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Professor Joan C. Williams "seeks to build bridges" across audiences and disciplines with her latest book, Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter. She also attempts to bridge seemingly insuperable chasms of gender and class, to encourage the formation of a political coalition that is simultaneously profamily and prowork. In Web 2.0 argot, "crowdsourcing" is a distributed, networked computing method of solving problems through the combination of ideas from individual sources and different perspectives. This issue of the Seattle University Law Review features ten other distinguished legal scholars who add their designs to Williams's bridge blueprint through scholarly crowdsourcing. Their approaches result in surprising, sometimes provocative new ideas for cultural, legal, and policy reform at the nexus of work and family.

This paper develops a theoretical and conceptual understanding of the role of space and politics in governing relationships between cities, critical energy, water, waste and transportation infrastructures and resource flows. It presents a view of cities as dynamic, experimental social spaces underpinned by infrastructural unevenness with variable provision of and access to resource flows. An emerging set of new pressures to the ways in which cities, infrastructure and resource flows are organised under conditions of neo-liberal urbanism is reviewed. The paper then reflects theoretically and conceptually on the ways in which these pressures can be appropriated in terms of the re-organisation of city, networked infrastructure and resource flows as predicated on tensions between transformative reconfiguration and obduracy from historically produced social and institutional coalitions.

Localist movements support increased local ownership of regional economies and oppose the colonization of local economies by corporate firms, franchises, and agribusiness. Events organized by a "buy local" and "anti-big-box" organization in upstate New York provide the point of departure for an exploration of the meanings of the terms "local" and "independent." Drawing on the discussion of "knowledge practices" in this journal, the relationships among local knowledge, mainstream economic development knowledge, and the "localist knowledge" of social science research are explored. Strategic combinations of local knowledge and localist knowledge can provide a powerful basis for mobilizing political and consumer support for localist movements. Localist movements in the United States are situated in the broader currents of antiglobalization movements, new political coalitions, and neoliberalism.

This article discusses two issues of majority-minority relations in deeply divided societies. The first is the legitimacy of the transfer of a homeland minority (or a part of it) — along with the territory it inhabits — to a neighboring kin-state against the will of the minority or most of its members. The second is the constitutional validity of legislation that renders citizenship or the right to vote contingent upon an oath of allegiance to the state or to its fundamental attributes. These two interrelated steps, advanced by a central partner in the current government coalition in Israel, are aimed at the Arab-Palestinian minority. This article's main focus is the examination of Israeli constitutional law safeguards that may prevent the implementation of these initiatives, which I find to be very dangerous.

Drawing on existing literature and two case studies of workplace cooperation in Ireland, this article illustrates that although Ireland has had national-level consensus bargaining since 1987, workplace-level cooperation is rare. This can be largely attributed to Ireland's permissive voluntarist institutional and employment relations context, characterized by limited institutional coordination linking national and workplace governance, and which renders workplaces particularly exposed to the contradictions of capitalism. The result is that few employers construct and maintain workplace bargains with their employees. Focusing on the concept of 'beneficial constraints' on employer choice, it is concluded that if efficient and fair workplace coalitions are to increase, the state would need to reform the permissive voluntarism dominating Irish employment relations by 'reinstitutionalizing' workplace pluralism through proactive policy interventions.

Résumé Plus de dix ans après les manifestations contre l'Organisation mondiale du commerce à Seattle, le bilan politique des mouvements altermondialistes aux États-Unis est mitigé. D'un côté, la mobilisation des outsiders , représentant l'aile non institutionnalisée, accuse un certain déclin, qui s'explique par une combinaison de facteurs internes et externes. De l'autre, l'action politique plus constante des groupes d'intérêts ou insiders , a, sans complètement compromettre la politique de libéralisation des échanges, permis à la cause altermondialiste d'occuper une place de plus en plus visible dans les débats sur la mondialisation aux États-Unis. Ce constat reste valable pour l'administration Obama, malgré son ouverture qui, bien que sensible aux revendications sociales et environnementales de la coalition syndicalo-écologiste, n'a pas véritablement changé l'orientation de la politique économique extérieure américaine.

Résumé L'article explique pourquoi, seize ans après l'assassinat du président Ndadaye et le déclenchement de massacres et d'une guerre civile, aucun mécanisme de justice transitionnelle n'a encore été établi au Burundi alors que l'ONU et la société civile le demandent depuis longtemps et que l'accord d'Arusha pour la paix et la réconciliation de 2000, conformément aux nouvelles normes globales, prévoyait la création d'un tribunal pénal international et d'une commission de vérité. Les raisons tiennent au contexte politique national : la transition politique est fondée sur un compromis ; les élites politiques et militaires ont intérêt à former une coalition de l'oubli ; enfin, la société civile au Burundi manque des moyens qui lui permettraient d'imposer au politique son agenda de justice transitionnelle. Burundi – Contexte politique national – Justice transitionnelle – Normes globales.

In this paper, we provide a political economy account of the European Union's failed attempt to reform its anti-dumping legislation between 2006 and 2008. We review the role played by different interest groups, and the way public authorities at both European Commission and member state level responded to conflicting societal demands. Despite declining support among outsourcing producers and a rise in organisational capacity among importers and retailers, a coalition of heavy manufacturing producers mobilised against a change in the status quo. While the diffuse interests of consumer organisations and NGOs remained mute, sector consolidation was key to the capacity to mobilise against concentrated losses in defence of the vested interests of a policy community of traditional anti-dumping users, supportive member states, and the European Commission Directorate of trade defence.

This article examines the importance of action-theoretical considerations in European studies. By outlining the notion of "usage" of the European Union, we argue for a more systematically sociological consideration of strategic action in the study of European transformations. The recent turns towards constructivism and comparative political sociology allow analyzing the rationality of political actors without falling in the trap of overly reductionist rational choice assumptions. Concentrating on intentional action helps to reveal the importance of three aspects of the multi-level polity: (1) informal and non-constraining procedures, (2) the effects of ways in which actors move in between the different levels of the European political system, and (3) the ambiguous and often surprising coalitions that come together despite often considerable disagreement over their final goals.

AbstractHenry Kissinger has been persistent in his claim that the U.S. Congress's failure to adequately supply South Vietnam was the ultimate cause of its collapse in 1975 – a claim many historians dispute. An incident that has received less attention is the role of Congress in terminating a potential negotiated settlement of the civil war in Cambodia by imposing a halt of U.S. bombing there in the summer of 1973. This article demonstrates that in this case, Kissinger's claims are not without foundation. Although the conclusions are tentative without the full Chinese record, the evidence suggests that terminating U.S. military operations in Cambodia fatally undermined Chinese efforts to negotiate the removal of Lon Nol as Cambodian head of state and the establishment of a coalition government involving the Khmer Rouge but with Sihanouk at its head.

This article examines the importance of action-theoretical considerations in European studies. By outlining the notion of "usage" of the European Union, we argue for a more systematically sociological consideration of strategic action in the study of European transformations. The recent turns towards constructivism and comparative political sociology allow analyzing the rationality of political actors without falling in the trap of overly reductionist rational choice assumptions. Concentrating on intentional action helps to reveal the importance of three aspects of the multi-level polity: (1) informal and non-constraining procedures, (2) the effects of ways in which actors move in between the different levels of the European political system, and (3) the ambiguous and often surprising coalitions that come together despite often considerable disagreement over their final goals.

Judicial independence reform in Taiwan was pioneered by a group of reform-spirited judges from Room 303 of the Taichung (Taizhong) District Court, in 1993. Rather than joining the mass movement that was unfolding on the streets, the reformers formed a coalition with other judges to trigger reform from within the judiciary. The reformers appealed to the rule of law and democracy as a movement strategy for mobilization. As a result, the movement strategy turned out to be a great success, and Room 303 became the chief engine for further judicial reforms in subsequent years. However, the movement strategy in itself also presents some limitations. This paper examines why the movement strategy was successful and how its limitations eventually created problems that hinder further judicial reforms in Taiwan. (JCCA/GIGA)