By the usual standards of measuring a former mayor's legacy — the city he inherited, the challenges he faced, the resources available to meet those challenges and the extent to which his work endured beyond his term — historians and political experts generally give Mr. Koch mixed-to-good reviews.
Those measures by a former capital-punishment advocate made Ryan a hero to many death penalty foes.
"This is one of the most fundamental pieces of information that everybody's been looking for," said Mark Schneider, president of College Measures, and a former commissioner of the federal government's National Center for Education Statistics.
"Those who applaud this eventual measure," Vladimir Villegas, a former Venezuelan ambassador to Brazil under Mr. Chávez, wrote in a newspaper column, "could regret it sooner rather than later".
The place has the enforced cheer of a counseling center, maybe because so many pro athletes have come here to regain some measure of a former glory that they once took for granted.
The Intrade political futures market gives him a 41% chance of winning the nomination, while his nearest challenger by this measure, Mitt Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has only a 29% chance.
About 125 of the school's lowest-performing students are barred from taking anything except math, reading and gym, a measure that Samuel Harris, a former lieutenant colonel in the Army who is the school's principal, said was draconian but necessary.
"It is an exceptional measure," says John Credland, a former Cluster project manager and now acting head of the scientific projects department at the European Space Research and Technology Centre in Noordwijk, the Netherlands.
It seems strikingly bold, even from a writer skilled at hiding home thoughts about politics in foreign fables, to have offered at this time, in Measure for Measure, a play in which a former leader comes back to sort out his incompetently autocratic replacement.
Still, many in Russia's democratic elite are reluctant to tie the resurgence of suspicion and security measures directly to Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. agent who was director of the Federal Security Service not six months before becoming president.
