The number of mental health courts in the United States is rapidly increasing, from one in 1997 to nearly 100 in 2004. However, to date there is comparatively little research regarding these specialty courts. The present study reports data on the referral and disposition decision-making processes of seven mental health courts. Information on all referrals to the seven courts over a three-month ...

Several recent decisions by the US Supreme Court have strengthened the ability of federal courts to consider medical testimony regarding injuries associated with exposure to toxic substances. Judges are expected to examine the basis of all expert testimony before it is introduced at trial to ensure that it meets the same standards of intellectual rigor that professionals use outside the courtro...

In recent years the nation's courts have expanded their influence in health policy in four areas: reviewing insurers' coverage decisions, deciding the adequacy of Medicaid payment rates to hospitals and nursing homes, arbitrating hospital mergers, and assessing hospitals' tax-exempt status. The major problem with developing health policy through the courts is that the courts' focus will be the ...

Youth courts provide an efficient—albeit unconventional—alternative to the formal juvenile justice system. Although structures of youth courts vary, the purpose remains the same: to rehabilitate and deter youth offenders in a forum largely governed by their minor peers—one free of the stigma associated with the traditional justice system. This Note examines the expansion of youth courts; variou...

Although the Supreme Court’s 1989 decision in Teague v. Lane generally prohibits the application of new constitutional rules of criminal procedure in federal habeas review of state-court judgments, the Court’s 2008 decision in Danforth v. Minnesota frees state courts from Teague’s strictures. Danforth explicitly permits state courts to fashion their own rules governing the retroactive applicati...

The decision in RJ Reynolds vs. FDA (2012) to invalidate FDA's proposed graphic health warnings was based in part on the reasoning that the proposed graphic warnings cued emotional responses and therefore could not be considered "factual." However, this reasoning demonstrated the courts' fundamental misunderstanding of current behavioral-science research. In contrast to the courts' artificial s...

Should managers be liable for ill-conceived business decisions? One answer is given by U.S. courts, which almost never hold managers liable for their mistakes. In this paper, we address the question in a theoretical model of delegated decision making. We find that courts should indeed be lenient as long as contracts are restricted to be linear. With more general compensation schemes, the answer...

In its June 2008 decision in MetLife v. Glenn, the Supreme Court held that federal courts reviewing claim denials by Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) employee benefit plan administrators should take into account the fact that plan administrators (insurers or self-insured plans) face a conflict of interest because they pay claims out of their own pockets and arguably stand to prof...

This influential opinion by famed jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes [5], Jr. was copied by courts throughout the United States. For over sixty years, courts refused to recognize a cause of action on behalf of a child who died before or after birth as a result of injuries suffered in the womb [6] because the fetus [7] was considered legally a part of its mother and thus did not possess personhood [8]...

Abstract: In this article, I review the decisions of the appellate courts in National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) cases over a twenty year period, 1994 to 2014, to ascertain what political, economic and legal factors impact judicial decision making. Unlike many other analyses of appellate decision making, this study makes a deliberate effort to take into account legal and procedural differen...