Deriving Peremptory Norms from Sovereignty

Peremptory Challenges: Lessons from Hernandez v. Texas

INTRODUCTION What insights can a close study of Hernandez v. Texas contribute to current debates about the use of peremptory challenges to strike non-whites from venires? In light of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Thomas Miller-El v. Cockrell, 537 U.S. 322 (2003) and Hernandez v. New York, 111 S.Ct. 1859 (1991), analysis of the defense’s and prosecutor’s lines of reasoning in Hernandez v....

Deriving Economic Values for Reaction Norms of Growth in Pigs

Slopes of reaction norm models, also called reaction norms (RN), are alternative traits used in animal breeding for selection of genotypes that perform more consistently across a range of environments. Environmental sensitivity is of economic importance when the environment where selection takes place differs considerably from the commercial environment of slaughter pigs. The position on the en...

Peremptory Challenges and Jury Selection

I examine how peremptory challenges, which are vetoes that attorneys may use on prospective jurors, affect jury composition. The purpose of peremptory challenges is to eliminate biased jurors, however I show that under the two most common rules used in the United States peremptory challenges make biased juries more likely. I show that if unanimity is required for conviction, the distribution of...

Equal Protection and Peremptory Challenges

Deriving Wishlists from Blogs

We use a combination of text analysis and external knowledge sources to estimate the commercial taste of bloggers from their text; our methods are evaluated using product wishlists found in the blogs. Initial results are promising, showing that valuable insights can be mined from blogs, not just at the aggregate but also at the individual blog level.