The Supreme Court recently denied certiorari to review the Federal Circuit’s ruling in Apotex v. Pfizer (S. Ct. 906-1006, October 16, 2006). The ruling was predictable. Pfizer had mooted the case by providing a covenant not to sue Apotex on its Quinapril patent. But the underlying legal issue – subject matter jurisdiction in declaratory judgment cases – is currently pending before the Supreme C...

Court scholars have a voracious appetite for Supreme Court preference measures. Several papers question whether widely-used Martin and Quinn scores provide valid intertemporal measures, calling into question virtually an entire generation of quantitative research on the Court. This paper discusses the challenges of inter-temporal preference estimation and revises, updates and extends Bailey and...

This paper provides an analysis of the judgment by the German Supreme Court in socalled Poem title list III (Gedichttitelliste III) together with relevant background to the case. The dispute concerned the infringement of the Sui Generis database right and the domestic supreme court decided the matter after the European Court of Justice gave its preliminary ruling on the interpretation of the re...

This Essay offers the first in-depth examination of the role of colorblind constitutionalism in the history of Brown v. Board of Education. In light of the recent Supreme Court ruling in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, such an examination is needed today more than ever. In this case, Chief Justice John Roberts drew on the history of Brown to support his c...

The landmark 1972 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Jackson v. Indiana prohibited the indefinite commitment of criminal defendants on grounds of incompetence to stand trial if there was no substantial probability of restoration to competency in the foreseeable future. Such defendants are still subject to ordinary civil commitment; however, not all will meet civil commitment criteria, given that th...

Under the dimension of US constitutionalism, freedom of speech is imprescriptible, while limitation to obscene speech in judicial practice becomes exception of the stipulation of US Constitution “prohibiting laying down the law”. Furthermore, coordination of conflicts between the two turns to be the target sought by the Federal Supreme Judicial Court. Prejudication on games between the two by t...

Previous research has identified strategic behavior in the nomination, confirmation, and retirement processes of the Supreme Court, each independently. This paper analyzes the interaction between the justices, the president, and the Senate in these processes. I constructed a game theoretic model to consider the nomination and approval process of Supreme Court justices and the change in dynamics...

This edition of “Ask the Author” features a discussion with Andrew Martin, who is a professor of law and chair of the political science department at Washington University in St. Louis. Andrew has done some very influential work on the Supreme Court, including co-authoring a paper on ideological drift of Supreme Court Justices, see [1] here, that will appear in issue four of the Northwestern Un...