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Full-Text Articles in Law

An Empirical Evaluation Of The Connecticut Death Penalty System Since 1973: Are There Unlawful Racial, Gender, And Geographic Disparities?, John J. Donohue Dec 2014

An Empirical Evaluation Of The Connecticut Death Penalty System Since 1973: Are There Unlawful Racial, Gender, And Geographic Disparities?, John J. Donohue

John Donohue

This article analyzes the 205 death-eligible murders leading to homicide convictions in Connecticut from 1973–2007 to determine if discriminatory and arbitrary factors influenced capital outcomes. A regression analysis controlling for an array of legitimate factors relevant to the crime, defendant, and victim provides overwhelming evidence that minority defendants who kill white victims are capitally charged at substantially higher rates than minority defendants who kill minorities, that geography influences both capital charging and sentencing decisions (with the location of a crime in Waterbury being the single most potent influence on which death-eligible cases will lead to a sentence of death), and …


A Century Of Patent Litigation In Perspective, Ron D. Katznelson Nov 2014

A Century Of Patent Litigation In Perspective, Ron D. Katznelson

Ron D. Katznelson

When comparing patent litigation rates or “rarity” across decades, one must take into account the proportion to the actual scale of commercial activities that give rise to patent disputes. Such normalizing scales are preferably national metrics of commercial activity such as (a) the number of patents issued in the year, (b) the total number of patents in force over which disputes may arise, (c) the total number of Federal civil suits, or (d) the economic scale of the Gross National Product (GDP) in real dollars. This paper marshals for the first time information on all patent litigation in Federal district …


The Homicide Survivors’ Fairness-For-Victims Manifesto, Lester Jackson Oct 2014

The Homicide Survivors’ Fairness-For-Victims Manifesto, Lester Jackson

LESTER JACKSON

Murderer advocates place a far greater value on the lives of the most savage murderers than on the lives of their victims. Let them deny it; their words and deeds conclusively give the lie to that denial. The critical question is this: Whose concept of justice is going to prevail? The concept of a small but vocal well-financed minority with influence and power out of all proportion to its numbers, or that of the large but poorly financed and disorganized majority. In recent decades, the former have dominated. Tragically, compared to media-dominant murderer advocates, victims have been virtually voiceless. Yes, …


Justice And Starvation In Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge Famine, Randle C. Defalco Jul 2014

Justice And Starvation In Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge Famine, Randle C. Defalco

Randle C DeFalco

No abstract provided.


Table Annexed To Article: Counting Words In The Federalist, Peter Aschenbrenner Jan 2014

Table Annexed To Article: Counting Words In The Federalist, Peter Aschenbrenner

Peter J. Aschenbrenner

Word counts for each of the eighty-five articles published by Publius, the (collective) pseudonym of John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, are surveyed. The 189,497 words are also broken down by author. The effort is ancillary to a project fixing the semantic values of ‘constitution’, ‘federal’ and ‘republic’ throughout the Early Republic (=1787 through 1857).


Public Reason As Higher Law, Gordon D. Ballingrud Jan 2014

Public Reason As Higher Law, Gordon D. Ballingrud

Gordon D Ballingrud

This paper presents a model of higher-law formation by employing a modified version of John Rawls’ idea of public reason. The model specifies a theory of public reason that combines the procedural and substantive aspects of public reason, and extends the concept over a third dimension, time. This concept, by virtue of its multi-generational democratic pedigree, forms a repository of political and legal concepts of justice that conform to the duty of civility, and the broad consensus on political and legal norms required of the content of public reason, which forms the overlapping consensus. Thus, public reason as higher law …


Legitimation, Mark C. Modak-Truran Jan 2014

Legitimation, Mark C. Modak-Truran

Mark C Modak-Truran

This article identifies three different conceptions of legitimation - pre-modern, modern, and post-secular - that compete both within and across national boundaries for the coveted prize of informing the social imaginary regarding how the government and the law should be legitimated in constitutional democracies. Pre-modern conceptions of legitimation consider governments and rulers legitimate if they are ordained by God or if the political system is ordered in accordance with the normative cosmic order. Contemporary proponents of the pre-modern conception range from those in the United States who maintain that the government has been legitimated by the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to those …


The Weaknesses Of Criticism Against Supermajority, Sergio Verdugo Sverdugor@Udd.Cl Jan 2014

The Weaknesses Of Criticism Against Supermajority, Sergio Verdugo Sverdugor@Udd.Cl

Sergio Verdugo R.

The article critically examines the objections that professors Guillermo Jiménez, Pablo Marshall and Fernando Muñoz have made to the exceptional legislative supermajority rule, defended by Sergio Verdugo in a prior paper of 2012. The objections relies in a biased conception of democracy and political equality. Their arguments conduct to a naïve position that prevents the evaluation of supermajorities in an instrumental way. Verdugo defends the idea that legislative supermajorities are useful given certain conditions and under certain cases.


Justice Stewart Meets The Press, Keith Bybee Jan 2014

Justice Stewart Meets The Press, Keith Bybee

Keith J. Bybee

Among the Supreme Court Justices who have articulated distinctive views of free expression, Justice Potter Stewart alone placed particular emphasis on the First Amendment's protection of a free press. Drawing upon the lessons of history, the plain language of the Constitution, the political events of his day, and his own personal experience, Stewart argued that the organized news media should be considered an essential part of the checks-and-balances competition between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of the federal government. Stewart’s emphasis on the special structural function of the established press placed him at odds with most of his colleagues …