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 ...

This paper analyzes the understanding of the Brazilian Supreme Court and the Supreme Court of the United States about press freedom. The research aims to compare the position of the Courts about this fundamental right. Using the comparative method, it analyzes the arguments used by the courts in trials which had press freedom as its object. The paper also presents a literature review of the Bra...

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...

The placement of a laryngeal mask airway (LMA) changes the relative positions of the common carotid artery (CCA) and right internal jugular vein (IJV), thereby affecting venipuncture via the right IJV. Therefore, we went on to determine the optimal site for puncturing the IJV after LMA-Supreme™ placement. In this study, forty-six patients were placed with a LMA-Supreme™ (size 3 or 4), and the r...

BACKGROUND The Supreme™ and ProSeal™ laryngeal mask airways (LMAs) are widely used in paediatric anaesthesia; however, LMA use in infants is limited because many anaesthesiologists prefer to use tracheal intubation in infants. In this study, we compared the Supreme and ProSeal LMAs in infants by measuring their performance characteristics, including insertion features, ventilation parameters, i...

Under the U.S. Supreme Court's 1989 decision in Stanford v. Kentucky, the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishments clause does not shield minors 16 or 17 years of age from the death penalty. Holding, astonishingly, that Stanford is no longer the law of the land, the Missouri Supreme Court recently reversed the death sentence of a 17-year-old murderer in Simmons v. Roper. The U.S. Suprem...

In writing The Supreme Court: How It Was, How It Is, William H. Rehnquist becomes the first sitting Chief Justice to author a book that explains the workings of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is not a treatise on constitutional doctrine; rather, it surveys the "borderland between American history and constitutional law" (p. 8). Chief Justice Rehnquist's book succeeds in providing the "int...

In Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. Supreme Court was once again asked to determine if the execution of a juvenile, aged 16 or 17 years at the time of the offense, represents cruel and unusual punishment. In a five-to-four decision, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the decision of the Supreme Court of Missouri to overturn the death penalty of Christopher Simmons and held that the execution of juvenile...