Center for Social Justice Online Library

Link goes to Chapter 6 Legislative Advocacy
Who will speak for the children? is the question posed by Judith S. Palfrey, a pediatrician and child advocate who confronts unconscionable disparities in U.S. health care―a system that persistently fails sick and disabled children despite annual expenditures of $1.8 trillion.
In Child Health in America, Palfrey explores the meaning of advocacy to children's health and describes how health providers, community agencies, teachers, parents, and others can work together to bring about needed change. Palfrey presents a conceptual framework for child health advocacy consisting of four interconnected components: clinical, group, professional, and legislative. Describing each of these concepts in useful and compelling detail, she is also careful to provide examples of best practices. This original and progressive work affirms the urgent need for child advocacy and provides valuable guidance to those seeking to participate in efforts to help all children live healthier, happier lives.

A. Philip Randolph's career as a trade unionist and civil rights activist fundamentally shaped the course of black protest in the mid-twentieth century. Standing alongside individuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey at the center of the cultural renaissance and political radicalism that shaped communities such as Harlem in the 1920s and into the 1930s, Randolph fashioned an understanding of social justice that reflected a deep awareness of how race complicated class concerns, especially among black laborers. Examining Randolph's work in lobbying for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatening to lead a march on Washington in 1941, and establishing the Fair Employment Practice Committee, Cornelius L. Bynum shows that Randolph's push for African American equality took place within a broader progressive program of industrial reform. Some of Randolph's pioneering plans for engineering change--which served as foundational strategies in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s--included direct mass action, nonviolent civil disobedience, and purposeful coalitions between black and white workers. Bynum interweaves biographical information on Randolph with details on how he gradually shifted his thinking about race and class, full citizenship rights, industrial organization, trade unionism, and civil rights protest throughout his activist career.

Walter F. White of Atlanta, Georgia, joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1918 as an assistant to Executive Secretary James Weldon Johnson. When Johnson retired in 1929, White replaced him as head of the NAACP, a position he maintained until his death in 1955. During his long tenure, White was in the vanguard of the struggle for interracial justice. His reputation went into decline, however, in the era of grassroots activism that followed his death. White's disagreements with the US Left, and his ambiguous racial background--he was of mixed heritage, could "pass" as white, and divorced a black woman to marry a white woman--fueled ambivalence about his legacy. In this comprehensive biography, Zangrando and Lewis seek to provide a reassessment of White within the context of his own time, revising critical interpretations of his career. White was a promoter of and a participant in the Harlem Renaissance, a daily fixture in the halls of Congress lobbying for civil rights legislation, and a powerful figure with access to the administrations of Roosevelt (via Eleanor) and Truman. As executive secretary of the NAACP, White fought incessantly to desegregate the American military and pushed to ensure equal employment opportunities. On the international stage, White advocated for people of color in a decolonized world, and for economic development aid to nations like India and Haiti, bridging the civil rights struggles at home and abroad.

This book examines Texas regulations from the Texas Black Codes of 1866, some of the most deceptive regulations in Texas history, to contemporary Texas Child Care Licensing regulations, which perhaps symbolize some of the most audience-friendly contemporary regulations in Texas. The author focuses on the contemporary African-American audience, often categorized as distrustful of government. The book can help public policy students understand the complexities of intercultural communication and negotiation in public policy development and implementation.

What is effective legislation? Can lawmakers around the world improve the effectiveness of their laws? And if yes, how? Designing Effective Legislation analyses legislative effectiveness in theory and practice and concludes that effective laws can be engineered through the use of particular design and drafting techniques. Employing a clear and logical structure, the author demonstrates that four elements, that exist in every law, are paramount to effectiveness: purpose, content, context and results. A clear purpose sets a benchmark for what a law aims to achieve; well designed and communicated content ensures that the law has the mechanics required to achieve the desired results; laws that integrate harmoniously the legal system ensure coherence and the lack of contradiction; and results determine what has been achieved and whether this corresponds to initial intentions. By examining these four elements in unity and addressing the particular challenges involved in their design and drafting, lawmakers can secure the basic foundations of an effective law. Providing an in in-depth analysis of the concept of legislative effectiveness this book will be relevant to academics and researchers working in the fields of legislative studies, theory of law, regulation and the sociology of law but also to legal practitioners, policy makers and legislative drafters involved in the design or reform of legislation worldwide.

Provides guidance on producing transactional documents, contracts, instruments, legislation, and regulations that solve existing problems and prevent future problems. The book provides both a large scale, macro overview of the drafting process as well as small scale, micro focused discussion of the mechanics of legal documents at the sentence, word, and punctuation level. For this fourth edition, each chapter has been extensively updated to incorporate the current and developing perspectives regarding subjects like plain English, legal typography, and document preparation in the 21st century. This is especially the case in the sections of the text dealing with contracts and instruments, although it is true throughout the text. Legal drafting is as much a thought process as a writing process; clear thinking leads to clear drafting.

This book describes how governments formulate policies, draft legislation, and manage stocks of legislation and how approaches to these tasks are converging. That convergence has developed over 30 years through the work by the OECD in its studies on regulatory reform and the work of other international organizations to improve regulatory management.
The Institutions of the European Union and its member states, OECD member countries and a growing number of developing and transitional countries have developed a policy best described as ‘Better Regulation.’ That policy is characterized using regulatory impact assessment, improving public consultation, and reducing administrative burdens. The policy has brought improvements in legislative drafting and managing stocks of legislation.
The book concludes with a description of the impact of information technology on governments and how the challenges posed by the Internet, globalization and pandemics are being met by new approaches to regulating to ensure its benefits exceed its costs.