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Getting Power Back: Court Restoration Of Executive Authority In Boston City Government (1985), Marcy Murninghan

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article, originally published in 1985, is based partly on the author’s experience with the Boston school desegregation case, but goes beyond it. It chronicles some of the events that occurred when a state and a federal court attempted to disengage from active jurisdiction over two Boston public systems: the Boston Public Schools and the Boston Housing Authority. It makes three proposals, which, if enacted, would help to keep the courts out of day-to-day management of municipal operations. It also makes some generalizations about the court-agency interplay that are relevant to the post-remedial phase of institutional reform litigation. The author …

Introduction, Marcy Murninghan

New England Journal of Public Policy

America faces a reckoning, a crucible of what Reinhold Niebuhr observed more than eighty years ago. Our democratic principles and traditions are imperiled by the power of financial oligarchs and unfettered money flows, which have contributed to massive inequality that, in turn, has given rise to political unrest and a sense of cultural unmooring.

The articles presented here are both descriptive and normative, setting forth a complex social problem with seemingly bottomless proportions and then offering a design or set of remedial actions to alleviate them. Drawing on my professional experience going back to the mid-1970s, I wrote these pieces …

Looking Back Without Anger: Reflections On The Boston School Crisis, Robert Wood

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article is taken from the unpublished autobiography of Robert Wood who served as Superintendent of Boston Public Schools from 1978 to 1980 during the difficult period when U.S. District Court Judge W. Arthur Garrity was overseeing court ordered desegregation of schools. After leaving the University of Massachusetts in January 1978, Robert Wood spent six months at the Harvard Graduate School of Education working on a book and considering a possible run for the United States Senate. Suggestion as to his next assignment, however, came from an unexpected source, as he describes below.

Demographic Trends In Boston: Some Implications For Municipal Services, Margaret O'Brien

New England Journal of Public Policy

The City of Boston is gaining in population during the 1980s, after several decades of loss. During the current decade and beyond, population trends will bring increases in the number of children, adults between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four, and those aged seventy-five and over, along with declines among the older teenagers and college-age population, the more mature adults, and the younger elderly. A recent analysis of the income distribution indicates that while there were more well-to-do residents in Boston in 1985 than there were in 1980, there were also more poor and near poor. Average family income has …

Getting Power Back: Court Restoration Of Executive Authority In Boston City Government, Marcy M. Murninghan

New England Journal of Public Policy

This article chronicles some of the events that occurred when a state and a federal court attempted to disengage from active jurisdiction over two Boston public systems: the public schools and the Boston Housing Authority (BHA). It makes three proposals which, if enacted, would help to keep the courts out of day-to-day management of municipal operations. It also makes some generalizations about the court-agency interplay which are relevant to the postremedial phase of institutional reform litigation. The author uses the term restorative law to describe this court-controlled process of returning power to the executive branch.