Malcolm “Mac” Jewell was a mainstay of the Political Science Department at the University of Kentucky (UK) for 36 years. For that same period and even longer, he was one of the profession's leading researchers in explaining legislative behavior (particularly in the states) and how state political parties worked. Mac retired from UK in 1994 but continued being active in our profession. Around 2004, he began suffering from Alzheimer's disease. He died on February 24, 2010, in Fairfield, Connecticut.

External funding is a common indicator of research productivity in political science. Comparing departments, university administrators often use external funding as an indication of the quality of research. While this can simply reflect administrators' desire for departments to obtain grants that provide overhead for the institution, this metric also rests on an assumption that external funding is a measure of quality research.For example, Indiana University's web site posted a discussion with President Myles Brand on October 23, 2000, in which he stresses “the ability to win competitive grants” as a measure of department and university quality. Also, e.g., while she focuses on an earlier period, see Lewin's (1997) discussion of Stanford, especially its Political Science Department at pp. 213-23. Departments themselves often use external funding as a proxy for research productivity in evaluating faculty performance. Again, the justification is generally that quality research depends on funding and that those who secure competitive funding will publish quality research.

This address explores the Supreme Court's involvement in the nation's politico-moral disputes. The Court sometimes injects itself into these disputes and through dicta and other inspirational activities becomes a cheerleader for one side. I consider the effectiveness of the Court's cheerleading in inspiring change in national policy following Roe v. Wade (1973) and Brown v. Board (1954), finding that judicial cheerleading was much more effective for achieving a consensus about desegregation than for achieving one about abortion rights. I conclude by arguing that the Court's cheerleading: (1) has the capacity to bring politico-moral issues to the front burner, (2) is more effective in supporting change rather than in defending the status quo, (3) does not frighten or shame the losing side into abandoning its cause, often having the opposite effect, and (4) must persuade the uncommitted within a decade if its cause is to be successful.

Social scientists have given increasing attention to the diffusion of policy innovations among the American states, focusing on the legislative and administrative sectors. This study is an effort to expand our understanding of policy diffusion by analyzing the diffusion of 23 innovative tort doctrines among state court systems between 1876 and 1975. This analysis examines the innovativeness of state judicial systems, the correlates of innovativeness, and the pattern of diffusion. The findings suggest that the diffusion of judicial doctrines is a very different process from the diffusion of legislation. A major reason for the difference appears to be the courts' dependence on litigants to provide opportunities for innovation.

Common law doctrines may have as significant an impact on everyday life as those of the U.S. Supreme Court. This paper focuses on the abrogation of the doctrine of charitable immunity, which has occurred in 32 states since World War II. We investigate the impact of this change on average hospital room rate charges in each state. Both static and dynamic analyses are conducted. In both we control for economic and inflationary variables by using state per capita income data. Static analysis involves year-by-year comparison of room rate charges in abrogating states with those in states which retain the doctrine. The results are inconclusive. In dynamic analysis we identify those states which abrogated the doctrine and note changes in their average room rates at periods two, four, and six years subsequent to the abrogations. We also identify states which underwent no change in doctrine over the same periods. The amounts of room rate change in the two categories of states are then compared. We had expected the amount to be greater in abrogating states, and in fact this is almost universally the case. This strongly suggests that abrogation of charitable immunity has produced a demonstrable increase in hospital room rate charges.

Political scientists have in recent years been focusing more of their attention on compliance with Supreme Court decisions. Of course, with rare exceptions, the Supreme Court does not issue orders directly; rather it announces broad policies in the form of opinions. Detailed interpretation and application of these policies are, insofar as the judicial system is concerned at least, left to other courts. Thus those interested in the nature of compliance with Supreme Court policies must explore the manner in which lower courts handle the high court decisions.

Students of the judicial process have focused considerable attention on the relationship between judges' background characteristics and their voting behavior on collegial courts. The argument for such a focus is that background characteristics are usually indicative of particular socialization processes and that these processes produce certain attitudes which are often responsible, directly or indirectly, for the judges' votes. Thus these characteristics can be viewed, in the aggregate, as predictive of judges' behavior — at least in certain types of cases.