The Difference Between Filing Lawsuits and Selling Widgets: The Lost Understanding that Some Attorneys’ Exercise of State Power is Subject to Appropriate Regulation

[Excerpt] It is often argued that all attorneys practicing in the United States – regardless of the function they perform in the American justice system – are purely private actors working in a free market system. This article examines whether it is true that all attorneys in every instance should be equated, as a matter of public policy, with other private actors. This article explores why not all attorneys function in a free market, and consequently their remuneration should not always remain unregulated. Attorneys who file lawsuits can, by simply filing a complaint at their unfettered discretion, immediately subject defendants to the threat of a default judgment and necessitate their spending money and resources toward their defense. That dynamic results in a situation in which a defendant will be made to pay any amount to the plaintiff in settlement, provided the settlement demanded is less than the defendant’s costs of defense and the plaintiff’s attorneys’ costs for filing the case are minimal (as they universally are). This article proceeds to discuss a short history of attorney regulation – from Roman times to the present, a story beginning with severe limits on attorneys’ influence and ending in a regime of rules that encourage the filing of lawsuits and do little to restrain them – and an examination of how that breakdown of attorney regulation occurred over time. This article concludes with a discussion of Supreme Court precedents indicating that private attorneys who file lawsuits should be considered state actors in most circumstances in which they trigger the authority of the state and, through the state, the threat of a default judgment and the consequent necessary expenditure of defense costs. This article concludes that attorneys who file lawsuits are qualitatively different than other private actors who seek to sell products to willing buyers in a free market system, and hence private attorneys who file lawsuits are more appropriately subject to regulation

An extensible web interface for databases and its application to storing biochemical data

This paper presents a generic web-based database interface implemented in Prolog. We discuss the advantages of the implementation platform and demonstrate the system's applicability in providing access to integrated biochemical data. Our system exploits two libraries of SWI-Prolog to create a schema-transparent interface within a relational setting. As is expected in declarative programming, the interface was written with minimal programming effort due to the high level of the language and its suitability to the task. We highlight two of Prolog's features that are well suited to the task at hand: term representation of structured documents and relational nature of Prolog which facilitates transparent integration of relational databases. Although we developed the system for accessing in-house biochemical and genomic data the interface is generic and provides a number of extensible features. We describe some of these features with references to our research databases. Finally we outline an in-house library that facilitates interaction between Prolog and the R statistical package. We describe how it has been employed in the present context to store output from statistical analysis on to the database.Comment: Online proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Implementation of Constraint Logic Programming Systems and Logic-based Methods in Programming Environments (CICLOPS-WLPE 2010), Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K., July 15, 201

Dissecting the 2008 Electorate: Most Diverse in U.S. History

Analyzes the demographic composition of voters in the 2008 elections and compares trends in voter participation rates and shares among all voters by race/ethnicity, gender, and age

Latinos and the 2010 Census: The Foreign Born Are More Positive

Compares survey results on knowledge of, attitudes toward, and participation in the census among foreign- and U.S.-born Latinos/Hispanics and Spanish-speaking, bilingual, and English-speaking Latinos/Hispanics. Examines the impact of outreach efforts

The 2010 Congressional Reapportionment and Latinos

Explores how the large share of Latino/Hispanic voters in states that gained congressional seats and Electoral College votes as a result of the 2010 census, as well as Latino/Hispanic population growth, could affect their role in national politics

National Latino Leader? The Job is Open

Presents results of a survey of Latinos/Hispanics on whom they consider "the most important Latino leader in the country today," as well as their familiarity with prominent Latinos, by nativity and language