The Supreme Court decision O'Connor v. Donaldson (1975) has been widely interpreted to assert that dangerousness is a constitutional requirement for civil commitment. This interpretation is a misreading of the decision, which actually addressed the conditions disallowing indefinite, involuntary custodial confinement and not the requirements for an initial commitment. An excessive reliance on da...

The recent High Court ruling upholding a prior decision to allow a mother to sue for the cost of rearing a child after having had a failed sterilisation has understandably attracted great controversy (Cattanach v Melchior [2003]). The implications of this decision on what can now be claimed for through medical litigation are significant, and lawyers and doctors will extract from it lessons for ...

The use of a simple 50%-50% box score of decisions for parents and districts, respectively, is a false measure of the impartiality of hearing officers under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This analysis canvasses relevant structural factors that the stakeholders, the mass media, and the professional literature have failed to recognize both generally and systematically. T...