Suchergebnisse

Several Supreme Court battles during the Warren-Burger era finally brought public sector employees under constitutional protection, setting forth a new legal framework for personnel management. This new framework requires administrators to manage personnel foremost in compliance with the established constitutional principles without necessarily sacrificing efficiency. Public Personnel Administration and Constitutional Values is a sketch of this new framework in which constitutionalism and judicial accountability become defining characteristics.||In the text the author provides, for the first t

Contemporary theory of the constitutionally reasonable public servant, established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1982 in Harlow v. Fitzgerald, is measured in reference to clearly established constitutional or statutory rights that a reasonable person would have known. In this article, the author seeks to elucidate the evolving contours of the objective reasonableness standard and examines how federal courts have applied it. To gain a firsthand impression of how public officials challenged in federal courts are measuring up to the objective reasonableness standard, the author provides a snapshot of 449 recent court cases selected from two federal circuits, the Eighth and the District of Columbia circuits. He concludes that public officials in these two circuits have fared very well under the standard of objective reasonableness. The flip side is that aggrieved individual citizens must carry a heavy burden to protect their constitutional rights.

Issues in technology transfer among industrialized countries, partnerships between universities and industry, and transfer from military to civil uses; 11 articles.

During the last decade, the Supreme Court has been vacillating in its approach to affirmative action (AA)--from stricker scrutiny standards to more liberal standards--seriously complicating the job of public administration. Whyhas the Court been so ambivalent towards AA ? This article shows that the two-tieranalytic framework the Court has formulated for judicial review is not asystematic test enabling coherentapplication but largely a set of conflicting and often polarized value preferences. This "conglomerate" framework has permitted the Court to make essentially inconsistent choices, depending on who sits on the bench and is able to forge the opinion. With the retirement of Justices Brennan (1990) and Marshall (1991)--the ardent supporters of affirmative action--the Court will certainly embark upon a strict scrutiny path. Inevitably then, AA debate will change in focus, gradually moving away from the idea of quotas to a case-by-case approach. The challenge here would be to structure AA policyin a way that is consistent with the language of the Equal Protection of the Laws. If, for instance, merit is the only constitutionally acceptable criterion, AA policymayhave to be focused on the concept of merit, defining it in a way that is not going to be disadvantageous to a particular group. Thatmaymean that "merit" is definedbroadlyin terms of whata person is capable of contributing to his or her employerand the larger community in which he or she is a part.