Era Of Choice Research Articles

The Harm Paradox: Tort Law and the Unwanted Child in an Era of Choice

I undertook this task under something of a misconception. The sub-heading ‘Tort Law and the Unwanted Child’ suggests that it will be concerned, in the main, with the development of case law in the area of reproductive torts. This, however, is not its primary purpose. Certainly, McFarlane1 and its progeny provide the skeleton on which the work hangs but, as befits a book that started life as a doctoral thesis, it is concerned with the more subtle and specific issues that are derived from those cases—in particular, and as declared in the main title, the nature of the harm, if any, sustained by women as child-bearers in general and, especially, as unwilling child-bearers. Accordingly, the reader is entitled to an admission of, if not a conflict of interests, at least a difference of interests being inherent in this review. The reviewer is male; moreover, he is an elderly male...

What counts as evidence in the school choice debate?

This article has two chief purposes. It presents a substantive reappraisal of a decade of school choice research in the UK. This reappraisal is used as a case study illustrating the elasticity of the notion of social science ‘evidence’, when wielded by academics in an area where strong ideological preconceptions struggle with the lack of a sound quantitative tradition of research. The focus here is on the changing socio‐economic compositions of schools in an era of choice. A prediction from theory and from small‐scale studies had been that schools in England and Wales would become more segregated in terms of indicators of socio‐economic disadvantage after the Education Reform Act 1988. The first large‐scale study of the actual compositions of schools suggested that this did not happen. This study was then subjected by a majority of UK academics in the field to a level of criticism that was not applied by them to subsequent, but seemingly inferior, studies that reached an opposite conclusion. The criticism involved widespread misquotation and misunderstanding that was not picked up by ‘peer’ review. What, therefore, counts as evidence in the school choice debate?

Communications Policy in the Era of Choice and Convergence with Reflections on the Markle Foundation

Advances in information technology have gradually blurred the boundaries among the communications media, raising complex policy issues concerning regulation, intellectual property rights, the role of media in politics, and educational methods. The new information technology has ushered in the era of convergence and choice: convergence in the sense that all communications media are rapidly moving towards becoming simply a different form of bit streams in a digital network, and choice in that monopolies (like telephones) and tight oligopolies (like network television and local newspapers) are rapidly being challenged by new entrants as technological progress has lowered entry barriers. During this period, the Markle Foundation has been the leading supporter of research on the social and economic effects of these changes, under the leadership of its president, Lloyd Morrisett. This essay traces the co-evolution of information technology, communications policy research, and the Markle Foundation.