Supreme court

About: Supreme court is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 41858 publications have been published within this topic receiving 306787 citations. The topic is also known as: court of last resort & highest court of appeal.

Protection of Children from Physical Maltreatment in Canada: An Evaluation of the Supreme Court's Definition of Reasonable Force

Abstract: In 2004, the Supreme Court of Canada set out seven criteria to distinguish reasonable from abusive corrective force with children. We tested the validity of those criteria by mapping them onto a nationally representative data set of substantiated cases of physical abuse. The court's criteria defining reasonable force actually characterized the majority of cases of child physical maltreatment in Canada. These cases were more likely to be characterized by the use of spanking in the family than by each of the criteria set out by the Supreme Court. One in five cases was not characterized by any of the court's criteria, and virtually none were characterized by all of them. The findings provide stronger support for abolishing physical punishment than for legal attempts to narrow its definition.

At law. Ethics committees: from ethical comfort to ethical cover.

Abstract: Fifteen years ago, my first column was entitled "In re Quinlan: Legal Comfort for Doctors." [1] The subtitle referred to the New Jersey Supreme Court's suggestion that instead of bringing cases like Quinlan to court, families and physicians should rely on a hospital ethics committee. The court based this recommendation on the suggestion of a Texas pediatrician, Karen Teel, that a committee "composed of physicians, social workers, attorneys and theologians" could help to diffuse the "professional responsbility for decision...." I was unenthusiastic about the New Jersey solution, nothing that "the idea seems to be that all feel more (ethically?) 'comfortable' with decisions thus arrived at for which no one individual is seen as responsible and for which no individual can be held legally accountable." Although the Quinlan case has been the touchtone for legal and ethical discussions of the right to refuse medical treatment for the past fifteen years, no other court has delegated immunity-granting authority to an ethics committee. On the other hand, the strategy of using ethics committees to provide "comfort" for physicians and others worried about either legal liability or public reaction has prospered. "Ethics committees" have grown from an anomalous entity to provide ethical comfort to a few, to an almost standard entity to provide ethical cover for many. Without the threat of legal liability and community disapproval (which could lead to new laws), ethics committees would probably not have developed at all. Law and ethics are distinct, although related, activities. The law is mandatory, setting standards that can only be breached at the risk of civil or criminal liability. Ethics is aspirational, setting forth universal goals that we should try to meet, but suffer no temporal penalty for falling short of. Ethicists often criticize the law as too blunt, as scaring people unnecessarily, as interfering, and as counterproductive. All of these criticisms are sometimes fair. Nonetheless, over the past two decades the greatest force propelling bioethics in the U.S. has been the law. The History of "Ethics Committees" In the 1960s some states required that hospital review committees approved any abortion before it could be legally performed. And when kidney dialysis began, and there was a shortage of dialysis machines, some hospitals set up committees to decide which of the competing candidates would receive dialysis. Roe v. Wade and its companion case Doe v. Botton ended the abortion committees, and both public reaction and the End-Stage Renal Disease Act ended the dialysis patient selection committees. Although there have been periodic attempts to use similar "ethics committees" to make decisions for individual patients (for example, psychosurgery committees), prospective decisionmaking by committee for individual patients has never held wide support either in the medical community or the public. Infant Care Review or "Baby Doe" committees were established in many neonatal ICUs across the country as a direct response to the Reagan Administration's Baby Doe regulations. Under the threat of intrusive federal investigations, the American Academy of Pediatrics and others recommended an alternative: hospital-based committees that would be available to review contested decisions to withdraw treatment from handicapped newborns. Many of these committees have survived, even though the federal Baby Doe regulations did not. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) The most longstanding "ethics" - type committee is the Institutional Review Board, or IRB. This committee was created by law, and specific federal regulations govern its conduct. In the 1960s, when such committees were rare, they were usually designated as human studies committees, or human subjects committees. In the 1970s their name was changed to "institutional" committees--and this has always seemed just right, because the primary function of the committee has become to protect the institution, and its membership is almost exclusively made up of researchers (not potentials subjects) from the particular institution. …

The Sarbanes-Oxley Yawn: Heavy Rhetoric, Light Reform (And it Might Just Work)

Abstract: A thorough examination of the much ballyhooed Sarbanes-Oxley Act reveals dominantly a federal codification of extant rules, regulations, practices, and norms. Despite advertising it as "the most far-reaching reforms of American business practices since the time of FDR," a soberly apolitical view sees the Act as more sweep than reform. Important are provisions calling for nine studies; redundant but much publicized were the certification requirements imposed during the summer of 2002; other moves are mere patchwork responses to precise transgressions present in the popularized scandals. The Act is far from trivial, however. A silver bullet relates to the structure and funding of those who set the standards for auditing and accounting in the United States. Stripped of power is the AICPA, and altered in funding structure is the FASB. All parties but Congress are singled out for a wrist-slapping (auditors, accountants, officers, directors and committee members, lawyers, securities analysts, credit rating agencies, investment banks and financial advisors, state corporate lawmakers, the SEC, the Federal Sentencing Commission and even the Supreme Court). No reexamanation of Congressional reforms relating to private securities litigation or the erstwhile barrier between investment and commercial banking appear. In fact there is implicit endorsement of the Congressional approach, rooted in the process and control philosophy of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which the Act follows. This reading of the Act as modest is advanced in three stages of this Article. The first sets the background by summarizing the salient features of the dominant precipitating scandals and their times. The second stage dissects every material provision of the Act in context. The third and final stage suggests why the political rhetoric and substance diverged so widely, with illustrations of what a substantively bold Act might have looked like. Explaining the Act's rhetoric-reality yawn requires speculation but informed hunches readily emerge. On the one hand, Congress may have understood that the visible debacles were not chronic epidemics but discrete pathologies and their root causes were market psychology beyond its regulatory reach (hence a reformless Act). On the other, Congress knew that the public perceived an acute systemic crisis of power abuse they had no responsibility for creating (hence the "sweeping" rhetoric). Another explanation, which also explains the Act's call for so many studies, is that it is too soon to diagnose deep causes or broad shortcomings but that immediate action was politically expedient. The studies bridge the gap between action and knowledge, constituting continuing threats to their targets to abide by the spirit of the Act, a threat to make the "sweeping" rhetoric real "reform."

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission: Civil Rights and States' Rights

Abstract: In 1956, two years after the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously outlawed legally imposed racial segregation in public schools, Mississippi created the State Sovereignty Commission. This was the executive agency established "to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi ...from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government." The code word encroachment implied the state's strong resolve to preserve and protect the racial status quo. In the nomenclature the formality of the word sovereignty supposedly lent dignity to the actions of the Commission. For all practical purposes the Sovereignty Commission intended to wage this Deep South state's monolithic resistance to desegregation and to the ever-intensifying crusade for civil rights in Mississippi. In 1998 the papers of the Commission were made available for examination. No other state has such extensive and detailed documentary records from a similar agency. Exposed to public light, they unmasked the Commission as a counterrevolutionary department for political and social intrigue that infringed on individual constitutional rights and worked toward discrediting the civil rights movement by tarnishing the reputations of activists. As the eyes of the citizenry studied the records, the Commission slid from sovereign and segregated to unsavory and abominable. This book, the first to give a comprehensive history of this watchdog agency, shows how, to this day, the Sovereignty Commission remains obscure, debated, and for many citizens a star chamber of the most sinister sort. Why was the Commission created? What were some of the political and social climates that initiated its creation? What were its activities during its seventeen years? What was its impact on the course of Mississippi and southern history? Drawing on the newly opened materials at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, this examination gives answers to such questions and traces the vicissitudes that took the Commission from governmental limelight to public opprobrium. This book also looks at the attitudes of the state's white citizenry, who, upon realizing the Commission's failure, saw the importance of a nonviolent accommodation of civil rights.