‐time use of fMap algorithms may reduce VT ablation procedure time and improve substrate modification, which may improve outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically examines how undergraduate students in a red brick university in the North of England have experienced the threefold rise in tuition fees since 2012, with particular attention on how they have begun to understand and negotiate the process of indebtedness. Drawing on a corpus of 118 interviews conducted with a group of 40 undergraduates across their whole student lifecycle, analysis is directed toward examining how students have variously sought to respond to the policy, reconcile the debt with their decision to study at university and, begin to negotiate a life of everyday indebtedness. The findings are located in the context of wider neoliberal policy trends that have continued to emphasise 'cost-sharing' as a mechanism for increased investment within the higher education sector generally, and individual fiscal responsibility specifically. Given the lack of any other viable career pathways for both lower and higher income students, they had to accept indebtedness as inevitable and take what comfort they could from the discourses of 'foregone gain' that they had been presented with. Evidently, and as the students in our sample well recognised, whether those discourses actually reflect the future remains to be seen. There is also no evidence within our data that students anticipated the subsequent changes to the repayment terms and conditions – a fact that is likely to compound feelings of economic powerlessness and constrain their capacity for financial agency yet further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is currently much interest in the interconnections between research and teaching in Higher Education. This relationship is usually termed 'the research/teaching nexus' (RTN). However, within this wide body of literature, there has been little attempt to explore the emergent experiences of students across the entire length of their degree programme. Drawing on the results of a three-year qualitative study that followed 40 students through their whole student lifecycle, this paper explores how undergraduates in an English university experienced the RTN, how those experiences developed over time, and how these changes can be variously enabled or constrained. Situating the findings in the context of the 'post-truth' society and the uncertainty of employment futures, the paper highlights how the nexus can also often serve to exclude students as much as it includes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been an increasing emphasis placed on the skills and attributes that university students develop whilst studying for their degree. These ‘narratives of employability’ often construct extracurricular activity (ECA) as an essential part of gaining post-graduation employment. However, these future-oriented drivers of engagement often neglect the role ECAs have within contemporary student life-worlds, particularly with respect to lower-income students. Drawing on a 3-year longitudinal study that tracked a cohort of 40 undergraduates throughout their student life cycle, this paper examines how students in a northern English red brick university understood the purposes of ECA, and how they chose to engage with it. The results suggest ECAs appear to be somewhat stratified in terms of timeliness of engagement and motivation to participate. By extension, the paper argues that those recent attempts to measure and use ECA to narrate future ‘global’ employability are likely to reproduce well-established inequalities. As such, any further pressure to engage with ECAs solely in terms of employability could result in the further marginalisation of lower-income students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the various pressures of finance, employability and part-time work are experienced by undergraduates studying in an English Red Brick University. Drawing on the results of a 3-year qualitative study that followed 40 students throughout their 3 years of studies (n₁ = 40, n₂ = 40, n₃ = 38, ntotal = 118), the paper details three dimensions by which students understood their part-time employment experiences: the characteristics of employment types; motivations for employment and the challenges of shaping their employment experiences around their studies. It is argued that the current shortfalls in the student budget and the pressures of the employability agenda may actually serve to further disadvantage the lower income groups in the form of a ‘double deficit’. Not only are discrepancies between income and expenditure likely to mean that additional monies are necessary to study for a degree, the resulting need for part-time employment is also likely to constrain both degree outcome and capacity to enhance skills necessary for ‘employability’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National projects of reconciliation in settler colonial countries such as Australia are predicated on assumptions about non-Indigenous willingness to engage with the cultures and histories of Indigenous peoples. However, empirical research consistently finds such attitudes are far from universal. This article reports findings from focus groups with non-Indigenous peoples conducted at four locations around Australia during 2014. The goal was to see what ‘emergent’ discourses of reconciliation lay in the quotidian lives of non-Indigenous Australians. As with a comparable study conducted in Canada, this research used a poetics-rich approach to critical discourse analysis of the focus group discussions. It surfaced strong but complex themes, in particular a mode of ‘delegation’ and another of ‘embodiment’. We explore these themes with one eye towards Australia’s coming referendum on a constitutional amendment that would recognise the precolonial presence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Courts resolve individual disputes and create principles of law to justify their decisions and guide the resolution of future cases. Those tasks present informational challenges that affect the whole judicial process. Judges must simultaneously learn about (1) the particular facts and legal implications of any dispute; (2) discover the doctrine that appropriately resolves the dispute; and (3) attempt to articulate those rules in the context of a single case so that future courts may reason from past cases. We propose a model of judicial learning and decision making in which there is a complicated relationship between facts and legal outcomes. The model has implications for many of the important questions in the judicial process, including the dynamics of common law development, the path-dependent nature of the law, and optimal case selection by supervisory courts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ideal point estimation in political science usually aims to reduce a matrix of votes to a small number of preference dimensions. We argue that taking a nonparametric perspective can yield measures that are more useful for some subsequent analyses. We propose a conditional autoregressive preference measurement model, which we use to generate case-specific preference estimates for US Supreme Court justices from 1946 to 2005. We show that the varying relative legal positions taken by justices across areas of law condition the opinion assignment strategy of the chief justice and the decisions of all justices as to whether to join the majority opinion. Unlike previous analyses that have made similar claims, using case-specific preference estimates enables us to hold constant the justices involved, providing stronger evidence that justices are strategically responsive to each others' relative positions on a case-by-case basis rather than simply their identities or average relative preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines 21st century wars and the growth in refugee numbers and changes in the nature of the conflicts producing them, drawing from data on refugee numbers and on battle-related deaths from 2014. Measuring conflicts by battle-related deaths is no longer enough. Refugee numbers produced must be a central part. The evolution of refugee-producing armed conflicts and the United Nations' responses to them are set out. The mid-2015 status of the peace plans is reviewed for each of the 10 conflicts connected to the largest of the 2014 refugee populations. The central role of the United Nations and the Security Council is clear, responding to the complexities of war situations involving weak States such as Somalia and strong States such as Sudan. The article suggests a wider monitoring of the detail of these conflicts with greater advocacy for constructive measures proposed and the resources necessary to follow through. The article also suggests the promotion of longer-term actions such as arms embargoes, the United Nations Armed Trade Treaty, and initiatives around mining industries to address ongoing post-war violence. The article calls for increased participation of those engaged in refugee protection in advocacy to end the wars producing refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many non-Indigenous peoples in settler societies describe themselves as concerned with the legacies of colonialism and wish to become more engaged with that history and with Indigenous peoples. Paradoxically, however, many do not understand what that engagement might entail, how they could do it or whether, indeed, it is their place to do so. In this research, we survey findings from three sets of focus groups with non-Indigenous peoples in Canada conducted over a two-year period and intersecting with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process that has nearly concluded there. The goal was to see what ‘emergent’ discourses of reconciliation are at play in reflective conversations between non-Aboriginal Canadians. Some strong but complex themes arise from this research, in particular a mode of ‘delegation’ and another, of ‘embodiment’. These are expressed in different rhetorical styles and speak to variations in the geography, history and identity of the participants and their communities. A broad but tentative conclusion is that for reconciliation the politics of the local matter. We explore this finding with one eye toward policy innovations and as part of a broad comparative inquiry into non-Indigenous peoples' ideas of engagement and responsibility in settler colonial states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I develop a formal model of Supreme Court opinion-writing in an environment of uncertainty. In particular, the model captures how the Supreme Court will optimally design the specificity of its legal rules. The model focuses on the tradeoff between more precise rules which are controlling in a smaller subset of cases against less precise rules, which have wider applicability but yield less certain outcomes. When the basic model is considered in a dynamic world in which the Court is able to hear multiple cases, it yields insights about how the factual representativeness of a case and the clarity of existing precedent jointly affect its optimal opinion-writing and willingness to hear new cases. These last implications provide theoretical foundations for theoretical and empirical questions about rule-making, case selection, and the construction of doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The move towards a national curriculum in Australia has created a new urgency to consider the extent to which teachers can claim agency within their profession. Drawing on data from interview transcripts of a small scale participant centred research project involving secondary English teachers in a school in Melbourne, Australia, this paper explores an apparent contradiction in teachers’ perceptions of their role in curriculum decision-making. The focus of the project was to investigate teachers’ attitudes to the teaching of poetry in an attempt to explain why this genre of literature is now almost entirely absent from the senior secondary ‘taught’ curriculum in the Australian state of Victoria. On one hand, the teachers in this study express frustration that the looming introduction of a national curriculum—combined with an increased emphasis on standardised testing—seems set to reduce their agency; on the other, they entertain the possibility that children from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and communities might be better served by a centrally set curriculum than has previously been recognised. We draw on Bernstein’s theories to argue that an analysis of this apparent contradiction may lead to the development of more socially just pedagogical practices within the teaching profession and among teacher educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The move towards a national curriculum in Australia has created a new urgency to consider the extent to which teachers can claim agency within their profession. Drawing on data from interview transcripts of a small scale participant centred research project involving secondary English teachers in a school in Melbourne, Australia, this paper explores an apparent contradiction in teachers' perceptions of their role in curriculum decision-making. The focus of the project was to investigate teachers' attitudes to the teaching of poetry in an attempt to explain why this genre of literature is now almost entirely absent from the senior secondary 'taught' curriculum in the Australian state of Victoria. On one hand, the teachers in this study express frustration that the looming introduction of a national curriculum - combined with an increased emphasis on standardised testing - seems set to reduce their agency; on the other, they entertain the possibility that children from diverse socio-economic backgrounds and communities might be better served by a centrally set curriculum than has previously been recognised. We draw on Bernstein's theories to argue that an analysis of this apparent contradiction may lead to the development of more socially just pedagogical practices within the teaching profession and among teacher educators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In shaping constitutional courts' jurisdictions, societies must contend with the informational challenges associated with rule making and the distributive politics of granting courts jurisdiction over administrative lawmaking. Curiously, judges are often granted jurisdiction that seems to create a tension between their ability to acquire information about appropriate rules and to clearly articulate them. In particular, many courts handle the onerous burden of resolving thousands of routine, low-stakes cases of law application. We develop an informational model of judicial docket style that isolates a tension between information acquisition and quality rule writing and examine how that tension manifests in the incentives concerning jurisdiction style. Dockets that include a mix of law application and rule construction promote more informed judicial rule construction at the cost of lower-quality rules and a greater role of the judiciary in the day-to-day activity of the state. We develop implications for constitutional design in a liberal democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well known that the public often relies on cues or heuristics when forming opinions. At the same time, leading theories of opinion formation about the Supreme Court see such support as relatively fixed. Using a series of survey experiments, we find source cues significantly influence the public’s support for the Court, including the extent to which individuals believe the Court should be independent from the elected branches. Specifically, we find partisan source cues play a significant role in shaping public opinion regarding life tenure for the justices and the extent to which the Court should have the final say in constitutional matters—individuals are less likely to support court-curbing measures when informed that elites from the opposite party have proposed them than when such measures are endorsed by either a neutral source or members of their own party. We also find a strong connection between specific support for particular decisions and the degree to which people believe the Court should be free from external influence, as individuals are more likely to say the justices should be influenced by demonstrators when the side they favor is the one doing the demonstrating. These results have important implications for understanding the extent to which politicians can shape the public’s overall support for the Court, as well as for assessing the degree to which the public views the Court as a “political” institution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the series of international protection policy initiatives by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 2000 to 2013: Global Consultations, Agenda for Protection, Convention Plus, and the High Commissioner’s Dialogues. It shows how each initiative evolved and developed into another. It analyses the initiatives: how they began; what they have in common; and whether they met refugees’ needs. The analysis demonstrates that these form a single evolving initiative, establishing then following the Agenda for Protection and continuing with the High Commissioner’s Dialogues. These initiatives centred around annual June/July meetings which involved senior international protection staff of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and governmental representatives on the Standing Committee of the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme. The Dialogues on international protection, with the possibility of future actions from them, are a continuing legacy. International protection policy initiatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees demonstrate that it has the capacity and the means to respond to the pressures of a volatile external environment and the wide-ranging needs of refugees while, at the same time, influencing the direction and shape of States’ responses to the plight of the world’s refugees and other persons of concern to the Refugee Agency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Item response theory models for roll-call voting data provide political scientists with parsimonious descriptions of political actors' relative preferences. However, models using only voting data tend to obscure variation in preferences across different issues due to identification and labeling problems that arise in multidimensional scaling models. We propose a new approach to using sources of metadata about votes to estimate the degree to which those votes are about common issues. We demonstrate our approach with votes and opinion texts from the U.S. Supreme Court, using latent Dirichlet allocation to discover the extent to which different issues were at stake in different cases and estimating justice preferences within each of those issues. This approach can be applied using a variety of unsupervised and supervised topic models for text, community detection models for networks, or any other tool capable of generating discrete or mixture categorization of subject matter from relevant vote-specific metadata. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most U.S. state supreme court justices face elections or reappointment by elected officials, and research suggests that judicial campaigns have come to resemble those for other offices. We develop predictions on how selection systems should affect judicial decisions and test these predictions on an extensive dataset of death penalty decisions by state courts of last resort. Specifically, the data include over 12,000 decisions on over 2000 capital punishment cases decided between 1980 and 2006 in systems with partisan, nonpartisan, or retention elections or with reappointment. As predicted, the findings suggest that judges face the greatest pressure to uphold capital sentences in systems with nonpartisan ballots. Also as predicted, judges respond similarly to public opinion in systems with partisan elections or reappointment. Finally, the results indicate that the plebiscitary influences on judicial behavior emerge only after interest groups began achieving success at targeting justices for their decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examine how the Supreme Court learns from lower court decisions to evaluate new legal issues. We present a theory of optimal stopping in which the Court learns from successive rulings on new issues by lower courts but incurs a cost when lower courts come into conflict with one another. The Court faces a strategic trade-off between allowing conflict to continue while it learns about a new legal issue and intervening to end a costly conflict between the lower courts. We evaluate how factors such as the quality of lower courts, the distribution of judicial preferences, and the timing of the emergence of conflict affect how the Court weighs this trade-off. We provide empirical evidence that supports one of the theory’s novel predictions: the Court should be more likely to end a conflict immediately when it emerges after several lower courts have already weighed in on a new legal issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An interview with Joe Freidhoff, director of online learning research and innovation at the Michigan Virtual University® (MVU) is presented. He says that the MVU is the parent company with three divisions, the Michigan Virtual School® (MVS) is a K-12 online subsidiary provider that works with school districts. He states that his dissertation research suggests preservice teachers (PSTs) to be an active in an online technological activities.

One-dimensional spatial models have come to inform much theorizing and research on the U.S. Supreme Court. However, we argue that judicial preferences vary considerably across areas of the law, and that limitations in our ability to measure those preferences have constrained the set of questions scholars pursue. We introduce a new approach, which makes use of information about substantive similarity among cases, to estimate judicial preferences that vary across substantive legal issues and over time. We show that a model allowing preferences to vary over substantive issues as well as over time is a significantly better predictor of judicial behavior than one that only allows preferences to vary over time. We find that judicial preferences are not reducible to simple left-right ideology and, as a consequence, there is substantial variation in the identity of the median justice across areas of the law during all periods of the modern court. These results suggest a need to reconsider empirical and theoretical research that hinges on the existence of a single pivotal median justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Principal-agent relations are replete in politics; politicians are agents of electorates, bureaucrats are agents of executives, lower courts are agents of upper courts, and much more. Commonly, principals are modeled as the rule-making body and agents as the rule-implementing body. However, principals often delegate the authority to make the rules themselves to their agents. The relationship between the lower federal courts and the Supreme Court is one such example; a considerable portion of the law (rules) is made in the lower federal courts with the Supreme Court serving primarily as the overseer of those lower courts’ decisions. In this article, we develop and test a principal-agent model of law (rule) creation in a judicial hierarchy. The model yields new insights about the relationship among various features of the judicial hierarchy that run against many existing perceptions. For example, we find a non-monotonic relationship between the divergence in upper and lower court preferences over rules and the likelihood of review and reversal by the Supreme Court. The empirical evidence supports these derived relationships. Wider implications for the principal-agent literature are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Electricity generation is one of the major contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions. Transitioning the World's energy economy to a lower carbon future will require significant investment in a variety of cleaner technologies, including renewables and nuclear power. In the short term, improving the efficiency of fossil fuel combustion in energy generation can provide an important contribution. Availability of life cycle GHG intensity data will allow decision-makers to move away from overly simplistic assertions about the relative merits of certain fuels, and focus on the complete picture, especially the critical roles of technology selection and application of best practice. This analysis compares the life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) intensities per megawatt-hour (MWh) of electricity produced for a range of Australian and other energy sources, including coal, conventional liquefied natural gas (LNG), coal seam gas LNG, nuclear and renewables, for the Australian export market. When Australian fossil fuels are exported to China, life cycle greenhouse gas emission intensity in electricity production depends to a significant degree on the technology used in combustion. LNG in general is less GHG intensive than black coal, but the gap is smaller for gas combusted in open cycle gas turbine plant (OCGT) and for LNG derived from coal seam gas (CSG). On average, conventional LNG burned in a conventional OCGT plant is approximately 38% less GHG intensive over its life cycle than black coal burned in a sub-critical plant, per MWh of electricity produced. However, if OCGT LNG combustion is compared to the most efficient new ultra-supercritical coal power, the GHG intensity gap narrows considerably. Coal seam gas LNG is approximately 13--20% more GHG intensive across its life cycle, on a like-for like basis, than conventional LNG. Upstream fugitive emissions from CSG (assuming best practice gas extraction techniques) do not materially alter the life cycle GHG intensity rankings, such is the dominance of end-use combustion, but application of the most recent estimates of the 20-year global warming potential (GWP) increases the contribution of fugitives considerably if best practice fugitives management is not assumed. However, if methane leakage approaches the elevated levels recently reported in some US gas fields (circa 4% of gas production) and assuming a 20-year methane GWP, the GHG intensity of CSG-LNG generation is on a par with sub-critical coal-fired generation. The importance of applying best practice to fugitives management in Australia's emerging natural gas industry is evident. When exported to China for electricity production, LNG was found to be 22--36 times more GHG intensive than wind and concentrated solar thermal (CST) power and 13--21 times more GHG intensive than nuclear power which, even in the post-Fukushima world, continues to be a key option for global GHG reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a model of opinion writing in the judicial hierarchy. The model adopts a case-space approach to judicial decision making with informational asymmetries across levels of the hierarchy. In the model, a lower court writes an opinion with two features: a legal rule and a level of quality. An upper court must then decide whether to review the decision. The model yields new insights about the strategic incentives created by the judicial hierarchy, including relationships among judicial ideology and opinion quality, judicial quality and the content of an opinion’s rule, and the effect of the case facts on these relationships. The findings suggest that several common tests employed in the literature may not discriminate among competing sets of first principles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper surveys a range of methodological approaches to underpin a creative project that will develop a pair of online, computer-based conversational agents to interact as "comedian" and "straight man". The project will interrogate the scriptwriting process as it is applied to a pair of interacting chat-bots: a confluence of human and non-human agency. This survey is necessary due to the project's trans-disciplinary nature; it borrows from information science, drama and scriptwriting, creativity theory, humour theory, and interactive design. "Ontology and epistemology can be considered as the foundations upon which research is built. Methodology, methods and sources are closely connected to, and built upon, our ontological and epistemological assumptions" (Grix 2004, p. 58). These ontological and epistemological foundations are often viewed as tacit knowledge within the disciplines, however, there appears to be little agreement across disciplines. Positioned in this manner, the researcher is implicated inside larger research structures in much the same manner as the creative individual is implicated in the systemic view of creativity offered by Csikszentmihalyi (1999; 2003). This is not a privileged position. The researchers themselves operate within same "discourses and traditions" as the object of study, "consequently, knowledge is theoretically or discursively laden" (Marsh and Furlong 2002, p. 26). The purpose of this paper is to explore these issues from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to make the implicit explicit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supporting a football team in the lower leagues of the English league system is rarely a glamorous endeavour that is full of success and glory. So why do fans keep turning up game after game, season after season, in spite of the frequent false dawns, regular disappointment, and apparent lack of success of their adopted team? This essay aims to offer a sociological analysis of this question by firstly examining the historical, social, economic and place-related ontology of English football clubs and the English football league. Secondly, the paper explores how recent developments in the organization and management of football, and wider society more generally, have threatened the very identities that football clubs are built upon and have traditionally relied on. Finally, the paper explores how these developments can actually be seen to both sustain and inhibit lower league football support. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gatekeepers occupy increasingly important positions within qualitative social work research and their engagement with research is crucial to the ongoing development of a useable knowledge base. However, while some studies have hinted at the mechanisms that support and challenge the relationship between gatekeepers and researchers, there is a paucity of systematic research concerning how these relationships can be maintained more effectively for all concerned. This article aims to develop the literature in this respect by examining how researchers in the child and families research arena (n = 13) understand the mechanisms that support and challenge the engagement of gatekeepers. Several mechanisms that support engagement are identified. These are: political representation, civic and moral responsibility to engage, and the identification of good practice. Similarly, a number of mechanisms that can challenge engagement are also explored. These include: methodology, representation, intrusion, and, disruption. These results are discussed in relation to the current developments within the field of qualitative social work that have seen a rise in collectivized responses to research requests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the changing place of poetry studies in the broader English curriculum of Victoria, Australia. Its focus is on how students learning to become English teachers engage with poetry studies. Setting this problem within the context of pedagogical theory and evidence about the evolving Victorian curriculum, we have interviewed six first-year students to explore their perspectives on the study of poetry. A clear finding is that exposure to the study of poetry is very limited in Australia's secondary school system. A more surprising finding is that students do not clearly recognize their exposure to poetry studies as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentencing of dangerous offenders has been transformed by the amendments of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. Although the sentencing procedure remains highly prescribed and complex, judicial discretion has returned. This, together with statutory support and guidance from the appellate courts, is likely to increase the requirement for psychiatric evidence in such cases. Such cases highlight the dual agent role of psychiatrists when engaging in this work, and clinicians must be acutely aware of the differences between the court and clinical practice when making risk assessments. This requires a proper understanding of the sentencing procedure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a scaling model to estimate U.S. Supreme Court opinion locations and justice ideal points along a common spatial dimension using data derived from the citations between opinions. Citations from new opinions to precedent opinions usually apply and endorse the doctrine of the precedent opinion; however, sometimes they implicitly or explicitly dispute the precedent opinion. We collect original datasets classifying citations from search and seizure and freedom of religion opinions written between 1953 and 2006 into these different types and develop a model relating the similarity of the doctrine embodied in the citing and cited opinions to the relative probability of these different types of citations. The resulting spatial estimates of opinion location are used to evaluate theories of Supreme Court bargaining and opinion writing. We find empirical support for theoretical models that predict the majority opinion will fall at the ideal point of the median member of the majority coalition. Given the centrality of theories of judicial policymaking to various substantive problems in political science, the method of scaling opinions developed in this article can facilitate a range of future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key source of institutional variation across judicial systems is the degree of control that the highest court has over its docket. Despite this variation, the consequences of various institutional designs in judicial hierarchies remain relatively unexplored by the theoretical literature. In this article, we develop a formal model of high court resource allocation. We analyze the model under two institutional designs: (1) the Court must allocate at least some minimum effort to all cases; (2) the Court has complete discretion over which cases to hear. We analyze the model to identify the optimal allocation of resources across cases as the institutional design varies. We then consider the conditions under which the various institutional rules increase or decrease the legal efficiency, or performance, of the judicial system. Our analysis reveals the complex relationship among the institutional rules governing high court dockets, the design of the judicial hierarchy, and the performance of the legal system. We find that the effect of institutional design on legal efficiency is conditioned by the performance of the lower courts and the incentives for judicial 'shirking' at the High Court. While requiring some per-case effort by the High Court may marginally increase aggregate efficiency, such a requirement causes the High Court to divert resources away from the most difficult cases toward relatively easier cases. The consequence is that more difficult cases are less likely to be decided correctly, while relatively easier cases are more likely to be decided correctly. The model substantively informs policy debates among judicial reformers and scholars concerned with institutional design as well as disciplinary debates about case selection and judicial decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]