The Best for Last: The Timing of U.S. Supreme Court Decisions

This Article investigates the hypothesis that the most important and, often, controversial and divisive cases—so called big cases—are disproportionately decided at the end of June. We define a big case in one of four ways: front-page coverage in the New York Times; front-page and other coverage in four national newspapers (the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Tribune); the number of amicus curiae briefs filed in a case; and the number of subsequent citations by the Supreme Court to its decision in a case. We find a statistically significant association between each measure of a big case and end-of-term decisions even after controlling for the month of oral argument (cases argued later in the term are more likely to be decided near the end of the term) and case attributes (e.g., dissents and concurrences) that increase the time it takes to decide a case. We also speculate on why big cases cluster at the end of the term. One possibility is legacy and reputational concerns: when writing what they think will be a major decision, the Justices and their law clerks take more time polishing until the last minute with the hope of promoting their reputations. Another is that the end-of-term clustering of the most important cases may tend to diffuse media coverage of and other commentary regarding any particular case, and thus spare the Justices unwanted criticism just before they leave Washington for their summer recess

Get Thee to a Shelter

Psychotherapy and surrogate care, the two basic strategies for providing services to battered women, are criticized against outcome evidence of their reliability and efficacy. Surrogate care is shown to be the more desirable service approach. Some implications of this conclusion for the helping professions are enumerated

Cleavage in American Attitudes toward Social Welfare

Opinion polls probing both the narrow and broad senses of social welfare among Americans indicate hardly any substantial differences over crucial social sentiments among a variety of groups with at least theoretically divergent interests: rich and poor, men and women, blacks and whites, a variety of ethnic groups, union and nonunion households. The items mainly concern the provision of welfare to the poor through AFDC, now TANF, and Food Stamps but also cover OASDHI. Consistently over more than sixty five years of systematic opinion polling, there is an astonishing consensus, so large in fact that it may undermine any effort to move the American citizenry into a more congregational series of provisions for each other. In fact, the consensus is antagonistic to the public welfare. Americans by their very actions, opinions, and codified intentions have canceled the notions of class and caste in subverting a generous welfare state

Our Town : A Case Study of Ideology and the Private Social Welfare Sector

This case study explores the relationship between ideology and the performance of the voluntary social welfare sector in Western New York. Data were collected from the directors of 22 of the largest and most important voluntary social welfare agencies relating to their own social attitudes and those of their boards. The common expression of similar agency attitudes toward a variety of social policies were in narrow conformity with the conservative values of the current national administration. The common core of conservative values, suggesting that the agencies perform an ideological role within the community in addition to their service role, may explain much of their decision to ignore great and growing social needs. Yet most troubling for the possibility of liberal reform, the ideological commitments of the voluntary social welfare sector and the social preference voiced through its social service programs may be the widely-shared and regnant values of the contemporary United States

The Sensory Core and the Medieval Foundations of Early Modern Perceptual Theory

This article seeks the origin, in the theories of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Descartes, and Berkeley, of two-stage theories of spatial perception, which hold that visual perception involves both an immediate representation of the proximal stimulus in a two-dimensional ‘‘sensory core’’ and also a subsequent perception of the three dimensional world. The works of Ibn al-Haytham, Descartes, and Berkeley already frame the major theoretical options that guided visual theory into the twentieth century. The field of visual perception was the first area of what we now call psychology to apply mathematics, through geometrical models as used by Euclid, Ptolemy, Ibn al-Haytham, and Descartes (among others). The article shows that Kepler’s discovery of the retinal image, which revolutionized visual anatomy and entailed fundamental changes in visual physiology, did not alter the basic structure of theories of spatial vision. These changes in visual physiology are advanced especially in Descartes' Dioptrics and his L'Homme. Berkeley develops a radically empirist theory vision, according to which visual perception of depth is learned through associative processes that rely on the sense of touch. But Descartes and Berkeley share the assertion that there is a two-dimensional sensory core that is in principle available to consciousness. They also share the observation that we don't usually perceived this core, but find depth and distance to be phenomenally immediate, a point they struggle to accommodate theoretically. If our interpretation is correct, it was not a change in the theory of the psychology of vision that engendered the idea of a sensory core, but rather the introduction of the theory into a new metaphysical context

First Records for \u3ci\u3eAeshna Sitchensis\u3c/i\u3e (Odonata: Aeshnidae) and \u3ci\u3eEnallagma Clausum\u3c/i\u3e (Odonata: Coenagrionidae), and a Northwestern Record for the State-Endangered \u3ci\u3eSomatochlora Incurvata\u3c/i\u3e (Odonata: Corduliidae) in Wisconsin

While surveying for Odonata in coastal peatlands and associated shoreline areas adjacent to Lake Superior in Wisconsin, we documented populations of two new state record species, the zig-zag darner (Aeshna sitchensis Hagen) and the alkali bluet (Enallagma clausum Morse). We also located a robust population of the state-endangered incurvate emerald (Somatochlora incurvata Walker) at the northwestern edge of the known range of this species. Adults and exuviae of A. sitchensis and S. incurvata were found at an insular fen on Stockton Island, Ashland County, within the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore (AINL). Breeding of both species had occurred in areas of the fen where small pools had dried by summer. Additionally, a single adult male A. sitchensis was collected in the City of Superior in Douglas County. Adult E. clausum were found at two sites: on the Lake Superior beach near the mouth of the Sand River within the AINL in Bayfield County, and along the northeast shore of Allouez Bay in the City of Superior in Douglas County