Supreme Court Justices' uniform professional backgrounds have drawn increasing criticism. Yet it is unclear how diverse professional training would affect the Court's decisions. This Article offers the first empirical analysis of how Justices with diverse professional training vote: It examines a unique period when Justices with formal legal education sat with Justices who entered the professio...

The article analyzes and determines the place of judicial precedent in system sources Ukrainian law. relationship between case law is analyzed. It was found that gives court decision on a particular normative nature, determining legal position judge mandatory when considering similar cases. proved this feature distinguishes from practice, which understood as set decisions specific issues. deter...

It is no exaggeration to say that no U.S. Supreme Court opinion has been more misunderstood and has had its arguments more misrepresented in the public square than Roe v. Wade (1973). 1 There seems to be a widespread perception that Roe was a moderate opinion that does not support abortion on demand, i.e., unrestricted abortion for all nine months for virtually any reason. Even a philosopher of...

Court scholars have a voracious appetite for Supreme Court preference measures. Several papers question whether widely-used Martin and Quinn scores provide valid intertemporal measures, calling into question virtually an entire generation of quantitative research on the Court. This paper discusses the challenges of inter-temporal preference estimation and revises, updates and extends Bailey and...

In December 1993, Garyand JenniferTroxel filed a petition in Washington Superior Court to obtain increased visitation with their two granddaughters under theprovision ofaWashington statuteallowing any person toseekvisitation ofachild ifthevisitation could beshown to be in the child's best interest.' The trial courtgranted increased visitations to thegrand parents. The Washington Court ofAppeals...

Lower courts supposedly follow Supreme Court precedent—but they often don’t. Instead of adhering to the most persuasive interpretations of the Court’s opinions, lower courts often adopt narrower readings. For example, recent courts of appeals’ decisions have narrowly interpreted the Court’s rulings on police searches, gun control, and campaign finance. This practice—which I call “narrowing from...

Segal and Spaeth’s The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisisted argues that judges are policymakers who decide cases primarily (and sometimes exclusively) on the basis of their personal policy preferences. This is particularly true of Supreme Court justices, for the American political system leaves them unconstrained when issuing decisions on the merits. Segal and Spaeth label this th...

Genetic testing is becoming more common and more powerful by the day. The costs of the underlying DNA sequencing technology are plummeting, making it likely that tests based on it will become even more pervasive. The use of tests to determine DNA sequence to help make clinical decisions is here to stay. DNA sequencing is also finding new uses in forensics, determination of ancestry, understandi...

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...