ABSTRACT
The Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Sell v. United States declared that situations in which the state is authorized to forcibly medicate a criminal defendant to restore competency to stand trial “may be rare.” Experience since Sell indicates that this prediction was wrong. In fact, wittingly or not, Sell created three exceptions to its holding [...]
Americans have a seemingly insatiable appetite for wireless bandwidth. Global mobile data traffic has grown at an annual rate exceeding 140 percent each year since 2008, and it is predicted to increase another 26-fold by 2015. Spurred by increasing adoption of smartphones and tablet computers, growth in the U.S. has outpaced worldwide averages, with [...]
The U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Morrison v. National Australia Bank has substantially shortened the reach of the anti-fraud provisions of the securities laws. Before Morrison, the courts utilized the conduct and effects tests to determine whether § 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 applied. Under those tests, the statute reached [...]
Despite the alleged triumph of legal realism and the empirical turn of closely related fields such as judicial behavior, a startling number of constitutional theorists continue to approach their work as a purely conceptual enterprise. This is particularly true of originalists, but it is true of many others as well. Indeed, much of normative constitutional [...]
Japan is a civil law country, and the precedent of the Supreme Court is not binding on either the Supreme Court itself or lower courts. Judges are supposed to return to the text of the statute for each legal dispute and apply the rules to specific cases. Judicial decisions are not “law” to be applied [...]
We all know that criminal proceedings implicate heightened constitutional protections in comparison to civil proceedings. Many of us also have at least heard of civil forfeiture, somewhat of a hybrid of criminal and civil process that has its roots in this country in the first session of Congress. A civil forfeiture proceeding is filed directly [...]
