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I INTRODUCTION In the summer of 2001, President George W. Bush faced a difficult decision. He needed to articulate his administration's policy regarding federal funding of medical research on embryonic stem cells. A year earlier, the National Institutes of Health had announced guidelines to fund such research. Upon entering office, President Bush elected to review those guidelines and to make his own determination of federal policy. On August 9, 2001, he made his first primetime television address to announce his decision. The period preceding the President's decision drew as much attention as the decision itself. President Bush reportedly studied the problem with great care, read and consulted with experts about the medical potential of such research compared to research using adult stem cells, and heard from individuals and groups concerned about the intentional destruction of human embryos as well as from others convinced that the medical benefits of such research should not be foregone. (1) Several weeks before the President's final decision, his Secretary of Health and Human Services talked with Jim Lehrer of the nightly PBS news program, the News Hour. JIM LEHRER: In a general sense is the president making--in your opinion--is the president making a scientific decision, or is he making a political decision? TOMMY THOMPSON: I can assure you it's not a political decision--it will be a scientific and ethical decision that this president will make, will base his final decision on. JIM LEHRER: But isn't it basically weighing the whole element of when life begins and anti-abortion ideas versus other things--all that it's not a big-- TOMMY THOMPSON: It's all of that and more. (2) "Political decision [-making]" in this exchange involves calculating the electoral advantages or disadvantages to President Bush by figuring out who the winners and losers of the decision to fund stem-cell research would be, and predicting how they would react. As estimated by the public opinion polls conducted at the time, more people supported federal funding than opposed it. (3) A politician's benefit-loss calculation, however, takes account of more details than these overall numbers. The composition of the groups on either side of an issue can matter a great deal. In this case, right-to-life citizens strongly opposed such funding, while medical researchers and persons standing to benefit from the medical advances promised by stem cell research earnestly supported funding. In looking over this breakdown, any adviser to President Bush could see that the opposition included a crucial re-election constituency known to vote in high percentages. It would be costly to dampen their enthusiasm for making political contributions, participating in get-out-the-vote efforts, and turning out to vote themselves. In contrast, the people committed enough to stem cell funding to make it the basis for their vote were probably less numerous, as well as less critical to the President's re-election prospects, although only time would reveal whether that prediction was accurate. Secretary Thompson sought to dissuade Lehrer and his viewership from thinking that such a political calculation would play any role in the stem cell research decision. Most Americans were probably not convinced. (4) Polling organizations often ask citizens about their perceptions of the role electoral or political considerations play in the, choices their elected officials make. The results show an overwhelming belief that elected officials are "out for themselves," either by giving priority to electoral considerations or feathering their own nests in other ways. By a five-to-one ratio, for example, Americans think members of Congress work to better themselves rather than the country. (5) By a 61% to 32% margin, people think it is impossible for members to avoid being influenced by the financial contributions that they receive when making policy decisions. …

When a public official exercises judgment to make a discretionary decision of some significance, taking into account any factors her own common sense, experience, and understanding of the public interest consider relevant, and subsequently is called to account for the soundness of the decision, she performs one of the paradigmatic acts of politics. When a public official makes a decision because it has been mandated by a prior binding command, and subsequently is called to account only for whether the decision in fact complied with that command, she performs one of the paradigmatic acts of law. The fundamental flaw in the independent counsel law-not the only flaw, but the root of many of its problems-consists of its attempt to convert a political decision, the decision whether to refer a case of public corruption to an investigator outside normal prosecutorial offices, into a legal one. When the Independent Counsel Reauthorization Act of 1994 ("the Act")1 expires on June 30, 1999, it should not be reenacted unless this flaw is eliminated. Our existing law enforcement institutions have ample integrity and resources to investigate wrongdoing by high political officials. Whenever the Attorney General or the President reaches the political judgment that someone outside normal investigatorial channels ought to be asked to conduct a particular investigation, he or she has the authority to act on that judgment and to appoint such an investigator. Even if concern about the ultimate accountability of the President or the Attorney General for such investigations lingers, the mandatory referral mechanism of the Act is a poor way to address those concerns. A better ap

This article examines the selection of decisionmaking procedures by regulatory agencies, using the Environmental Protection Agency ("EPA") and its implementation of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act ("RCRA")1 as our source of data. It seeks to refine recent work that has explicated the role that congressional selection of agency procedures plays in the efforts of Congress to control agency policy.2

Agency has changed substantially during this period. An early mix of enthusiasm for the project of environmental protection, respect for the public policy decisions of the Congress, and a rhetoric of close scrutiny of EPA's decisionmaking processes has given way to neutrality toward environmental values, skepticism about whether environmental legislation expresses coherent public policy, and a rhetoric of deference toward EPA's decisions. This shift is apparent in both doctrinal changes and in the language of judicial opinions reviewing EPA decisionmaking. It is part of a larger reorientation of the federal courts toward judicial review of agency decisionmaking generally. During the period we study, scholarly analyses of aggressive judicial review of agency rulemaking have also moved from agreement with the judiciary's early self-evaluation that "agencies and courts together constitute a 'partnership' in furtherance of the public interest, and are 'collaborative instrumentalities ofjustice,' "' to a more negative appraisal. As Peter Strauss has recently observed, "recent scholarship is tending to [view judicial review as] paralyzing" the ability of administrative agencies to carry out their statutory responsibilities, or-what is not always the same thing-to develop sound public policy.2

For more than a generation, cancer has been America's most feared disease. Cancer deaths are frequently long, debilitating, and inexorable. In addition to its toll on its immediate victims, cancer brings extended grief and, all too frequently, financial disaster to the families of its victims. In the early part of this century, the disease was not so singled out for attention tuberculosis, polio, bubonic plague, malaria, and measles all competed with cancer for attention as public health problems and for primacy in each citizen's private economy of dread. Now, medical science has largely mastered treatments and preventions for these other diseases, leaving cancer with fewer competitors.' Eliminating these rival sources of death has done more than simply leave cancer with fewer challengers; because people no longer die of these other afflictions, our life-spans have been increased sufficiently so that cancer, typically a disease of the middle-aged and elderly, has a much greater opportunity to claim its victims (pp. 17-18). Americans are convinced that our advances in science play another major role in cancer causation, thereby contributing to its prominence as a public concern in yet another way. Numerous chemicals now used throughout the American economy have been linked to cancer, either through epidemiological studies of groups with an abnormally high incidence of cancer, especially workers in chemical and chemicalrelated industries, or through laboratory experiments on animals. Many of these chemicals, such as the synthetic hydrocarbons that form the basis of the plastics industry, were literally unknown to the planet before the Second World War. Others, like asbestos, were not a substantial problem until industrial uses dramatically expanded their

Under American law, a stranger generally bears no duty to rescue another, even another in a life-threatening situation, and even if the rescue could be accomplished with little or no inconvenience or risk. This contrasts with the rule in many European countries that people do bear a legal obligation to render assistance to others in imminent peril when doing so would not place the potential actor at risk.1 In his contribution to this symposium, Professor Kleinig examines the support for the American view. Many who defend the American rule argue that a sharp, categorical distinction separates harm-causing conduct that is properly sanctionable from failures to rescue. Failures to act, including failures to rescue, allegedly exhibit a difference in kind from actions that justify, indeed demand, different legal treatment. That difference is variously described: as the difference between causing harm and conferring a benefit; as that between negative duties and positive duties; as that between duties of a specific obligor to a specific obligee ("perfect" duties) and those that take no specific obligee ("imperfect" duties); or as that between obligations that do not intrude upon individual liberties and those that do. One or more of these distinctions

"The household," wrote A. E. Kennelly in 1890, "is in itself the condensed history of a nation's past, the centre of its present, and the cradle of its future."' Such a microcosm would certainly seem to deserve detailed study. And, when properly read, household artifacts ought therefore to disclose more than another page in the history of decorative arts and furnishings, for there is also a technology that underlies the ornamentation of domestic life. Domestic technology has certainly not been neglected by historians, yet a close look at one family of artifacts reveals something important about the nation's past, a legacy that continues to be central today.2

A mourning dove (Zenaidura macroura) production study was conducted during the 1962 nesting season in an osage orange (Maclura pomifera) planting in Ellis County, Kansas. Altogether 389 nests built by an estimated 92 pairs of doves were followed to termination between May 2 and September 11. Of these, 166 nests (43 percent) were lost to predators, storms, or abandonment. Two hundred and forty-two (32 percent) of the 766 eggs laid and 114 (22 percent) of 524 nestling doves were lost during the nesting season. Four hundred and ten nestlings were fledged, averaging 4.5 young per pair. The greatest number of active nests found at any one time was 92, a density of 17.3/acre. The fall dove hunting season resulted in the cessation of nesting activity. Doves were still in the process of nest building and incubation when the season began, but no new nests were started after this time and many active nests were deserted. In the spring of 1961, I found a high density of mourning doves nesting in a 10- acre planting of osage orange trees estab- lished under the timber culture act of 1873, 5 miles north and 2 mile west of Hays, Ellis County, Kansas. AREA DESCRIPTION