Thoughts on Some Potential Appellate and Trial Court Applications of Therapeutic Jurisprudence

To date, the application of therapeutic jurisprudence principles has been concentrated mainly on specialized trial courts: drug treatment courts, domestic violence courts, criminal courts, and juvenile and family courts. Its application to trial courts generally, as well as its application to the appellate courts, remains largely unexplored. This Article considers three areas in which trial and appellate courts may want to consider applying therapeutic jurisprudence

Editor\u27s Note

The lead article in this issue is Professor Charles Weisselberg’s annual review of the criminal decisions for the past Term of the United States Supreme Court. As always, there are a number of cases that are significant, and Professor Weisselberg has placed them in context for us. By reading this article each year, you can stay on top of the past year’s key developments, and Professor Weisselberg also previews the key cases now pending before the Court

Editor\u27s Note

This issue starts with an article identifying three targets of opportunity for the improvement of any court: clarify the vision, foster a public-service mentality, and get everyone involved. Brian Ostrom, Roger Hanson, and Kevin Burke focus on how to have a high-performance court

Editor\u27s Note

The lead article in this issue is Professor Charles Weisselberg’s annual review of the key criminal-law cases decided by the United States Supreme Court during the past Term of the Court (the Term that began in October 2009 and ended with the last decisions on June 30, 2010). This is the third year we’ve had the benefit of Professor Weisselberg’s analysis, and I hope you will take advantage of it if you need to keep up-to-date on criminallaw developments in the United States

Writing Like the Best Judges

With more than 30,000 judges in the United States alone, you’d expect to find an impressive array of judicial-training materials. And there are some good ones—the American Judges Association’s video training series for handling domestic-violence cases (education.amjudges.org) stands out as one recent example. But there’s not much out there specifically on judicial writing, and what’s out there is generally limited in scope (reflecting the idiosyncratic views of a single author or even of a committee), outdated, or . . . well, boring. Legal-writing consultant Ross Guberman has entered the market with a new book on judicial writing. Any judge who writes opinions should read it. Guberman organized his book, Point Taken: How to Write Like the World’s Best Judges, around opinion excerpts taken from 34 judges well known for their writing abilities. The chosen judges are mostly appellate judges (six are trial judges); mostly from the United States (six are from Canada, the United Kingdom, or Australia); and mostly still on the bench (13 are no longer active). The current judges include John G. Roberts, Jr., Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagen from the United States Supreme Court; United States appellate judges Marsha Berzon, Edward Carnes, Frank Easterbrook, Brett Kavanaugh, Alex Kozinski, Richard Posner, O. Rogeriee Thompson, and Diane Wood; and Canadian Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin. The former judges include Benjamin Cardozo, Lord Denning, Learned Hand, Robert Jackson, John Paul Stevens, Roger Traynor, and Patricia Wald

The effect of finite rank perturbations on Jordan chains of linear operators

A general result on the structure and dimension of the root subspaces of a matrix or a linear operator under finite rank perturbations is proved: The increase of dimension from the $n$-th power of the kernel of the perturbed operator to the $(n+1)$-th power differs from the increase of dimension of the corresponding powers of the kernels of the unperturbed operator by at most the rank of the perturbation and this bound is sharp

Editor\u27s Note

The lead article in this issue is Professor Charles Weisselberg’s annual review of the criminal decisions for the past Term of the United States Supreme Court. As always, there are a number of cases that are significant, and Professor Weisselberg has placed them in context for us. By reading this article each year, you can stay on top of the past year’s key developments, and Professor Weisselberg also previews the key cases now pending before the Court