During the past decade political scientists have become increasingly aware that state supreme courts make major contributions to public policy. Various highly publicized decisions concerning, for example, school finance, the termination of life support systems, and plea bargaining have underlined the importance of state supreme court policymaking. Historical studies have documented that this policy involvement is not merely a recent phenomenon. However, the Burger Court's new federalism has invited state supreme courts to play a more active role, and many courts have availed themselves of this opportunity.

Yet despite the obvious importance of state supreme court activity, research on their policymaking has lagged. In part this can be attributed to the sheer volume of cases they annually decide. Numerous law journals assist the political scientist in overcoming this difficulty by publishing annual surveys of state supreme court decisions. Listed below are journals which provide such surveys.

The field of organization theory includes the individual human being, small group, human institution, and entire social system. Existential writings are concerned with individual morality, authenticity, human selfactualization and the same time with cognitive and intellectual variables which are relevant to human growth. Existentialism provides some very useful insight to the conventional organization theory. Existential literature explores the shrinking of consciousness, the blocking off of awareness, and feelings of depersonalization and apathy. Students express their discontent to the depersonalizing effects of the modern organization, society and bureaucratic world of their lives, and their community. Public administrators face scientific management on points where the nature of the matter is not rational. If help is to be found, it may very well come from poets and writers who often deal with the limits of rational certainty.

The Canadian Confederation is a 1980 National Film Board of Canada release written, directed, and edited by Joan Henson. This technically competent work begins with the establishment of the Canadian political system, and then gives us glimpses of all major facets of that system from village government in Smithfalls to the paramount halls of power in Ottawa. But this is not all. There are minicourses in Canadian constitutionalism, federal-provincial relations, energy policy, regionalism and regional economic planning, and last but not least, ethnology including native peoples packed into this freeze dried smorgasbord.

Some themes receive more treatment than others. The perceived dominant theme is diversity. Senator Maurine Lamontagne sets the tone by pointing out that Canada differs from the United States’ melting pot in that Canada is a mosaic, to use John Porter's enduring image.

Professions are increasingly central to any grasp of contemporary democratic societies. Their expertise in matters of vital public interest has gained them special privilege in the social order, including the authority to prescribe and police the rules which govern the application of specialized knowledge. This privileged autonomy is justified by the professions' claim that it is the sole source of competence to evaluate professional performance and is also sufficiently ethical to control deviant behavior. Of prime importance to students of politics and public policy is the exercise of professional power and its relation to the public interest, for at issue here is nothing less than the authoritative allocation of values within that slice of social life served by the professions.

“You learn how to do research by doing research.” “You learn about research by studying others’ research.” “You learn research by studying the elements and requirements of research.” We have taught students, both undergraduate and graduate, about the research process with those three traditional approaches and sets of basic assumptions. However, the idea of a Research Process Vision provides a fourth alternative blending elements of the three basic approaches.

The Research Process Vision is an exercise for students in studying and experiencing the political science research process. Basically, the project/ exercise serves as a vehicle for students to sense the varied elements and issues in research and research design through a hypothetical “envisioning” process. Specifically, they develop a paper or document which sketches out and discusses a potential research project, envisions what might exist or be done, and what might occur.

After grading my last batch of spring 1980 term papers, my paranoia began to strike deep. Did Michael really write that paper on intelligence oversight in Congress? And wasn't Joan's term paper remarkably better than her written exams? And didn't I get a term paper from a basketball player at Indiana University a few years ago that was 10 pages long with 81 footnotes? Hey, who really writes these papers anyway?

My general operating assumption throughout the 1970s had been that I assumed each paper turned into me was written by that person, during the semester, for my course only.

Eighteen American government textbooks were published in 1979 (seven new books and 11 new editions of previously published books). In 1980, another 16 were published (nine new books and seven new editions.) In 1981, the year after a presidential election, came 20 more (six new books and 14 new editions). Three of the 1981 books (new editions) were published in multiple versions (some combination of basic, national, national- state-local), so there were a total of 25 versions of American government textbooks published in 1981. Examining all the texts for course consideration is an extremely time consuming process. The purpose of this paper is to simplify the process by briefly reviewing the American government textbooks and readers published in 1980 and 1981. (Books throughout are indicated by the name of the first author; a complete list is given in the Appendix.)

This discussion of rights and citizenship is part of a series falling under the general topic “Ethical Issues and Citizenship Education.” Although it contains little directly dealing with how to go about the education of citizens, it does embody material that would be desirable for citizens to know and to understand. Citizenship as well as rights will be discussed in the pages that follow, but the bulk of this particular contribution to the series will deal with rights. (Specifically sections 3-7 deal solely with rights.) The relation between the two is greater than might otherwise appear to the casual reader, for it is as citizens that we claim our most important rights, our rights against the state. Our legal rights have derived from our citizenship. As citizens we enjoy the right to have our rights enforced — as a matter of right, not just as a privilege that could be legitmately taken away from us at the whim of some arbitrary ruler.