Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

More Than Censorship: The Harm Of Libricide, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Libricide, although often deemed an extreme instance of censorship, is altogether different. Censorship involves the suppression of particular books due to alleged inappropriate content; libricide refers to the intentional destruction of entire libraries. Understanding the differing motives recognizes that the library is more than the books it contains, and is instead an institution rooted in its history of selection and use by the local community. Over time, the library reflects the users’ identity, a reminder that any aggressor would wish to eliminate when the goal is pacification by erasure of a population’s memory and history. Prerequisites for an act of …

Finding The Way Forward: Expectations For Interim Law Library Directors, Billie Jo Kaufman, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

With almost 7 percent of all academic law libraries being headed by interim directors, this chapter seeks to fill a gap in the literature about what these leaders can expect.

Leave The Books On The Shelves: Library Space As Intrinsic Facilitator Of The Reading Experience, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Library literature frequently reports projects to remove print collections and replace them with other amenities for patrons. This project challenges the untested assumption that the physical library itself serves no useful function to users unless they are actively consulting books from the shelves. The alternative hypothesis is that readers benefit from the mere act of studying while in a book-rich environment.

To test this possibility, ten subjects completed SAT-style reading comprehension tests in both a traditional library environment, and a renovated chapel that strongly resembles library space except for lacking books. Results provide a reasonable basis to support an expectation …

Diversity: How Is Aall Doing?, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This paper describes the possible approaches to encouraging diversity within the workplace that are available to all professional organizations, including the American Association of Law Libraries [AALL]. Part I reviews the basic terms: discrimination, bias, and diversity. Reasons for pursuing diversity in the workplace are discussed in Part II. Two instrumental justifications and one intrinsic rationale reveal the range of motivations behind these projects. Each rationale supports its characteristic form of diversity: reflective, substantive, and cognitive. Because the kind of diversity determines the anticipated outcome, disagreement over progress may be the result of expecting different kinds of diversity. Clarity on …

Keeping Up With New Legal Titles, Patricia Alvayay

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In this book review, Patty Alvayay discusses Rethinking Library Technical Services: Redefining Our Profession for the Future by Mary Beth Weber.

Lc Subject Headings, Fast Headings, And Apps: Diversity Can Be Problematic In The 21st Century, Karen A. Nuckolls

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In this chapter, the author discusses and evaluates the effort to study and update relevant ethnic, racial, and other diverse subject headings. This discussion includes the work of the Library of Congress and software vendors. The author encourages for the technical services community to develop, use, and change subject headings to accurately reflect society.

Order Matters: Typology Of Dual-Degreed Law Librarians, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

To a great extent law librarianship has regarded the dual-degreed librarian as too familiar and uncomplicated to merit extended attention. The present discussion challenges this assumed simplicity. The nature of professional education is to work on deeper personal levels to create a particular identity and to inculcate specific values necessary to the successful practice of the vocation. Such fundamental effects are neither easily erased nor superseded by a later professional indoctrination. Understood in this way, professional education produces an outcome that defies the commutative property. Order matters. Librarians who go to law school (i.e., “libyers”) should be discernible from lawyers …

Will An Institutional Repository Hurt My Ssrn Ranking? Calming The Faculty Fear, James M. Donovan, Carol A. Watson

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Faculty members should not view the institutional repository as a drain on their SSRN rankings. While SSRN excels at delivering their work to the cadre of legal specialists, IRs typically do a better job of presenting it to a broader readership. This expanded exposure should be judged a

positive benefit of participation in the IR, helping to mitigate criticisms of law faculty as sequestered, insular, and writing only for themselves. Anyone interested in giving their ideas the widest possible hearing should deposit their intellectual work in as many venues as possible. For law professors, this means they should have both …

A Library Is Not The Books: An Ethical Obstacle To The Digital Library, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Casual and thoughtful speakers alike frequently use “library” as though it were the collective noun for “book”: A herd of cows, a murder of crows, a library of books. In practice it matters little whether “book” is understood as a specific physical artifact of ink and paper, or whether it refers more generically to any information-containing entity. The consistent point appears to be that in the presence of a sufficient number of those items, a library necessarily rises into existence.

This implied relationship proves critical to debates over the implications of digital formats for libraries. If libraries are reducible to …

Drug Law Reform—Retreating From An Incarceration Addiction, Robert G. Lawson

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Now, thirty years into the "war on drugs," views about the law's reliance on punishment to fix the drug problem are less conciliatory and more absolute: "[t]he notion that 'the drug war is a failure' has become the common wisdom in academic ... circles." Those who have most closely studied the results of the "war" believe that it has "accomplished little more than incarcerating hundreds of thousands of individuals whose only crime was the possession of drugs." More importantly, they believe that it has had little if any effect on the drug problem: "Despite the fact that the number of …

"Anticipatory Self-Defense" And Other Stories, Jeanne M. Woods, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

We argue that the specious justification for the invasion of Iraq -- a war based on a pretext of anticipatory self-defense -- necessarily exacerbates the inherent tendency of war to dehumanize and humiliate the enemy. This tendency is particularly evident in the variant of anticipatory self-defense that we have denominated as "capacity preemption," a type of claim that by definition depends upon characterizations of the opponent as utterly inhuman.

The Bush Doctrine tells a timeless story of self-defense. This story is shaped by an identifiable and predictable narrative structure, one that is able to transform the morally outrageous -- an …

Implicit Religion And The Curvilinear Relationship Between Religion And Death Anxiety, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Debate over the relationship of religion to death anxiety has included the opposing views of Malinowski, who held that religion lessened death anxiety, and Radcliffe-Brown, who argued that religion increased death anxiety. Homans' theoretical synthesis of these viewpoints was tested by Leming, who concluded that the empirical relationship was curvilinear, meaning that both high and low religious involvements resulted in low death anxiety while middle-range attachments did not.

Reconsideration of this result argues that the presence of death anxiety is not dependent upon social learning, and that either high or low levels of theism leads to the resolution of anxiety …

A Brazilian Challenge To Lewis's Explanation Of Cult Mediumship, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Recruitment into peripheral possession trance cults has been explained as attempts to compensate for socio-economic deprivation and jural impotence. This model, best developed by I.M. Lewis, is reviewed and its predictions tested against two types of Brazilian data. Firstly, national census figures of religious affiliation are compared with measure of socio-economic stress for a diachronic analysis. A second, synchronic analysis involves 62 respondents in Rio de Janeiro who completed questionnaires on socio-economic status, cultic affiliation, and perceptions of stress and gender inequality. The results offer only weak support for Lewis's original model, which may therefore profit from supplementation from other …

Reinterpreting Telepathy As Unusual Experiences Of Empathy And Charisma, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Telepathy is often dismissed because it is judged to be contrary to the accepted facts of social psychology. This article argues that what is called telepathy may require nothing more than empathy and charisma and is reducible to these sociopsychological constructs. Two studies explore this hypothesis. In the first the proposed relationship is used to explain the sheep-goat effect. In the second study scores on charisma and empathy are used as direct predictors of scores on traditional telepathy measures. The results in combination support the interpretation of telepathy as phenomenologically impressive social psychological events which in less dramatic instances are …

Psychic Unity Constraints Upon Successful Intercultural Communication, James M. Donovan, Brian A. Rundle

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article begins with the unchallenged assertion that intercultural communication episodes are necessarily imperfect. The disciplinary corpus reflects the correct assumption that much of this failure is attributable to the lock of various competencies on the part of the communicants. Experts become vague, however, where the line should be drawn, if at all, beyond which increased competency will not yield improved communication.

The principle of psychic unity assures us that there will be some experiences (not many, but some) which are so far removed from the ordinary processes of categorization and conceptualization that the raw data cannot be encapsulated faithfully …

Toward A Model Relating Empathy, Charisma, And Telepathy, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Telepathy is often dismissed because it is judged to be so weird as to be counterintuitive. This article argues that telepathy may be interpreted as phenomenologically impressive events of a social psychological process which in less dramatic instances would be termed empathy and charisma. Such an equation, however, herein called the "possible world model," would perhaps normalize telepathy, and lessen the opprobrium attached to its study. A first step is taken to validate the model when a comparative literature search finds that telepathy and empathy relate very similarly to other experimental variables.

Relating Psychological Measures To Anthropological Observations: Procrastination As A Field Proxy For Death Anxiety?, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Anthropologists frequently incorporate psychological concepts such as death anxiety into their sociocultural theorizing, but are reluctant to use the psychological instrumentation quantifying these concepts. Due to the needs of ethnographic fieldwork, behavioral proxies should be identified for psychological concepts wherever possible. Two exploratory studies investigate whether procrastination might serve as just such a proxy for death anxiety. While significant results were found, they are too weak for the intended field application.

Validation Of A Portuguese Form Of Templer's Death Anxiety Scale, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

To translate Templer's Death Anxiety Scale into the Brazilian Portuguese Escala de Ansiedade de Morte, linguistic validity was first established by back-translation and calculating bilingual split-half reliability coefficients. Even-numbered items achieved a minimally adequate .59, while the odd-numbered items attained a satisfactory .91. The internal consistency of the Escala (.77) matches that found for the original scale. The construct validity was tested by replicating the interactions of the English form with (1) the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, (2) the Purpose-in-Life Test, and (3) Levenson's measure of locus of control. The Escala performed as expected, save for some difficulty with the locus …

The Effects Of Sex And Sexual Orientation On Attractiveness Judgments: An Evolutionary Interpretation, William R. Jankowiak, Elizabeth M. Hill, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

If attractiveness judgments reflect biologically important reproductive criteria, men should base judgments of potential partners on objective physical criteria more than do women; homosexuals and heterosexuals of the same sex should perceive attractiveness in the same terms, regardless of the sex-object choice. To test this theory, photographs of men and women (20 each) were presented to members of four subject groups, solicited on an opportunistic basis. Subjects were asked to rank the sets of photographs separately on the dimensions of physical attractiveness and general social attractiveness. We found some sex differences across sexual orientation. There was less variation among men …

Charisma, Empathy, And The Experience Of Telepathy, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A critique is offered of the preference of parapsychology for physical explanatory models for telepathy. Discussion shows this trend emerging from the combined effects of historical accident. An alternative explanatory model is offered which draws upon the rich but underutilized psychological foundations of parapsychology. Emphasizing telepathy's original definition as a communication event, two other phenomena are held to fall into the same class of events: charisma and empathy. Concepts traditionally used to understand charisma and empathy are shown to be equally suited for modeling telepathy. Experimental, theoretical, and especially philosophical implications of this "possible world" model are addressed throughout.

Blaming It On God: Considerations When Presented With Supernatural Explanatory Entities, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

If the presence of an anthropologist at a fieldsite indicates that there exist unknowns, then for that anthropologist off-handedly to dismiss informant responses as irrelevant, inadequate, or otherwise poor explanations for observed phenomena is an intellectually arrogant, if not dangerous act.

What then does the anthropologist do with statements that "god willed it" and "the spirits did it"? To dismiss them without good reasons is to be guilty of intellectual condescension; but what constitutes a "good reason," either to reject or to accept such testimony? This essay seeks to consider just such "good reasons," to see if they are as …

Sociobiological And Psychosocial Models Of Physical Attractiveness Phenomena: A Confrontation Of Theories, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A majority of cultural anthropologists underestimate the value of sociobiological theory for a better understanding of human behavior. This essay attempts to demonstrate the shortcomings of this position by presenting an illustrative problem. Sexually asymmetrical physical attractiveness phenomena are examined first from a traditional psychosocial model. In its pure form this model is unable to account for the known data; when supplemented by sociobiological premises, however, these difficulties are resolved.

Gender, Sexual Orientation, And Truth-Of-Consensus In Studies Of Physical Attractiveness, James M. Donovan, Elizabeth Hill, William R. Jankowiak

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Truth-of-consensus methodology presently holds that sex differences in perceptions of physical attractiveness are negligible and may be routinely ignored during prescaling. No determination has been made in the literature of the effects of sexual orientation on this perceptual process. The data presented herein suggest that while sex and sexual orientation of judge are largely irrelevant to prescaling of female stimuli, these variables are important when judging male stimuli. In particular, male homosexuals and male heterosexuals differ significantly in ranking male facial photographs. Thus, experimenters wishing to treat attractiveness levels as known quantities should control for this difference, especially when using …

A Charisma Model Of Telepathic Communication, James M. Donovan

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This paper opened by making some general criticisms of the state of parapsychological research: that it suffered from a lack of external validity and from uncritical acceptance of a flawed paradigm. The charisma model was offered as an attempt to rectify these problems. It allows for laboratory experiments to be designed which closely approximate genuine human interactions by shifting the paradigm for telepathy from that of energy transfers to one of communication events.