The Solicitor General and the Interests of the United States

Strauss examines the institutional and administration approach to the issue of the Solicitor General\u27s involvement in legal questions not directly involving the federal government

Model-Independent Measurement of the Primordial Power Spectrum

In inflationary models with minimal amount of gravity waves, the primordial power spectrum of density fluctuations, $A_S^2(k)$, together with the basic cosmological parameters, completely specify the predictions for the cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropy and large scale structure. Here we show how we can strongly constrain both $A_S^2(k)$ and the cosmological parameters by combining the data from the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) and the galaxy redshift survey from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We allow $A_S^2(k)$ to be a free function, and thus probe features in the primordial power spectrum on all scales. MAP and SDSS have scale-dependent measurement errors that decrease in opposite directions on astrophysically interesting scales; they complement each other and allow the measurement of the primordial power spectrum independent of inflationary models, giving us valuable information on physics in the early Universe, and providing clues to the correct inflationary model.Comment: 4 pages including 4 figures. To appear in "Particle Physics and the Early Universe (COSMO-98)", editor David O. Caldwell (American Institute of Physics

The Common Law Genius of the Warren Court

The Warren Court\u27s most important decisions-on school segregation, reapportionment, free speech, and criminal procedure are firmly entrenched in the law. But the idea persists, even among those who are sympathetic to the results that the Warren Court reached, that what the Warren Court was doing was somehow not really law: that the Warren Court made it up, and that the important Warren Court decisions cannot be justified by reference to conventional legal materials. It is true that the Warren Court\u27s most important decisions cannot be easily justified on the basis of the text of the Constitution or the original understandings. But in its major constitutional decisions, the Warren Court was, in a deep sense, a common law court. The decisions in Brown v. Board of Education,\u27 Gideon v. Wainwright,2 Miranda v. Arizona,3 and even in the reapportionment cases all can be justified as common law decisions. The Warren Court\u27s decisions in these areas resemble the paradigm examples of innovation in the common law, such as Cardozo\u27s decision in MacPherson v. Buick Motor Co.4 In all of those areas, the Warren Court, although it was innovating, did so in a way that was justified by lessons drawn from precedents. And the Warren Court\u27s decisions were consistent with the presuppositions of a common law system: that judges should build on previous decisions rather than claiming superior insight, and that innovation should be justified on the basis of what has gone before