Volume 4, Issue 2 (Winter 2007)
Monte Neil Stewart
As one of the Nation’s preeminent legal philosophers and public intellectuals, Ronald Dworkin has, not surprisingly, engaged the Nation’s preeminent legal-political-social issue – the meaning of marriage. That engagement appears in its most focused form in Is Democracy Possible Here? published in August 2006 (with key excerpts appearing in the September 21, 2006 issue of the New York Review of Books) but is prefigured in his Justice in Robes of April 2006. View More
NOT A LIVING ROOM SOFA:CHANGING THE LEGAL STATUS OF COMPANION ANIMALS
Susan J. Hankin
Veterinary medicine has gone through tremendous changes in the past several decades. Until fairly recently, veterinary practice was viewed primarily as a “service profession to agriculture,” that involved many rote practices such as vaccinating herds of cows. In contrast, today’s veterinary practice focuses much more heavily on companion animal medicine and includes such specialty areas as veterinary oncology, veterinary orthopedics, veterinary cardiology, and even veterinary ophthalmology. In the ten years from 1991 to 2001, spending on veterinary care increased nearly three-fold, with expenditures totaling over nineteen billion dollars. View More
Lance Cassak
“This is without question the worst case of my judicial career…” So observed United States District Court Judge Gerard Lynch in 2002 in a case before him involving a defendant facing a mandatory-minimum ten-year sentence on a charge of advertising the distribution of child pornography. That case and Judge Lynch’s actions and observations, about which more will be said later, brought dramatic if brief attention to an issue that we first wrote about more than twenty years ago: whether and under what circumstances jurors should be told about the punishment faced by defendants in cases before them. View More