The views expressed are the responsibility of the author and are not necessarily those of the Council.

Decisions over whether to accord a New York City building or site landmark status are frequently controversial.2 Such decisions implicate divergent and often diametrically opposed views of the role the city’s government should play in economic development and in protecting cultural sites, as well as the role the democratic process should play in these decisions. Different views on the aesthetic...

Medicine is still largely a pre-Darwin, pre-Newton enterprise.. . . Wedo not yet understand the underlying mechanisms of the major illnesses which plague humanity, and therefore much of what is done in the treatment of illness must still be empirical, trial and error therapy. We are compelled by our limitations to resort to shoring things up, applying halfway technology, trying to fix things af...

Despite its contemporary and theoretical importance in numerous social scientific disciplines, institutional confidence research is limited by a lack of consensus regarding the distinctions and relationships among related constructs (e.g., trust, confidence, legitimacy, distrust, etc.). This study examined four confidence-related constructs that have been used in studies of trust/confidence in ...

In this paper we explore the impact of relational history on firms’ willingness to “work things out” in subsequent agreements, by examining the way that contract disputes between partners in vertical exchange relationships are actually resolved. Counter to the received wisdom we find no evidence of an automatic preference for private dispute resolution (negotiation, mediation or arbitration) am...

Many Australian courts now prefer pre-hearing meetings of experts (conclaves) being convened to prepare joint reports to identify areas of agreement and disagreement, followed by concurrent expert evidence at trial. This contrasts to the traditional approach where experts did not meet before trial and did not give evidence together. Most judges, lawyers and expert witnesses favour this as a pos...

This paper aims to examine increases in professional liability for architectural and engineering (A/E) professionals following quantitative changes in litigation risks after the Chichi Earthquake. The methodology uses t-tests and ANOVA to analyse the impact of the earthquake with regard to (1) the number of A/E litigations, (2) the type of plaintiff, (3) court decisions, and (4) the scope of A/...

The second Rehnquist Court has remained unchanged in composition for 8 yr, resulting in a large temporally stable database. This paper reports on a mathematically objective analysis of this ensemble of rulings aimed at extracting key patterns and latent information. Although the rulings of a nine-justice Court require representation in nine dimensions, smaller spaces describe the Court's action...