Clan Mothers and Founding Fathers: The Impact of the Iroquois Confederacy on American Constitutionalism

The American Constitutional tradition was influenced by many different sources, such as Scripture, English Common Law, and the governmental structure of ancient Greece and Rome. However, many Constitutional scholars often fail to realize that the Founding Fathers looked beyond Europe for inspiration. One source to which they may have turned was the Iroquois Great Law of Peace. The Great Law of Peace was the first constitution in North America, potentially as early as 1450, and passed down via oral tradition until it was written down in the 1880s. The Great Law of Peace brought together the Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Cayuga nations together peacefully, with a sixth tribe, the Tuscarora, joining around 1722. The Iroquois continue to govern themselves under the Great Law even today. This thesis will seek to understand the impact that the Iroquois Confederacy may have had on the American constitutional tradition

Autism and Communication: A Phenomenology of Parents’ Perspectives

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by language impairments and are often treated with a variety of communication interventions. In addition to these interventions, the parents of autistic children have to learn how to care for and communicate with their children on a daily basis, especially when their children do not speak. This study made use of phenomenological investigation techniques to explore (1) what parents understand about communication with their nonspeaking autistic children and (2) what particular strategies they find to be effective. Six mothers of autistic children were interviewed, and resulting themes were divided according to parents’ understandings and the formal and informal strategies they use. Implications for practice and future research are given

Autism and Communication: A Phenomenology of Parents\u27 Perspectives

Undergraduate Applie

Lawyers in the Perfect Storm

The multiple corporate collapses and scandals of recent years, for which "Enron" is a convenient shorthand, resulted from a perfect storm in which regulatory oversight, the law of fiduciary duty, gatekeepers, market discipline, and contractual incentives all failed to prevent gross self-dealing, conflicts of interest, and deception, or themselves produced perverse consequences. The story of this simultaneous failure of the structures in place since the New Deal and before, has received considerable attention in both the popular and scholarly literature, but is summarized here to provide a context for consideration of the contributions that lawyers made to the perfect storm. The contribution of lawyers has received less attention than that of gatekeepers such as auditors and research analysts, perhaps because their complex role as both advocates and gatekeepers does not lend itself to a relatively simple morality tale, as did the failures of the auditors and analysts. This article attempts to identify the various types of failures by lawyers in these cases, and argues that there is no single way to describe or explain them; lawyers contributed to the perfect storm in at least several different ways. This complexity suggests that the SEC's new professional standards for lawyers, while perhaps helpful, do not provide a comprehensive solution to the problems that produced a significant contribution by lawyers to the perfect storm.

Lawyers in the Moral Maze

This article overviews the various forms of lawyer complicity in illegal or immoral behavior by corporate managers in the corporate scandals of the last three years, but focuses primarily on the question of why lawyers so often seemed willing to engage in or ignore behavior that presumably violated their own personal moral codes (whether religious or secular) as well as their professional role morality. The article draws on Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes (1988) for an answer derived from the sociology of corporate bureaucracies. Jackall's case studies of corporate managers found that managers adhered to the moral "rules-in-use" developed in their social setting to facilitate their own survival and success. These rules emphasized an ethos of unrelenting pragmatism, flexibility and cynicism that placed great weight on group loyalty. By adopting their social setting's actual moral rules-in-use, managers tended to bracket other moral considerations, removing such considerations as a potential obstacle to illegal or immoral behavior. Applying Jackall's concept of socially-defined moral rules-in-use to corporate in-house counsel and lawyers in large firms, the article concludes that the social settings in which lawyers operate can produce a similar bracketing of moral concerns and, even more important, the type of professional role morality that should check managerial wrongdoing. The potential impact of the SEC's new professional standards for lawyers is assessed pessimistically in light of this phenomenon.

Competing Visions of the Corporation in Catholic Social Thought

Catholic Social Thought (CST) is coherent body of principles concerning the organization of social and economic life drawing on the inspiration of natural law, Thomism, the Gospel and the tradition of Christian personalism. While valuing the creative energy of capitalism and its contributions to the production of wealth, it is often highly critical of the inequalities generated by capitalism, its tendency to promote materialistic consumerism and capital's devaluation of the dignity of work. While not easily characterizable as "right" or "left", CST thinking about corporate social responsibility and corporate governance has become split between interpretations emphasizing the importance of economic liberty to human dignity (a central CST value) and those deriving from a much more communitarian conception of that dignity. This paper contests the neoconsevative positions articulated principally by Michael Novak, and identifies the core CST premises that lead to a much more communitarian vision of the corporation. In so doing, it emphasizes affinities between that vision and secular views of the corporation derived from the critical and legal progressive traditions.