When contemporary commentators decry what they describe as growing threats to “judicial independence,” they typically invoke “judicial independence” as a normative ideal—an institutional virtue. That virtue is the capacity of courts to protect individual rights, to police structural limits on governmental power, and to decide individual disputes based solely on the applicable law and the factua...

The Canadian oncology community was devastated by the news in August 2006 that a patient had died from an overdose of fluorouracil. Where we once thought our checks and balances ensured patient safety, we now knew they were not enough. Practice immediately began to change around the country. However, the incident report highlighted that there was much we still didn't know about safety issues in...

Methods for determining post-election audit sampling have been the subject of extensive recent research. This article • provides an overview of post-election audit sampling methods, focusing on risklimiting audits, • advances and improves three methods for calculating risk-limiting election audit samples, showing how to apply precise margin error bounds to improve the accuracy of existing metho...

Programs with dynamic allocation are able to create and use an unbounded number of fresh resources, such as references, objects, files, etc. We propose History-Register Automata (HRA), a new automata-theoretic formalism for modelling such programs. HRAs extend the expressiveness of previous approaches and bring us to the limits of decidability for reachability checks. The distinctive feature of...

To ensure the consistency of database subsystems involved in communication systems (e.g., telephone systems), appropriate scheduled maintenance policies are necessary. Audit operations, consisting in periodic checks and recovery actions, are typically employed in databases to cope with run time faults which may affect the dependability and quality of service of the overall system. This paper ai...

The traditional notion of aggression as an antisocial instinct is being replaced by a framework that considers it a tool of competition and negotiation. When survival depends on mutual assistance, the expression of aggression is constrained by the need to maintain beneficial relationships. Moreover, evolution has produced ways of countering its disruptive consequences. For example, chimpanzees ...

Recent controversies in campaign finance have generated concerns that wealthy donors will dominate the political landscape, with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission1 and McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission2 standing as the high-water marks in the U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudential turn towards deregulation. This short Essay puts this case law in perspective by briefly explain...

This paper proposes a normative theory of constitutional rules. The first-best cannot be achieved whenever constitutional rules cannot be made contingent on information about the costs and benefits of policy reforms. We characterize and welfare rank four classes of second best constitutions: constitutions that specify one rule for all types of decisions; constitutions that provide incentives fo...

The drive to breathe is a fundamental human and biologic behavior, regulated by a complex system of checks and balances in the body. When respiratory mechanics are deregulated by injury, infection, coma, or a host of other conditions, the biologic equilibrium shifts into a state of respiratory failure. When this occurs, mechanical ventilation can be a life saving therapy. While commonplace in d...

For most Marxian theorists Britain’s parliamentary system has little to do with the politics of democratic representation. Instead, parliament, as a formal institution, is argued to be inextricably tied to the wider, subtly constraining forces of “omnipresent capitalism”. Eric Hobsbawm, for example, has argued that by gradually institutionalising representation under the rubric of parliamentary...