Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: ABSTRACT: The Rehnquist Court—its decisions, decision making, and conception of the judicial role—have as powerfully shaped legal theorizing about the court and judicial review as did the Warren Court. In leaving its mark on a broad range of juridical subjects, the Rehnquist Court inspired a series of scholarly reflections on and reassessments of the Supreme Court's role as a constitutional court in the American political system. This paper traces the efforts of the court's commentators to back away from the "legal liberalism" that had been central to the construction of the court's role since the Warren era, and argues that the Rehnquist Court's principal legal impact is this intellectual, ideational impact on court scholarship.

Supporting Publications:
Supporting Document

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: In social network sites, friendship is a feature. It allows users to acknowledge other people on the system and to have their connection permanently cemented into the structure of the system... that is, until a breakup prompts an explicit destruction of the friend relationship both on and offline. This explicit articulation requires participants to consciously consider the social complications of adding or deleting someone. While friendship may seem like a simple matter, having to publicly list who is in and who is out is not that easy.

In this paper, I will examine how friendship is constructed in social network sites, how it differs from traditional understandings of friendship, and how friendship technology has complicated the negotiation of relationships between people. I will focus primarily on the friending process in Friendster and MySpace, drawing on three years of ethnographic data.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: For more than a half century, the
Administrative Procedure Act has laid out the fundamental process
through which the public participates in rulemaking by agencies of the
federal government. In recent years, however, the notice-and-comment
approach to rulemaking has come under fire as inherently adversarial
and problematic, leading to unnecessary delay and unsatisfactory
outcomes. At the same time, a highly touted and controversial
alternative has emerged. Under negotiated rulemaking, agencies and
stakeholders jointly bargain over the substance of proposed rules in a
search for consensus among interested parties. The ongoing, vigorous
debate over the relative merits of these two competing visions of
public involvement misses an important point, that much rulemaking
entails modes of participation that are between commenting and
negotiation. For example, many rules are developed in part through
public hearings, advisory committee proceedings, and online interactive
forums.
Despite the prevalence of this “middle ground” in rulemaking, little is
known about the prevalence of different forms of public participation
and the conditions under which these forms are used. As a result, there
is much uncertainty over the role that stakeholders play in the making
of many of the policy decisions that come out of the federal
bureaucracy. With this in mind, the paper addresses two fundamental
questions: (1) How often are various forms of public participation
used? (2) Under what conditions are particular modes of participation
most likely to be part of the rulemaking process?
The paper will investigate these questions from two distinct empirical
perspectives. First, an inventory of public involvement will be
assembled for hundreds of rulemakings completed by the Department of
Transportation (DOT) over the past five years. In the late 1990s, the
DOT began placing all of its dockets on the Internet. Dockets are the
full written records of rulemakings and include Federal Register
documents, comments on proposed rules, transcripts of public hearings,
and memorandums reporting on meetings, phone calls, and outside
interactions that take place while rules are being developed. Because
these records are increasingly online, it is for the first time
feasible to lay out the contours of public participation, in all of its
forms, for a large number of rulemakings. In the end, our understanding
of public participation will be greatly enhanced, beyond the case
studies of particularly salient rulemakings from which most of our
existing wisdom has been drawn.
Second, the paper will report on a series of interviews conducted with
DOT officials who were involved in the development of a sample of the
rulemakings being studied. These interviews will focus on the factors
that entered into the decisions about how specifically to reach out to
the public. For example, to what extent did agency officials have
discretion over the venues through which the public participated in the
rulemaking? What kinds of decision rules governed the exercise of this
discretion? In addressing the use of public participation mechanisms in
this way, the paper will bring new evidence to bear on an ongoing
debate in political science regarding the efficacy of procedural
arrangements, like outside involvement, in fostering political control
of the bureaucracy. Little yet is known about how agency officials
respond to the structural and procedural constraints that are placed on
them by politicians. One of the paper’s ultimate aims is to break new
ground in studying agency strategy and responsiveness to political
constraints.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This paper asks a simple, yet crucial question: Does the application of information technology to rulemaking, in particular the online submission of comments, affect the amount of public participation that occurs in response to agency proposals?

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: We utilized qualitative and quantitative approaches to examine how appearance-related communications within one’s family relate to eating pathology and internalization of cultural appearance norms. College women completed standardized measures of these factors and responded to open-ended questions regarding appearance-related communication within the family. Findings are examined within a feminist framework.