Nathaniel R. Jones
This Inaugural Judge A. Leon
Higginbotham Lecture honors the work of the late Judge and asserts
that interpretation of the law cannot be separated from the social
issues that the law is to resolve. The lecturer contends that
different perspectives and backgrounds can often bring an equally
different interpretation of what might otherwise appear to be a very
clear set of facts or circumstances. To be able to make sound
judgments, judges must be able to call upon a diversity of
experiences.
In the Long Run: Career Patterns
and Cultural Values in the Low-Wage Labor Force
Katherine S. Newman
What happens to workers who enter
the labor market in low wage jobs? Do they remain working poor for
most of their careers or do they graduate to better employment once
they have work experience and references? In the context of welfare
reform, these questions assume new significance. This article examines
the career pathways of a sample of inner city workers from Harlem and
reports on a four-year follow-up that shows surprising wage gains and
occupational mobility over time. It also explores the stability of
workers' attitudes toward opportunity, welfare reform, and racial
barriers in the labor market.
When a Stumble Is Not a Fall:
Recovering from Employment
Setbacks in the Welfare to Work Transition
Celeste Watkins
Most of the literature on the
welfare-to-work transition argues that maintaining, rather than
finding, employment is the highest hurdle. This article investigates
how welfare-reliant mothers recover from unsuccessful experiences in
the labor market. It finds that respondents develop employment
strategies that include finding work with "family friendly"
institutionalized benefits, improving their problem-solving skills,
and marshaling resources to improve their capacity to handle work and
family. Negotiating the conflicts between work and single motherhood
with limited resources remains a formidable task, but the respondents
develop strategies over time to better manage family and work
simultaneously.
No Equal Justice: How the
Criminal Justice System Uses Inequality
David Cole
This article is an adaptation from
David Cole's No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal
Justice System (1999). It maintains that the criminal justice system
not only fails to live up to its promise of equality before the law,
but affirmatively, depends upon the exploitation of inequality.
Virtually all criminal justice decisions present a trade-off between
protecting people from crime on the one hand, and protecting society
from abuses by the state on the other. The tension is inescapable.
While declining to extend those rights equally to all, society has
mediated this tension in a particularly illegitimate way. The article
further maintains that this reliance on double standards is not only
morally wrong, but counterproductive as well. The double standards
also contribute to the racial divide in America on issues within and
beyond criminal justice.
The Relationship between Race and
Mental Health Treatment
Sharon Parsons, William Payne, Ron
Vogel and Damien Ejigiri
Using data from the Louisiana Office
of Mental Health, this article examines racial disparities in mental
health treatment and the influence of the race of the psychiatrist on
diagnosis. While they find an association between race of the patient
and the diagnosis, the authors maintain that the race of the
psychiatrist was relatively unimportant to diagnostic decisions.
Additionally, the results indicate that the race of the client was
related to the distribution of services. After controlling for
diagnosis, white clients received more services than comparable black
clients did.
