Nine Justices, Ten Years: A Statistical Retrospective

The 2003 Term marked an unprecedented milestone for the Supreme Court: for the first time in history, nine Justices celebrated a full decade presiding together over the nation\u27s highest court.\u27 The continuity of the current Court is especially striking given that, on average, one new Justice has been appointed approximately every two years since the Court\u27s expansion to nine members in 1837.2 Although the Harvard Law Review has prepared statistical retrospectives in the past,3 the last decade presents a rare opportunity to study the Court free from the disruptions of intervening appointments. Presented here is a review of the 823 cases decided by the Court over the past decade. Of course, bare statistics cannot capture the nuanced interactions among the Justices nor substantiate any particular theory about the complex dynamics of the Court. Rather, this statistical compilation and the preliminary observations articulated here are intended only as a starting point- a modest effort to showcase trends that deserve closer attention and to jumpstart more robust analyses of how the Court, despite its apparent stability, has evolved over the past decade

The Political Roots of Judicial Legitimacy: Explaining the Enduring Validity of the Insular Cases

At the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898, America gained control of three new territories—Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The political fate of these islands generated a bitter debate in the United States as many wondered how a country whose identity had been forged in the crucible of colonialism could, only a century after gaining its independence, administer an empire of its own. Despite the enormous political and public attention paid to the issue of American expansion, it was the Supreme Court—in a series of decisions collectively known as the Insular Cases—that interceded to settle the protracted political feud. What is most striking about this episode in constitutional history is that the Court\u27s intervention brought closure to a volatile national debate implicating international affairs and foreign treaties—matters in which courts were expected not to meddle—without provoking significant public backlash or damaging the Court\u27s institutional credibility. And the Insular Cases themselves have remained good law ever since. This Article seeks to understand why. Specifically, this piece aims to understand the process by which divisive, politically charged issues were transformed into questions fit for judicial review, how that process ratified the decisions themselves, and what role the political branches can play in validating otherwise questionable judicial action. It concludes first that there is considerable evidence, as a descriptive matter, that before the Supreme Court decided the Insular Cases, political actors took a series of steps that authorized and facilitated judicial consideration of questions that were political in nature. Second, the Article contends, as a normative matter, that the Insular Cases illustrate how the political branches can properly validate the Court\u27s decisions by consenting in advance to the judiciary\u27s involvement and certifying certain questions to the courts. Although the precise features of this process defy easy classification, it is possible to discern evidence of five elements that laid the groundwork for legitimate judicial review. By (1) disavowing their own authority to settle the dispute, (2) publicly inviting the Court to mediate the controversy, (3) endorsing the validity of judicial resolution, (4) casting the political issue in legal and constitutional terms, and (5) proposing nonlegal factors that could compensate for the absence of traditional standards, the popular branches helped transform arguably political questions into justiciable ones. It is this consent and certify process that at once explains and justifies the Supreme Court\u27s intervention in the Insular Cases. More broadly, the Article suggests that the largely forgotten historical context of the Insular Cases reveals an important, unexplored potential source of judicial legitimacy: the political branches of government

ASIC Design of Bit-Serial and Bit-Parallel Discrete Cosine Transform Processors

Designs of the bit-serial and bit-parallel versions of the Discrete Cosine Transform Processor using the universal IIR filter module are presented, with emphasis on the bit-serial design. A bit-serial cell mini-library was created. The designs were performed with the AlliedSignal Aerospace Microelectronics Center's 1.2 micro double metal p-well CMOS standard cell library. The core of the bit-serial design is the 18-bit data x 8-bit coefficient bit-serial multiplier, whose design is also presented in detail; the multiplier is capable of handling negative data and negative coefficients, and has an accuracy of o(2-16), The 8-point 18-bit bit-serial DCT has a maximum clock speed of 139.0 MHz and 55.6 MHz under best and worst case conditions respectively. Two bit-parallel design implementations are presented, one with straight bit-parallel multiplier cells and the other with ROM multipliers using distributed arithmetic. The bit-parallel designs are also 8-point, but have an 8-bit wide input and a 12-bit wide output, thereby calculating with much less precision. The parallel multiplier chip's maximum speed under best and worst case conditions is 28.4 MHz and 11.4 MHz respectively, whereas the ROM multiplier chip's is 36.3 MHz and 14.5 MHz respectively. All three designs have a throughput of one clock cycle, with respect to their data input rates. The latencies for the bit-serial and bit-parallel designs are 38 and 5 cycles respectively

Nine Justices, Ten Years: A Statistical Retrospective

The 2003 Term marked an unprecedented milestone for the Supreme Court: for the first time in history, nine Justices celebrated a full decade presiding together over the nation\u27s highest court.\u27 The continuity of the current Court is especially striking given that, on average, one new Justice has been appointed approximately every two years since the Court\u27s expansion to nine members in 1837.2 Although the Harvard Law Review has prepared statistical retrospectives in the past,3 the last decade presents a rare opportunity to study the Court free from the disruptions of intervening appointments. Presented here is a review of the 823 cases decided by the Court over the past decade. Of course, bare statistics cannot capture the nuanced interactions among the Justices nor substantiate any particular theory about the complex dynamics of the Court. Rather, this statistical compilation and the preliminary observations articulated here are intended only as a starting point- a modest effort to showcase trends that deserve closer attention and to jumpstart more robust analyses of how the Court, despite its apparent stability, has evolved over the past decade

Collateral Consequences: Plea Bargaining, Post-Conviction, and the Right to Effective Assistance of Counsel

The panel examines how the right to counsel applies in the context of plea bargaining, and how and how ineffective assistance of counsel at early stages of a criminal proceedings may affect later states such as post-conviction