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During the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the onslaught of flooding, the single most important role for government and the public sphere was deemed to be law and order, at times to the exclusion of other public responsibilities. Law and order were articulated almost exclusively as a policing matter with the emphasis on order rather than law. Policing took different public and private forms in the early days of the flooding. This chapter examines the nature of that policing and the unquestioned presence of private police as a key element of the law and order response to Katrina in New Orleans. [Copyright 2007 Elsevier Ltd.]

Today, despite daily struggles in courtrooms against capital punishment, there appears little legal room to challenge the death penalty. Most constitutional questions appear "settled. Given the present composition of the Supreme Court, there is scant expectation of any major reversals. Also, the Court's future is to be decided by a President who was governor of a state that has executed more people since 1976 than any other state in the nation. While abolitionist scholars and activists continue to raise constitutional issues, the most dramatic events challenging the death penalty have occurred in the larger political arena outside the courtroom. The many gestures across the country advocating moratoriums on executions give hope to abolitionists that the political terrain of the death penalty could be shifting.

Today, despite daily struggles in courtrooms against capital punishment, there appears little legal room to challenge the death penalty. Most constitutional questions appear "settled. Given the present composition of the Supreme Court, there is scant expectation of any major reversals. Also, the Court's future is to be decided by a President who was governor of a state that has executed more people since 1976 than any other state in the nation. While abolitionist scholars and activists continue to raise constitutional issues, the most dramatic events challenging the death penalty have occurred in the larger political arena outside the courtroom. The many gestures across the country advocating moratoriums on executions give hope to abolitionists that the political terrain of the death penalty could be shifting.

The idea of authority lies at the conceptual heart of much legal policy analysis. This essay discusses three perspectives on state and legal authority—the liberal‐constitutional, the corporatist, and the technocratic—as a broad political framework for understanding major issues of judicial policy‐making in the United States today. The essay examines recent literature on judicial legitimacy and capacity within the context of the three perspectives and raises research questions which derive from this approach to judicial policy. This framework provides a theoretical basis for seeing not only a decline, but changes in patterns of judicial authority and their relationship to any existing crisis of authority in the state in general.