A National Health Insurance Program for the United States

The US will spend $1.79 trillion on health care in 2004, yet 44 million Americans remain uninsured. What the country needs, argues McCanne, is publicly funded universal health coverag

Powers, Rights, and Section 25

The article offers information on the individual rights related to the issues discussed in the section 25 of The 1789 Judiciary Act. It states that the priority of the rules of federal courts focuses on the protection of individual rights and power against government. It also informs about the certain amendments done in the act to protect individual rights and power

State Separation of Powers and the Federal Courts

The cases discussed herein mostly surfaced in the regulatory era of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. This Article first discusses arguments as to state delegations of legislative power, and the Court’s rejection of legislative-style deference that state agencies often argued for. This Article next discusses the Court’s decisions as to state adjudicative bodies, and its refusal to treat state agency adjudicators as full-fledged courts. This Article then addresses the Court’s response to arguments for unreviewable executive discretion and to laws allowing delegations to private parties. It then addresses whether the discussion sheds light on modern debates as to the use of private enforcement and as to the Independent State Legislature Doctrine. This abstract has been taken from the author\u27s introduction

Powers, Rights, and Section 25

The article offers information on the individual rights related to the issues discussed in the section 25 of The 1789 Judiciary Act. It states that the priority of the rules of federal courts focuses on the protection of individual rights and power against government. It also informs about the certain amendments done in the act to protect individual rights and power

Rethinking the Judicial Reception of Legislative Facts

In a recent article, Professor Peggy Davis called for reforms in judicial reception of legislative facts. Her suggestions, which follow an empirical analysis of the use of psychological parent theories in child custody disputes, echo similar proposals by Professor Kenneth Karst in 1960s and by Professors Arthur Miller and Jerome Barron in 1975 for judicial reception of legislative facts in constitutional cases.As originally defined by Kenneth Culp Davis, legislative facts are facts that inform[] a court\u27s legislative judgment on questions of law and policy. They contrast with adjudicative facts, which are facts about what the parties did, what the circumstances were, what the background conditions were. \u27 The most commonly cited examples of legislative facts are Louis Brandeis\u27 recitation of opinions that workingwomen needed special protection in his brief in Muller v. Oregon, and the social science appendix detailing the deleterious effects of segregation on black children in Brown v. Board of Education. Discussions of the judicial reception of legislative facts implicate questions of the role of social science in law, the scope of judicial notice, and, more generally, the process of judicial decision making. Because assumptions about disputable general facts are necessary to any reasoning process, the advisory committee on the Federal Rules of Evidence declined to prescribe formal rules for the reception of legislative facts when providing standards for judicial notice. The advisory committee believed that judicial absorption of general nonlegal knowledge should not be circumscribed by any limitation in the form of indisputability, any formal requirements of notice other than those already inherent in affording opportunity to hear and be heard and exchanging briefs, and any requirement of formal findings at any level

Inmate Constitutional Claims and the Scienter Requirement

Scholars have criticized requirements that inmates prove malice or deliberate indifference to establish constitutional claims against corrections officials. The Eighth Amendment currently requires convicted prisoners to show that a prison official acted “maliciously or sadistically” to establish an excessive force claim and with subjective “deliberate indifference” to establish a claim of unconstitutional prison conditions. Similar requirements can apply with respect to claims by pretrial detainees, whose claims are governed by substantive due process rather than the Eighth Amendment. Scienter critics have argued for use of an objective reasonableness standard for all inmate claims—both those brought by convicted prisoners and pretrial detainees. This Essay argues that the scienter requirements are more justified than critics claim. Critics argue that the Court has based its state-of-mind requirements on a mistaken notion that, for an action to constitute punishment, it must necessarily involve a purpose to chastise or deter. Intentions to chastise and deter, however, remain central to the concept of punishment, and reference to other purposes of punishment does not suggest dispensing with a culpable state-of-mind requirement in inmate suits against corrections officials. Scienter requirements, moreover, may be justified apart from notions of punishment, by the need to maintain order in prisons and to distinguish constitutional violations from ordinary torts. Finally, state-of-mind requirements do not pose the impenetrable barrier to liability that critics claim. This is particularly true in systemic conditions cases—the cases that have the most promise for improving the lives of inmates

Jurisdictional Discrimination and Full Faith and Credit

In Hughes v. Fetter (1951), the Supreme Court ruled that state courts are ordinarily required-as a matter of the Full Faith and Credit Clause-to take jurisdiction of claims arising under sister-state law, their own wishes notwithstanding. Hughes remains a foundational case for conflict of laws and interstate relations