There are many views on how human decision makers behave. In this work, the Justices of the United States Supreme Court will be viewed in terms of constrained maximization and cognitivecybernetic theory. This paper will integrate research in such fields as law, political science, psychology, economics and decision making theory. It will be argued that due to its heavy workload, the Supreme Cour...

The evolution of U.S. Supreme Court antitrust jurisprudence over the past fifty years is well known. As one of us has written, “[f]orty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court simply did not know what it was doing in antitrust cases.”1 The Court interpreted the Sherman2 and Clayton Acts3 to reflect a hodgepodge of social and political goals, many with an explicitly anticompetitive bent, such as prote...

According to attitudinal theorists, justices on the U. S. Supreme Court decide cases largely on political preferences that fall within one dimension of ideology. The focus of this study is to test whether a unidimensional ideological model explains the voting behavior of Canadian Supreme Court justices (1992-1997). The factor analysis results in three areas of law, two of which have never been ...

In the case of Beal v. Doe, decided in 1977, the US Supreme Court ruled that states could constitutionally restrict money from Medicaid from funding elective abortions. After the 1973 case Roe v. Wade [2], in which the US Supreme Court had ruled that women have rights to terminate pregnancies within the first trimester [3], the state of Pennsylvania passed legislation that restricted the use of...

In 2011, the United States Supreme Court in Sorrell v. IMS Health Inc. struck down a Vermont law that would restrict the ability of pharmaceutical companies to purchase certain physician-identifiable prescription data without the consent of the prescriber. The law's stated purpose was threefold: to protect the privacy of medical information, to protect the public health and to contain healthcar...

The declining numbers of cases on the Supreme Court’s plenary docket may or may not be a problem. After all, there are lots of good reasons that could happen, including the obvious possibility that the Court was previously hearing too many cases that did not warrant plenary review and is now doing a better, not worse job, of picking cases. But while the mere fact of fewer cases is not necessari...

This paper considers the distribution of some extremum on the risk process whose income depend on the current reserve. We first construct the defective renewal sequence and obtain the density function of them. By the presented renewal measure and the strong Markov property, the distribution of the first hitting time is obtained explicitly. Then, the ruin probability and the probability that the...

Terrorist violence is often condemned for targeting innocents or non-combatants. There are two objections to this line of argument. First, one may doubt that terrorism is necessarily directed against innocents or non-combatants. However, I will focus on the second objection, according to which there may be exceptions from the prohibition against killing the innocent. In my article I will elabor...

On June 26, 2015, exactly two years after it invalidated key portions of the Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”) in United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court issued its historic 5-4 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, holding that same-sex couples could no longer be barred from exercising the fundamental right to marriage. For marriageequality supporters, this judicial victory represented “the culmi...

It seems mere common sense to begin any serious discussion of terrorism with an attempt at definition. After all, how can we talk sensibly about the topic unless we know what the topic is? It is true that there are various objections to common sense at this point, but I shall not pursue them here beyond remarking that widespread disarray among theorists about what to count as terrorism suggests...