An appeal to public intellectual should have special resonance in Eastern and in Central Europe—a part of the world where former dissident writers and intellectuals have become presidents, ministers, and chairs of parliaments, and lawyers once persecuted for opposition to regimes have become chairs of constitutional courts and tribunals. As a matter of fact, Eastern and Central Europe have produced many great intellectuals, as evidenced by a quick check of the birthplaces of Nobel Prize winners. It is also a place where a distinctive social class, the intelligentsia, was considered to have a particular mission to govern the souls and spirits of nations in the name of Freedom and Justice. Where better then to debate the role of intellectuals in answering the big questions concerning democracy and freedom, and indeed in moving the world in that direction!

Gays and lesbians have recently turned to the courts and the law for recognition of their families. Some of the most successful cases are those won by a gay or lesbian “second-parent” of a child whose biological or legally adoptive parent is his or her partner. The court opinions granting these second-parent adoptions have often portrayed these petitioners as similar to an idealized heterosexual family unit, albeit with two same-sex parents. In this study, 20 parents who successfully pursued a second-parent adoption were interviewed to examine their experiences with the legal system. Results indicate that these petitioners did not envision themselves as similar to heterosexual families and resisted attempts by state actors who tried to formulate them as such. The literature on legal consciousness and pragmatism is used to analyze the respondents' experiences.

While many of the decisions of federal district court judges involve the routine application of settled legal rules, a significant minority of their decisions present the judges with the opportunity to engage in judicial policy making. A considerable body of literature suggests that when faced with policy-making opportunities, the policy preferences of the judges exert a significant impact on the nature of those decisions. The present study explores the question of whose preferences are manifested in the policy-relevant decisions of the district court judges. In particular, we seek to determine the relative impact of the preferences of the major elites involved in the selection of federal district judges: the appointing president, home state senators of the president's party, and home state elites outside the Senate who are consulted when a president makes an appointment from a state whose Senate delegation is in the hands of the opposition party.

The analysis is based on all published decisions of the district courts in civil liberties, economic and labor, and criminal procedure cases decided between 1961 and 1995. We find that contrary to the expectations derived from the existing literature on district judge appointments, the political preferences of the appointing presidents are most closely related to the policy relevant decisions of the judges.

When I was a child, I had a book called The Chosen Baby. Originally written in 1939 by Valentina Wasson, the edition I was given had been revised and updated in 1950 (Wasson 1939). It is the book I, as an adoptee, was given to understand adoption— my origins. It is the story of Mr. and Mrs. Brown, who had everything they could ask for, except one thing—they needed a baby to make their happiness complete (Patton 2000).

At the turn of the 20th century, as more people in the United States started moving to urban areas, the quality of the milk supply became one of the preeminent public health challenges of the day and a centerpiece of the Progressive agenda. Governments passed ordinances and statutes to safeguard the milk supply and sanctioned violators of these laws. This study collects the published cases where judges were asked to enforce these health regulations.

Contrary to the Revisionist reading of Progressive Era constitutional history, these cases demonstrate that enforcement of these health laws became more difficult during the Progressive Era. Parties resisting these laws made broader constitutional challenges to the laws more often. While the number of victories for these parties remained steady, the scope of their victories became broader. The study also throws light on the early use of “regulatory crimes.” Governments were more likely throughout the study period to use a criminal rather than a civil enforcement process. Surprisingly, the use of criminal enforcement did not affect the government's success rate in these cases.

Drawing on the laws and practices of three countries—England, France, and Germany—this article examines the constructions of narratives of abandoned children. Although the three countries share the values of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, having ratified it, their laws and practices with regard to the child's identity rights have little in common. Explaining the different approaches to abandonment, the article argues that these are justified by stories about the birth giver as the “real” mother, stories that vary according to place and culture. This leads to different conceptions of the child's identity and of motherhood, to exclusions and stigma. Focusing on the justifications offered in each country for its laws and practices, the article analyzes discourses of nature (England), juridical constructs (France), and pragmatic concerns for the child's life (Germany). The article concludes that, given the myriad of family forms and of life experiences, it is not surprising to find that countries governed by a shared international convention give very different accounts of the meanings of identity and motherhood.

This article analyzes why the Chinese government turned to international adoption in the 1990s as a means to deal with increasing numbers of abandoned children in Chinese orphanages. Although many people involved in international adoption assume that Chinese families are unwilling to adopt the kinds of children who fill most Chinese orphanages, primarily abandoned girls, research indicates that many families in China are willing to adopt abandoned children, including girls. Yet legal requirements that adopters be over 35 and childless severely limited the number of families who could legally adopt children in the 1990s. While this did not prevent unofficial adoption in violation of the restrictions, it did keep adopters away from government orphanages, thus increasing the burden on those institutions. Restrictions on adoption are the result of birth planning efforts to prevent adoption from being used as a loophole whereby birth parents adopt out daughters in order to be able to try again for a son. The result of this policy has been to increase abandonment while decreasing the number of legally eligible adoptive families in China. International adoption has helped enlarge the pool of potential adopters without disturbing birth planning priorities. It has also helped provide needed funds for improving conditions in state orphanages. Although legal changes in 1999 eased restrictions on the adoption of abandoned children living in orphanages, a number of factors have limited actual change, while restrictions on adoptions outside of orphanages have been largely maintained. Birth planning authorities remain wary of liberalizing domestic adoption, and a decade of international adoption has institutionalized powerful interests that orient adoption from orphanages toward the outside rather than inside China. Nonetheless, China is slowly moving toward an adoption policy more in line with the Hague Convention's injunction to prioritize domestic adoption over international placement, turning to international adoption only when it is impossible to find domestic adoptive families.

While the normative debate over originalism continues unabated (e.g., Scalia 1997; Whittington 1999), the systematic empirical validity of originalism lies relatively unexamined. Using data derived from briefs filed by litigants over eight years, we developed an initial systematic test of the influence of arguments about text and intent on the decisions of U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Typically, we find that Justices support textual or intentional arguments when they are made by liberal parties or when they are made by conservative parties, but not across the board. Multivariate analyses show that legal arguments as to text, and particularly intent, have little impact on the votes of even those Justices alleged to be originalists. Instead, ideology continues to explain their decisions.

Focusing on child circulation among the urban poor in Southern Brazil, this article considers the parallels and divergences between local practice, national legislation, and global policy involved in legal adoption. Following a brief ethnographic account of child circulation among working-class families in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the analysis focuses on adoção à brasileira (clandestine adoption) as one of the ways in which the Brazilian poor bypass legal bureaucratic procedures in order to adjust the State apparatus to their needs. Finally, the comparative analysis of Brazil and North America centers on the evolution of adoption law and policies. Our approach highlights the variant experiences of family and legal consciousness according to class and national identity, while at the same time considering the political inequality implied in the hierarchization of different cultural repertoires.

What explains how and why the Supreme Court interprets precedent? We contend that Justices incorporate precedents into their opinions to maximize the extent to which the Court's legal policy reflects their own policy preferences and to increase the likelihood that their opinions will be efficacious. Thus, we expect the interpretation of precedent to be influenced by the Justices' policy preferences, the norm of stare decisis, and certain characteristics of precedents. To test this idea, we examined how, in all cases decided in the 1991 and 1995 terms, the Court's majority opinions chose to legally interpret the set of available Supreme Court precedents. While our results are not uniformly supportive of our hypotheses, they lend general support to our theoretical argument. First, we demonstrate that the Court is more likely to positively interpret (rather than not interpret) a precedent that is ideologically proximate to the Court, that is legally relevant, or that was previously positively interpreted by the Court. When considering negative treatment broadly construed, our data only demonstrate that the legal relevance of a precedent exerts any influence. However, when we restrict our analysis to “strong” negative interpretation of precedent, we uncover reasonable support for the influence of stare decisis in that both the legal relevance of precedent and prior negative interpretation of precedent affect strong negative treatment. Thus, one implication of this study is that, contrary to the attitudinal model's prediction, the Court's prior treatment of precedent does appear to influence the way Justices make decisions.

Models of judicial decisionmaking have traditionally relied on legal, political, and contextual variables, emphasizing judges' background, litigants' rights claims, and the relative social status of the parties involved. A recent scholarly expansion has brought cultural variables into the equation, indicating that judicial scholarship might usefully include narrative and rhetoric as measures of legal consciousness. This project examines AIDS-related litigation from the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals between 1983 and 1995, emphasizing the social construction of sexuality. It uses content-based coding and stepwise probit analysis to evaluate the importance of controlling for language that depicts AIDS as a “gay disease” and its association with death and plague metaphors.

The recent article by Marco Verweij in Law and Society Review offers a promising approach for studying the effectiveness of rules for achieving environmental goals. He suggests treating levels of toxic substances as the independent variable, and then looking at that variable across a range of legal and regulatory cultures. In the article, he argued that the adversarial culture of the United States compared to the cooperative culture in civil law nations meant that firms in Europe were more proactive in cleaning up their emissions than was the case in the United States. To make this point, he sought to compare chemical pollution in the Rhine to that found in the Great Lakes of North America. He also claimed that the International Joint Commission (IJC), a small-but-respected international organization, had worsened the situation in the Great Lakes. Verweij's approach is so promising, but the execution so flawed, that a comment on his thoughtful effort seemed in order. My comments will address, first, the scientific/technical difficulties in his study and, then, political/social science issues. It concludes with a brief review of other ways we could test his idea. I believe correcting the flaws related to the biophysical science and executing a relevant study along the lines he suggests would advance our understanding of how differences in legal cultures and institutions produce real-world outcomes.

In her response to my article, Mary Durfee argues that my research, though promising, is “flawed” in its execution and rests on “incoherent biophysical science.” She reaches this conclusion by misrepresenting my article in eight ways. I would like to highlight these misunderstandings before pointing out, and correcting, a real flaw in the execution of my research, which went undetected by Durfee, but which did not affect the conclusions of my study.