In recent years the nation's courts have expanded their influence in health policy in four areas: reviewing insurers' coverage decisions, deciding the adequacy of Medicaid payment rates to hospitals and nursing homes, arbitrating hospital mergers, and assessing hospitals' tax-exempt status. The major problem with developing health policy through the courts is that the courts' focus will be the ...

Introduction This Overview has two primary purposes. First, it provides judicial system officials with the arguments in favor of and in opposition to the creation of specialized courts. Second, it offers recommendations for consideration by judicial system officials when they are deliberating whether to establish specialized courts. This Overview also provides a review of types of specialized c...

Despite a growing awareness that mistaken eyewitness identifications contribute significantly to wrongful convictions, most courts continue to apply federal Due Process criteria for admissibility of eyewitness identification that has proved useless in protecting against the use of highly unreliable evidence. In response, this article reviews the path-breaking decisions of several state supreme ...

As an alternative to traditional juvenile courts, juvenile drug courts attempt to provide substance abuse treatment, sanctions, and incentives to rehabilitate nonviolent drug-involved youth, empower families to support them in this process, and prevent recidivism. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) sponsored a multisite study of juvenile drug courts to examine the...

In the last fifteen years or so, courts have issued a small but significant number of decrees requiring that governmental bodies reorganize themselves so that their behavior will comport with certain legal standards. Such decrees, addressed to school systems, prison and mental hospital officials, welfare administrators, and public housing authorities, insert trial courts in the ongoing business...

The Judges’ Journal • Vol. 54 No. 2 rates of treatment retention than addicts participating in treatment voluntarily and lower rates of recidivism than defendants in traditional courts.1 Another reason for the blossoming of mental health courts was a belief by judges and other stakeholders in the logic underlying their design and operations. They assumed that (1) untreated, or inadequately trea...

Mental health courts (MHCs) generally began to appear in 1997. Today, more than 80 courts exist in the United States. In the present article, the authors argue that the 2nd generation of MHCs has arrived. The authors compare 8 previously described courts (P. A. Griffin, H. J. Steadman, & J. Petrila, 2002) with 7 newer courts that have not been previously described in the psycholegal literature....

Lower courts supposedly follow Supreme Court precedent—but they often don’t. Instead of adhering to the most persuasive interpretations of the Court’s opinions, lower courts often adopt narrower readings. For example, recent courts of appeals’ decisions have narrowly interpreted the Court’s rulings on police searches, gun control, and campaign finance. This practice—which I call “narrowing from...

Each year, state juvenile courts provide thousands of immigrant and refugee children with access to consistent and reliable caregiving and a stable environment. To examine how courts interpret "the best interests" of immigrant and refugee children, this article examines 24 cases in courts across the United States, which indicate they use a territorial approach when evaluating the best interests...

Several states have enacted statutes to protect minors from harmful or obscene materials disseminated over the Internet, as well as from pedophiles seeking to use the Internet to lure them into sexual conduct. State and federal courts have diverged in their analysis of the Dormant Commerce Clause’s impact on state regulation in these areas. While state courts have held that the Dormant Commerce...