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There is perhaps no better setting in which to discuss the role of social research in the courts than that of school desegregation. From its early, rural, southern beginnings in Brown to its present, urban, northern manifestation in the Detroit case of Milliken v. Bradley, empirical evidence has been used in the litigation. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared that "[s]eparate educational facilities are inherently unequal" and ruled that the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson—which for half a century had legitimated Jim Crow legislation—had "no place" in the public schools. Eleanor Wolf, Professor of Sociology at Wayne State University, provides a detailed account of this litigation in Trial and Error: The Detroit School Segregation Case. This article reviews the book and uses it as a springboard to examine broader issues concerning the uses and limits of social research in the judicial process. Since judicial reliance on empirical inquiry may vary according to the problems under consideration, these issues cannot be addressed in the abstract. They have to be discussed in the context of a particular substantive problem; hence, the topic chosen here is school desegregation.

In July 1975, riding the crest of the national reform movement, the Washington State legislature enacted a new rape law that repealed a centenarian, common law-based statute. This article presents the results of an empirical study of the effects of the common law and reform rape statutes on prosecution in King County (Seattle), Washington, and assesses the implications of the findings for the law of rape and for prosecutorial discretion in the charging of rape. To the extent that definitional elements of the new Washington law have parallels in reform statutes of other states, and the statistical profile of the incidence and circumstances of the crime in King County is similar to that found in other jurisdictions, the findings and conclusions of this study have broader significance.

A questionnaire survey of nationalist attitudes of a nonrepresentative sample of 374 high school youth in Quebec and Belgium was conducted. Scales of political and cultural nationalism, constructed by factor analysis and interitem correlations, had satisfactory alpha reliability and concurrent validity. The effects of different kinds of status on nationalist attitudes were examined. Political nationalism was found related to ethnicity (ascribed status) and social class (achieved status), but not to the interaction of ethnicity and social class (status inconsistency). The relationship between bilingualism and nationalism was also explored. Bilingual fluency was associated with cultural, but not with political, nationalism.

Assessment, particularly program assessment, has reached a new height
in the APSA with the publication of an edited volume,
Assessment in Political Science (2008),
followed by the appointment in 2010 of an association-wide working
group on assessment. This task force has been asked to investigate
current practices in program assessment and make recommendations
regarding the role that the APSA should play to help departments and
faculty conduct assessment better. Track participants were
encouraged to think about how the issues they raised could help
guide the APSA's overall approach to assessment.