An explosion of Eighth Amendment challenges to lethal injection protocols has struck the federal courts. The Supreme Court's recent decision in Hill v. McDonough,1 which empowered prisoners to bring challenges to lethal injection procedures under 42 U.S.C. para. 1983, has facilitated a flood of new lethal injection cases. In response, several courts have ordered states to alter their protocols,...

Public support for legal recognition of same-sex marriage increased markedly in Canada over the course of the 1990s. While changes in fundamental values likely account for part of the increase, the speed and magnitude of aggregate opinion change in this domain casts some doubt on strictly sociological explanations for the shift. The argument of this paper is that a sequence of high-profile Supr...

The opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, In re Roslin Institute, rejecting patent claims to mammals cloned from somatic cells, was rendered about a month before the United States Supreme Court's decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International. The Alice opinion explicitly sets out the standard for determining whether an invention falls within statutory patent...

There is perhaps no other sector that reflects the fractured nature of civil society in the United States more than public education. Despite a Supreme Court decision calling for schools to be racially integrated, public schools across the United States remain largely segregated with respect to the race and class make-up of their student populations (Orfield and Eaton 1996). Public schools are ...

Nearly a decade after the Federal Circuit decision in State Street, patents on computerimplemented methods of doing business have become commonplace. To date, there is little evidence of any effect on the rate of innovation or R&D among firms in financial services. Indeed, measuring such effects presents difficult problems for researchers. We do know that some of these patents are successfully ...

Where do we go from here? While risk equalisation has been given legal backing by the Irish High Court and the European Court of First Instance, the Supreme Court judgment is still awaited, and it remains to be seen whether the Court of First Instance judgment will be appealed to the European Court of Justice. Further legal challenges are also pending in the Irish courts, and Sean Quinn, Chairm...