A bulletin of the federal courts.

This study explores the socio-legal context of economic rationality in the legal and judicial systems. It examines the meaning and relevance of the concept of efficiency for the operation of courts and court systems,seeking to answer questions such as: in what sense can we say that the adjudicative process works efficiently? What are the relevant criteria for the measurement and assessment of court efficiency? Should the courts try to operate efficiently and to what extent is this viable? What is the proper relationship between 'efficiency' and 'justice' considerations in a judicial proceeding? To answer these questions, a conceptual framework is developed on the basis of empirical studies and surveys carried out mainly in the United States, Western Europe and Latin America. Two basic ideas emerge from it. First, economic rationality has penetrated the legal and judicial systems at all levels and dimensions, from the level of society as a whole to the day-to-day operation of the courts, from the institutional dimension of adjudication to the organizational context of judicial decisions. Far from being an alien value in the judicial process, efficiency has become an inseparable part of the structure of expectations we place on the legal system. Second, economic rationality is not the prevalent value in legal decision-making, as it is subject to all kinds of constraints, local conditions and concrete negotiations with other values and interests.

This important volume examines rights from an inter-disciplinary law and society perspective, beginning with the premise that the most basic functions of rights requires the empirical study of rights consciousness and claiming behavior. As such the volume includes articles and essays by political scientists, historians, lawyers, and sociologists which place the study of ordinary citizens' understandings of rights, and what actions they take based on that knowledge, at the forefront of an empirical research agenda. This has important implications for law's capacity to achieve social change and can lead to better understanding of how rights can and should operate in a social and legal system. The volume is organized around the social movements and political processes which give rise to rights, the processes by which people come to understand they enjoy a right, the decision to invoke the right either formally or informally, and the organizational and institutional constraints and opportunities for exercising rights.

This volume is a collection of chapters covering recent advances in stochastic optimal control theory and algebraic systems theory. The book will be a useful reference for researchers and graduate students in systems and control, algebraic systems theory, and applied mathematics. Requiring only knowledge of undergraduate-level control and systems theory, the work may be used as a supplementary textbook in a graduate course on optimal control or algebraic systems theory.

Every editor of the Policy Studies Review Annual brings a unique perspective to bear in selecting articles to be included. This perspective reflects varying methodological and disciplinary judgments, varying judgments on what the field of policy studies or policy analysis is and where it should be going, and varying judgments regarding the quality of articles which are or claim to be in the field. Because it is the objective to assemble a set of essays which are both interesting and topical, there will be varying perspectives on these matters as well. The volume clearly reflects the editors perspectives. They are explicit about these judgments and perspectives, and then let the content of the volume speak for itself. First, we are both economists. As a result, the general topics selected and the articles chosen under each topic tend to emphasize economics more than the other disciplines involved in the field of policy studies—sociology, psychology, political science, law, and so on. This emphasis is clearly seen by comparing the contents of volume I (edited by Stuart Nagel, a political scientist) and volume II (edited by Howard Freeman, a sociologist) with that of this volume. Second, the editors have a particular view of what policy studies or policy analysis is. That view has several aspects. In the first place, they feel that the field of policy studies or policy analysis must define itself, and this definition will develop as researchers do just what the title of the field says—study or analyze policies. A corollary of this view is that we place a low weight on papers which discuss the policy process or reforms in policy-making, relative to papers which analyze a policy, a policy proposal, or a problem which leads to calls for policy action.