Building Economic Security in America's Cities: New Municipal Strategies for Asset Building and Financial Empowerment

Outlines city governments' role in poverty alleviation and emerging financial empowerment strategies, including better access to supports and tax credits; safe, affordable financial products and services; and opportunities to leverage savings into assets

Exploring Permanency Rates Within the Southern California Counties of Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego

The term permanency within child welfare is the right for all children to have a childhood with a nurturing and permanent family. For children within foster care, it means a permanent family-based living situation with one of the following: parents, permanent placement with relatives, reunification with parents or adoption (Freundlich et al., 2006). The purpose of this study is to examine the perceived differences in permanency rates within 12 months of entry in child welfare within the Southern California counties of Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego within a 10-year time span. The study will use pre-existing data collected by the California Child Welfare Indicators Project (CCWIP)

E-Commerce and Trans-Atlantic Privacy

For almost a decade, the United States and Europe have anticipated a clash over the protection of personal information. Between the implementation in Europe of comprehensive legal protections pursuant to the directive on data protection and the continued reliance on industry self-regulation in the United States, trans-Atlantic privacy policies have been at odds with each other. The rapid growth in e-commerce is now sparking the long-anticipated trans-Atlantic privacy clash. This Article will first look at the context of American e-commerce and the disjuncture between citizens\u27 privacy and business practices. The Article will then turn to the international context and explore the adverse impact, on the status quo in the United States, of European data protection law as harmonized by Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 Oct. 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data. Following this analysis, the Article will show that the “safe harbor” agreement between the United States Department of Commerce and the European Commission--designed to alleviate the threat of disruption in trans-Atlantic data flows and, in particular, to mollify concerns for the stability of online data transfers--is only a weak, seriously flawed solution for e-commerce. In the end, extra-legal technical measures and contractual mechanisms might minimize privacy conflicts for e-commerce transactions, but an international treaty is likely the only sustainable solution for long-term growth in trans-border commercial interchange

SOCIAL COMMERCE: THE ROLE OF TRUST

The future of e-commerce is changing with the more recent emergence of social commerce. Web 2.0 has affected e-commerce, resulting in the emergence of a new concept known as social commerce. For a long time trust has been considered a challenge for both parties in e-commerce transactions; trust is also now challenging s-commerce. Drawing on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1989) the author analyses trust along with some of the components of social commerce which affect the intention to buy among individuals by proposing and testing Social Commerce Adoption Model (SCAM). This research gathers survey data and applies structural equation modeling (SEM) to analyze the data. The results show trust is influential in s-commerce. The influence of trust is also strong on consumers’ intentions to buy. Limitations and implications are discussed in the end

An Empirical Examination of the Iowa Bar\u27s Approach to Regulating Lawyer Advertising

Since the Supreme Court held the prohibition of lawyer advertising unconstitutional in Bates v. State Bar of Arizonal American lawyers have engaged in heated debate over the appropriateness of advertising for their profession. Although the debate over lawyer advertising-- especially as it applies to mass media-- raises relatively new issues for the profession, the concerns at the heart of the debate are the oldest that lawyers as a profession face. Lawyer advertising at its core is concerned with professionalism : how lawyers, as an organized profession, ought to deliver legal service to the public. Immediately following Bates, most state bar associations proceeded to regulate false and misleading advertisements. Recently, however, concern with the image of lawyers has prompted many states to commence a second wave of attorney advertising regulation. Led by new bar rules in Iowa and Florida, several states, through regulation, have attempted to supress undignified, tasteless, and sleazy lawyer ads. Some have argued that lawyer advertisements have become the graven image of the profession. Indeed, state bar associations-in the spirit of a modern day Moses-often have acted through regulation to curtail or suppress the harsh imagery of lawyers who advertise. Recent regulation has focused particularly on mass media advertising, disclaimers, and maintaining professional dignity in messages to the public. Apart from raising several constitutional questions, this second wave reveals a fundamental tension which underlies the legal profession: Can lawyers make their services widely available to the public while sustaining a high level of quality? Why is the advertising of legal services at odds with sustaining minimal quality delivery of legal services? Further, does the legal profession\u27s perception of dignity necessarily equate to quality of legal service