Collective bargaining is common in American public education, but its consequences are poorly understood. We focus here on key contractual provisions—seniority-based transfer rights—that affect teacher assignments, and we show that these transfer rights operate to burden disadvantaged schools with higher percentages of inexperienced teachers. We also show that this impact is conditional: It is substantial in large districts, where decisions are likely to follow rules, but it is virtually zero in small districts, where decisions tend to be less formal and undesirable outcomes can more easily be avoided. The negative consequences are thus concentrated on precisely those districts and schools—large districts, high-minority schools—that have been the nation’s worst performers and the most difficult to improve.

The argument that cultural and other forms of diversity enhance the educational experience of all students is generally associated largely with post-1960 efforts to expand the presence of disadvantaged groups on the campuses of America’s universities and colleges. Yet, in the case of UC Berkeley, debates on the merits of cultural diversity have much earlier roots in the historical enrollment of international students. Debates in the late 1800s and early twentieth century revolved around the appropriateness of enrolling foreign students, particularly those from Asia. The result was an important intellectual discussion on the merits of diversity that was eventually reframed to focus largely on underrepresented domestic students. In this short essay, I discuss how the notion of diversity, and its educational benefits, first emerged as a value at UC Berkeley. I then briefly discuss the significant increase of international students at UC Berkeley and other public universities. Thus far, the primary impetus of this increase has been mostly financial—Berkeley has faced significant public disinvestment, seeks new revenue sources, and can charge international students tuition rates similar to elite private colleges and universities. By targeting 20 percent of all undergraduates as international or out-of-state (US-resident non-Californians)—the majority international—the Berkeley campus is essentially diversifying its student body. How does having more globally inclusive enrollment fit into our contemporary ideas of diversity? I attempt a brief discussion of this question and the policy challenges generated by the dramatic increase in international students at the undergraduate level at Berkeley and other UC campuses, including access for Californians.

After a distinctly punitive era, a period of remarkable reform in juvenile crime regulation has begun. Practical urgency has fueled interest in both crime reduction and research on the prediction and malleability of criminal behavior. In this rapidly changing context, high-risk youth - the small proportion of the population where crime is concentrated - present a conundrum. Research indicates that these are precisely the individuals to intensively treat to maximize crime reduction, but there are both real and imagined barriers to doing so. Institutional placement or criminal court processing can exclude these youths from interventions that would better protect public safety. In this article, we synthesize relevant research to help resolve this challenge in a manner that is consistent with the law’s core principles. In our view, adolescence offers unique opportunities for risk reduction that could (with modifications) be realized in the juvenile justice system in cooperation with other social institutions.

The program of regulation through private litigation that Democratic Congresses purposefully created starting in the late 1960s soon met opposition emanating primarily from the Republican party. In the long campaign for retrenchment that began in the Reagan administration, consequential reform proved difficult and ultimately failed in Congress. Litigation reformers turned to the courts and, in marked contrast to their legislative failure, were well-rewarded, achieving growing rates of voting support from an increasingly conservative Supreme Court on issues curtailing private enforcement under individual statutes. We also demonstrate that the judiciary’s control of procedure has been central to the campaign to retrench private enforcement, particularly in the last decade. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure became for a brief time the lawmaking territory in which a newly assertive institutional judiciary sought to forge instruments of retrenchment, but the ensuing controversies quickly animated interest groups and members of Congress who were protective of the procedural status quo to press successfully for changes in the Enabling Act process that limited rulemakers’ capacity to change the Federal Rules. Rulemaking is not, however, the only way that the judiciary can influence private enforcement. Federal Rules afford ample room for interpretation, and they can be effectively amended by the Supreme Court outside the Enabling Act process. Empirical analysis of the Court’s Federal Rules decisions confirms that, in this domain as well, the campaign to retrench private enforcement has had its greatest success in the courts. Indeed, it may be that the success experienced in the Supreme Court affected both the content and the zeal of the legislative campaign for civil litigation reform. Thus, although the issue of litigation reform in general, and procedure as a tool of litigation reform in particular, has been declining in Congress since the mid-1990s, it is at its highest level ever on the Court.

Congress routinely relies upon private lawsuits to enforce its mandates. In this paper we investigate whether, when it does so, the details of the legislation can importantly influence the extent to which the private bar is mobilized to carry out the prosecutorial function. Using an original and novel dataset based upon review of archived litigation documents for cases filed in the Northern and Eastern Districts of California over the two decades spanning 1981 to 2000, we examine the effects of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which increased economic damages available to Title VII job discrimination plaintiffs, on their ability to secure counsel. We find that over the course of the decade after passage, the law substantially increased the probability that Title VII plaintiffs would be represented by counsel, and that in doing so it reversed a decade long trend in the opposite direction.