In the shadow of a 15 year battle between the federal courts and Congress over how much protection is afforded religious behavior, more than half of the states have declared the highest level of protection either through a state-level Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), or through a court decision. This study finds the results of the states' attempts by calculating how often actors seeking protection for a religious act win the judge's vote. The study's date range is the eight years following the last volley in the federal battle, City of Boerne v. Flores: 1998-2005. The unit of analysis is each judge vote, 3,254 in all. And the research question is if and under what conditions are these institutional attempts actually helping religious actors win more judge votes? To make sure the effects of the institutional attempts are independent of other factors, as well as to conduct exploratory research on how other factors affect religious freedom, several controls will be used. Those controls are specifically: characteristics about the judge and county, characteristics about the religious claimant and case, and characteristics about the legal opinion. The results of the study show: (1) States appear to protect religious actors more than federal courts with a 44% favorable vote-rate in the state courts. But (2) neither legislative nor judicial attempts affect religious success, most evidence shows. Judicial attempts can find some significantly positive results in specific models. (3) The most explanatory predictor is the way constitutional language is used in the opinion.

This dissertation examines jury nullification - the ability of American juries in particular criminal cases to ignore or override valid law to be applied to defendants by acquitting them in cases in which the facts are undisputed or clear - as an exercise of sovereignty over the friend-enemy distinction as those terms are defined by Carl Schmitt. It begins with a biography of Schmitt and a description of his concept of sovereignty as ultimate decisional power. It then discusses sovereignty in the American context, with particular attention to the principles of the Founding and the nature of the fictively constructed American people. It next applies Schmitt's concept of decisional sovereignty to the American context, concluding that sovereignty in America is diffuse, and its exercise by particular governmental actors is to some degree cloaked, and that the sovereignty of the American people, while crucial to the founding moment, is largely latent in ordinary times. This application of Schmitt to sovereignty in America also demonstrates the deep tension between democratic popular sovereignty and rule-of-law liberalism. The dissertation then turns to Schmitt's understanding of the distinction between friend and enemy as the central political axis, and argues that the criminal in the American context is functionally the enemy, if not the absolute enemy of the polity. It then discusses in detail the mechanics and history of jury nullification, ultimately concluding that jury nullification both operates at the crucial political moment at which enemies are generated (or not) through the application of criminal law to defendants, and is an act of popular sovereignty, intended by the Founders to help preserve a balance between democracy and liberalism by maintaining a central political role for the people.

In the tradition of legal pluralism, I explore the various notions of a right influenced by claims on little bits of contingent space. As a consequence of this territoriality, the municipal regulation of and local politics surrounding parking spaces produce competing notions of legality. The jurisprudence of the parking space examines a type of governing that is local and often contested. In spaces where formal law is evident, yet dominantly absent, social law become judge and jury. Right and its regulation are culturally dependent and politically malleable. The right to park is a special right, considered to be a presumption of expectation connected, literally, to a person driving a car and lines on the pavement. Jurisprudentially, this special right is enacted between individuals in everyday parking environments where often the social norm operates as 'the law.' In many cases, formal law is distanced. Feeding the meter manages the threat of a ticket. The appeal of a ticket is the pronouncement of right. Yelling angrily at a driver who parks triumphantly in a coveted space is a noisy but weak attempt to assert a right. The fundamental issues that I explore in the project involve the hybridization of right, identity, and property. My study of the parking space is complex, as I consider the semiotics of the terrain, the embodiment of jurisdiction, and expertise as governance as factors of legitimacy focused on the visibility of who is parking. This notion of belonging is central to the frameworks of community and citizenship in which parking spaces become site of politically constructed architecture. These sites are policed officially by the sexualized authority of parking enforcement and unofficially (and often violently) by other parkers. In this way, law is personified, with the administration of authority inviting closer scrutiny into the nature of constitutive legal theory. At both the level of the United States Supreme Court and in the everyday parking area, the parking space engenders disputes over equal protection guarantees, acts of free speech, and assertions of reserve that reach beyond the stated scope of policy.

Doctrine as Data examines the issues and opportunities around machine acquisition and analysis of legal doctrine. This work sought to treat doctrine as data, as a clump of federal appellate case opinion texts, which could be procured and empirically analyzed with information processing technology. Doctrine is a nimble knowledge structure however, existing as a clump as well as a logic where parameters and understandings in case law are constituted. The subject doctrine for this project, compelling interests of the strict scrutiny balancing test, proved to be a logic where notions of legitimate police power and individual rights are established. That logic is flexible, politically sensitive, and responsive, going beyond opinions from a myriad of cases said manifesting doctrine. Doctrine as Data examines information systems and their practices of indexing and accessing appellate case opinions to explore whether these systems are significant to sustaining, or challenging, conceptualizations of doctrine in cases. The examination consists of defining, identifying, and collecting appellate case opinions exhibiting the compelling interest doctrine using the preeminent hard bound and computer legal information systems (i.e. West's digests and reporters and Lexis/Nexis respectively). The project also introduces a new tool, the InQuery search engine from the University of Massachusetts' Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, to analyze that collection for conceptual coherency attributed to doctrine, i.e. to probe doctrine's presence in, and relationship to, case opinions. It appears however that doctrine exists outside of cases, or rather, is attributed to cases through traditions of legal practice, commentary, and scholarship moreso than in the systems created to manage law's hard data.

<p> This dissertation develops a normative theory of the American administrative state on the basis of Hegelian and American Progressive political thought. I reconstruct the substantive and procedural commitments of the American state from its intellectual history and institutional development. The basic principle I recover from this history is that the state must make the public sphere politically efficacious. </p><p> I begin by tracing German understandings of the state which heavily influenced certain American Progressives. G.W.F. Hegel, and the German public law scholars who followed in his footsteps, understood the modern state to have an emancipatory function. The public bureaucracy would institute the requirements of freedom through market regulation and social welfare provision. This German Hegelian theory of the state was not, however, democratic. Reflecting the failures of the Revolution of 1848 and the subsequent entrenchment of constitutional monarchy in the German states, Hegelian public law scholars sought only to free individuals from conditions of domination within civil society, not to enable the people as a whole to author the laws that bind them. This amalgam of liberal social aims and authoritarian state structure gave way to a crisis-prone, president-centered regime during the Weimar Republic.</p><p> American Progressives were deeply influenced by the Hegelian political thought, but they radically revised this German conception of statehood by democratizing it. W.E.B. Du Bois, Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, Mary Parker Follett, and Frank Goodnow each engaged with German Hegelian thinkers in their efforts to imagine and legitimate bureaucratic institutions that would be appropriate for the American democratic context. Like Hegel, they defended administrative efforts to promote individual freedom. But they departed from the German tradition in emphasizing that administration must be rooted in popular sovereignty. The Hegelian Progressive theory that emerges from these writers has two normative requirements: The state must furnish the material and social requisites for individual and collective autonomy, and it must use participatory forms of administration to deliver these requisites. </p><p> This Progressive conception of democratic statehood provides a coherent perspective from which to assess and critique the legitimacy of our contemporary political order. The state's substantive aim should be to protect individual and collective autonomy against the unequal circulation of information and power in civil society. The state should carry out this aim procedurally through the "discursive separation of powers," which treats each branch of the federal government as an approximate institutionalization of the public. The political branches&mdash;the executive and the legislature&mdash;have only a qualified claim to represent the popular sovereign, because they lack complete information about the problems members of the public perceive. Their qualified authority must therefore be augmented through deliberative forms of administration, which bring the people back into the policy-making process when laws are implemented. The judicial branch must police this process to ensure that administrative agencies recognize the "public rights" which are established by statutory law and rooted in public discourse.</p><p> To demonstrate how this Progressive conception of the state functions in practice, I turn to the New Deal and the Civil Rights Revolution. New Deal agricultural agencies partially realized Progressive ideals through subsidies for marginal farmers and participatory forms of land-use planning. These reforms wrought social changes which contributed to the formation of the civil rights movement. I then show how administrative agencies in the War on Poverty furthered radical forms of participatory governance, while civil rights agencies operationalized the discursive separation of powers in combatting segregation.</p><p> Our contemporary state continues to follow this Progressive vision in many respects, but serious problems remain: affected parties do not participate equally in the administrative process; the president sometimes supplants broad public discourse with unilateral executive action; courts and agencies often deploy a technocratic mode of analysis that fails to foster ethical judgment by administrators and value-based argument with the affected public. Despite these institutional failures, the Progressive theory continues to provide a normatively attractive vision for administrative legitimacy. It avoids the narrow economistic reasoning of cost-benefits analysis and the unstable politics of plebiscitary democracy. This theory helps us to separate illegitimate from legitimate exercises of state power in the present, on topics ranging from climate change to immigration reform. By recovering the ethical content of the institutions that have evolved from Progressive political thought, we may better realize the democratic forms and functions of our state.</p>

<p> The federal government is devoted to an open, safe, free, and dependable cyberspace that empowers innovation, enriches business, develops the economy, enhances security, fosters education, upholds democracy, and defends freedom. Despite many advantages&mdash; federal and Department of Defense cybersecurity policies and standards, the best military power equipped with the most innovative technologies in the world, and the best military and civilian workforces ready to perform any mission&mdash;the defense cyberspace is vulnerable to a variety of threats. This study explores cybersecurity requirements in the defense acquisition process. The literature review exposes cybersecurity challenges that the government faces in the federal acquisition process, and the researcher examines cybersecurity requirements in defense acquisition documents. The study reveals that cybersecurity is not at a level of importance equal to that of cost, technical, and performance in the current defense acquisition process. The study discloses the defense acquisition guidance does not reflect the change of cybersecurity requirements, and the defense acquisition processes are deficient, ineffective, and inadequate to describe and consider cybersecurity requirements, weakening the government&rsquo;s overall efforts to implement cybersecurity framework into the defense acquisition system. The study recommends defense organizations elevate the importance of cybersecurity during the acquisition process, to help the government&rsquo;s overall efforts to develop, build, and operate in an open, secure, interoperable, and reliable cyberspace. </p>

<p> This dissertation proposes, exemplifies, and validates the usage of course-subject co-occurrence (CSCO) data to generate topic maps of an academic discipline. CSCO is defined as course-subjects taught in the same academic year by the same teacher. This work is premised on the assumption that in the aggregate and for reasons of efficiency, faculty members teach course-subjects that are topically similar to one another. To exemplify and validate CSCO, more than 112,000 CSCO events were extracted from the annual directories of the American Association of Law Schools covering nearly eighty years of law school teaching in the United States. The CSCO events are used to extract and visualize the structure and evolution of law for the years 1931-32, 1972-73, and 2010-11&mdash;roughly, forty year intervals. Different normalization, ordination (layout), and clustering algorithms are compared and the best algorithm of each type is used to generate the final map. Validation studies demonstrate that CSCO produces topic maps that are consistent with expert opinion and four other indicators of the topical similarity of law school course-subjects. Resulting maps of the educational domain of law are useful as a reference system for additional thematic overlay of information about law school education in the United States. This research is the first to use CSCO to produce visualizations of a domain. It is the first to use an expanded, multi-part gold-standard to evaluate the validity of domain maps and the intermediate steps in their creation. Last but not least, this research contributes a metric analysis and visualizations of the evolution of law school course-subjects over nearly eighty years.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Drexel University, 2008. / Includes abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 351-370).

<p> The purpose of the research is to explore the cultural intelligence (CQ) of law firm librarians in the United States. This dissertation is motivated by three research questions: (a) What is the overall level of CQ of participating law firm librarians? (b) What variations among participating law firm librarians, if any, exist among the four capabilities of CQ?; and (c) What viewpoints do the librarians have about the value and importance of CQ within their law firms? This research contributes to the limited amount of empirical literature on CQ. Officially defined in early 2000s, the CQ framework is what guides this study. The research extends the application of the CQ framework by applying it to an area not formerly studied, law firm libraries.</p><p> A concurrent nested strategy model was used in order to gain a broader perspective of CQ. The researcher conducted a mixed-methods study using a web-based survey process incorporating the CQS, an instrument that measures CQ level, demographic and open-ended items. The target population consisted of librarians within the United States who currently work in private law firm libraries. Of the initial 170 individuals who responded to the request, 70 provided survey responses. The sample was based on self-selection from those that were members of two professional associations. </p><p> Based on a triangulation of the findings, four conclusions were made: (a) law firm librarians have a strong sense of value and importance of CQ to their law firms, (b) law firm librarians have varying levels of CQ within each of the four CQ factors, (c) the librarian's feel valued and appreciated within their law firm, and (d) law firm librarians cope with cultural challenges and have to adapt to unfamiliar environments. The findings support the research questions and prompt thinking of how to incorporate CQ into training, maximize the benefits of CQ with stakeholders that utilize the library services, and how law firms may use CQ to help with industry changes. This research provides a glimpse into CQ and additional important issues to law librarians within law firms in the United States including their value within a law firm.</p>

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