Gerrymandering is returning to the Supreme Court. For the first time in three decades, a federal court invalidated redistricting legislation on the grounds that it constituted a partisan gerrymander in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. That court relied, in part, on a new tool—the efficiency gap—which some have touted as the means to “end gerrymandering once and for all.” We evaluate this ...

Beginning on March 26, 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States heard oral arguments regarding challenges to the recent federal health care reform legislation. The Court scheduled this unusually lengthy series of arguments to last for three days—a reflection of both the high stakes and the complexity of the legal issues involved. Whatever the Court ultimately decides, the outcome will have ...

Placing a high profile gay rights case on its agenda for the first time since Romer v. Evans, the U.S. Supreme Court announced on January 14 that it will review the federal constitutional issues decided by the New Jersey Supreme Court in Dale v. Boy Scouts of America, 734 A.2d 1196, 160 N.J. 562 (Aug. 4, 1999). The case will be argued this spring and probably decided by the end of the Court’s t...

The recent Supreme Court decision of Queensland v B [2008] 2 Qd R 562 has significant implications for the law that governs consent and abortions. The judgment purports to extend the ratio of Secretary, Department of Health and Community Services (NT) v JWB and SMB (1992) 175 CLR 218 (Marion's Case) and impose a requirement of court approval for terminations of pregnancy for minors who are not ...

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 forever changed the face of electoral equality in the United States. Today, almost forty years later, the Act is considered one of the most pivotal pieces of federal legislation in our country’s history and the “most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever enacted.” Congress has revisited various segments of the Act ave times since its enactment. A key 19...

For two decades, clinicians have been guided by an agreement about the appropriate use of artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH). In general, ANH has been seen as a medical treatment that patients or their surrogates may accept or refuse on the basis of the same considerations that guide all other treatment decisions: the potential benefits, risks, and discomfort of the treatment and the reli...

We build simple models for the distribution of voting patterns in a group, using the Supreme Court of the United States as an example. The least structured, or maximum entropy, model that is consistent with the observed pairwise correlations among justices’ votes is equivalent to an Ising spin glass. While all correlations (perhaps surprisingly) are positive, the effective pairwise interactions...

consent from patients, substitute decision-makers or an independent tribunal in order to pull the plug on life-sustaining treatments they deem futile? An informal survey of Canadian case law indicates that courts have been all over the map on the issue, which has recently resurfaced in the headlines as part of a dispute between two physicians at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto,...

The United States Supreme Court has considered the question of whether a judge or a jury must make the findings necessary to support imposition of the death penalty in several notable cases, including Spaziano v. Florida (1984), Hildwin v. Florida (1989), and Ring v. Arizona (2002). In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court revisited the subject in Hurst v. Florida Florida Statute § 921.141 allows the ju...

The 20th century U.S. Supreme Court advanced the Constitutional rights of adult criminal defendants. Although far reaching in their impact, these constitutional protections were not afforded to juveniles. For example, the Supreme Court held in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963) that indigent adult defendants in felony cases have a right to counsel as a matter of due process, but did not extend this ri...