Justice Story Cuts the Gordian Knot of Hung Jury Instructions

Constitutional law grows more complex over time. The complexity is due, in large part, to the rule of stare decisis. When faced with precedents that it does not wish to follow, the Court usually distinguishes the case before it. Thus, the constitutional landscape is littered with cases that do not fit well together. Navigating past these shoals is often difficult for courts following the Supreme Court’s lead. One example is the law governing instructions that a trial judge can give a deadlocked jury in a criminal case. The right to a jury trial entails the right to have the jury reach a verdict without pressure from the judge, but giving voice to that principle has resulted in a bewildering array of approved instructions. This article argues that the law of 1824, manifested in Justice Story’s opinion in United States v. Perez, was superior to today’s morass. In 1824, judges had virtually uncontrolled discretion to decide when to declare a hung jury. We argue for a return to 1824 with one twist: that judges give deadlocked juries the instruction: “Please continue to deliberate.” This simple change will result in fewer hung juries and far fewer appeals about whether the instructions were too coercive

The use of derivatives in the mining sector : a comparative analysis of companies listed in South Africa, Australia and the UK

This study investigates whether significant differences exist between South African, Australian and United Kingdom mining corporations in terms of derivative usage. The study further investigates whether such differences or similarities are due to size differences, specific mining industry sector differences, or are as a result of specific derivatives being more prevalent in a particular region of the world

Genomics and Privacy: Implications of the New Reality of Closed Data for the Field

Open source and open data have been driving forces in bioinformatics in the past. However, privacy concerns may soon change the landscape, limiting future access to important data sets, including personal genomics data. Here we survey this situation in some detail, describing, in particular, how the large scale of the data from personal genomic sequencing makes it especially hard to share data, exacerbating the privacy problem. We also go over various aspects of genomic privacy: first, there is basic identifiability of subjects having their genome sequenced. However, even for individuals who have consented to be identified, there is the prospect of very detailed future characterization of their genotype, which, unanticipated at the time of their consent, may be more personal and invasive than the release of their medical records. We go over various computational strategies for dealing with the issue of genomic privacy. One can “slice” and reformat datasets to allow them to be partially shared while securing the most private variants. This is particularly applicable to functional genomics information, which can be largely processed without variant information. For handling the most private data there are a number of legal and technological approaches—for example, modifying the informed consent procedure to acknowledge that privacy cannot be guaranteed, and/or employing a secure cloud computing environment. Cloud computing in particular may allow access to the data in a more controlled fashion than the current practice of downloading and computing on large datasets. Furthermore, it may be particularly advantageous for small labs, given that the burden of many privacy issues falls disproportionately on them in comparison to large corporations and genome centers. Finally, we discuss how education of future genetics researchers will be important, with curriculums emphasizing privacy and data security. However, teaching personal genomics with identifiable subjects in the university setting will, in turn, create additional privacy issues and social conundrums

Network security and data integrity in academia: an assessment and a proposal for large-scale archiving

A direct impediment to the optimal use of online databases is the increasing prevalence, severity, and toll of computer and network security incidents. Funding agencies should set up working groups that can provide essential services such as universal backup, archival storage, and mirroring of community resources, consistent with the key goal of security in academia: to preserve data and results for posterity

Biobanking, consent, and commercialization in international genetics research: the Type 1 Diabetes Genetics Consortium

Background and Purpose This article describes several ethical, legal, and social issues typical of international genetics biobanking, as encountered in the Type 1 Diabetes Genetics Consortium (T1DGC)