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...

BACKGROUND To select a proper diagnostic test, it is recommended that the most specific test be used to confirm (rule in) a diagnosis, and the most sensitive test be used to establish that a disease is unlikely (rule out). These rule-in and rule-out concepts can also be characterized by the likelihood ratio (LR). However, previous papers discussed only the case of binary tests and assumed test ...

The 1991 Delaware court ruling involving Credit Lyonnais expanded the fiduciary duties of managers towards debtholders in the event that a firm is within the proximity of insolvency. Using a difference-in-differences approach that exploits this exogenous shock, we find that the 1991 ruling induced managers of Delaware firms ex ante to place a greater emphasis on investments that foster long-ter...

The decision to request a preliminary injunction—a court order that bans a party from certain behavior until its lawfulness is ascertained in a final court ruling at trial—is an important litigation instrument in many areas of the law including antitrust, copyright, patents, trademarks, employment and labor relations as well as contracts. The process of filing for a preliminary injunction and t...

Ruling gap ratios are an affine-invariant characterization of parallel ruling configurations in scanned documents. This report quantifies the advantage of simultaneous extraction of horizontal and vertical rulings. It demonstrates that every ruling gap ratio can be derived from a minimal set of basis ratios. The effect on the basis ratios of noise on the radial coordinates of individual rulings...

We propose that institutions such as the U.S. Supreme Court can lead individuals to update their perceptions of social norms, in contrast to the mixed evidence on whether institutions shape individuals' personal opinions. We studied reactions to the June 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage. In a controlled experimental setting, we found that a favorable ruling, when pre...

Various versions of legitimacy theory predict that a duty and obligation to obey legitimate authorities generally trumps people's personal moral and religious values. However, most research has assumed rather than measured the degree to which people have a moral or religious stake in the situations studied. This study tested compliance with and reactions to legitimate authorities in the context...

Three studies tested the conditions under which people judge utilitarian harm to be authority dependent (i.e., whether its right or wrongness depends on the ruling of an authority). In Study 1, participants judged the right or wrongness of physical abuse when used as an interrogation method anticipated to yield useful information for preventing future terrorist attacks. The ruling of the milita...