Dueling Federalists: Supreme Court Decisions with Multiple Opinions Citing \u3cem\u3eThe Federalist\u3c/em\u3e, 1986-2007

This Article examines the use of history in legal interpretation through an empirical analysis of one of the most prominent examples of historical evidence in law: citations to The Federalist in Supreme Court Justices\u27 published opinions. In particular, the Article examines a phenomenon that has occurred frequently over the last two decades, but has thus far been virtually ignored: the citation by different Justices to the same historical source (such as The Federalist) to support divergent or opposing historical interpretations of legal meaning. Although the use of historical evidence in constitutional interpretation is itself much debated, The Federalist continues to be cited as binding or persuasive authority by scholars and judges

The Origins and Constitutionality of State Unit Voting in the Electoral College

On November 1, 2000, a Joint Resolution was introduced in Congress proposing a constitutional amendment to change the Article II system of electing the President and Vice President\u27 by abolishing the Electoral College. Acknowledging the fact that there have been more congressionally proposed constitutional amendments on this subject than any other, the sponsoring Senator noted that the issue could become supremely important in a few days, because we have the possibility that the winning candidate for President might not win the popular vote in our country.\u27 One prominent legal scholar has described the mere possibility of such an event as a constitutional accident waiting to happen. Six days later, on election day 2000, the Senator proved to be a prophet (the issue was not fully resolved for over a month). Governor George W. Bush won the presidency with 271 electoral votes, despite Vice President Al Gore tallying more popular votes. The possibility of a split between the electoral vote and the popular vote moved from the province of mere academic speculation to political reality, and the Electoral College debate moved with it to the fore-front of public consciousness. From the media to politicians to scholars, no one seemed without an opinion on whether the Electoral College should be totally discarded, or meticulously preserved. This Note does not attempt to make any judgments on the value of the Electoral College as an institution. Whether as a constitutional procedure the Electoral College ought to be preserved, altered, or eliminated is a question left for other scholars to ad- dress. Instead, this Note analyzes legal issues that would confront any attempt to change the Electoral College by lawsuit or legislation. It will do so by comparing the historical underpinnings of the institution to the legal status of the electoral voting systems currently practiced in the states. The analysis will focus on two separate, but ultimately related, areas of inquiry: (1) the inception of the Electoral College as a product of the Constitutional Convention, and (2) how that origin relates to possible challenges to the winner-take-all allocation of electoral votes, or what is commonly known as the unit rule. This Note examines the Electoral College debate in light of two recent developments: the controversial 2000 election and the decision in Bush v. Gore, and the Supreme Court\u27s recent jurisprudence on state sovereignty. The Constitution leaves the decision on how to allocate its electoral votes completely to the discretion of each state. There are a number of different methods from which the states could choose; an overwhelming majority of states employ the unit rule. This method has become unpopular with many commentators and has been the subject of much criticism. Included in the bill of charges against the method are that it amplifies the effect of the imbalanced allocation of electoral votes, and that it fails to count the votes within a state that were cast for a losing candidate. It is also controversial because it is the mechanism that enhances the possibility of having an electoral vote winner, and hence a president, who received fewer popular votes than the electoral runner- up

Dueling Federalists: Supreme Court Decisions with Multiple Opinions Citing \u3cem\u3eThe Federalist\u3c/em\u3e, 1986-2007

This Article examines the use of history in legal interpretation through an empirical analysis of one of the most prominent examples of historical evidence in law: citations to The Federalist in Supreme Court Justices\u27 published opinions. In particular, the Article examines a phenomenon that has occurred frequently over the last two decades, but has thus far been virtually ignored: the citation by different Justices to the same historical source (such as The Federalist) to support divergent or opposing historical interpretations of legal meaning. Although the use of historical evidence in constitutional interpretation is itself much debated, The Federalist continues to be cited as binding or persuasive authority by scholars and judges

Archiving primary data: solutions for long-term studies

The recent trend for journals to require open access to primary data included in publications has been embraced by many biologists, but has caused apprehension amongst researchers engaged in long-term ecological and evolutionary studies. A worldwide survey of 73 principal investigators (Pls) with long-term studies revealed positive attitudes towards sharing data with the agreement or involvement of the PI, and 93% of PIs have historically shared data. Only 8% were in favor of uncontrolled, open access to primary data while 63% expressed serious concern. We present here their viewpoint on an issue that can have non-trivial scientific consequences. We discuss potential costs of public data archiving and provide possible solutions to meet the needs of journals and researchers

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe