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In June 2009, the Supreme Court decided the employment discrimination case of Ricci v. DeStefano . In a 5-4 decision, the Court held that the City of New Haven, Connecticut, discriminated against White and Hispanic firefighters based on their race in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when it refused to certify exam results that could have resulted in promotions for the firefighters. The case attempted to clarify what the Court saw as a conflict between two provisions of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act— disparate-treatment discrimination and disparate-impact discrimination. Unfortunately, the Court’s decision and reasoning may cause even more confusion and questions in the area of employment discrimination leaving both public and private employers to ask themselves difficult questions regarding their employment practices and procedure.

Although immigration policy is a key component of public administration scholarship in the United States, research into Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) for both documented and particularly undocumented immigrants has been tangential in focus. This exploratory study questions 1. the effect of immigration reform on U.S. undocumented immigrant women of IPV and 2. how changes in the number of undocumented immigrants affect IPV victimization rates and the regulations concerning U non-immigrant status.A least-square trend line suggests that the 10,000 U visa applications permitted annually will not cover the undocumented female population of IPV let alone the victims qualified under the U non-immigrant status. Based on a review of the laws and policies regarding the U-Visa we provide several recommendations to reform immigration laws directed toward immigrant victims of IPV. This study adds to the growing, but still weak body of knowledge on abused immigrant female populations in the United States and how federal legislation toward immigration reform and policy will help these women become valuable contributors to our society.

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In my critique of the field, submitted before attending Minnowbrook III, I noted that it seemed to me that Minnowbrook III had more in common with Minnowbrook I than Minnowbrook II. The scholars who gathered for the first conference in 1968 were faced with a society in a state of upheaval and a field in crisis. Those attending the second conference in 1988 had the luxury of a more stable, if cynical, society, and a field that was searching for itself-in other words, business as usual for public administration. Minnowbrook II was "designed to compare and contrast the changing epochs of public administration" (Frederickson, 1989). This was a conservative mission and as one attendee stated:In contrast to Minnowbrook I, which challenged public administration to become proactive with regard to social issues, Minnowbrook II retreated from an action perspective to cerebral examinations of democracy, ethics, responsibility, philosophy, and even economics. This was a discussion of the classics. (Bailey, 1989, p. 224) The mission of Minnowbrook III, much like that of Minnowbrook I, was to critique and to challenge the status quo. This mission, in my opinion, was unfulfilled. So what was Minnowbrook III?Minnowbrook III was largely a conference of individuals finding those who had similar research agendas as themselves and attempting to further those agendas. Absent from Minnowbrook III was any discussion of the "big questions" of public administration. The debate on our governments' capacity to govern did not happen. The debate on the administrative state and its inability to sustain reform did not happen. There was, in fact, no real critique of the status quo. There seemed to be an unspoken consensus that we would neither critique nor debate-this was a kinder, gentler Minnowbrook, and as such, it was a missed opportunity to make an impression on the field and a difference in the field.Some of the topics that were discussed were the academic/practitioner divide, networks, information technology and management, public admin-