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From the landmark work by John Rohr, Ethics for Bureaucrats, the authors seek to take a step in furthering moral readings of the Supreme Court for public administrators. While Rohr and the Constitu...

What moral readings characterize contemporary U.S. Supreme Court opinions on discrimination by race; ethnicity; religion; gender; sexuality; and disabilities? John Rohr and the Constitutional Schoo...

Is the U.S. Supreme Court inviting litigants to take aim at unraveling injunctions in institutional reform litigation—especially consent decrees in the schools? In Horne v. Flores (2009), the court remanded a 17-year-old school reform case to a federal judge with orders to look beyond consent decrees on financing, reducing class sizes, and moving from bilingual education to structured English immersion—to look anew at whether the schools in Nogales, Arizona, provide equal opportunity. Those concerned with schools worry that the court has signaled the end of institutional reform litigation in the schools. However, we closely analyze these dense opinions and data tables to posit the court’s preference for a catalytic judicial strategy that may work best with institutional reform litigation. We place this analysis within a larger context of empirical studies of institutional reform litigation judicial strategies, including judicial roles of deferrer, director, broker, and catalyst. We also argue that these preferences demonstrate the court’s awareness of a sociolegal empirical literature on what works in institutional reform litigation—rather than the end of consent decrees in the schools.

The definition and nature of the public interest is an ongoing area of debate and controversy among public administration scholars and practitioners. This article’s main thesis is that there exists an identifiable public interest entailing both normative and pragmatic elements that should be a foundational concern of every practicing public administrator. The administrator’s duty entails three factors: (a) the fiduciary duties to the commons as defined and constrained by constitutional principles, (b) policies that are congruent with our democratic values, and (c) the practice of nonidiosyncratic and universalized ethical administrative leadership and decision making. The article addresses this much maligned and dismissed topic by tracing its historical development focusing on the various lenses, working definitions, characteristics, and typologies of the public interest and illustrating their application in a case study of the Federal Communications Commission. The authors conclude with summary reflections and implications for public administration and public policy.

What moral justifications do we find in Fourth Amendment judicial opinions of the Rehnquist Court, and what does this suggest about future Court decision making? First, the authors develop the moral justification model of judicial decision making in a literature review, with linguistic patterns and categories by Hercules and Herbert for content analysis. Second, they discuss the methodological strategies used in this content analysis of official opinions of the Court on the Fourth Amendment from 1986 to 1994. Third, from this content analysis, the authors describe the patterns of moral justification in Rehnquist Court Fourth Amendment opinions, including the Court’s assessments of the moral virtue of “druggie” defendants. Finally, they draw conclusions from this analysis for a moral science of the politics of law.

What “triggers” federal court intervention in prison reform litigation? The authors present a causal model of federal judicial intervention in the prison reform litigation of 48 states (all except Alaska and Hawaii). From analysis of variables posited by numerous qualitative case studies to be critical, the causal model indicates that federal court intervention in state prison systems can be correlated to various factors, including political ideology, socioeconomic factors, and the “problem environment” of state prison conditions. The authors offer the analysis in the hope that it will stimulate additional discussion of the jurisprudence and behavior of federal judicial intervention in prison reform litigation.

Plea bargaining processes have been subjected in recent decades to a heightened level of scrutiny and attacked as constituting an unethical practice. Yet plea bargaining continues to be the primary means of resolving criminal cases. Can plea bargaining be institutionally reformed to facilitate ethically acceptable practices?