Hidden Nondefense: Partisanship in State Attorneys General Amicus Briefs and the Need for Transparency

In all fifty states, the State Attorney General (SAG)—as the state’s chief legal officer—is charged with defending state laws that are challenged in court. If an SAG declines to defend or challenges a state law on the ground that it is unconstitutional—an action scholars describe as “nondefense”— the SAG ordinarily will disclose this decision to the public. This Essay discusses a hidden form of nondefense that can occur when SAGs file amicus curiae briefs on behalf of their states in matters before the U.S. Supreme Court. Surprisingly, some SAGs have joined multistate amicus briefs that support invalidating other states’ laws without disclosing that similar state or local laws exist in the SAGs’ own jurisdictions. This Essay explores this problem through analysis of multistate amicus briefs filed in the 2017 Supreme Court term. It proposes requiring that SAGs disclose relevant laws from their state when they file amicus briefs on behalf of their state with the Supreme Court

A tale of two cities: Annapolis and St. Augustine balancing preservation and community values in an era of rising seas

Annapolis, Maryland, and St. Augustine, Florida, are colonial cities on the East Coast of the United States with national historic landmark designations recognizing the strong blends of natural and cultural resources that make each community unique. Annapolis faces nuisance flooding that is challenging the above-ground resources and the natural settings and cultural frameworks that support and enhance them. St. Augustine has witnessed dozens of hurricanes and frequent coastal flooding, impacting the delicate balance of natural and cultural resources in a fast-growing population with significant vulnerabilities. The Federal Emergency Management Agency provides a model for determining “community value” in cultural resource hazard mitigation planning. These communities can prioritize the protection of historic places threatened by natural disasters by comparing that model against the United States Secretary of the Interior’s factors for determining historic integrity. This framework can serve as a model approach for evaluating public sentiment for the protection and preservation of historic places within the larger context of disaster preparedness and recovery. This can enable communities to evaluate and prioritize places that matter to prepare for and recover from rising waters

Global Diversity Management: Towards a Conceptual Framework

[Excerpt] Compared to research on cross-national differences in diversity management, more research has been conducted within the second key area of global diversity management – that on the effective management of culturally diverse teams and organizations, and on the development of global competence among employees. Indeed, research on multicultural teams (e.g. Earley and Gibson, 2002), global competence (e.g. Chang and Tharenou, 2004; Earley and Peterson, 2004), and conflict management in multicultural groups (e.g. Barkema et al., 2003) has been emerging in the last decade; it simply has not been labelled a part of global diversity management per se. However, to date, there are no unifying frameworks for studying global diversity, with the exception of one by Mor Barak (2000), which focuses on the connection between subsidiaries and the larger communities in which they are embedded. While we agree that this is an important issue, many leaders of global firms first want to know how to manage global diversity within the confines of their organization. Thus, one of our goals in introducing this special issue on global diversity is to propose one such framework, to serve two primary aims: (a) to provide a framework within which to situate the papers that appear in this special issue; and (b) to stimulate future research in the area. In what follows, we briefly describe this framework, and then we introduce the papers for the special issue

The Supreme Court As Risk Manager: An Analysis of Skinner

Examining a recent case in which the U.S. Supreme Court approved the collection of blood and urine samples from railroad employees, the authors conclude that, in attempting to improve railroad safety, both majority and minority opinions reflected undue emphasis on technical issues and inadequate attention to the intangible social values underlying traditional Constitutional rights to privacy

Social conformity and autism spectrum disorder : a child-friendly take on a classic study

Perhaps surprisingly, given the importance of conformity as a theoretical construct in social psychology and the profound implications autism has for social function, little research has been done on whether autism is associated with the propensity to conform to a social majority. This study is a modern, child-friendly implementation of the classic Asch conformity studies. The performance of 15 children with autism was compared to that of 15 typically developing children on a line judgement task. Children were matched for age, gender and numeracy and literacy ability. In each trial, the child had to say which of three lines a comparison line matched in length. On some trials, children were misled as to what most people thought the answer was. Children with autism were much less likely to conform in the misleading condition than typically developing children. This finding was replicated using a continuous measure of autism traits, the Autism Quotient questionnaire, which showed that autism traits negatively correlated with likelihood to conform in the typically developing group. This study demonstrates the resistance of children with autism to social pressure

The Centrality of Variability: How society shapes patterns of aging

Increasing variability is a hallmark of aging populations. Although demographic trends are often described in terms of average experiences, in this paper we argue that variability in the health experiences of older men and women is key to understanding aging. The variations in outcomes among older people are not merely nuisances obscuring the more salient averages and trends. The deviations from the mean are a central part of the story: the patterning of these variations reveals factors that influence health for everyone and indicates what sort of advances in healthy aging might be possible under optimal circumstances.Aging, demography

Discovering Functional Communities in Dynamical Networks

Many networks are important because they are substrates for dynamical systems, and their pattern of functional connectivity can itself be dynamic -- they can functionally reorganize, even if their underlying anatomical structure remains fixed. However, the recent rapid progress in discovering the community structure of networks has overwhelmingly focused on that constant anatomical connectivity. In this paper, we lay out the problem of discovering_functional communities_, and describe an approach to doing so. This method combines recent work on measuring information sharing across stochastic networks with an existing and successful community-discovery algorithm for weighted networks. We illustrate it with an application to a large biophysical model of the transition from beta to gamma rhythms in the hippocampus.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figures, Springer "Lecture Notes in Computer Science" style. Forthcoming in the proceedings of the workshop "Statistical Network Analysis: Models, Issues and New Directions", at ICML 2006. Version 2: small clarifications, typo corrections, added referenc