Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service

Notes

Notes Chapter 1 1. For a review of the literature and a description of these tensions, see Marcia K. Meyers and Susan Vorsanger, “Street-Level Bureaucrats and the Implementation of Public Policy,” in Handbook of Public Administration, ed. B. Guy Peter and Jon Pierre (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, forthcoming). 2. See David A. Harris, “The Stories, the Statistics, and the Law: Why Driving while Black Matters,” Minnesota Law Review 84, no. 2 (1999): 265–326. 3. For a discussion of the discomfort associated with scholarship that operates between competing ideas and the desire for conceptual unity related speci‹cally to inquiry of law and culture, see David Goldberg, Michael Musheno, and Lisa Bower, “‘Shake Yo’ Paradigm: Romantic Longing and Terror in Contemporary Sociolegal Studies,” in Between Law and Culture: Relocating Legal Studies, ed. David Goldberg, Michael Musheno, and Lisa Bower (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), ix–xxv. 4. For an earlier version of the state-agent and citizen-agent narratives, see Steven Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno, “State-Agent or CitizenAgent : Two Narratives of Discretion,” Journal of Public Administration Theory and Research 10, no. 2 (2000): 329–59. 5. For an overview of police abuse of authority, see David Barlow and Melissa Hickman Barlow, Police in a Multicultural Society: An American Story (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2000), 3–78; and Neil Websdale, Policing the Poor: From Slave Plantation to Public Housing (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001). Austin Sarat describes legally abusive powers of social workers and how welfare workers deploy law to resist abuse in “‘. . . The Law Is All Over’: Power, Resistance, and the Legal Consciousness of the Welfare Poor,” Yale Journal of Law and Humanities 2, no. 2 (1990): 343–79. David Engel explores the intimidation that parents of children living with disabilities experience in school meetings with teachers, social workers, and other professionals in “Origin Myths: Narratives of Authority, Resistance, Disability , and Law,” Law and Society Review 27, no. 4 (1993): 785–826. 193 6. Two meanings of the word character merge in story interpretation: the “nice lady” is a character in a story, but the characterization provided by the storyteller indicates judgments about her essential and distinguishing nature— her character. 7. What characteristics and actions a worker “notices” or overlooks can have profound consequences. See Ann Arnett Ferguson, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 88. 8. The relationship between worker and citizen-client, if often personal and direct, is not a relationship of equal power. Street-level workers make judgments about who is helped and who is hassled or threatened and control access to state resources and opportunities, especially for the poor. See Joel F. Handler, Law and the Search for Community (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 18. Other scholars have focused on the broader implications of street-level decision making, including works by Barbara Yngvesson on the importance of court clerks and other front-line judicial employees in the construction of community and social order. See Barbara Yngvesson, Virtuous Citizens, Disruptive Subjects: Order and Complaint in a New England Court (New York: Routledge, 1993), and “Making Law at the Doorway: The Clerk, the Court, and the Construction of Community in a New England Town,” Law and Society Review, 22, no. 3 (1988): 409–48. Chapter 2 1. The legitimacy of the modern state is substantially entwined with the rule of law. For an overview and critique of the rule of law, see David Kairys, “Introduction,” in The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique, ed. David Kairys (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 1–17. In addition, according to Michel Foucault, the modern state hinges on its capacity to “foster civil respect and public morality” (“The Political Technology of Individuals,” in Technologies of the Self, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988], 155). For a focus on the culturally productive role of the police, see Trish Oberweis and Michael Musheno, Knowing Rights: State Actors’ Stories of Power, Identity, and Morality (Burlington, VT: Ashgate/Dartmouth, 2001), 1–10. It is important to emphasize that law and culture are interwoven. For example, Naomi Mezey focuses on law as culture, emphasizing that “law’s power is discursive and productive as well as coercive” (“Law as Culture,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 13, no. 1 [special issue 2001], 47). Further, we recognize that some scholars would take the view that both the culturally and legally productive judgments of...