This Article discusses the concept of judicial independence, the political nature of the courts, and efforts to insulate the courts from the ordinary politics engulfing the popularly elected branches. It reviews Florida’s political history and changing political landscape. It traces the development of the state’s judicial selection processes and ties them to current legislation being considered...

The impetus of the drug court movement can be traced to a number of factors, such as the social and organizational costs of imprisonment and the literature surrounding the effectiveness of community-based treatment. Regardless of its origins, however, drug courts have altered the way in which court systems process drug cases and respond to drugdependent offenders. Evaluations of U.S. drug court...

Implicit but significant assumptions made in the criminal justice system include beliefs that criminals do not commit crimes to be tried and convicted and that, once arrested, defendants' primary motives are to avoid or minimize the legal consequences of the charges they face. When those assumptions are not correct, clinicians and legal decision makers are faced with difficult tasks. The author...

This commentary explores the relationship among the 1999 U.S. Supreme Court Olmstead decision; the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, in its application of CRIPA (the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Patients Act); and the application of both CRIPA and Olmstead to the question of individuals hospitalized in state mental institutions following commitment from criminal courts. Using O...

Last term, in Safford Unified School District No. 1 v. Redding,1 the Supreme Court considered whether the strip search of a 13-year-old student in school violated the Fourth Amendment, and whether divergent opinions in lower courts about such searches entitled the school officials who conducted the search to qualified immunity from liability.2 The case does not announce a new constitutional fra...

A Code of Ethics sets forth professional values and ethical principles and offers ethical guidelines to which professionals aspire and by which their actions can be judged. Health information management (HIM) professionals are expected to demonstrate professional values by their actions to patients, employers, members of the healthcare team, the public, and the many stakeholders they serve. A C...

Recommendations issued by agencies undertaking appraisals of health technologies at the national level may impact upon the availability of certain treatments and services in some publicly funded health systems, and, as such, have regularly been subject to challenge, including by way of litigation. In addition to expertise in the evaluation of evidence, fairness of procedures has been identified...

Case law, in a common law domain, provides for statements of principle that bind courts as to the manner in which like cases are to be decided. Citations of previous cases are as a result, frequent in judicial writing. The FIRE Information Retrieval from Legal Documents Precedence Retrieval task concerned finding cited documents, where the name of the cited decision had been removed [4]. In thi...