In the United States, the right to a jury trial is guaranteed by the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, made applicable to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. The Sixth Amendment states, in part, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed...

Brady v. Maryland I established that, as a matter of due process, a criminal defendant has an access right upon request to evidence within the prosecutor's possession that is both favorable and material to the defense.2 The extent of this constitutional right, however, depends on the definition of materiality. In United States v. Agurs, 3 the Supreme Court created a two-tiered framework for det...

There is perhaps no other sector that reflects the fractured nature of civil society in the United States more than public education. Despite a Supreme Court decision calling for schools to be racially integrated, public schools across the United States remain largely segregated with respect to the race and class make-up of their student populations (Orfield and Eaton 1996). Public schools are ...

The Supreme Court has traditionally applied the Eighth Amendment differently to capital and non-capital cases based on the longstanding notion that “death-is-different.” In the recent case of Graham v. Florida, however, the Supreme Court applied its “evolving standards of decency” standard, heretofore reserved for capital cases, to a non-capital case. The Court held that the Eighth Amendment pr...

This Article considers the broad range of "tort experiments" states have undertaken in recent years, as well as the changing attitudes of Congress and the Supreme Court toward state tort law. Notably, while states have limited tort rights and remedies in the products liability and personal injury areas in recent years, they have at the same time increased tort rights and remedies to address new...

www.frontiersinecology.org © The Ecological Society of America T Clean Water Act (CWA) protects “navigable waters”, defined as “waters of the United States” (33 USC § 502[7]). Regulations by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and US Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) further define what are considered “waters of the US” (33 CFR § 328.3[a] and 40 CFR § 230.3[s]). Prior to 2001, any tribut...

On June 25, 2012, the Supreme Court issued its much-anticipated decision in Arizona v. United States, ruling that some aspects of an Arizona statute intended to deter unlawfully present aliens from remaining in the state were preempted by federal law, but also holding that Arizona police were not facially preempted from running immigration status checks on persons stopped for state or local off...

On Monday, April 18, 2005, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Asia Foundation held a joint conference on “Legal Reform in China: Problems and Prospects.” The conference gathered leading experts from China and the United States to discuss the efforts that China has undertaken to reform its judicial and administrative systems. Co-organized by Dr. Veron Hung of the Carnegie End...

Public health laws may mandate drastic limitations on individual liberty, such as forced medication and quarantine. This results in a tension between public health laws and guarantees of liberty such as the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court has resolved this tension in favor of one or the other of these legal principl...

In the 1989 case Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Missouri law regulating abortion [3] care. The Missouri law prohibited the use of public facilities, employees, or funds to provide abortion [3] counseling or services. The law also placed restrictions on physicians who provided abortions. A group of physicians affected by the law ch...