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Author: Jon Elster
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610441850
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341
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Book Description
Notions of justice and fairness are central to the American belief that the pursuit of a healthy and productive life is the right of all citizens. Yet in the real world there are seldom sufficient resources to meet the needs of everyone, and institutions are routinely forced to make difficult decisions regarding who will be favored and who will not. Local Justice in America is an insightful look into how selections are made in four critical areas: college admissions, kidney transplants, employee layoffs, and legalized immigration. This volume's case studies survey the history and modern rationale behind seemingly enigmatic allocation systems, chronicling the political and ethical debates, occasional scandals, and judicial battles that have shaped them. Though these selection processes differ significantly, each reflects a bitter struggle between opposing—and equally intense—principles of local justice. For example, are admissions officers who use special points to foster student diversity less fair than those who rely exclusively on scholastic achievement? How did the system of personal discretion among doctors selecting transplant patients come to be viewed by the public as more inequitable than compassionate? Does the use of seniority as a gauge in layoffs violate equal opportunity laws or provide employers with their only objective and neutral criterion? How have partisan interest groups repeatedly shifted immigration quotas between the extremes of xenophobia and altruism? In framing chapters, editor Jon Elster draws upon these studies to speculate on the unique nature of the American value system. Arguing that race matters deeply in all considerations of local justice, he discusses how our society's assessment of neediness balances on the often uneasy compromises between the desire to reward deserving individuals and the call to strengthen opportunities for disadvantaged groups. Well informed and stimulating, Local Justice in America speaks directly to policy debates in the fields of health, education, work, and immigration, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the fundamental social issues that affect our daily welfare.
Author: Jon Elster
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610441850
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341
Get Book Here
Book Description
Notions of justice and fairness are central to the American belief that the pursuit of a healthy and productive life is the right of all citizens. Yet in the real world there are seldom sufficient resources to meet the needs of everyone, and institutions are routinely forced to make difficult decisions regarding who will be favored and who will not. Local Justice in America is an insightful look into how selections are made in four critical areas: college admissions, kidney transplants, employee layoffs, and legalized immigration. This volume's case studies survey the history and modern rationale behind seemingly enigmatic allocation systems, chronicling the political and ethical debates, occasional scandals, and judicial battles that have shaped them. Though these selection processes differ significantly, each reflects a bitter struggle between opposing—and equally intense—principles of local justice. For example, are admissions officers who use special points to foster student diversity less fair than those who rely exclusively on scholastic achievement? How did the system of personal discretion among doctors selecting transplant patients come to be viewed by the public as more inequitable than compassionate? Does the use of seniority as a gauge in layoffs violate equal opportunity laws or provide employers with their only objective and neutral criterion? How have partisan interest groups repeatedly shifted immigration quotas between the extremes of xenophobia and altruism? In framing chapters, editor Jon Elster draws upon these studies to speculate on the unique nature of the American value system. Arguing that race matters deeply in all considerations of local justice, he discusses how our society's assessment of neediness balances on the often uneasy compromises between the desire to reward deserving individuals and the call to strengthen opportunities for disadvantaged groups. Well informed and stimulating, Local Justice in America speaks directly to policy debates in the fields of health, education, work, and immigration, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the fundamental social issues that affect our daily welfare.
Author: Jon Elster
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
ISBN: 1610441834
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 294
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Book Description
The well-being of individuals routinely depends on their success in obtaining goods and avoiding burdens distributed by society. Local Justice offers the first systematic analysis of the principles and procedures used in dispensing "local justice" in situations as varied as the admission of students to college, the choice of patients for organ transplants, the selection of workers for layoffs, and the induction of men into the army. A prominent theorist in the field of rational choice and decision making, Jon Elster develops a rich selection of empirical examples and case studies to demonstrate the diversity of procedures used by institutions that mete out local justice. From this revealing material Elster fashions a conceptual framework for understanding why institutions make these crucial allocations in the ways they do. Elster's investigation discloses the many complex and varied approaches of such decision-making bodies as selective service and adoption agencies, employers and universities, prison and immigration authorities. What are the conflicting demands placed on these institutions by the needs of applicants, the recommendations of external agencies, and their own organizational imperatives? Often, as Elster shows, methods of allocation may actually aggravate social problems. For instance, the likelihood that handicapped or minority infants will be adopted is further decreased when agencies apply the same stringent screening criteria—exclusion of people over forty, single parents, working wives, and low-income families—that they use for more sought-after babies. Elster proposes a classification of the main principles and procedures used to match goods with individuals, charts the interactions among these mechanisms of local justice, and evaluates them in terms of fairness and efficiency. From his empirical groundwork, Elster builds an innovative analysis of the historical processes by which, at given times and under given circumstances, preferences become principles and principles become procedures. Local Justice concludes with a comparison of local justice systems with major contemporary theories of social justice—utilitarianism, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia—and discusses the "common-sense conception of justice" held by professional decision makers such as lawyers, economists, and politicians. The difference between what we say about justice and how we actually dispense it is the illuminating principle behind Elster's book. A perceptive and cosmopolitan study, Local Justice is a seminal work for all those concerned with the formation of ethical policy and social welfare—philosophers, economists, political scientists, health care professionals, policy makers, and educators.
Author: Danielle F. Jung
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108888607
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 95
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Book Description
What are the social and political consequences of poor state governance and low state legitimacy? Under what conditions does lynching – lethal, extralegal group violence to punish offenses to the community – become an acceptable practice? We argue lynching emerges when neither the state nor its challengers have a monopoly over legitimate authority. When authority is contested or ambiguous, mass punishment for transgressions can emerge that is public, brutal, and requires broad participation. Using new cross-national data, we demonstrate lynching is a persistent problem in dozens of countries over the last four decades. Drawing on original survey and interview data from Haiti and South Africa, we show how lynching emerges and becomes accepted. Specifically, support for lynching most likely occurs in one of three conditions: when states fail to provide governance, when non-state actors provide social services, or when neighbors must rely on self-help.
Author: William J. Stuntz
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674051750
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 425
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Book Description
Rule of law has vanished in America’s criminal justice system. Prosecutors decide whom to punish; most accused never face a jury; policing is inconsistent; plea bargaining is rampant; and draconian sentencing fills prisons with mostly minority defendants. A leading criminal law scholar looks to history for the roots of these problems—and solutions.
Author: Peter Edelman
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 162097553X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 223
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Book Description
Awarded "Special Recognition" by the 2018 Robert F. Kennedy Book & Journalism Awards Finalist for the American Bar Association's 2018 Silver Gavel Book Award Named one of the "10 books to read after you've read Evicted" by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel "Essential reading for anyone trying to understand the demands of social justice in America."—Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy Winner of a special Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the book that Evicted author Matthew Desmond calls "a powerful investigation into the ways the United States has addressed poverty . . . lucid and troubling" In one of the richest countries on Earth it has effectively become a crime to be poor. For example, in Ferguson, Missouri, the U.S. Department of Justice didn't just expose racially biased policing; it also exposed exorbitant fines and fees for minor crimes that mainly hit the city's poor, African American population, resulting in jail by the thousands. As Peter Edelman explains in Not a Crime to Be Poor, in fact Ferguson is everywhere: the debtors' prisons of the twenty-first century. The anti-tax revolution that began with the Reagan era led state and local governments, starved for revenues, to squeeze ordinary people, collect fines and fees to the tune of 10 million people who now owe $50 billion. Nor is the criminalization of poverty confined to money. Schoolchildren are sent to court for playground skirmishes that previously sent them to the principal's office. Women are evicted from their homes for calling the police too often to ask for protection from domestic violence. The homeless are arrested for sleeping in the park or urinating in public. A former aide to Robert F. Kennedy and senior official in the Clinton administration, Peter Edelman has devoted his life to understanding the causes of poverty. As Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy has said, "No one has been more committed to struggles against impoverishment and its cruel consequences than Peter Edelman." And former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert writes, "If there is one essential book on the great tragedy of poverty and inequality in America, this is it."
Author: Shahid M. Shahidullah
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 9780761840985
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
This book is a systematic examination of the nature of America's crime and criminal justice system as defined by its policy-makers at different times and in disparate contexts of social and political realities. By examining legislative documents and court cases and analyzing federal and state policy developments in such areas as drug crimes, juvenile crimes, sex crimes, and cyber crimes, this book provides a historically embedded and policy relevant understanding of how America's system of criminal justice was born, how it has grown, and where it is going. Book jacket.
Author: Leonard Territo
Publisher: Prentice Hall
ISBN: 9780130981684
Category : Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
This volume it the most comprehensive, current and applied introduction to criminal justice in the field today. The authors' collective criminal justice experience as jail administrators, police administrators, attorneys, educators and trainers provides a unique perspective into relevant criminal justice topics. The book provides real world examples with a focus on the human dimension within the major components of the Criminal Justice System that illuminate the abstract aspects of the material. The authors examine crime and justice in America, the substantive criminal law, the law of criminal procedure and the rights of the criminally accused, the nature and distribution of crime and its victims, police operations, issues and trends in policing, the dynamics of the criminal court, pretrial procedures, the criminal trial, sentencing, appeals, and the death penalty, jails and detention, correctional institutions, probation, parole, and community corrections, juvenile justice, and drugs, crime and the criminal justice system. For individuals interested in a comprehensive look at America's criminal justice system.
Author: Shima Baradaran Baughman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107131367
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
Examines the causes for mass incarceration of Americans and calls for the reform of the bail system. Traces the history of bail, how it has come to be an oppressive tool of the courts, and makes recommendations for reforming the bail system and alleviating the mass incarceration problem.
Author: Lisa Magarrell
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812221138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
On November 3, 1979, in the Morningside neighborhood of Greensboro, North Carolina, a caravan of Ku Klux Klan and Nazi Party members arrived on the scene of an anti-Klan protest. After a scuffle, some of the Klan and Nazis opened fire on the mostly unarmed, racially mixed gathering of political activists, labor organizers, and children. While news cameras filmed, five protesters were killed and ten were wounded. Police officers were notably absent at the time of the attack. State and federal criminal trials resulted in acquittals of the shooters by all-white juries. The City of Greensboro consistently denied any responsibility for the events. In 2001, Greensboro took its first groundbreaking steps toward confronting the past through an independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Inspired by South Africa's efforts to tackle injustice and seek reconciliation on a larger scale, Greensboro explicitly and controversially connected its experience to other contexts of injustice and launched a novel undertaking for a U.S. community. Learning from Greensboro provides an insider's look at the truth and reconciliation process, including how it worked, the challenges it faced, and the local context in which it existed. The book offers valuable practical insights into the process of truth-telling and gives testimony to the possibility that denial, indifference, and hidden histories can be made to yield to a deeper and lasting justice.
Author: Richard Rothstein
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631492861
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
New York Times Bestseller • Notable Book of the Year • Editors' Choice Selection One of Bill Gates’ “Amazing Books” of the Year One of Publishers Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Year Longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction An NPR Best Book of the Year Winner of the Hillman Prize for Nonfiction Gold Winner • California Book Award (Nonfiction) Finalist • Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) Finalist • Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize This “powerful and disturbing history” exposes how American governments deliberately imposed racial segregation on metropolitan areas nationwide (New York Times Book Review). Widely heralded as a “masterful” (Washington Post) and “essential” (Slate) history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law offers “the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation” (William Julius Wilson). Exploding the myth of de facto segregation arising from private prejudice or the unintended consequences of economic forces, Rothstein describes how the American government systematically imposed residential segregation: with undisguised racial zoning; public housing that purposefully segregated previously mixed communities; subsidies for builders to create whites-only suburbs; tax exemptions for institutions that enforced segregation; and support for violent resistance to African Americans in white neighborhoods. A groundbreaking, “virtually indispensable” study that has already transformed our understanding of twentieth-century urban history (Chicago Daily Observer), The Color of Law forces us to face the obligation to remedy our unconstitutional past.
