The evolution of U.S. Supreme Court antitrust jurisprudence over the past fifty years is well known. As one of us has written, “[f]orty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court simply did not know what it was doing in antitrust cases.”1 The Court interpreted the Sherman2 and Clayton Acts3 to reflect a hodgepodge of social and political goals, many with an explicitly anticompetitive bent, such as prote...

F or more than a decade, there has been an intense debate about the ethics and legality of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in the United States. In June 1997, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that there is neither a constitutional right nor a constitutional prohibition to euthanasia or PAS. This permitted Oregon to experiment with legalizing PAS. During this decade, most o...

In June 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of using race as a factor in higher education admissions decisions. This article considers the impact of the Supreme Court decisions on admissions procedures at selected academic dental institutions (ADI) and their parent institutions. We interviewed fifty-eight leaders considered to be individual stakeholders at seven ADI and the...

At the turn of the last century, allies of industry on the Supreme Court deployed a novel constitutional doctrine to thwart government regulations aimed at improving public health and safety. During the Lochner v. New York era, the Supreme Court discovered a right to “freedom of contract” in the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that advanced the “economic liberty” of businesses to...

In the 1989 case Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Missouri law regulating abortion [3] care. The Missouri law prohibited the use of public facilities, employees, or funds to provide abortion [3] counseling or services. The law also placed restrictions on physicians who provided abortions. A group of physicians affected by the law ch...

state’s highest court, the South Carolina Supreme Court in late 1997 upheld the criminal conviction of a woman charged with child abuse for using crack cocaine during her pregnancy. Finding that a viable fetus is a “child” under the state’s child abuse law, the court ruled that “maternal acts endangering or likely to endanger the life, comfort, or health of a viable fetus” could constitute chil...

Given the fundamental unidimensionality in the data on Supreme Court voting patterns 1951–1993 we observe, we are able to determine the identity of “median” members of each court in a fashion that does not require subjective coding of the extent to which particular cases reflect left-right issues. Also, while the exact numerical values of MDS-obtained locations cannot be compared across differe...

Like the United Kingdom, Canada traditionally has been committed to the doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, which leaves little room for judicial protection of individual rights. In 1982, however, the Canadian Constitution, originally a product of the United Kingdom, was "patriated" to Canada. It was also amended to include a judicially-enforceable Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This amendmen...

5 As to the fundamental question shaking the National Patent System (NPS) since several years, the heat is not over yet. But clarity has increased looming largely at a series of national high level conferences addressing this issue – e.g. the FCBA conference, Ashville, 17.20.06.2014; the PTO’s respective hearing, Alexandria, 22.07.2014; the CASRIP, Seattle, 23.-24.07.2014. This groundbreaking q...