In Memoriam, Phillip Blumberg (1919–2021)

Phillip I. Blumberg served as Dean of the University of Connecticut School of Law from 1974 to 1984. These remarks were first shared, via email, with the University of Connecticut School of Law’s faculty after Dean Blumberg’s death. They have been lightly edited for publication

Emblems of Federalism

This Article reviews non-state federalism-more accurately not only state federalism - sometimes called pluralism or essential federalism, and contrasts it with conventional political federalism referred to here as monumental federalism and presented through a description of a painting by Erastus Field

Chapter 7 - Reflections on the Scholarship of Elizabeth B. Clark

Elizabeth Clark\u27s essays on early nineteenth-century reform movements make a compelling case that abolitionists and feminists alike understood individual rights from a profoundly religious perspective. Clark also demonstrates how these reformers advocated the protection of so-called natural rights for enslaved African-Americans and white women in the vivid and fervently emotional language of evangelical revivalism. Broader cultural and intellectual trends of resistance to governmental and clerical authority, trends rooted in liberal and evangelical Protestantism, Clark argues, helped fuel attacks on slavery and gender inequality. Rejecting other historians\u27 portrayals of the antebellum reformers as primarily secular in orientation, Clark makes the arresting, and well-substantiated, assertion that For a time liberal religious thought became the primary carrier of notions of individual integrity critical to liberal political theory. Antebellum reformers retrieved pre-Revolutionary language of natural rights and natural law and critiques of excessive state power and resurrected a Reformation-era faith in the epistemological reliability of individual conscience and private judgment, fusing them all into a set of moral conventions which over time . . . have become incorporated as a persistent strand in our rights tradition, notably the Thirteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866

Evaluation Research and Institutional Pressures: Challenges in Public-Nonprofit Contracting

This article examines the connection between program evaluation research and decision-making by public managers. Drawing on neo-institutional theory, a framework is presented for diagnosing the pressures and conditions that lead alternatively toward or away the rational use of evaluation research. Three cases of public-nonprofit contracting for the delivery of major programs are presented to clarify the way coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures interfere with a sound connection being made between research and implementation. The article concludes by considering how public managers can respond to the isomorphic pressures in their environment that make it hard to act on data relating to program performance.This publication is Hauser Center Working Paper No. 23. The Hauser Center Working Paper Series was launched during the summer of 2000. The Series enables the Hauser Center to share with a broad audience important works-in-progress written by Hauser Center scholars and researchers