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Litigation is part of the American policymaking playbook as diverse groups routinely turn to courts to pursue their agendas. All of this litigation raises questions about its consequences. This essay examines the literature on the political risks of litigation. It argues that this literature identifies four potential risks – crowd out, path dependence, backlash, and individualization – but offers less insight into the likelihood of these risks in practice. It ends by offering suggestions about how to advance our understanding of when litigation casts a negative political shadow in the current age of judicialization.

Fifty years ago the political scientist Robert Dahl concluded that courts are usually in sync with “the policy views dominant among the lawmaking majorities” and thus offer little help to aggrieved minorities (Dahl, 1957, p. 285). In recent years, Dahl's classic formulation has received renewed attention. This chapter uses the example of the Rehnquist Court's First Amendment decisions to analyze “regime politics” theory. On religion cases the Rehnquist Court was generally in sync with the socially conservative strain in the Republican Party, but in other First Amendment areas the pattern is far more complex, raising questions about the relationship between conservative judges and the political movements that brought them to office.

The empirical literature that attempts to study rights is at an impasse. It can demonstrate that big claims about how some rights structure politics are overblown, but it has struggled to go beyond this step. This is in large part because studying rights is much more difficult than is commonly appreciated. A study of rights promises implicitly to be a study of how rights politics differs from other kinds of politics. But rights are so ubiquitous and so diverse in form that it is often unclear what the excluded other is. We examine three books on rights that we admire: two by political scientists, Gerald Rosenberg's The Hollow Hope and Michael McCann's Rights at Work, and one by an anthropologist, Sally Merry's Human Rights and Gender Violence. These books conceptualize rights in diverse ways, in diverse settings, using diverse methodologies; yet they run up against similar difficulties in trying to think beyond the cases they study. At the conclusion, we make some humble suggestions for how researchers might try to overcome these problems.

Scholarship on workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is voluminous. Nevertheless, there is relatively little work that examines DEI from an organization development and change (ODC) or systems perspective. As a result, there is no unified framework ODC practitioners can use for DEI diagnosis and intervention. The purpose of this chapter is to review the ODC literature with respect to DEI and propose a diagnostic Context-Levels-Culture (CLC) framework for understanding and addressing diversity-related challenges in organizations. We also present a case example of how this framework can be used in DEI consulting, including implications for future research and practice.

Organization development is focused on implementing a planned process of positive humanistic change in organizations through the use of social science theory, action research, and data-based feedback methods. The role of personality in that change process, however, has historically been ignored or relegated to a limited set of interventions. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a conceptual overview of the linkages between personality and OD, discuss the current state of personality in the field including key trends in talent management, and offer a new multi-level framework for conceptualizing applications of personality for different types of OD efforts. The chapter concludes with implications for research and practice.

Organizations have become increasingly interested in developing their human resources. One tool that has been explored in this quest is mentoring. This has led to a surge in mentoring research and an increase in the number of formal mentoring programs implemented in organizations. This review provides a survey of the empirical work on mentoring that is organized around the major questions that have been investigated. Then a conceptual model, focused on formal mentoring relationships, is developed to help understand the mentoring process. The model draws upon research from a diverse body of literature, including interpersonal relationships, career success, training and development, and informal mentoring. Finally, a discussion of critical next steps for research in the mentoring domain is presented.