Introduction: New Federalism

Several intriguing and difficult questions about the federal-state allocation of power remain open even as we apparently near the end of the particular Rehnquist Court’s federalism initiative. New Justices on the Court and new initiatives by federal and state elected officials in the future will reshape this debate in ways that are perhaps unexpected and currently unforeseen. That the essays here are topically and methodologically diverse exemplifies the variety of this ongoing debate, which promises to continue throughout the next decade and beyond

Justice Harry Blackmun and the Phenomenon of Judicial Preference Change

We are fond of putting our judges into neat adjectival boxes, particularly when they sit on the Supreme Court. These typologies often reflect perceived attitudinal or ideological preferences; some Justices are called liberal or conservative or moderate, or occasionally some hyphenated combination thereof. Or the labels might seek to capture variations in jurisprudential philosophy or method, such as formalist, pragmatist, originalist, textualist, or minimalist. No Justice is immune from this classification game, and the subject of this symposium is an apt example. From the moment of his nomination by President Nixon in 1970, Harry A. Blackmun attracted a bevy of predictive characterizations, many of which now seem almost quaint in their wrong-headedness. Contemporary court-watchers described the new Justice as consistently ... on the conservative side of the issues, a jurisprudential twin of Chief Justice Warren Burger, and, in the ultimate compound taxonomy, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Republican Rotarian Harvard Man from the Suburbs.\u2

The Supreme Court Forecasting Project: Legal and Political Science Approaches to Predicting Supreme Court Decision-Making

This Essay reports the results of an interdisciplinary project comparing political science and legal approaches to forecasting Supreme Court decisions. For every argued case during the 2002 Term, we obtained predictions of the outcome prior to oral argument using two methods—one a statistical model that relies on general case characteristics, and the other a set of independent predictions by legal specialists. The basic result is that the statistical model did better than the legal experts in forecasting the outcomes of the Term’s cases: The model predicted 75% of the Court’s affirm/reverse results correctly, while the experts collectively got 59.1% right. These results are notable, given that the statistical model disregards information about the specific law or facts of the cases. The model’s relative success was due in large part to its ability to predict more accurately the important votes of the moderate Justices (Kennedy and O’Connor) at the center of the current Court. The legal experts, by contrast, did best at predicting the votes of the more ideologically extreme Justices, but had difficulty predicting the centrist Justices. The relative success of the two methods also varied by issue area, with the statistical model doing particularly well in forecasting “economic activity” cases, while the experts did comparatively better in the “judicial power” cases. In addition to reporting the results in detail, the Essay explains the differing methods of prediction used and explores the implications of the findings for assessing and understanding Supreme Court decision-making.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/116230/1/columbia04.pd

Experimental Apparatus for Production, Cooling, and Storing Multiply Charged Ions for Charge-Transfer Measurements

A novel method is described that combines the production of ions by laser ablation with an ion‐trap technique for the measurement of thermal‐energy charge‐transfer rates of multiply charged ions and neutrals. The charge‐transfer rate is determined by measuring the rate of loss of stored ions from the trap. Verification of the calibration of the apparatus is demonstrated through investigation of charge transfer of N2 and N2+, which has been studied by another group. We also have made the first measurement on the thermal‐energy charge‐transfer coefficient of Ar and W2+. The rate coefficient is 0.99(0.22)×10−11 cm3 s−1

Justice, culture and the political determinants of indigenous Australian health

Indigenous Australian health is distinguished by a median age of death in the order of 20 years less than that of the non-indigenous population (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2009). This makes Australia unique among comparable post-colonial societies in failing to make substantive reductions to the indigenous/non-indigenous health differential. Relatively poor indigenous housing, educational attainment, labour market participation and access to traditional resources for economic purposes contribute to the differen- tial. These contributing variables have an inherently political character which is integral to examining the just distribution of public authority, the purpose of political activity, equal political participation and cultural responsiveness in the provision of health ser- vices as important theoretical considerations in reducing cross-cultural inequities in the burden of disease