In 1987 Judge Russell Clark mandated tax increases to help pay for improvements to the Kansas City, Missouri, School District in an effort to lure white students and quality teachers back to the inner-city district. Yet even after increasing employee salaries and constructing elaborate facilities at a cost of more than $2 billion, the district remained overwhelmingly segregated and student achievement remained far below national averages. Just eight years later the U.S. Supreme Court began reversing these initiatives, signifying a major retreat from Brown v. Board of Education. In Kansas City, African American families opposed to the district court's efforts organized a takeover of the school board and requested that the court case be closed. Joshua Dunn argues that Judge Clark's ruling was not the result of tyrannical "judicial activism" but was rather the logical outcome of previous contradictory Supreme Court doctrines. High Court decisions, Dunn explains, necessarily limit the policy choices available to lower court judges, introducing complications the Supreme Court would not anticipate. He demonstrates that the Kansas City case is a model lesson for the types of problems that develop for lower courts in any area in which the Supreme Court attempts to create significant change. Dunn's exploration of this landmark case deepens our understanding of when courts can and cannot successfully create and manage public policy.

Describes the duel roles of prosecutors in the criminal justice system--ensuring fair trials and obtaining high conviction rates.

The need for informed analyses of health policy is now greater than ever. The twelve essays in this volume show that public debates routinely bypass complex ethical, sociocultural, historical, and political questions about how we should address ideals of justice and equality in health care. Integrating perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, medicine, and public health, this volume illuminates the relationships between justice and health inequalities to enrich debates. Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice explores three questions: How do scholars approach relations between health inequalities and ideals of justice? When do justice considerations inform solutions to health inequalities, and how do specific health inequalities affect perceptions of injustice? And how can diverse scholarly approaches contribute to better health policy? From addressing patient agency in an inequitable health care environment to examining how scholars of social justice and health care amass evidence, this volume promotes a richer understanding of health and justice and how to achieve both. The contributors are Judith C. Barker, Paula Braveman, Paul Brodwin, Jami Suki Chang, Debra DeBruin, Leslie A. Dubbin, Sarah Horton, Carla C. Keirns, J. Paul Kelleher, Nicholas B. King, Eva Feder Kittay, Joan Liaschenko, Anne Drapkin Lyerly, Mary Faith Marshall, Carolyn Moxley Rouse, Jennifer Prah Ruger, and Janet K. Shim.

Beyond High Courts: The Justice Complex in Latin America is a much-needed volume that will make a significant contribution to the growing fields of comparative law and politics and Latin American legal institutions. The book moves these research agendas beyond the study of high courts by offering theoretically and conceptually rich empirical analyses of a set of critical supranational, national, and subnational justice sector institutions that are generally neglected in the literature. The chapters examine the region’s large federal systems (Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico), courts in Chile and Venezuela, and the main supranational tribunal in the region, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Aimed at students of comparative legal institutions while simultaneously offering lessons for practitioners charged with designing such institutions, the volume advances our understanding of the design of justice institutions, how their form and function change over time, what causes those changes, and what consequences they have. The volume also pays close attention to how justice institutions function as a system, exploring institutional interactions across branches and among levels of government (subnational, national, supranational) and analyzing how they help to shape, and are shaped by, politics and law. Incorporating the institutions examined in the volume into the literature on comparative legal institutions deepens our understanding of justice systems and how their component institutions can both bolster and compromise democracy and the rule of law. Contributors: Matthew C. Ingram, Diana Kapiszewski, Azul A. Aguiar-Aguilar, Ernani Carvalho, Natália Leitão, Catalina Smulovitz, John Seth Alexander, Robert Nyenhuis, Sídia Maria Porto Lima, José Mário Wanderley Gomes Neto, Danilo Pacheco Fernandes, Louis Dantas de Andrade, Mary L. Volcansek, and Martin Shapiro.

An assessment of how the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is significantly influencing the nation's laws and reinterpreting the Constitution includes in-depth analysis of recent rulings and their implications.

Complicated Lives focuses on the lives of sixty-five drug-using girls in the juvenile justice system (living in group homes, a residential treatment center, and a youth correctional facility) who grew up in families characterized by parental drug use, violence, and child maltreatment. Vera Lopez situates girls’ relationships with parents who fail to live up to idealized parenting norms and examines how these relationships change over time, and ultimately contribute to the girls’ future drug use and involvement in the justice system. While Lopez’s subjects express concerns and doubt in their chances for success, Lopez provides an optimistic prescription for reform and improvement of the lives of these young women and presents a number of suggestions ranging from enhanced cultural competency training for all juvenile justice professionals to developing stronger collaborations between youth and adult serving systems and agencies.

America is a nation founded on justice and the rule of law. But our laws are too complex, and legal advice too expensive, for poor and even middle-class Americans to get help and vindicate their rights. Criminal defendants facing jail time may receive an appointed lawyer who is juggling hundreds of cases and immediately urges them to plead guilty. Civil litigants are even worse off; usually, they get no help at all navigating the maze of technical procedures and rules. The same is true of those seeking legal advice, like planning a will or negotiating an employment contract. Rebooting Justice presents a novel response to longstanding problems. The answer is to use technology and procedural innovation to simplify and change the process itself. In the civil and criminal courts where ordinary Americans appear the most, we should streamline complex procedures and assume that parties will not have a lawyer, rather than the other way around. We need a cheaper, simpler, faster justice system to control costs. We cannot untie the Gordian knot by adding more strands of rope; we need to cut it, to simplify it.