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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Suspect Population And Dna Identification, Richard O. Lempert Sep 1993

The Suspect Population And Dna Identification, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

Forensic DNA analysis typically proceeds by first determining whether alleles (one of two or more alternative forms of a gene) found in DNA apparently left by the perpetrator of a crime at a crime scene (the "evidence sample") match alleles extracted from a sample of the suspected criminal's blood (the "suspect sample"). If alleles drawn from the two sources match, the next step is to provide information about the probative value of the match by estimating the probability that alleles extracted from the blood of some random individual would have matched the alleles in the evidence sample. Thinking in terms …


Dna, Science And The Law: Two Cheers For The Ceiling Principle, Richard O. Lempert Sep 1993

Dna, Science And The Law: Two Cheers For The Ceiling Principle, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

The ceiling principle is an intentionally conservative way of estimating the frequency with which individuals who share particular alleles appear in the general population. It establishes frequencies for each allele by taking random samples of 100 individuals from each of 15 to 20 populations and using the largest frequency with which the allele is found in any of these populations or 5 percent, whichever is larger, as an estimate of the allele's frequency in the population of interest. These frequencies are then multiplied to yield an estimate of the likelihood that a randomly selected person would exhibit the same allelic …


Of Diagnoses And Discrimination: Discriminatory Nontreatment Of Infants With Hiv Infection, Mary Crossley Jan 1993

Of Diagnoses And Discrimination: Discriminatory Nontreatment Of Infants With Hiv Infection, Mary Crossley

Articles

Evidence of physician attitudes favoring the withholding of needed medical treatment from infants infected with HIV compels a reassessment of the applicability and adequacy of existing law in dealing with selective nontreatment. Although we can hope to have learned some lessons from the Baby Doe controversy of the mid-1980s, whether the legislation emerging from that controversy, the Child Abuse Amendments of 1984, has ever adequately dealt with the problem of nontreatment remains far from clear. Today, the medical and social characteristics of most infants infected with HIV introduce new variables into our assessment of that legislation. At stake are the …


The Case Of The Disappearing Briefs: A Study In Preservation Strategy, Margaret A. Leary Jan 1993

The Case Of The Disappearing Briefs: A Study In Preservation Strategy, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

Federal appellate court records and briefs are significant to researchers in many disciplines, but academic law libraries are discarding them. Ms. Leary chronicles the demise of paper holdings in law libraries, the rise of microforms, and the contents and usage of the National Archives and Records Administration's files. She then derives principles for preservation strategies that may apply to other categories of legal material.