Another chapter has opened in the tortured history of the status of Gillick competence. Never before has Gillick been extended to permit a mature child to make autonomous medical decisions over and above the curial 'parens patriae' power. In 2013, two judicial decisions promulgated from different Australian courts are in conflict over this most fundamental of questions. This Article situates th...

Judges face retention elections in over a third of U.S. state courts of last resort and numerous lower courts. According to conventional wisdom, these elections engender judicial independence and decrease democratic accountability. We argue that in the context of modern judicial campaigns, retention elections create pressure for judges to cater to public opinion on “hot-button” issues that are ...

The keyword-based searches perform unsatisfactorily because of their poor semantic identification, isolated output information and non-uniformed output format, which lead to hard manual screening. In order to overcome these drawbacks, under the challenges that the ambiguity of legal language, the deficiency of three-stage inference for court decisions and the limited role of cases in China, a c...

The tension between judicial review and democratic principles remains the most significant problem in modern constitutional theory. Yet this tension may be resolved in the context of ‘‘political stalemate.’’ Political stalemate arises when both parties in a two-party system find it electorally advantageous to ignore a given political issue, even when majorities favor reform on that issue. This ...

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) has become a common term to describe individuals demonstrating life-long psychopathic tendencies. This use of ASPD is misguided and can result in the permanent stigmatization of individuals so labeled, and it is particularly concerning when used to label juveniles. The diagnostic criteria for ASPD excludes individuals who have not reached the age of 18, an...

The Supreme Court of India has used its constitutionally mandated task of interpreting the enforceable fundamental rights enumerated in Part III of the constitution to extend its own powers. This extension in my view poses a dangerous threat to the Constitutional democracy of India. I argue below that the situation not only impacts the spillover effects beyond each case, but the learned justice...

Plurality decisions on the Supreme Court represent extreme dissensus where no clear majority is formed for any one controlling rationale for the final disposition. Studying these decisions is important because they erode the Court’s credibility and authority as a source of legal leadership, and because they provide broader lessons about judicial decision making. This article presents the first ...

The conventional wisdom among many legal scholars is that judicial independence can best be achieved with an appointive judiciary; judicial elections turn judges into politicians, threatening judicial autonomy. Yet the original supporters of judicial elections successfully eliminated the appointive systems of many states by arguing that judges who owed their jobs to politicians could never be t...

BACKGROUND The use of different forms of coordination according to situational demands plays a crucial role in teams working in complex environments. This study aimed to describe patterns of coordinative actions (CAs) as they occur during anaesthesia induction and to analyse the influence of two crucial situational factors on these patterns, namely the amount of existing standards and the level...