Courts and legislatures often grant rights to clients of social programs so that the clients can protect their own interests in the programs. Previous research has questioned whether rights provide effective protections for clients' interests. In this study, I examine parental rights of school choice in Britain, showing that rights can provide effective protections for clients' interests under some conditions. However, this study also reveals the dilemma of rights: rights that are effective in protecting individual client interests can also undermine a social program's ability to serve the collective interests of all clients.

In this paper we use a survey concerning a hypothetical taxpayer to analyze how certain features of the enforcement of the tax laws shape perceptions of the risks of detection and penalties for tax noncompliance. We also examine the effects of these perceptions on intended noncompliance behavior. Our findings provide strong support for various hypotheses concerning the effect of the enforcement process on perceptions. We also find, in contrast to prior results, that the perceived risk of criminal prosecution appears to act as a powerful deterrent to noncompliance. We explain why earlier studies might have failed to detect a deterrent role for the severity of punishment.

In the last two decades, federal judges in virtually all states have ordered state governments to alter dramatically the way they operate such institutions as prisons, hospitals, and mental health facilities. The research presented here seeks to improve our understanding of the budgetary linkage between the federal judiciary and state governments by examining the influence of court-ordered prison reform on state expenditures for corrections. Generally, the results indicate that the judiciary has had a limited but positive impact on capital outlays in one-half of the states examined. The influence on state operating expenditures for corrections has been even less noticeable. The analysis suggests that the judiciary's ability to exercise “the power of the purse” is tempered by the dynamics of state-level budgetary processes and the willingness of courts to adopt a comprehensive view of prison reform.

The judiciary & has no influence over either the sword or the purse.

—Alexander Hamilton

A state is not at liberty to afford its citizens only those constitutional rights which fit comfortably within its budget.

—U.S. District Judge

Frank M. Johnson, Jr.

This paper examines William Taggart's article on the judicial power of the purse as it affects American prisons and jails. It argues that the central concerns in this area have involved issues of judicial propriety and judicial capacity rather than, as Taggart argues, whether judicially mandated expenditures disrupt normal budget processes. It then takes issue with Taggart's conclusions that the courts have had little impact on prisons and jails. Using his evidence, this paper argues that the courts have had a significant effect in transforming prisons and jails in at least one region of the country, the South.

In 1985, laws mandating the wearing of automobile seatbelts went into effect in Illinois and in Yugoslavia. Although the form of the legislation was similar in both jurisdictions, the public response to the laws was very different in the two societies. In Illinois, there was public opposition, a protracted legal challenge to the law, and minimal enforcement by the police. In Yugoslavia, there was no public or legal challenge to the law yet strict enforcement. Compliance, however, was much greater in America than in Yugoslavia. Since previous studies of the impact of seatbelt laws in the United States and in other countries had found patterns of compliance that were similar to those in Illinois, the Yugoslav situation is anomalous. This unexpected finding raises questions concerning the importance of cultural context on the effectiveness of seatbelt laws, on the basic views of law in the two societies, on problems in testing deterrence theory cross-culturally, and on the problems and benefits of comparative research on the impact of legislation.

This paper examines the sentencing behavior of judges in a context characterized by significant legislative and social change. Data from Georgia are used to explore the ways in which judges accommodated their sentencing practices to a general crusade against drug use and to specific legislation that identified trafficking as criminal, set harsh penalties, and limited judicial discretion. The results suggest that judges selectively mitigated the harshness embodied in legislative pronouncements. The extent of mitigation depended on when sentencing occurred, the offense under consideration, and the offender's race. The impact of legislative changes appeared to be shortlived for the initial incarceration decision and more sustained for outcomes involving imprisonment, but modest for both. The target of symbolic policies, the trafficker, bore the brunt of increased punitiveness, but some spillover severity affected less serious drug offenders. Finally, the effect of race on sentences was influenced by legislative changes. During the height of legislative activity, differential treatment by race increased, further disadvantaging blacks, particularly black traffickers.

This paper examines the relationship between lynchings and executions of blacks in North Carolina and Georgia between 1882 and 1930 as well as before and after the political disenfranchisement of blacks in both states. The findings are used to assess two competing models of the relationship between these different types of lethal sanctioning. No supporting evidence is found for a “substitution model,” which predicts a negative relationship between lynchings and executions. The evidence for Georgia, especially for the pre-disenfranchisement period, does offer moderate support for the “conflict model,” which hypothesizes a positive association between lynchings and executions. Although the direction of the relationship between lynchings and executions was insensitive to disenfranchisement in both states, our analysis reveals that total lethal sanctioning (lynchings plus executions) did decline in Georgia after several restrictive voting statutes were implemented. No similar effect is observed for North Carolina.