US senators agreed late on 26 March to “set aside” a proposal to create a special approval pathway at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for antibiotics. Public interest advocacy and government watchdog organizations celebrated the news after scrambling to urge senators to vote against the amendment, which had been added to the US congressional budget bill and introduced earlier in the day....

Streaming Video Profile is the subject of an Amendment of MPEG-4, and is developed in response to the growing need on a video-coding standard for streaming video over the Internet. It provides the capability to distribute single-layered frame-based video over a wide range of bit rates with high coding efficiency. It also provides fine granularity scalability (FGS), and its combination with temp...

Current proposals to regulate campaign finance practices cannot survive the kind of scrutiny that the First Amendment requires. This study demonstrates that the ban on political action committees, the PAC ban fallback provisions, the "voluntary" spending limits, the restrictions on soft money, the regulation of issue advocacy, and the proposals to expand the enforcement powers for the Federal E...

The Supreme Court has traditionally applied the Eighth Amendment differently to capital and non-capital cases based on the longstanding notion that “death-is-different.” In the recent case of Graham v. Florida, however, the Supreme Court applied its “evolving standards of decency” standard, heretofore reserved for capital cases, to a non-capital case. The Court held that the Eighth Amendment pr...

In 1973, the Supreme Court decided one of the most well-known cases in history—Roe v. Wade. In this landmark decision, the United States Supreme Court held that the constitutional right to privacy extends to a woman’s right to have an abortion. From 1973 through 1977, Medicaid covered the costs of an abortion without restriction. In 1966, Republican Senator Henry Hyde introduced an amendment to...

A dividend imputation tax system provides shareholders with a credit (for corporate tax paid) that can be used to offset personal tax on dividend income. This paper shows how to infer the value of imputation tax credits from the prices of derivative securities that are unique to Australian retail markets. We also test whether a tax law amendment that was designed to prevent the trading of imput...

We study computational problems for two popular parliamentary voting procedures: the amendment procedure and the successive procedure. While finding successful manipulations or agenda controls is tractable for both procedures, our real-world experimental results indicate that most elections cannot be manipulated by a few voters and agenda control is typically impossible. If the voter preference...