  The ground state as well as low-lying excitations in a 2D electron system in
strong magnetic fields and a parabolic potential is investigated by the
variational Monte Calro method. Trial wave functions analogous to the Laughlin
state are used with the power-law exponent as the variational parameter. Finite
size scaling of the excitation energy shows that the correlation function at
long distance is characterized by anon-universal exponent in sharp contrast to
the standard Laughlin state.The Laughlin-type state becomes unstable depending
on strength of the confining potential.
