Legislative Debates Research Articles

Introduction to the Special Section on Assisted Outpatient Treatment in New York State

Introduction to the Special Section on Assisted Outpatient Treatment in New York State

Benchmarks for Assessing the Potential Impact of a Natural Gas Severance Tax on the Pennsylvania Economy

The Marcellus Shale natural gas play has the potential to provide an important source of energy for the U.S. and to create significant economic impacts for Pennsylvania. However, the Marcellus Shale development opportunity also has generated controversy about its potential environmental, safety, and health impacts. Whether to impose a severance tax on natural gas produced - and the structure, rate, and exemptions for such a tax - has been a focus of vigorous legislative and public attention and debate. A number of severance tax proposals have been offered. The potential impact of a natural gas severance tax on the Pennsylvania economy has received slight analytical attention, even though the Pennsylvania General Assembly intended to enact a natural gas severance tax by October 1, 2010. The research reported in this document was designed to estimate the magnitude of the impact on the Pennsylvania economy of a Pennsylvania natural gas severance tax. We benchmarked the impact of every $100 million of revenue collected from a natural gas severance tax between 2011 and 2015 jobs, business sales, income, and population in Pennsylvania. Of course, what is revenue for the Commonwealth is, at the same time, a production cost for Pennsylvania gas producers. For this reason, we treated the revenue collected as a production cost that gas producers cannot pass along to customers. Also, some yet-to-be-decided plan will allocate revenue collected to state government and to local county and municipal governments. Therefore, we also considered the economic consequences for Pennsylvania of spending the severance tax revenue collected under various spending plans. Severance tax and revenue spending plans that actually have been proposed are not evaluated in our analysis because the revenue yield and spending distribution for each plan have not been specified completely by their proponents. The revenue yields from each plan are dependent on the volume and price of gas extracted, which are factors that are exogenous to any tax structure and rate plan. The spending distribution plans will evolve through fiscal and political negotiation. As a consequence of these information constraints, we chose to benchmark the impact of every $100 million in severance tax revenue collected - treated in our analysis as $100 million of production costs for the Pennsylvania oil and gas industry - on the Pennsylvania economy. In addition, our benchmarks take into account the potential impacts of distributing each $100 million of revenue through state and local spending and through deferring spending by saving some revenue to mitigate environmental, safety, and health problems that might occur in the future. In this way, we seek to provide a yardstick by which various tax and spending plans can be measured. The REMI Policy Insight model was applied to simulate the outcomes of various scenarios that describe the potential economic and demographic impacts of each $100 million of severance tax collected, along with the current and deferred spending of these tax revenues by state and local authorities. We found that each $100 million of production costs added to the Pennsylvania oil and gas industry from 2011 through 2015 could generate a small impact on Pennsylvania’s economy and demography. Also, each $100 million of spending by state and local governments, even if some is deferred, potentially more than makes up for any losses resulting from each additional $100 million of production costs imposed by a severance tax. The benchmarks for the potential impact of a severance tax on the Pennsylvania economy are subject to numerous cautions, constraints, and uncertainties, some of which are discussed in this report. The report ends with an open invitation to civil dialogue about the potential impacts of a severance tax using an online discussion forum and social bookmarking tools. This conversation is started in this report with critical comments from two independent reviewers about our estimates of the potential economic and demographic impacts of a severance tax on natural gas extraction. Our main conclusion is that a severance tax on natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania would increase costs for gas drilling companies, but spending the resulting increase in state revenue generated by the tax could yield positive, but small, impacts on the state’s economy and population. This report was prepared using the resources and expertise of the Penn State Institute for Research in Training & Development. Planning, conducting, producing, and distributing this report was not funded by any organization, entity, or individual internal or external to Penn State.

Look who’s talking: Parliamentary debate in the European Union

Legislative speeches are an important part of parliamentary activity in the European Parliament (EP). Using a new dataset on EP speeches, this paper offers an explanation for participation in legislative debates. We argue that floor speeches partially serve as a communication tool between members of parliament, their national parties, and their European political groups. EP group dissidents often go on record by taking the floor when there is a conflict between their national party and their European political group. In this instance, members give speeches for two reasons: to explain their national party’s position to other members of their EP political group, and to create a positive record for themselves in the eyes of the national party to serve their own reelection purposes.

‘The Wandering Jew has no Nation’: Jewishness and Race Relations Law

This essay considers judicial discourse on Jews and Jewishness in UK race relations law. Beginning with an account of how ‘the Jew’ appeared in legislative debates, the essay goes on to explore the confusions, paradoxes, and underlying normativities revealed in both legislative and judicial narratives of Jews and Jewishness. The essay concludes with a discussion of the first two decisions in the Jews' Free School case.

State-Building, Stability, and Oil as “Shared Competencies” in Iraq

Introduction Despite the democratic and developmental progress made in Iraq, the state's key ethnic, sectarian, and political groups have yet to achieve consensus on core issues, including the division of oil wealth and resolutions to territory disputes in Khanaqin and Kirkuk. Control of Kirkuk represents control over one of two major oil producing regions in Iraq and, thus, control over a substantial amount of wealth from the surrounding region's oil development. Moreover, tensions between the leadership within the Government of Iraq (GOD and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) demonstrate that progress on issues such as these is critical to achieving a stable, secure Iraq that is not merely a short-term phenomenon. These tensions are exacerbated by the inability of the Council of Representatives (COR) to pass a set of hydrocarbon laws that clarify oil and gas policies as well as related management procedures, constitutional amendments, and other investment laws. (1) The short history of Iraq's nascent, democratically elected government has shown that legislation passed by the COR sometimes fails to be implemented. Even worse, a meddlesome executive is occasionally wont to tinker with legislation already passed or, in extreme cases, quash it altogether. These actions only serve to degrade a legislative process that is beset with indecision and institutional delays most recently associated with the certification of the 2010 election results and the protracted government formation process. As of October 2010, the four hydrocarbon laws that were introduced in the COR in 2007 have been neither finalized nor signed into law. The discord regarding hydrocarbon legislation is, arguably, driven by competing regional interests and exacerbated by the asymmetrical constitutional division of powers and weak institutions that exist at the federal, regional, and gubernatorial levels. Blanchard notes: Concurrent negotiations regarding constitutional amendments have had direct implications for the hydrocarbon legislation debate, particularly efforts to clarify the specific authorities granted to federal and regional governments to regulate oil and gas development and export activities under Articles 111 and 112 of the Iraqi Constitution ... violence and political tension that have prevailed in Iraq in recent years have not been conducive to careful consideration of detailed hydrocarbon sector legislation or new national oil and natural gas contracts. (2) The focus of this analysis on intergovernmental control over the oil and gas industry is deliberate--Iraq has the world's fourth largest oil reserves, and its primary economic challenges are complicated by weak institutions and persistent stability and security concerns. (3) While oil and gas are part of Iraq's economic policy, each is not treated as such in the Constitution, Provincial Powers Law of 2008, or the draft oil and gas laws. Understanding oil as such is critical, because qualitative and quantitative studies suggest that a state's oil resources can have antidemocratic effects, rentier effects, (4) repression effects, (5) and modernization effects. (6) Regardless of the structure of the government it may very well place at risk state-building, stability, and democratic consolidation given the lack of economic development often associated with wealth. (7) When tying these effects together, existing research suggests that states like Iraq face a resource curse wherein the greater the state's wealth, the more slowly the state develops, the greater the instability, and the more likely it is to experience civil war. (8) Decision-makers in Iraq are faced with overcoming these effects and the constitutional dilution of the GOI's federal authority, specifically with respect to the regulation of the oil and gas industry and its resources. The division of powers related to oil as a shared competency of the federal, regional, and provincial governments has the potential to lead to negotiation gridlock across these government levels and result in the continued promotion of alternative markets for the sale and export or trafficking of oil not regulated by the government. …

Legislative Argumentation and Democratic Legitimation

AbstractI will argue that an adequate conception of democracy must be deliberative, that is, it must include not only formal, but also substantial elements in the sense that democratic decisions must aim at establishing solutions that give due consideration to all interests involved, that this implies a necessary relation between rational argumentation and democratic legitimation, and, consequently, that also legislative debate in parliament must comply with the requirements of rational argumentation. However, it is unable to do so for structural reasons embedded in the political system. This leads to some conclusions for the institutional design of the democratic constitutional state, and allows to understand the democratic function of constitutional review.

Sustaining the “Societal and Scriptural Fence”: Cultural, Social, and Political Topographies of Same-Sex Marriage in Alabama

In June 2006, voters in Alabama overwhelmingly approved a statewide referendum that added a prohibition against same-sex marriage to the state's constitution. This research examines the Alabama vote by “placing” the politics of sexuality within the state's multifaceted web of cultural and social space. We fuse a traditional electoral geography approach with an overall postpositivist cultural and social perspective, beginning with an assessment of the politics of place by situating Alabama as a place with a long history of battles over the so-called culture wars. The cultural politics of the legislative debate and the geographic distribution of the actual vote are also examined within a socio-demographic context, drawing some comparisons from a similar vote in Georgia in 2004, another state in the American Deep South. Those opposed to same-sex marriage in Alabama made effective use of various social constructions that are deeply embedded within a “moral” geography, situating the state as a fenced-off bastion of “religious traditional values,” a common theme throughout the American South. In this vein, social boundaries and territory were demarcated as a powerful political act in Alabama, a strategy that situated the state as hetero-normatively “in place,” while deeming sexual minorities as “out of place.”

The Page Act of 1875: In the Name of Morality

The Page Act of 1875 is usually characterized as an anti-prostitution law that helped pave the way for the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Most scholars also describe the Page Act as an example of lawmaking restraint, as Congress refrained from broader immigration restrictions out of respect for the existing Burlingame Treaty with China. This Article suggests that such an understanding is inaccurate or at best, questionable. Though the Page Act’s text may be focused on the protection of American morals, a review of newspaper articles, legislative debates, and other historical records indicate that the true driving force was the protection of American labor. Furthermore, while the text maybe have complied with the Burlingame Treaty, the Act’s application was a de facto violation of Chinese immigration protections. The focus on prostitution was thus a strategic victory: the emphasis on morality successfully masked what would otherwise be questionable restrictions on Chinese immigration. The Page Act is thus an early example of legislation purposefully couched in the name of morality in order to avoid legal or political backlash. It should be remembered not as a footnote to the Chinese Exclusion Acts, but as an important episode in the development of both immigration and foreign treaty law.

A regulação do uso de animais no Brasil do século XX e o processo de formação do atual regime aplicado à pesquisa biomédica

The article analyzes Brazilian public policy and legislation concerning the use of animals in teaching and biomedical research. It examines the institutional and judicial framework and legal status of animal protection in Brazil, including the legislative debate that preceded enactment of Law 11.794/2008, which defined procedures to be employed in the scientific use of animals. It underscores certain features of current regulatory practice and also explores considerations of a theoretical and methodological nature, with a view to broadening our understanding of the question.

Learning to Work: A Functional Approach to Welfare and Higher Education

The current welfare law mandates participation in designated work activities at the expense of education for welfare recipients, particularly discouraging pursuit of higher education while, at the same time, emphasizing marriage. On the eve of the 2010 reauthorization of welfare reform, this article challenges the assumption underlying the 1996 welfare law and its 2005 reauthorization that work and education are wholly distinct concepts and activities. Indeed, both educational theory and workforce development policies have reflected this conceptual and functional common ground between work and education for decades. Similarly, peer nations and international law squarely acknowledge the ways in which these activities interact. Focusing on the common ground between work and education can serve as the basis for a new, broader understanding of welfare-to-work activities. Instead of pitting work and education against each other, as was done during the prior legislative debates and post-implementation analyses, this perspective reveals that work and education have considerable overlap. These overlaps can easily facilitate design of welfare programs that, unlike government-sponsored marriage promotion initiatives, build individual human capital while also conveying important values and skills necessary to workplace success.

Changes in law and society during the Civil War and Reconstruction: a legal history documentary reader

This title presents significant legal history documents from a transformative era. The first comprehensive collection of legal history documents from the Civil War and Reconstruction, this volume shows the profound legal changes that occurred during the Civil War era and highlights how law, society, and politics inextricably mixed and set American legal development on particular paths that were not predetermined. Editor Christian G. Samito carefully selected excerpts from legislation, public and legislative debates, and rare court-martial records, adds his expert analysis to clearly present the key facts, and illustrates the selections with telling period artwork to create an outstanding resource that demonstrates the rich and important legal history of the era. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, the United States experienced long-lasting and significant constitutional and societal reform. This critical period forced the government and the American people to confront the contours of presidential power and consider the boundaries of civil liberties during wartime. Samito shows how legislation fueled national development, furthered the centralization and expansion of the federal government, revolutionized and nationalized the banking system, and promoted the coercive power of the government as well as its role in taking care of its citizens. The law of slavery gave way to the hard-fought struggle for black equality while Americans struggled over how to implement the egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence. The materials in this volume demonstrate that legal development is not a story of linear progression. They illuminate themes of fluidity, contingency, and participation, and bring forth the theoretical and personal aspects of the law. Samito focuses on such topics as blacks in the North and South before the Civil War, the expansion of governmental power and the nationalization of the Union, blacks and the U.S. military, President Lincoln's constitutionalism, the expansion of civil rights and opposition to them, and judicial interpretation of the Civil War Amendments and civil rights legislation. The Civil War Amendments and other legislation afforded African Americans national citizenship and began to define some of the rights and practices associated with that status, but, as Samito makes evident, the potential of this reformative moment eroded in the face of Southern white resistance as well as the judicial limitation of the amendments themselves. Nonetheless, the theoretical arguments and practical changes during this era set valuable precedents and influenced future arguments over these same issues. Through this exciting collection, readers will come to understand how the issues of the 1860s are, in many cases, the same issues Americans debate today.

Rhetoric as Argument: Social Justice and Affirmative Action in India, 1990

AbstractSocial justice is a key concept in the theory and practice of affirmative action. In India, social justice has come to serve as shorthand for affirmative action for disadvantaged groups, mainly lower castes. This paper provides a detailed analytical interpretation of social justice in a landmark legislative debate on quotas in India, namely the 1990 Mandal debate. It unpacks political rhetoric to reveal distinct conceptions of social justice, shows that claims for quotas for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the bureaucracy drew substantially on principles of social justice and democracy and argues that, despite appearances, several arguments for OBC representation in government jobs were compatible with the principle of merit. In doing so, the paper demonstrates that contrary to common opinion, political rhetoric deserves close attention. A reconstruction of political arguments over affirmative action advances understanding of some puzzling features of lower-caste politics in India. It also illuminates important questions in political theory debates on social justice.

Registro Geral de Imóveis, propriedade e Estado Nacional no Segundo Reinado

O objetivo é relacionar os debates legislativos e jurídicos para promulgação da Lei Hipotecária número 1.237 de 1864 à construção do Estado Nacional no Segundo Reinado e à institucionalização da ordem jurídica liberal. Serão consideradas as disputas relacionadas à criação do registro das alienações de imóveis e de hipotecas.

Maeve Boland Selected as AGU Congressional Science Fellow

Maeve Boland, research assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines, is AGU's 2009–2010 Congressional Science Fellow. Boland, who has a Ph.D. in geology from the Colorado School of Mines, is spending a year working in the office of U.S. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D‐N. D.). She was selected in March by AGU's Committee on Public Affairs after a competitive interview process, and she is AGU's 32nd Congressional Science Fellow.In September, Boland and 31 other Congressional Science Fellows participated in a 2‐week course in politics and the legislative process put on by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She then interviewed with a number of congressional offices and was offered a position in the office of Sen. Dorgan, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development and is a member of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. Boland is working as a legislative fellow carrying out a range of duties such as organizing congressional hearings, crafting legislation, advising legislators on votes, meeting with lobbyists, and writing speeches. Fellows also are often asked to assist their senator or representative during committee hearings and on the U.S. House or Senate floors during legislative debates.

Access to contraception by minors in Jamaica: a public health concern.

Background:Access to contraceptive by minors (pre-adolescents and adolescents) has spurred policy and legislative debates, part of which is that in an effort to successfully meet government's objective of a healthy sexual lifestyle among minors.Aims:This study examined factors affecting sexual reproductive health in minors, namely: access to contraceptive advice and treatment, pregnancy, number of sexual partners, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and confidentiality.Materials and Methods:This research involved quantitative and qualitative data. Two hundred and thirty eight sexually active cases were investigated in Jamaica by the researchers, during the period 2006-2007. The age group population was 9-11, 12-14, and 15-17.Results:The study showed that access to contraceptive advice and treatment by minors was more favorable to males than females. The difference in access to contraceptive between male and female was statistically significant (x2 = 20.16, p<0.05). Of the 80 male respondents, who are contraceptive users, 11 encountered challenges in legitimately accessing contraceptive methods, while 38 of the 40 female users also encountered challenges. This resulted in unintended pregnancies and impregnation (33.2%), as well as the contracting of STIs (21%).Conclusion:The findings of this study will be important in informing the development of reproductive health services and family life education programs for pre-adolescents and adolescents in Jamaica and other Caribbean countries.

Shifting Rationales: The Waning Influence of Feminism on Canada’s Embryo Research Restrictions

This article analyzes the competing influences on the federal government's policy and eventual legislative action regarding embryo research in Canada. Beginning with the events surrounding the establishment of the Royal Commission on New Reproductive Technologies, the article traces the diminishing importance of feminist rationales to the ultimate legislation regulating embryo research, the Assisted Human Reproduction Act. The article reveals the steady rise of pro-life discourse that has helped to displace feminist concerns about the threats to women’s bodies posed by new reproductive technologies in general and, instead, made the embryo the focus of legislative debates. As legal debates around abortion are relatively settled in Canada, the authors conclude that pro-life arguments are enjoying a level of respect in the embryo research context and a political and legal voice that has been denied in the abortion arena. The article ends by briefly raising questions regarding the discursive impact of this resurgence on attitudes towards abortion.

Party Coalitions and Interest Group Networks

We analyze affiliation networks of interest groups that endorse the same candidates in primary elections, donate to the same candidates in general elections, and voice support for the same legislative proposals. Patterns of interest group ties resemble two competing party coalitions in elections but not in legislative debate. Campaign endorsement and financial contribution ties among interest groups are consistently correlated but legislative ties do not follow directly from electoral alliances. The results challenge the consensus in the emerging literature on the expanded party organization; interest groups have distinct incentives to join together in a party coalition in elections but also to build bipartisan grand coalitions to pursue legislative goals. We also modify conventional views on party differences. The Democratic coalition is not fractured into many small constituencies. The Democratic campaign and legislative networks are denser than equivalent Republican networks, with a core of labor organizations occupying central positions.

After the First Amendment Fails: The Newsmen's Privilege Hearings of the 1970s

The recent jailing and threatened jailing of journalists seeking to protect confidential sources has prompted Congress to reopen debate on legislation providing journalists with a statutory right of confidentiality. This article explores debates over eighty-six newsmen's privilege bills introduced in the House of Representatives between 1972 and 1975, after the Supreme Court of the United States decided Branzburg v. Hayes. The article identifies the primary policy differences, motives and perspectives of key advocates, and reasons for the failure of any bill to become law. It examines arguments for and against a privilege and the four major areas of policy disputes: the range of protections from absolutist to qualified protections, the problem of defining “journalist,” protection of only confidential information or all newsgathering material, and whether a federal privilege statute should apply to state proceedings. In doing so, the article provides historical context to contemporary legislative debates.

Evidence and argument in policymaking: development of workplace smoking legislation

BackgroundWe sought to identify factors that affect the passage of public health legislation by examining the use of arguments, particularly arguments presenting research evidence, in legislative debates regarding workplace smoking restrictions.MethodsWe conducted a case-study based content analysis of legislative materials used in the development of six state workplace smoking laws, including written and spoken testimony and the text of proposed and passed bills and amendments. We coded testimony given before legislators for arguments used, and identified the institutional affiliations of presenters and their position on the legislation. We compared patterns in the arguments made in testimony to the relative strength of each state's final legislation.ResultsGreater discussion of scientific evidence within testimony given was associated with the passage of workplace smoking legislation that provided greater protection for public health, regardless of whether supporters outnumbered opponents or vice versa.ConclusionOur findings suggest that an emphasis on scientific discourse, relative to other arguments made in legislative testimony, might help produce political outcomes that favor public health.

The Effect of Crosslisting on Corporate Governance: A Review of the International Evidence

ABSTRACTManuscript Type: ReviewResearch Question: This review essay examines the mechanisms by which crosslisting of a firm's shares on a foreign stock exchange and its subsequent exposure to an international capital market can induce changes in corporate governance. We also review reasons why a firm might elect to use crosslisting to improve investor perception of the quality of its governance.Research Findings/Results: After a review of the existing literature, we conclude that there is substantial support for legal bonding in the decision to crosslist, with lesser evidence consistent with reputational bonding. We also conclude that firm growth opportunities and the need for external capital are critical factors in a decision to crosslist.Theoretical Implications: This study synthesizes the extensive empirical work done on crosslisting and consequent changes in corporate governance structures. It also highlights a number of areas that require further research including more direct testing of governance changes following crosslisting, the effect of crosslisting on corporate equity ownership structures, and the investment/new securities issuance behavior of firms subsequent to crosslisting. This research will help to chart the path of future academic study by scholars of international corporate governance.Practical Implications: This review of the empirical evidence will contribute to the identification of a set of best practices that can lead to improved governance for firms worldwide. Furthermore, the discussion of what remains unexamined by governance researchers will help to shape the contours of future policy and legislative debate.