Parliamentary committees in Zambia's Third Republic: partial reforms; unfinished agenda

This article critically examines the contribution of parliamentary committees in Zambia to democratic government. Several committees are of long-standing, including the Committee on Government Assurances and Committee on Delegated Legislation; others, notably committees involved in departmental oversight, were refashioned, expanded and given additional powers in 1999. They have worked hard to make government more open and accountable. Additional proposals for reforms to the committee system are currently being studied by a committee of Parliament. Although measuring the 'effectiveness' of such committees is not easy due to conceptual and methodological difficulties, their ability to influence policy and administration is found to be severely limited due to the absence of effective mechanisms to enforce their recommendations. This article maintains that this situation is unlikely to alter significantly unless there are wider changes in the party system, the institutional balance of power between executive and legislature, and the political culture more generally

Fostering Balance on the Federal Courts

During the 1992 presidential election campaign, Governor William Jefferson Clinton pledged to increase the numbers and percentages of women and minorities on the federal bench while appointing judges who are highly intelligent, demonstrate balanced judicial temperament, and exhibit a commitment to enforcing constitutional rights. The record of judicial selection that President Clinton compiled in his first term as Chief Executive shows that he honored these campaign commitments. President Clinton chose federal judges who make the judiciary\u27s composition more closely resemble the American populace and who possess excellent qualifications. The Clinton Administration named unprecedented numbers and percentages of very capable female and minority lawyers in the first half of its initial term, although it was less successful during the second half-term, partly because the Republican Party captured a Senate majority in 1994. Numerous observers of the federal courts and judicial appointments, therefore, wondered whether the Chief Executive would continue to choose more women and minorities for the courts. Now that President Clinton has completed the initial year of his final term, judicial selection in the second administration deserves assessment. This Essay undertakes that effort by focusing on the appointment of female and minority federal judges. Part I of this Essay evaluates how the Chief Executive chose judges during his first term. This Section asserts that the President enunciated clear objectives for appointments and instituted effective procedures, particularly by undertaking special efforts to seek out, identify, and nominate talented women and minorities. Part II of this Essay then examines the selection process during the opening year of the Clinton Administration\u27s second term, emphasizing those features that were different. This analysis reveals that the Chief Executive continued to nominate many highly qualified female and minority candidates but enjoyed less success in having them confirmed. The Essay concludes by suggesting that the President implement additional measures to foster the appointment of substantial numbers of women and minorities over the next three years

The New Normal: Regulatory Dysfunction as Policymaking

Scholars often presume that administrative dysfunction is a deviation from the norm of regularity in administrative law. This presumption is reinforced by courts who defer to agencies on the basis of a legal fiction of idealized regularity. In reality, irregularities are common in policymaking and they make agencies vulnerable to dysfunction. Irregularities are not bugs, but features of the administrative state. Sometimes, a national emergency makes political influence unavoidable and urges departures from usual regulatory processes. At other times, however, the framing of a problem as a national emergency is a pretextual justification to pursue a pre- determined political goal that may not be otherwise attainable or attractive through regular processes—a striking example of bad faith governance. The consequences of this kind of dysfunctional policymaking can be dangerous, especially when it then becomes normalized in agency policymaking. Building on an emerging scholarship on internal administrative law, this Article looks inside agencies to expose the phenomenon of regulatory dysfunction in policymaking. It describes the structural characteristics and logics associated with irregular policymaking and provides a typology of agency responses to irregularities ranging from bureaucratic legalism to bureaucratic rationality. Using case studies from immigration law, environmental law, and public health law, it explains how the resulting irregularities can lead to dysfunction. It concludes by assessing the consequences of dysfunctional policymaking for administrative law and scholarship, showing where it makes a difference to flip the starting presumption of regularity. While irregularity is predictable, the normalization of dysfunctional policymaking is worrisome. This Article seeks to shift the discourse around administrative policymaking by injecting some realism about what is, and what should be, the new normal

Faculty Senate Newsletter, May 2015

Message from President: Readers of heroic literature such as that written by Homer, Virgil, and an assortment of epic poets know that various forms of shame—embarrassment; bashfulness; reticence; and shyness to name but a few—serve as powerful mechanisms of social control. None of the warriors in Beowulf want their peers to regard them as less than valorous, hence will do anything, including courting of self-destruction, to avoid reprobation. Our ivy-covered walls stand far away from the shores of Troy, yet shame and shaming remain effective tools for controlling even freethinking academic people. In its various disguises, shame may well count as public enemy number one for those in the employ of universities. A productive petri dishes for the cultivation of shame is the segregation of and resulting envy and wariness among the disciplines. In a process that resembles the tainting of mankind by original sin, relentless criticism of public employees, along with the suggestion that seemingly wellpaid professionals ought to be grateful for their wages, sets up an environment in which faculty members feel shy about asking for more. What happens next is that those skilled in the less prosperous disciplines—nowadays, mostly those comprising the liberal, the performing, and the fine arts—begin to feel inferior to and therefore ashamed in comparison to those who have made the wise choice to prepare for careers in the affluent disciplines. This interdisciplinary shaming is by no means a one-way process. Those in the rich disciplines—for the most part, the STEM fields—become cautious about tooting their own horns lest they be seen as proud or presumptive. Finally, those in an assortment of homeless disciplines—agriculture and law come to mind—begin a regime of self-censorship, either fearing that they have no place in or wanting to avoid a dichotomous dialogue between the genteel and the mechanical disciplines. This cycle of shame fits well with the ambitions of those who would like to subordinate education to other agencies and other goals, for the aggressive seldom fear the reticent and are more than ready to speak out against the shame-induced silence. The pervasive sense of unspoken shame in many American universities arises from a deep uncertainty in the American consciousness about achievement. On the one hand, the now old-fashioned faith in progress—in the “great big beautiful tomorrow,” as the Disneyland “imagineers” once called it—drives the American mind to present our institutions as better than everyone and everything. On the other hand, the intense egalitarianism of American culture casts into suspicion anything or anyone situated too far to the right side of the renowned Gaussian distribution curve. From this mentality, which transcends rank, the seemingly powerful upper administration enjoys no exemption. The thinness of credentials among those in command positions, where last-minute degrees in “educational leadership” and other recently invented areas is far more the rule than the exception, ensures that seeming leaders will experience secret embarrassment either when confronted with scholars possessing disciplinary competence or when compared to management board members, who possess that other badge of accomplishment, money, in much greater degree than do their proxies in seeming leadership roles. Those who not only run institutions, but who deal with legislators experience an even more special short of awkwardness on the realization that, in their well-learned smoothness as simulated academic personnel, they cannot possibly excel at the kind of aboriginal mediocrity that characterizes legislators and many elected officials. Overcoming the culture of shame is both easy and difficult. One response to the juggernaut of shame is an unrepentant embrace of accomplishment: an affirmation that, despite everyone being created equal, some end up being cleverer than others and, on top of that, some are better at distinguishing Beethoven from bombast. Another, more therapeutic approach is to answer imposters by making recourse to fundamentals. Administrations, for example, enjoy barrages of statistics. They dole out shame by reminding a citizen giving public comment at a board meeting that a 1998 IPEDS study concluded x, y, or z owing to data drawn from the 1995 NCATE investigation of some or other acronym-identified phenomenon. Questioning whether such a pursuit of the trees is the best way to see the forest will often enough undercut the strategy of intimidation by overcompensation. So will asking covertly embarrassed experts why, if their expert opinions were so wise, we have, as a result of their policies, arrived at the difficulties that beset us today

Copyright Arbitrage

Regulatory arbitrage—defined as the manipulation of regulatory treatment for the purpose of reducing regulatory costs or increasing statutory earnings—is often seen in heavily regulated industries. An increase in the regulatory nature of copyright, coupled with rapid technological advances and evolving consumer preferences, have led to an unprecedented proliferation of regulatory arbitrage in the area of copyright law. This Article offers a new scholarly account of the phenomenon herein referred to as “copyright arbitrage.” In some cases, copyright arbitrage may work to expose and/or correct for an extant gap or inefficiency in the regulatory regime. In other cases, copyright arbitrage may contravene one or another of copyright’s foundational goals of incentivizing the creation of, and ensuring access to, copyrightable works. In either case, the existence of copyright arbitrage provides strong support for the classification (and clarification) of copyright as a complex regulatory regime in need of a strong regulatory apparatus. This Article discusses several options available for identifying and curbing problematic copyright arbitrage. First, courts can take a purposive, substantive approach to interpretations of the Copyright Act. Second, Congress can empower a regulatory agency with rulemaking and enforcement authority. Finally, antitrust law can help to curb the anticompetitive effects of copyright arbitrage resulting from legislative capture

The Planet, 2000, Winter

https://cedar.wwu.edu/planet/1088/thumbnail.jp