Faith and Funding: Toward an Expressivist Model of the Establishment Clause

This article seeks to provide an alternative to the polarization that so often characterizes debates about church and state. In Part I, the author suggests that there are good policy reasons for supporting faith-based initiatives, and that these reasons ought to be attractive to liberals and progressives, many of whom have opposed faith-based initiatives. Faith-based social services are, after all, social services, and are often the very types of welfare services that liberals and progressives tend to support. Core religious values--in particular, concern about the less fortunate, a belief in human dignity, and a commitment to the possibility of redemption--reinforce liberal values that appear to have lost ground in modern America. Religious institutions are an integral element of a vital civic society and have an independent normative authority that may permit them to succeed where secular institutions have not. The case for supporting faith-based services does not require proof that faith-based services are better for all; it only requires that they may be better for some. That seems likely, even though solid empirical evidence is not yet available. Several important caveats should be noted. The faith-based initiative may simply be a cover for privatizing public services, and for reducing public support for the most needy. Faith-based institutions and their proponents often attribute problems of poverty to personal moral failings, minimizing the systemic and structural features of those problems. Religious institutions can be a fount of intolerance and prejudice toward nonbelievers generally and women and gays and lesbians in particular. And government support of religious institutions may itself undermine and dilute the effectiveness of religious institutions. Thus, the faith-based initiative is not without significant dangers. But its potential benefits nonetheless provide strong reasons for supporting the concept in principle. In Part II, the author argues that the current constitutional polarization on public aid to religion is also unwarranted. Both the assimilationist and the separationist camps paint with too broad\u27a brush. He suggests an expressivist approach to the Establishment Clause, built upon Justice Sandra Day O\u27Connor\u27s endorsement test, as a mediating principle. The endorsement test asks whether a reasonable observer would interpret challenged government conduct as approving or disapproving religion. It provides that the government must avoid messages that make adherence to religion relevant to political standing in the community. While initially developed to assess government messages and displays, the endorsement test need not be limited to those confines, and in particular provides a critical tool for assessing the constitutionality of government funding. This is because once one acknowledges that some government support of religion is permissible under, and indeed required by, the Constitution, it is not enough to ask whether the government has aided religion. Nor is it sufficient to ask whether the government has been formally neutral, as the assimilationists do. The endorsement test focuses not on the mere fact of funding, but on what the funding expresses. Funding schemes should be invalidated only where they express official approval or disapproval of religion, and thereby send the message that religious adherence is relevant to citizens\u27 standing vis-a-vis their government. The expressivist approach proposed here avoids formalism, pays attention to effects, and takes cognizance of the special status of religion

Family Choice: The Next Step in the Quest for Equal Educational Opportunity?

Various policy issues surrounding educational voucher plans are explored: Who would provide schools under such plans? What rules would govern enrollment (including concerns about one-race schools)? What variety of schooling should be permitted and how would they be evaluated? Voucher plans are compared with other related educational reforms in particular, school finance reform. Federal efforts to experiment with voucher plans are discussed in an Appendix

The New Governance and the Tools of Public Action: An Introduction

A fundamental re-thinking is currently underway throughout the world about how to cope with public problems. Stimulated by popular frustrations with the cost and effectiveness of government programs and by a new-found faith in liberal economic theories, serious questions are being raised about the capabilities, and even the motivations, of public-sector institutions. This type of questioning has spread beyond American political discourse to other parts of the world. Underlying much of this reform surge is a set of theories that portrays government agencies as tightly structured hierarchies insulated from market forces and from effective citizen pressure and therefore free to serve the personal and institutional interests of bureaucrats instead. The heart of this revolution has been a fundamental transformation not just in the scope and scale of government action, but in its basic forms. Instead of relying exclusively on government to solve public problems, a host of other actors is being mobilized as well, sometimes are their own initiative but often in complex partnerships with the state

Possession work on hosted digital consumption objects as consumer ensnarement

This paper extends prior critical discussions of digital prosumption by demonstrating that prosumer reliant online business models represent new ways to valorise consumer labour through the creation of multiple realities whereby digital consumption objects are simultaneously enacted as assests by companies, and as possessions by consumers. We argue that this ontological multiplicity means that consumers’ ‘possession work’ no longer serves to separate these objects from the market sphere, as in prior work. This produces a new form of consumer lock-in, or actually ensnarement as it is consumers’ own efforts to make objects meaningful that keep them in the market, similar to the psychological attachments seen in ‘brand love’, but also incorporating aspects of proprietary tie-ins, and access-based market systems. We further consider the implications of such a system. For companies we portray such ensnarement as an attractive, emerging mechanism for ongoing valorization of ‘free labour’. Yet we also argue that this presents significant consequences for ensnared consumers who may be subject not only to the ongoing financial exploitation of their possession work, but also restrictions on possession. As a broader contribution we highlight how the examination of multiple, potentially conflicting

Rights Markup Extensions for the Protection of Indigenous Knowledge

Indigenous cultures have experienced a renaissance over the past 5-10 years as indigenous communities have recognized the importance of documenting and sharing their cultural heritage and history. This has coincided with the explosion of the internet and the widespread application of multimedia technologies to the construction of large online cultural collections. Together these developments have triggered a demand for copyright protection mechanisms. A number of XML-based markup languages (XrML, ODRL) have been developed to support the expression of rights asssociated with the intellectual property of resources. The MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework standard being developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) aims to standardize such a language to enable the management and protection of intellectual property associated with multimedia content. However it has been widely recognized that modern intellectual property laws, which are rapidly assuming global uniformity, fail to protect indigenous knowledge adequately or to support traditional or customary laws governing rights over indigenous knowledge. This paper considers some of the requirements for the protection of indigenous knowledge and the enforcement of tribal customary laws associated with knowledge, which have been expressed by Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. It assesses the ability of the two major XML-based rights markup languages (XrML and ODRL) to satisfy these requirements and suggests extensions to these languages to improve their support for indigenous knowledge protection. The aim of this paper is to provide a starting point which will encourage input, feedback and suggestions from indigenous communities. This will enable a clearer understanding of their diverse requirements with respect to the protection of intellectual property and traditional knowledge and the development of a satisfactory solution through future collaboration and consultation. Given a standardized machine-understandable representation of rights information, the utopian dream of trusted systems - automated rights enforcement and secure transactions involving both indigenous and non-indigenous resources - moves one step closer. But more importantly, the recognition of customary law and the rights of indigenous cultures within such systems, will lead to greater cross-cultural understanding, respect and tolerance and the promotion of indigenous social, cultural and economic development

Intrusion-Tolerant Middleware: the MAFTIA approach

The pervasive interconnection of systems all over the world has given computer services a significant socio-economic value, which can be affected both by accidental faults and by malicious activity. It would be appealing to address both problems in a seamless manner, through a common approach to security and dependability. This is the proposal of intrusion tolerance, where it is assumed that systems remain to some extent faulty and/or vulnerable and subject to attacks that can be successful, the idea being to ensure that the overall system nevertheless remains secure and operational. In this paper, we report some of the advances made in the European project MAFTIA, namely in what concerns a basis of concepts unifying security and dependability, and a modular and versatile architecture, featuring several intrusion-tolerant middleware building blocks. We describe new architectural constructs and algorithmic strategies, such as: the use of trusted components at several levels of abstraction; new randomization techniques; new replica control and access control algorithms. The paper concludes by exemplifying the construction of intrusion-tolerant applications on the MAFTIA middleware, through a transaction support servic

School Vouchers and Religious Liberty: Seven Questions from Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance

In the immediate aftermath of the Revolutionary War, many upstanding citizens of the fledgling state of Virginia were not pleased. They were, in fact, appalled by the decline they perceived in the state of public morals. Newspaper editorials, sermons, and speeches in public assemblies resounded with references to the recent upsurge in gambling, whoring, cockfighting, and public drunkenness. That such departures from the straight and narrow are not uncommon in postwar periods, following all the social dislocations of military mobilization, was no consolation to Virginians eager to show a doubting world that government by the people could work. The root of the problem, in the view of many, was that the churches of the new commonwealth no longer enjoyed the influence or support they had taken for granted during the colonial period. In particular, the Episcopalian Church, formerly the colony\u27s established Church of England, was suffering. Many of its splendid edifices had been damaged in the fighting; fully half of its clergy were now exiled or discredited former tories. Those ministers who remained were having trouble eliciting sufficient voluntary contributions from congregations unaccustomed to that method of ecclesiastical support