Judges,Litigants, and the Design of Courts

Two important perspectives on courts highlight fundamentally different elements of adjudication and yield distinct predictions about judicial outcomes. The Attitudinal Model of judicial voting posits judge ideology as a strong predictor of court outcomes. Alternatively, the Law and Economics perspective focuses on the settlement behavior of litigants and reasons that while judges may vote ideologically, litigants adapt to these ideological proclivities, nullifying the effect of judge ideology. This analysis focuses on reconciling expectations about the effects of judge ideology and litigant strategies by examining their contingent nature and the conditioning effects of institutional design. The analysis examines state supreme courts from 1995–1998 to identify empirical evidence supporting both perspectives. While some state supreme courts have discretionary dockets allowing judges greater opportunities to exercise their ideology, others lack discretionary docket control, making dockets and outcomes largely litigant driven. Support for each perspective largely hinges on this fundamental feature of institutional design.     

The consequences of perpetrating psychological aggression in dating relationships: a descriptive investigation

Psychological aggression is the most prevalent form of aggression in dating relationships, with women perpetrating as much, if not more, psychological aggression than men. Researchers have advocated for an examination of the consequences that follow psychological aggression for the perpetrator, in hopes that this will lead to innovative intervention programs aimed at ameliorating dating violence. The current study investigated the self-reported consequences of having perpetrated psychological aggression against a dating partner among female college students in a current dating relationship (N = 115). Participants endorsed numerous consequences as having followed their perpetration of psychological aggression, including both punishing and potentially reinforcing consequences. Furthermore, findings indicated that for some perpetrators, psychological aggression may function as a method of emotion regulation. Implications of these findings for future research and intervention are discussed.     

Dynamic Tempered Transitions for Exploring Multimodal Posterior Distributions

George Casella Department of Statistics, University of Florida, Griffin-Floyd Hall, P.O. Box 118545, Gainesville, FL 32611 e-mail: casella{at}stat.ufl.edu Multimodal, high-dimension posterior distributions are wellknown to cause mixing problems for standard Markov chain MonteCarlo (MCMC) procedures; unfortunately such functional formsreadily occur in empirical political science. This is a particularlyimportant problem in applied Bayesian work because inferencesare made from finite intervals of the Markov chain path. Toaddress this issue, we develop and apply a new MCMC algorithmbased on tempered transitions of simulated annealing, addinga dynamic element that allows the chain to self-tune its annealingschedule in response to current posterior features. This importantfeature prevents the Markov chain from getting trapped in minormodal areas for long periods of time. The algorithm is appliedto a probabilistic spatial model of voting in which the objectivefunction of interest is the candidate's expected return. Wefirst show that such models can lead to complex target formsand then demonstrate that the dynamic algorithm easily handleseven large problems of this kind.     

Ontological Anti-naturalism and the Emergence of Life and Mind: Castoriadis and Deacon

This essay compares the ideas of Cornelius Castoriadis and Terrence W. Deacon. Castoriadis’s anti-Naturalistic ontology, with its conception of radical ontological creation and fundamental indeterminacy, along with his analysis of the category of the “for-itself”, comprising all subjective beings from the living organism to the social-historical, is compared to Deacon’s exploration of the emergence of life and mind, which sees the emergence of teleological beings as resulting from the creation of form-generating constraints that involve new types of dynamic process. Significant parallels and convergences between Castoriadis and Deacon are uncovered and explored.     

A Community-Level Comparison of Terrorism Movements in the United States

The aim of this article is to identify characteristics of communities where persons indicted under terrorism charges lived, planned, and prepared prior to carrying out a terrorist act. Guided by a model of community deterioration and using data from the Terrorism and Extremist Violence in the United States database, findings indicate: (1) half of all census tracts where terrorists planned and prepared for attacks were located in the western United States; nearly one fourth were in the Northeast; (2) nationally, terrorist pre-incident activity is more likely to occur in census tracts with lower percentages of high school graduates for Al Qaeda and associated movements (AQAM) terrorism but not for far-right terrorism, higher percentages of households living below the poverty level, more urban places, and more unemployed; and (3) communities with terrorist pre-incident activity are different types of places compared to those where there was no pre-incident activity, generally between different regions of the country, and specifically in terms of differences across far-right and AQAM terrorist movements.     

A Three-Step Latent Class Analysis to Identify How Different Patterns of Teen Dating Violence and Psychosocial Factors Influence Mental Health

Although multiple forms (i.e., physical, threatening, psychological, sexual, and relational abuse) and patterns (i.e., perpetration and victimization) of violence can co-occur, most existing research examines these experiences individually. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate: (1) homogenous subgroups based on victimization and perpetration of multiple forms of teen dating violence; (2) predictors of membership in these subgroups; and (3) mental health consequences associated with membership in each subgroup. Nine hundred eighteen adolescents in the 9^th or 10^th grade at seven public high schools in Texas participated in the survey (56?% female, White: 30?%, Hispanic: 32?%, African American: 29?%, others: 9?%). A three-step latent class analysis was employed. Five latent teen dating violence classes were identified: (1) nonviolence; (2) emotional/verbal abuse; (3) forced sexual contact; (4) psychological?+?physical violence; and (5) psychological abuse. Females, African Americans, and youth who had higher acceptance of couple violence scores and whose parents had less education were more likely to members of dating violence classes compared with the nonviolence class. Adolescents who experienced multiple types of dating violence reported greater mental health concerns. Prevention programs may benefit by identifying the homogenous subgroups of teen dating violence and targeting adolescent teen dating violence accordingly.     

Alternative to Brain Death

This article criticizes a range of assumptions that proponents of brain death usually share. It argues that one of the main contentions made in defense of brain death – that the brain is necessary for integrated functioning in a human organism – is mistaken. It then sketches an alternative account of human death that distinguishes between the biological death of a human organism and the death or ceasing to exist of a person.     

Fatal postpartum spontaneous liver rupture: case report and literature review

Maternal hepatic rupture is a rare complication of pregnancy that can be fatal to both mother and child. This phenomenon is most often associated with preeclampsia/eclampsia and/or HELLP syndrome, which is defined by a collection of clinical features including hemolysis (H), elevated liver enzymes (EL), and a low platelet count (LP). These disease processes are typically identified and treated during pregnancy, often in the last trimester. The described case is unusual in that the decedent had no known history of preeclampsia/eclampsia or HELLP syndrome during this pregnancy, and she died suddenly several days postpartum of liver rupture with massive intraperitoneal hemorrhage following a routine cesarean section delivery and an uneventful hospital course. Similar cases are infrequent in the literature, which is reviewed in this report.     

First Amendment Protection for Online Platforms

The United States is home to some of the largest online platforms in the world, in part due to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Section 230 provides platforms with extraordinarily broad immunity from lawsuits arising from user content. The statute is under unprecedented scrutiny, and Congress already has amended the statute to weaken its protections. This Article examines the First Amendment protections that would remain for online platforms if Congress were to entirely eliminate Section 230. After reviewing pre-Internet cases involving offline distributors such as bookstores and newsstands, this Article concludes that although the First Amendment would offer some protections to platforms, these protections would be limited and likely would require platforms to significantly alter their operations and business models.