A method, apparatus, and system are directed towards seeding a user's contacts for their online social network. The invention is arranged to automatically recommend to the user a set of seed contacts that the user may employ to invite to join their social network. The set of seed contacts may be harvested from the user's existing portal activities, as well as other sources. In one embodiment, the invention analyzes portal activity, such as email exchanges with the user, and the like, to determine a frequency of contact with the user. Other sources may include but not be limited to emails, names within an address book of the user, names within an address book of another person, a buddy list, an instant messaging list, an activity, a mailing list, an online discussion group, a membership in a category, chat group, and the like.

Method and system for seeding online social network contacts

A method, apparatus, and system are directed towards making a user's online portal information available to members of an online social network. Portal information can include information entered by the user and information determined based on the user's online behaviors, such as frequenting a Web site, sending spam messages, and the like. The online social network enables multiple degrees of relationships among members of the online social network. At least a portion of the portal information is made accessible to at least some of the members of the online social network who have a relationship to the user. The relationship can be through a public activity available to all members and/or through a user-defined category of members, such as family, friends, business contacts, and the like. The portal information can be used to determine which relationships will be established and/or which information will be available to members.

Method and system for sharing portal subscriber information in an online social network

As papers presented at recent disciplinary conferences and articles published in major political science journals reveal, the field of judicial politics is undergoing a sea change. Variants of the social-psychological paradigm, which have long dominated thinking about law and courts, are giving way to approaches grounded in assumptions in rationality. More to the point, ever-growing numbers of scholars are now invoking the strategic account to understand judicial politics. In what follows, we investigate this "strategic revolution." We begin by providing an intellectual history of the field, with special emphasis on why judicial specialists resisted strategic analysis for so long and why they are now (re)turning to it in ever-increasing numbers. Next, we consider the ways that analysts have begun to put the strategic account to work. This is an important task, for debates are already emerging over the "best" way to invoke the account to study judicial politics. We take the position that there is no one "right" way but rather four different approaches--all of which have the potential to provide us with important insights into law and courts.

Toward a Strategic Revolution in Judicial Politics: A Look Back, A Look Ahead

The Blackwell Companion To Law And Society

Although the term empirical research has become commonplace in legal scholarship over the past two decades, law professors have, in fact, been conducting research that is empirical - that is, learning about the world using quantitative data or qualitative information - for almost as long as they have been conducting research. For just as long, however, they have been proceeding with little awareness of, much less compliance with, the rules of inference, and without paying heed to the key lessons of the revolution in empirical analysis that has been taking place over the last century in other disciplines. The tradition of including some articles devoted to exclusively to the methododology of empirical analysis - so well represented in journals in traditional academic fields - is virtually nonexistent in the nation's law reviews. As a result, readers learn considerably less accurate information about the empirical world than the studies' stridently stated, but overconfident, conclusions suggest. To remedy this situation both for the producers and consumers of empirical work, this Article adapts the rules of inference used in the natural and social sciences to the special needs, theories, and data in legal scholarship, and explicate them with extensive illustrations from existing research. The Article also offers suggestions for how the infrastructure of teaching and research at law schools might be reorganized so that it can better support the creation of first-rate empirical research without compromising other important objectives.

The Rules of Inference

This is the first comprehensive analysis of how the collective nature of Supreme Court decision making affects the transformation of the justices' preferences into constitutional doctrine. Analyzing the Supreme Court from the perspective of social choice theory, Maxwell L. Stearns offers new insights into Supreme Court decision making that have profound implications for understanding the outcomes in a number of cases and the resulting doctrinal development within constitutional law which traditional analyses have proven ill-equipped to explain. The book models several important process-based Supreme Court rules, including outcome voting, the narrowest-grounds rule, stare decisis, and justiciability, with a particular emphasis on standing. These doctrines have each had a significant impact upon the evolution of modern constitutional law, including but not limited to the following areas: affirmative action, school desegregation, racial gerrymandering, obscenity, and abortion. Each model is presented in nontechnical language with several concrete illustrations drawn from recent Supreme Court case law. The book offers a new understanding of two apparently paradoxical situations: first, cases in which there are separate majorities on specific issues in the case that suggest, logically, that there should be a majority for the dissenting result; and second, cases in which discrete minorities--as opposed to the apparent majority--control the identification and resolution of dispositive case issues. In addition, the book sheds new light on why the Court employs stare decisis, even though the doctrine grounds the evolution of legal doctrine on the order in which cases are presented and decided, and on how the modern standing doctrine ameliorates the incentives for interest groups to time the litigation of cases in a way that will exert a disproportionate influence over the direction of constitutional doctrine. This book will appeal to scholars of the Supreme Court or judicial decision-making. It should also be of interest to students of social choice and of law and economics who have not previously considered the Supreme Court or constitutional law as fertile ground for their disciplines. Maxwell L. Stearns is Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law.

Constitutional Process: A Social Choice Analysis of Supreme Court Decision Making

IV. THE SUPREME COURT AND CONGRESS THROUGH AN ARROVIAN LENS ..... 1257 A. Range .............................................. 1258 B. Universal Domain ..................................... 1271 C. Unanimity and Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives ............ 1276 D. Nondictatorship ....................................... 1281 E. Rationality ........................................... 1283 F. Summary ............................................ 1285 TABLE 1. The Supreme Court and Congress Through an Arrovian Lens ................................ 1286

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The Misguided Renaissance of Social Choice

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Standing Back from the Forest: Justiciability and Social Choice

Public Choice Concepts and Applications in Law is a terrific introductory book for law students and a valuable analytic resource for professors, whether veterans or newcomers to the field Stearns and Zywicki break down the subject into freestanding components, allowing the reader to think about courts, legislatures, voters, and agencies in ways unimagined by anyone unfamiliar with the basic tools of public choice Cases, articles, and classic insights are brought together in a way that truly makes this a volume about the application of public choice tools to legal doctrines There is nothing like it --Saul Levmore, William B Graham Professor of Law, University of Chicago

Public Choice Concepts and Applications in Law

While the Commerce Clause neither mentions federal courts nor expressly prohibits the exercise of state regulatory powers that might operate concurrently with Congressional commerce powers, the Supreme Court has long used the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine to limit the power of states to regulate across a diverse array of subject areas in the absence of federal legislation. Commentators have criticized the Court less for creating the doctrine than for applying it in a seemingly inconsistent, or even haphazard way. Past commentators have recognized that a game theoretical model, the prisoners" dilemma, can explain the role of the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine in promoting cooperation among states by inhibiting a regime of mutual defection. This model, however, provides at best a partial account of existing dormant Commerce Clause doctrine, and sometimes seems to run directly counter to actual case results. The difficulty is not the power of game theory to provide a positive account of the cases or to provide the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine with a meaningful normative foundation. Rather, the problem has been the limited choice of models drawn from game theory to explain the conditions in which states rationally elect to avoid mutually beneficial cooperative strategies with other states. Professor Stearns shows how a state might avoid cooperation in a situation not captured in the prisoners" dilemma account to disrupt a multiple Nash equilibrium game, thus producing an undesirable mixed-strategy equilibrium in place of two or more available pro-commerce, pure Nash equilibrium outcomes. At the same time, the defecting state secures a rent that only becomes available as a consequence of the pro-commerce, pure Nash equilibrium strategies of surrounding states and that is closely analogous to quasi-rents described in the literature on relational contracting. The combined game theoretical analysis, drawing upon the prisoners' dilemma and multiple Nash equilibrium games, not only explains several of the most criticized features of the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine and several related doctrines, but also underscores the proper normative relationship between the dormant Commerce Clause doctrine and various forms of state law rent seeking. I do not think the United States would come to an end if we lost our power to declare an Act of Congress void. I do think the Union would be imperiled if we could not make that declaration as to the laws of the several States. For one in my place sees how often a local policy prevails with those who are not trained to national views and how often action is taken that embodies what the Commerce Clause was meant to end. (1) [I]n the 114 years since the doctrine of the negative Commerce Clause was formally adopted as [a] holding of this Court ... and in the 50 years prior to that in which it was alluded to in various dicta of the Court ... our applications of the doctrine have, not to put too fine a point on the matter, made no sense. (2) INTRODUCTION Describing the pivotal scene in A Beautiful Mind, (3) the 2002 Academy Award winner for Best Picture, is perhaps more problematic for its mathematical than for its political incorrectness. The disturbed but brilliant John Nash, a mathematics graduate student at Princeton, is in a bar with four male classmates. The men spot a group of women that includes an extremely attractive blonde woman. One of Nash's classmates offers the following assessment: According to the teachings of Adam Smith, if all members of the group pursue the blonde woman, competition, or the invisible bond, will increase the likelihood that each man will achieve his desired goal of "scoring" with one of the women. (4) In a burst of mathematical, if not hormonal, inspiration (Nash leaves the bar without pursuing any of the women), Nash suddenly realizes that this two century-old conventional economic wisdom--suggesting that competition produces the socially optimal result--is misplaced in this context. …

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Maxwell L. Stearns

Papers

Constitutional Process: A Social Choice Analysis of Supreme Court Decision Making

The Misguided Renaissance of Social Choice

Standing Back from the Forest: Justiciability and Social Choice

Public Choice Concepts and Applications in Law

A Beautiful Mend: A Game Theoretical Analysis of the Dormant Commerce Clause Doctrine