In District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to own handguns in the home for protection, invalidating a Washington, D.C. law banning most handgun possession. The Heller decision, however, provided lower courts with little guidance regarding how to judge the constitutionality of gun laws other than handgun bans. Neverthe...

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,...

Progressive reformers envisioned a therapeutic juvenile court that made individualized treatment decisions in the child's "best interests." The Supreme Court's Gault decision provided the impetus for transforming the juvenile court from an informal welfare agency into a scaled-down criminal court. Since Gault, the juvenile court procedures increasingly resemble those of adult courts, although i...

Answering one question often begets another. We present a decision-theoretic model that describes how this dynamic sequences decisions over time. Because answering an easy question may raise a more difficult one, a rational decision-maker may delay resolution even if he has perfect information about the correct decision. Furthermore, because otherwise unrelated questions may raise similar follo...

The doctrine of precedent, as it has evolved within the common law, has at its heart a form of reasoning—broadly speaking, a logic—according to which the decisions of earlier courts in particular cases somehow generalize to constrain the decisions of later courts facing different cases, while still allowing these later courts a degree of freedom in responding to fresh circumstances. Although th...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert modernized the long-standing Frye precedent and requires courts to make scientific judgments. Courts, however, are not well-equipped to parse scientific arguments and the Daubert criteria offer only a rudimentary framework for decision-making. To illustrate the problems, as well as possible ways for courts to deal with scientific evidence, the paper ...

real need exists to use the benefits of modern technology intelligently to reduce the court backlogs. Cyber courts are a viable alternative to the endless delays that plague court dockets, but only if they succeed in making courts more efficient. This column deals with the Michigan Cyber Court, one state’s effort to streamline the judicial process through the intelligent use of new technology. ...

Appellate courts, which have the most control over legal doctrine, tend to operate through collegial (multimember) decision making. How does this collegiality affect their choice of legal doctrine? Can decisions by appellate courts be expected to result in a meaningful collegial rule? How do such collegial rules differ from the rules of individual judges? We explore these questions and show tha...