Symposium Articles Research Articles

The OBR and the unintended economic consequences of Mr Osborne

AbstractThe creation of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) was heralded as a major change in UK economic governance, purporting to offer objective analysis insulated from partisan politics. In the tumultuous years since the OBR’s foundation, however, its neutrality has been disputed by critics of diverse political persuasions. Ben Clift’s new book, The Office for Budget Responsibility and the Politics of Technocratic Economic Governance, offers a nuanced evaluation of these criticisms, illuminating the subtle ways in which the OBR favours certain policy choices over others. Building on Clift’s work, this symposium article considers whether the OBR is inherently biased towards austerity and fiscal conservatism, or whether OBR scrutiny is compatible with more radical changes in the UK’s political economy.

Legal Innovation through a Biographical Lens: Antonio Cassese and the European Tradition

Abstract This symposium introduction reflects on themes of tradition and innovation in the work of Antonio (‘Nino’) Cassese. These themes were central to Cassese’s own thinking, in ways drawn out by the three symposium articles on aspects of his life and work, and they play important roles in international law more broadly. In exploring these themes in a loosely biographical inquiry, the introduction also poses questions about the nature of biographical writing in international law and its relation to memorialization and historicization of law’s recent past.

Why Games for Leadership?

The current article introduces the symposium Games for Leadership: an examination for leadership scholars and practitioners to further explore the use of games in the leadership process. Games can be leveraged to influence and solve a wide range of problems. Further, games include an embedded feedback loop that can drive leadership engagement. Examples are provided to illustrate these concepts alongside an introduction to each symposium article.

Operationalizing Power in Health Law: The Hospital Abolition Hypothesis.

This symposium Article describes how prison abolitionist arguments also support the hypothesis that a defining goal of health law should be the abolition of hospitals. Like prison abolitionism, the hospital abolition hypothesis can provide a constructive way to shift the focus of legal analysis from substantive dimensions (in health law - cost, quality, access, and equity) to the dimension of power.

Advancing the Science and Application of Implementation Science to Promote Health Equity: Commentary on the Symposium.

There has been an increasing focus on making health equity a more explicit and foundational aspect of the research being conducted in public health and implementation science. This commentary provides an overview of five reviews in this Annual Review of Public Health symposium on Implementation Science and Health Equity. These articles reflect on and advance the application of core implementation science principles and concepts, with a focus on promoting health equity across a diverse range of public health and health care settings. Taken together, the symposium articles highlight critical conceptual, methodological, and empirical advances in the study designs, frameworks, and approaches that can help address equity considerations in the use of implementation science in both domestic and global contexts. Finally, this commentary highlights how work featured in this symposium can help inform future directions for rapidly taking public health to scale, particularly among systemically marginalized populations and communities.

A Reply to Clark Wolf, Elizabeth Edenberg, and Helga Varden

AbstractIn this article, I respond to symposium articles by Clark Wolf, Elizabeth Edenberg, and Helga Varden. With shared sympathies for anti-oppression liberalism and social contract theory, they urge me to develop the theory of liberal dependency care (LDC) in new directions — respectively, as a form of subject-centered justice, with a political liberal justification, and with a Kantian foundation for ‘private right.’ I respond by explicating the inclusivity that is built into the arrow of care map and the variety of contract theory I advance. Furthermore, I insist that anti-oppression liberalism need not formulate its claims in political liberal terms.

The democratic problems with Washington as the capital

Abstract Democracy demands a capital city that represents a country and is not removed from it. If the government is to be of the people and for the people, then the capital must be able to relate to the people—and the people to the capital. In the United States, democracy struggles not just because of what happens outside of and comes to Washington, but because of what happens inside Washington. The federal government, in other words, faces democratic problems because of the type of place that Washington is. There are many factors to consider in deciding where a country should be governed from, but the ability of the capital to understand the country it governs is certainly one of the most important of these factors. The goal of this symposium article is to consider the contemporary democratic crisis in these geographical terms. Washington was initially a rural area meant to govern a rural country. It has gradually turned into a dynamic metropolitan area meant to govern a country featuring many—and many different—dynamic metropolitan areas. During its entire history, though, Washington has remained dominated by a single company: the federal government. A company town will struggle to attract and to cultivate the large range of people featured in the United States. Given that a company town struggles to satisfy the democratic demands of a capital, the question then becomes whether other types of places would better satisfy these democratic demands.

Introduction: ‘public information comics’

ABSTRACT This symposium article brings together distinguished scholars from the field of criminology, graphic arts, creative industries and social policy, and English to reflect on a suite of ‘educational’ or ‘public information’ comics created by the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies (SCCS), based at the University of Dundee. There are now 20-plus titles available to the public for free download and distribution on a range of subject matters relating to healthcare, law and justice, science, forensic analysis, trauma and memory studies, as well as a diverse range of literary adaptations, creative responses to literary and cultural texts, and other subjects. Each of these works relies on a strong symbiotic relationship between their authors, experts, artists, editors, and other contributors to successfully convey every story at hand. Every comic is also meticulously reviewed for accuracy – both written and visual – at each stage of creation, leading up to publication. In this article, the contributors have focused on selected titles from our ‘educational’ comics series to generate incisive analyses that will be relevant to scholars working in a broad range of fields from law, psychology, the humanities and creative arts, to healthcare and the sciences, understood broadly. In order of appearance, the contributors are Paul Long, Christopher Pizzino, Angus Nurse, and Ian Horton.

Public Administration Challenges in Disaster Responses: Issues

Disaster management has become a major research issue in the field of public administration in recent years. The importance of disaster management research has to do with the increase of natural and man-made disasters and their influence and consequences in our societies. This symposium is designed to examine the relationship between public administration theories and disaster management issues to understand major public policy and managerial challenges. This introduction paper provides a review of theoretical background about contributions of public administration theories to disaster management. It introduces issues, cases, and findings from five articles included in the symposium. The paper concludes with discussions about the contributions of symposium articles and suggestions for future studies

A symposium on Georg Simmel: Essays on art and aesthetics

Georg Simmel has long been appreciated as a major theorist of the arts in society, as well as of aesthetic phenomena in general in social life. Yet Simmel’s essays in the area have remained dispersed for many years across the disparate parts of his corpus and have not been easy to survey in their full thematic cohesion and interconnection. This symposium article reflects on Austin Harrington’s comprehensive anthology of these writings in English, published in 2020, which assembles virtually all the relevant titles – many of them appearing in English for the first time. Among the central topics of discussion are Simmel’s fluid style of theorizing, his thinking about representation, reality and modernity in art, his relationships to philosophers and artistic personalities, and his legacy for the present.

Brian Street - Thinking Through Practice And Working With Theory

Brian Street joined King’s College London as Professor of Language Education in 1996. For the best part of twenty years Brian was an enthusiastic and tireless colleague and teacher in the School of Education, Communication and Society. Already a well-established scholar, he continued to develop and extend his ideas in language and literacy theory and practice throughout his time at King’s. He drew on his intellectual grounding in cultural anthropology and literary studies in highly productive and imaginative ways when working with theoretical and educational matters (see Castenheira and Bloome, 2021 for an informed account of his intellectual trajectories). His own professional conduct was infused with a strong commitment to social justice and widening participation in public education. As colleagues and students we have had the privilege and benefits of working with Brian. In this symposium article, we put together three accounts that provide glimpses of Brian’s ways of living and working as an intellectual activist.

The New Public/Private Equilibrium and the Regulation of Public Companies

This Symposium Article examines how the public/private divide works today and maps out some of the potential implications for major issues in securities law. Classic debates in securities law were often predicated on the idea that public companies are a coherent class of firms that differ markedly from private companies. For more than fifty years after the adoption of the federal securities laws, this view was justified. During that period, the vast majority of successful and growing private firms eventually accepted the regulatory obligations of being public in order to access a wider and deeper pool of capital, among other benefits. This was a descriptive reality, but it had important normative implications as well. An identifiable class of large, growing firms went public, and they generally went public for a reason they shared: raising capital. As a result, regulatory interventions imposed on the category of “public companies” had a coherent target. 
 We argue that firms’ going public decisions are now shaped by a much larger and more varied set of factors. These factors are complex, cross-cutting, and impact firms considering going public in very heterogeneous ways. This complexity results from several developments and we emphasize two. First, it is a result of the fact that while the public/private divide was created by securities law, public and private markets now provide two widely different ecologies for firms, which profoundly shape firms’ governance as well as the issuance and trading of their shares. Second, long-term advances in the ease of capital raising in private markets have made it possible for firms to remain private indefinitely and have diminished or eliminated the capital-raising advantages of public markets. The result of this latter change has been rightly called a “new equilibrium.” In that equilibrium, fewer and older firms go public, while other successful firms remain private indefinitely. In this equilibrium, capital raising is no longer the primary reason firms go public. Rather, we argue, firms go public due to one or more of the many other features of the public market’s ecology. 
 The normative implication of this new equilibrium is to reduce the coherency of the regulation of public companies. The benefits and costs of being public (or private) apply unevenly to firms eligible to go public. Instead, to a greater degree firms now face idiosyncratic, company-specific tradeoffs between being public or private, and they often go public for reasons unrelated to the original design of the public/private divide. Regulations imposed on public firms are likely to not only be increasingly under- and over-inclusive, but also to apply to a class of companies whose coherency as an economic phenomenon may be increasingly suspect.

Stereotypes, Sexism, and Superhuman Faculty

This symposium article explores how law professors with caretaking responsibilities struggled so greatly during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because legal academia prioritizes masculine ideals of competence over warmth, faculty were expected to suppress their emotions and mental health needs in order to maintain the appearance of competence. While students were allowed to be seen as vulnerable individuals needing accommodations, we did not extend this same compassion to our faculty colleagues. To explain why the treatment was so disparate, I incorporated existing research on the stereotype content model (SCM) and psychological theories of dehumanization. These theories help to explain why many faculty with young children suffered in crushing silence during the pandemic while taking on new and overwhelming caregiving obligations.

Framing harm to children in the debate over religious exemptions in child welfare: Lessons from Fulton

AbstractThis symposium article examines important lessons that can be taken from the multiple ways in which children's interests, and in particular ideas about “harm to children,” are framed in the recent Fulton v. City of Philadelphia controversy. A close reading of the briefs filed after the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case reveals that both sides paid very different attention to LGBTQ youth in framing ideas about whether granting or denying religious exemptions from antidiscrimination laws in child welfare harms children. As explained, the different positionalities of LGBTQ youth in these discussions offer important lessons for child welfare law and policy in a post‐Fulton world. First, the analysis connects these discussions in Fulton to broader histories of child harm concepts being used to facilitate LGBTQ‐related discrimination against both LGBTQ adults and LGBTQ youth in the domains of family and child welfare law. It then considers lessons for lawmakers, policymakers, and child welfare actors relating to the institutional design of child welfare systems, and more specifically, how the special needs of LGBTQ foster youth are addressed within those systems. To examine these points, the analysis presents a typology of four models of LGBTQ child welfare. Finally, the analysis considers the lessons that discussions involving “harm to children” in Fulton offer for the direction of future empirical research that informs the debate over conflicts between religious exemption claims and LGBTQ antidiscrimination laws in child welfare.

New opportunities for institutional analysis in public administration research

AbstractThis Symposium features research that engages an institutional analysis approach, called the Institutional Grammar. Institutional analysis is the study of rules, norms, and strategies (e.g., public policies, organizational bylaws, social conventions) that govern social systems and organizations. The Institutional Grammar is an approach for comprehensively capturing the design of institutions; in particular, for describing the language of directives that comprise them. We posit that the engagement of the Institutional Grammar in public administration research can advance understanding of institutional dynamics of administrative settings and behaviors by lending conceptual and methodological clarity on the definition and measurement of institutions. In support of this position, we (i) provide a brief commentary on institutional analysis in public administration research; (ii) offer a brief overview of the Institutional Grammar; and (iii) highlight how methodological innovations presented in the Symposium articles advance the Institutional Grammar, and present opportunities for advancing institutional analysis in administrative settings.

Online Deliberation and #CivicTech: A Symposium

Online deliberation is one important instance of civic tech that is both for and by the citizens, through engaging citizens in Internet-supported deliberative discussions on public issues. This article explains the origins of a set of symposium articles in this journal issue based on the 2017 'International Conference on Deliberation and Decision Making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Civic Tech' held in Singapore. Symposium articles are presented in a sequence that flows from designing decision making systems to platforms to specific technological nudges.

Three-dimensional Printing in Orthopedic Surgery: Current Applications and Future Developments

Three-dimensional (3D) printing technology has revolutionized how the authors examine, diagnose, and treat various medical conditions across a wide range of specialties. Synonymous with additive manufacturing, 3D printing fuses materials together layer by layer in 2-dimensional cross-sections to build the finished 3D product. This technology has proven superior to other manufacturing methods in certain instances because of its flexibility in the design process to create personalized products on demand. Within the field of orthopedics, 3D printing’s popularity has been driven in part by its capacity to address difficult cases in which the design must meet unique anatomic or pathologic criteria. As its use has become more common, so have the ways in which the field has adapted 3D printing technology to improve patient care. This review outlines the basics of 3D printing technology and its current applications in orthopedics: anatomic models, noncustom implants, patient-specific instrumentation, and patient-specific implants. The authors then briefly summarize 3D bioprinting and how it could impact bone and cartilage restoration in the future. Editor’s Note: I solicited this paper and have classified it as a Symposium Article after seeing Dr. Peterson present the subject at Duke Orthopaedic Surgery Department Grand Rounds. I thought it was an excellent update to the information contained in the September 2016 TIO symposium “3D Modeling, Printing and Biofabrication in Orthopaedic Surgery,” guest edited by Kevin Tetsworth (vol 31 no 3).

Reply to: Beyond Money: Conscientious Objection in Medicine as a Conflict of Interests.

Giubilini and Savulescu in their recent Journal of Bioethical Inquiry symposium article presented an account of conscientious objection that argues for its recognition as a non-financial conflict of interest. In this short commentary, I highlight some problems with their account. First, I discuss their solicitor analogy. Second, I discuss some problems surrounding their objectivity claim about standards of medical care. Next, I discuss some issues arising from consistently applying their approach. Finally, I highlight that conscientious objection should be viewed not as a conflict of interest but as something that society has an interest in preserving. I conclude by arguing that clinicians who have a conscientious objection can be treated in the same way as those who decide to subspecialize and do not need to give up work in their specialty. While Giubilini and Savulescu present an interesting argument about conscientious objection, theirs is not a compelling view. Indeed, the way we approach conscientious objection has more to teach us about conflicts of interest than the other way around.

Who's Looking Out For The Banks?

When the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act authorized financial conglomeration in 1999, Professor Arthur Wilmarth, Jr. presciently predicted that diversified financial holding companies would try to exploit their bank subsidiaries by transferring government subsidies to their nonbank affiliates. To prevent financial conglomerates from taking advantage of their insured depository subsidiaries in this way, policymakers instructed a bank’s board of directors to act in the best interests of the bank, rather than the bank’s holding company. This symposium Article, written in honor of Professor Wilmarth’s retirement, contends that this legal safeguard ignores a critical conflict of interest: the vast majority of large-bank directors also serve as board members of their parent holding companies. These dual directors are therefore poorly situated to exercise the independent judgment necessary to protect a bank from exploitation by its nonbank affiliates. This Article proposes to strengthen bank governance — and better insulate banks from their nonbank affiliates — by mandating that some of a bank’s directors must be unaffiliated with its holding company. As long as banks are permitted to affiliate with nonbanks, this reform is essential to ensure that someone is looking out for the well-being of insured depository institutions.

More Contract Lore

Contract lore consists of “traditional beliefs” about contract law that judges, lawyers, and scholars applying and writing about contract law, employ so routinely and confidently that the principles demonstrate how we perceive contract law today. Previously, I presented three illustrations of contract lore: First, expectancy damages put the injured party in as good a position as if there were no breach. Second, the reasons for a breach, “whether willful, negligent, or unavoidable, are irrelevant to the rules of performance and remedies.” Third, contract formation and interpretation focus on the parties’ intentions. None of these principles are factually or historically even close to true and are nothing more than myths. For example, expectancy damages rarely if ever make the injured party whole. Important remedial rules, such as the obligation of injured parties to pay their lawyers win or lose, the bar to the recovery of prejudgment interest, the preclusion of unforeseeable and unquantifiable damages, and the high bar to recover emotional distress damages, means that injured parties usually recover well-short of their lost expectancy. When pressed, most people with knowledge about contract law would admit that contract lore is not law. Nevertheless, why do these people invoke these “traditional beliefs” even though they are, in reality, nothing more than myths? I reckoned that “contract lore represents contracts people’s aspirations—their strong preference for how contract law should operate if realities did not preclude it.” Further, people tend to seek consistency in their beliefs, which “leads them to believe things that are not true and to avoid conflicting information.” As such, contract lore represents an example of the psychological phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. In this symposium article, I delve deeper into the phenomenon of contract lore. I offer additional examples that focus on the contract lore of consent in the context of standard-form contracting, “intention of the parties” in the context of gaps in contracts, and the requirement of a “bargained-for exchange” in the context of promise enforcement. Based on these examples, I don’t abandon cognitive dissonance as one explanation of contract lore, but I offer additional explanations and show that context play an important role in explaining contract lore. My ultimate goal is to show how contract lore sheds light on possible areas of contract law in need of reform.