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We discuss various approaches to nonviolent conflict resolution and specifically the views of Gene Sharp and Erik Erikson as developed in their recent books on the subject. Both authors have in common a concern with the sources of obedience and the processes by which people come to question authority and the use of force. We explore the insights and limits of each approach and suggest aspects that need further clarification in the discussion of nonviolence. Sharp's encyclopedic effort draws together much material and is a valuable source. Erikson develops a set of poetic and telling conclusions from Gandhi's career that provide a deeper sense of how nonviolent campaigns can be waged and what they are all about.

Lax and Rader critique our use of the Chow test in our series of articles on jurisprudential regimes on the grounds that individual justices votes are not statistically independent, which constitutes a violation of assumptions underlying the Chow test. In this response we point out that the Chow tests constituted only one part of our analysis; we also conducted a sensitivity analysis to look at the strength of the Chow tests compared to other sequential splits. Most importantly, we required that the observed statistical patterns of change be theoretically consistent with the legal changes made by the regime changing decisions; we note two areas where we did preliminary analyses that produced statistically significant results, but where those results did not make sense in light of the jurisprudence. We repeat both our Chow tests and individual interaction tests taking into account the clustering of observations. Our reanalysis provides support for some, but not all, of our original results. Adapted from the source document.

In this research note/replication, we apply the construct of jurisprudential regimes as described in our recent article to the jurisprudential area of search and seizure. Given the centrality of this area of Supreme Court decision making in the core studies supporting the attitudinal model, replicating our analysis of the jurisprudential regime construct in this area provides an important test of the concept. Our results produce strong support for the proposition that post-Mapp decision making can be separated into distinct regimes, with a set of important cases decided in 1983-1984 demarcating the regimes. The predictors of decisions in the two periods are consistent with the types of changes one would expect the regime shift to produce. Our findings challenge the attitudinalists'proposition that there is at best negligible statistical evidence that law influences Supreme Court decision making.