Comment on the recent Grokster judgment by the US Supreme Court

The Supreme Court handed down its decision in MGM v Groksteron 27 June 2005, reversing the decision of the lower courtsand holding that peer-to-peer software services may be heldliable for inducing copyright infringement.     

Feminist theory confronts US Supreme Court rhetoric: the case of abortion rights

The research presented below analyses the rhetoric of abortion jurisprudence from the perspective of fundamental principles of feminist theory. While focused primarily on the American experience, it addresses and raises questions that are on the political agenda in a significant number of contemporary societies. The feminist principles identified, and against which judicial rhetoric is assessed, include: the importance of actual life experience over abstract principles, the significance of the distinction between the public and private realms and the understanding of society as a web of relationships. Demonstrated by the relevant data is that the decisions of the judiciary restrictive of reproductive choice are characterized by a distinctly non-feminist rhetoric.     

Challenging statutory limitations on children's education rights: a re-examination of the Canadian Supreme Court Decision in Auton

The 2004 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Auton concerns the right of autistic children to access services held by their parents to be essential to their children's ability to participate as members of a democratic society. It is argued that the child's right to have his or her basic developmental needs met is a constitutionally protected one. Having those developmental needs met engages both education and health rights. In Auton the parents had sought funding for the service at issue from the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Children and Families (which dealt with mental health services and other particular support programs for the families of disabled children) as well as from the Ministry of Education. The case raises central questions regarding the very nature of education and the constitutionality of a discretionary power of government to set out statutory limitations upon fundamental human rights including education rights.     

Conservatorship of Wendland: in the Supreme Court of California

HELD: A conservator of the person may not withhold tube feeding from a conscious conservatee who is not terminally ill, comatose, or in a persistent vegetative state, absent clear and convincing evidence that the conservator's decision is in accordance with either the conservatee's own wishes or his best interest.     

German Constitutional Law in the UK Supreme Court

Liverpool Law Review - The outgoing tide of EU law will be Britain’s most significant constitutional change in recent times. In an era of uncertainties, the UK Supreme Court proved to be a...     

Restraining the Court: Assessing Accounts of Congressional Attempts to Limit Supreme Court Authority

We propose a multilevel account of legislative Court curbing in order to assess existing explanations as to why such proposals come about. We argue that although Court curbing is commonly seen as the result of institutional conflict between Congress and the Supreme Court, it is best understood as a product of three interrelated factors: the individual motivations on the part of lawmakers, the partisan context in which they operate, and institutional disagreements between Court and legislature. We find evidence that micro‐level factors offer an important insight into Court curbing that institution‐focused explanations alone cannot.     

Campaign contributions in Texas Supreme Court races

One of the most disturbing features of an elective judiciary is judicial campaign finance. This paper explores the financing of the 1988 Texas Supreme Court races, probably the most expensive partisan judicial election campaign in history. It examines the sources of the funding of those six seats on the court in terms of competition among interest groups for control of the court. It also examines proposed reforms in the system of campaign finance and points out that those reforms are not neutral tools of good government, but that instead they have massive political implications for the interests vying to influence the direction of tort law in the state.