Lux et Data: ISPS Blog

Violence Prevention Programs Should Target Neighborhoods, Not Just Individuals

January 29, 2013

The window for renewing the Violence Against Women Act of 2012 (VAWA) has closed. Though new VAWA legislation was recently introduced in the Senate, Congress has no excuse for failing to reauthorize VAWA during the last two years.

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ISPS Faculty Discuss a Policy Agenda for the Second Obama Administration

January 23, 2013

On Tuesday, January 22, ISPS inaugurated a new series of workshops on public policy with a panel on the Obama administration’s policy agenda for the next four years. The panel featured three ISPS faculty: Amanda Kowalski spoke about the implementation of the Affordable Care Act; Eleanor Powell dealt with the prospects for filibuster reform; and Vesla Weaver assessed the prospect of immigration reform.

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Micro-Policing Can Reduce Violence in Urban Hot Spots

January 22, 2013

According to the FBI, a gun murder occurs about once every hour of every day; 8775 times a year in the U.S. in 2010. However, while some neighborhoods certainly experience a disproportionate amount of street violence, the reality is that it’s only a handful of street corners in these neighborhoods that really account for the vast majority of gun murders and assaults in high-violence areas.

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The Filibuster, the Fiscal Cliff, and the Costs of Congressional Procedure
Adam Dynes

January 15, 2013

Although overlooked in most news coverage, Congressional procedures play an important role in policy outcomes. Indeed, the fiscal cliff might not have even been an issue if not for the filibuster, which has pushed Congress to employ existing legislative procedures in ways that go beyond their intended purposes and resulted in sub optimal outcomes, such as the fiscal cliff

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How Conservative Governors End up Accepting Federal Disaster Assistance
Andy Horowitz

January 7, 2013

"This is why the American people hate Congress,” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie lashed out on Tuesday after the House of Representatives refused to appropriate funding for Hurricane Sandy relief before the end of the 2012 session.

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Numbers and Values in Regulatory Decision Making

December 14, 2012

In his recent talk at ISPS, Harvard Law School professor and former director of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Cass Sunstein, made particular note of an element of Executive Order 13563 which, he said, for the first time enshrines seemingly unquantifiable considerations of “equity, human dignity, [and] fairness” into the regulatory review process.

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April 30th Event: A Fairer Future

May 1, 2012

On April 30 ISPS hosted an all-day event on the federal budget to discuss the ways in which social science scholarship on policy issues can help inform the federal government’s responses to those challenges.

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