Price v. Time Revisited: The Need For Medium-Neutral Shield Laws In An Age Of Strict Construction

Journalists were alarmed when, in 2005, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit denied shield-law protection to Don Yaeger, an investigative reporter for Sports Illustrated, in a libel suit by fired football coach Mike Price. Yaeger is a journalist, and Alabama's shield law offers absolute protection even when a journalist is a party to a case. The court's decision turned on the fact that Alabama's seventy-three-year-old statute does not include the word “magazine.” This article shows that this hole in the “covered medium” language of Alabama's statute is not uncommon among the nation's thirty-six shield laws and that the Eleventh Circuit's strict reading of the statute's text is not at odds with current trends in statutory interpretation. Those two facts, combined with the rise of the Internet as an important vehicle for journalism, suggest the time is ripe to scrutinize and modernize shield laws, some of which have been on the books for more than a century.     

Tracing the Flow of Policy Ideas in Legislatures: A Text Reuse Approach

This article proposes a new approach to investigating the substance of lawmaking. Only a very small proportion of bills become law in the U.S. Congress. However, the bills that do become law often serve as vehicles for language originating in other bills. We investigate “text reuse” methods as a means for tracing the progress of policy ideas in legislation. We then show how a focus on policy ideas leads to new insights into the lawmaking process. Although our focus is on relating content found within bills, the same methods can be used to study policy substance across many research domains.     

Estimating Individual Contributions to Complex DNA SNP Mixtures.,

High‐throughput sequencing (HTS) of large panels of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) provides an alternative or complimentary approach to short tandem repeats (STRs) panels for the analysis of complex DNA mixture forensic samples. For STRs, methods to estimate individual contribution concentrations compare capillary electrophoresis peak heights, peak areas, or HTS allele read counts within a mixture. This article introduces three approaches (mean, median, and slope methods) for estimating individual DNA contributions to forensic mixtures for HTS/massively parallel sequencing (MPS) SNP panels. For SNPs, the major:minor allele ratios or counts, unique to each contributor, were compared to estimate contributor proportion within the mixture using the mean, median, and slope intercept for these alleles. The estimates for these three methods were typically within 5% of planned experimental contributions for defined mixtures.     

Crafts and trades (english): Comment on T. Shanin

Eric Hobsbawm's outline of the concept of social banditry suggest certain conditions of existence for that mode of primitive rebellion. Primary among these conditions are the presence of a ‘traditional peasant environment and the absence of ‘industrial capitalism’. This paper presents a critique of Hobsbawm's specifications, and suggest two alternative conditions: the presence of class conflict which unites direct producers, and the absence of effective, institutionalised political organisation of producers’ interests. This reformulation is illustrated by reference to the Kelly Outbreak in late nineteenth century Australia.