The reasons for judicial mistrust of the drug courier profile are numerous and, I believe, compelling. Because many of the profile characteristics (e.g. nervousness, arrival from a source city, little or no luggage, cash purchase of ticket) are equally applicable to innocent persons, use of the profile by reviewing courts could lead to approval of wholesale seizures of innocent citizens by poli...

In jurisdictions with two or more tiers of criminal courts, some defendants can choose the type of trial court to be tried in. This may involve a trade-off between the probability of acquittal/conviction and the estimated severity of sentence if convicted. For instance, in England and Wales, the lower courts have a higher conviction rate but limited sentencing powers, whereas the higher courts ...

Federal law that codifies military criminal procedure provides that “[n]o person subject to this chapter may attempt to coerce or, by any unauthorized means, influence the action of a court-martial . . . or the action of any convening, approving, or reviewing authority with respect to his judicial acts.”2 This section of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) statutorily limits the reach o...

The article shows how judicial review has expanded around the globe from the United States, Western Europe, and Japan to become a regular feature of constitutional design in Africa and Asia. Although the formal power to exercise judicial review is now nearly universal in democratic states, courts have varied in the extent to which they are willing to exercise this power in practice. After decad...

Drug courts are slowly beginning to expand their admission criteria to include more chronic and serious offenders since traditional probation and incarceration have failed to prevent drug use and crime. Drug courts have moved from providing diversion programs for first-time offenders charged with drug possession to developing tracks for more complex clients. Many of these new drug court partici...

The Council of State Governments 289 Introduction The current fiscal crisis is provoking budget reductions so deep they threaten the basic mission of state courts. Massachusetts Chief Justice Margaret Marshall recently described the state courts, which handle 95 percent of all criminal and civil litigation in the country, as poised at “the tipping point of dysfunction.”1 In the 2010 fiscal year...

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Daubert modernized the long-standing Frye precedent and requires courts to make scientific judgments. Courts, however, are not well-equipped to parse scientific arguments and the Daubert criteria offer only a rudimentary framework for decision-making. To illustrate the problems, as well as possible ways for courts to deal with scientific evidence, the paper ...

Investigation of the ecological and evolutionary basis for the often-intriguing courtship behavior of animals requires that we understand the patterns of variation inherent in such behaviors. The courtship displays of the White-ruffed Manakin (Corapipo altera) are not well-known, and previously published descriptions and interpretations of displays conflict with one another. We studied the repr...

This paper presents the machine translation system known as TransLI (Translation of Legal Information) developed by the authors for automatic translation of Canadian Court judgments from English to French and from French to English. Normally, a certified translation of a legal judgment takes several months to complete. The authors attempted to shorten this time significantly using a unique stat...

Few legal topics have raised more debate than the right of a pregnant woman to refuse medical treatment for religious, moral, philosophical, or personal reasons.' A woman's decision raises common law, statutory, constitutional, and ethical questions. Courts must define the scope of a pregnant woman's right to privacy in her own bodily integrity and compare that right to the State's interest in ...