American State Supreme Court Justices, 1900-1970

What are the paths that lead to the state supreme court bench? If we can identify these paths, can we then determine that they produce distinctive patterns in a court3 decision making? Based on a study of 694 judges who sat on 16selected American state supreme courts between 1900 and 1970, this article finds that the appellate judiciary was drawn from a variety of legal and political backgrounds rather than from any single career line. The judges came from both non-elite and elite law schools. About half had no substantial lower court judicial experience. Over one-third had been public prosecutors, another third had held other elective political office, and only a small minority had practiced in multilawyer big-city law firms. The article reports changes over time in these and other judicial characteristics (such CIS age, turnover, political party affiliations) and describes interstate differences. Few significant statistical relationships are found, however, between the background characteristics of judges and selected characteristics of state supreme court opinions.     

Brain Death - Too Flawed to Endure, Too Ingrained to Abandon

The concept of brain death has become deeply ingrained in our health care system. It serves as the justification for the removal of vital organs like the heart and liver from patients who still have circulation and respiration while these organs maintain viability. On close examination, however, the concept is seen as incoherent and counterintuitive to our understandings of death. In order to abandon the concept of brain death and yet retain our practices in organ transplantation, we need to either change the definition of death or no longer maintain a commitment to the dead donor rule, which is an implicit prohibition against removing vital organs from individuals before they are declared dead. After exploring these two options, the author argues that while new definitions of death are problematic, alternatives to the dead donor rule are both ethically justifiable and potentially palatable to the public. Even so, the author concludes that neither of these approaches is likely to be adopted and that resolution will most probably come when technological advances in immunology simply make the concept of brain death obsolete.     

中國地方政府發行債券的意義探究

財政部2011年10月20日印發《2011年地方政府自行發債試點辦法》的通知,批准上海市、浙江省、廣東省、深圳市開展地方政府自行發債試點。賦予地方政府完整、合法的舉債權,可以迅速地解決債務問題,但其衍生意義遠遠不限於此。如果說賦予地方政府舉債權僅僅是爲了防止地方政府債務危機,那麼問題未免被簡單化了。     

Reproducing a Fit Citizenry: Dependency, Eugenics, and the Law of Marriage in the United States, 1860-1920

Between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, American state legislatures enacted a series of new laws that delineated a class of citizens who were deemed ineligible to participate in the institution of marriage. Scholars have characterized this development as evidence that lawmakers had lost faith in a laissez-faire approach to nuptial governance, and thus transformed marriage into an object of public regulation. This essay argues that behind the ostensible nuptial privatism of the mid-nineteenth century lay a self-conscious policy of judicial governance. Judges invoked the language of nuptial privacy and the common law of contract strategically to advance their vision of moral and economic discipline. The new marital prohibitions thus represented, the essay argues, not the expansion of the state's police power into the previously private realm of domestic relations, but rather a critical transformation in how nuptial reformers and lawmakers understood the relationship between marriage and the well-being of the polity.
Fueled by growing concerns about pauperism, the racial character of the urban proletariat, and the collapse of the economically independent single-male-breadwinner household, the changing form of nuptial governance signaled a thoroughgoing intellectual and strategic reorientation from an understanding of marriage as forming economically and morally viable households – the fundamental units of society – to an understanding of marriage as a largely procreative institution, as the literal source of the citizenry. This reconceptualization of marriage underwrote a strategy of nuptial governance that mobilized marriage as a strategy in the state's regulation of social reproduction.     

Dominions: Law, Literature, and the Right to Death

The 'curious right' attending modernity and revealed in Blanchot's 'Literature And the Right to Death' could be readily reduced to that sovereign right to take life which ultimately subordinates law. Yet, so the argument runs, with that same curious right law surpasses sovereignty. And it does so by way of its similarity to literature. What will uncover that surpassing by law, and by literature, will be a pervasive concern with death as the horizon of the law.     

上海地区非法行医致孕妇死亡案例回顾性研究

目的研究上海地区非法行医致孕妇死亡案例并分析其特点,探究其形成原因及预防机制。方法收集本研究所2001～2005年接受上海市公安机关委托非法行医致孕妇死亡案例11例,按照孕妇情况、死亡原因及非法行医者的诊疗措施等进行分类整理分析。结果非法行医致孕妇死亡的原因多为产后大出血、羊水栓塞,多伴软产道裂伤。孕妇多未进行正规产前检查,到缺乏必要医疗条件的个体非法行医者处或者家中分娩,非法行医者往往存在不正当应用催产素,强行分娩,未采取及时有效抢救措施。     

推进“三化”建设 努力构建新时期监狱管理教育新模式

推进监狱工作法制化、科学化、社会化建设是完善有中国特色社会主义监狱制度的客观要求,是提高监狱工作整体水平,加快监狱工作发展步伐的有效途径,对于维护社会稳定,提高改造质量,树立监狱工作的良好形象具有重要而深远的意义。近年来,我省结合自身实际,对监狱“三化”建设工作     

Death as a result of asthma in Wayne County Medical Examiner cases, 1975-1987

All deaths ascribed to asthma in the 5-to-40-year age group at the Wayne County Medical Examiners' Office were reviewed from 1975 to 1987 inclusive. Fifty-eight deaths were attributed solely to asthma, and the annual number increased fivefold in the 1980s to a rate of approximately 0.5 per 100,000 per year when extrapolated to the Wayne County population. Blacks were overrepresented to double their proportion in the general population. Almost all cases were known asthmatics, and many had received previous emergency care. Most fatalities occurred at night and did not demonstrate any seasonal variation. The onset of the fatal attack was apparently very rapid in most cases, with many engaged in routine activities and few surviving any length of time in hospital or having sought treatment earlier. Our data reveal a significant increase in sudden death in previously well asthmatics in Wayne County in the 1980s. Similar increases in deaths as a result of asthma have been noted previously in other countries for reasons that remain unclear.