The recent High Court ruling upholding a prior decision to allow a mother to sue for the cost of rearing a child after having had a failed sterilisation has understandably attracted great controversy (Cattanach v Melchior [2003]). The implications of this decision on what can now be claimed for through medical litigation are significant, and lawyers and doctors will extract from it lessons for ...

The use of a simple 50%-50% box score of decisions for parents and districts, respectively, is a false measure of the impartiality of hearing officers under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). This analysis canvasses relevant structural factors that the stakeholders, the mass media, and the professional literature have failed to recognize both generally and systematically. T...

The Supreme Court decision on school desegregation 25 years ago-Brown v. Board o f ~ducatio-ushered in an era in which the law courts have carried an ever-growing share of the burden of social reform and policy change in this country. Even though several current members of the Supreme Court were appointed as "strict constructionists," and think of themselves as not in the business of setting so...

There have been important changes in the United Kingdom’s (UK) fertility and immigration in the past decade, with a large share contributed by migrants from Poland. A detailed understanding of Polish migrant fertility is lacking, however, because the relevant data are not routinely collected. This paper provides new insights into the fertility patterns of Polish migrants in the UK, and compares...

The landmark case of Jackson v. Indiana is well known to forensic psychiatrists, but little is known of the personal and legal background of this case. Mr. Jackson's state hospital records were reviewed, as were available transcripts and decisions of the Indiana court proceedings, before and after the U.S. Supreme Court decision, and local newspaper coverage, to understand how this case developed.

This article identifies the key issues involved in the debate about affirmative action. The June 2003 Supreme Court decisions allowing consideration of race to ensure that there is a "critical mass" of African American, Latino/Latina, and Native American applicants to higher education are addressed. Social psychologists have identified key myths and provided clarifications about the need for an...

The Supreme Court has consistently stated that federal appellate courts may issue the writ of mandamus as an interlocutory remedy only under "extraordinary" circumstances," to correct a lower court order that is "not mere error but usurpation of power."2 The Court has explained that mandamus cannot serve as a substitute for normal appeal and should be available "only where appeal is a clearly i...

F or more than a decade, there has been an intense debate about the ethics and legality of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in the United States. In June 1997, the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled that there is neither a constitutional right nor a constitutional prohibition to euthanasia or PAS. This permitted Oregon to experiment with legalizing PAS. During this decade, most o...

Although a 1996 U.S. Supreme Court decision affirmed that therapists cannot be compelled to testify in federal proceedings about patients' disclosures, a footnote could be interpreted as creating a "dangerous patient exception" when there is a serious threat of harm. This column describes circuit courts' differing views about whether such an exception exists and the value of an exception. Altho...

In June 2003 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of using race as a factor in higher education admissions decisions. This article considers the impact of the Supreme Court decisions on admissions procedures at selected academic dental institutions (ADI) and their parent institutions. We interviewed fifty-eight leaders considered to be individual stakeholders at seven ADI and the...