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The article examines the applicability of the vertical stare decisis concept of the Appellate Jurisdiction Theory in the decisions of three-judge federal district courts in the U.S.

The article discusses the court case Sissel v. United States Department of Health & Human Services. Particular focus is given to how this case relates to constitutional law, the Origination Clause and the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Details relating to how the court case took place in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia are also offered.

This Article undertakes a broad-based empirical review of intellectual property ("IP") litigation in U.S. federal district courts from 1994 to 2014. Unlike the prior literature, this study analyzes federal copyright, patent, and trademark litigation trends as a unified whole. It undertakes a systematic analysis of the records of more than 190,000 cases filed in federal courts and examines the subject matter, geographical, and temporal variation within federal IP litigation over the last two decades. This Article analyzes changes in the distribution of IP litigation over time and their regional distribution. The key findings of this Article stem from an attempt to understand long-term patterns in the filing data as well as short-term deviations from various trends. This data-driven approach has yielded insights in relation to such diverse topics as Internet filesharing litigation, the true impact of patent trolls on the level of patent litigation, and the extent of forum shopping and forum selling patent litigation. Just as importantly, this Article lays the foundation for planning and evaluating future empirical studies of IP litigation with a narrower focus. Many of the results and conclusions herein demonstrate the dangers of basing empirical conclusions on narrow slices of data from selected regions or selected time periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study of Lee v. Macon County Board of Education demonstrates that a federal district court in Alabama, enforcing Brown v. Board of Education, brought about significant social change despite constraints on the courts. The court's application of Brown played a decisive role in ending the racial caste system in this Alabama Black Belt county. The court, by adding the U. S. Department of Justice as a party, overcame constraints that had precluded the executive branch from pursuing school desegregation. Change came through the courts before Congress legislated against school segregation. Seekers of social change must evaluate the constraints on the courts relative to the constraints on the other branches and levels of government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The federal sentencing guidelines constrain decision makers' discretion to consider offenders' life histories and current circumstances, including their histories of drug use and drug use at the time of the crime. However, the situation is complicated by the fact that judges are required to take the offender's drug use into account in making bail and pretrial detention decisions and the ambiguity inherent in decisions regarding substantial assistance departures allows consideration of this factor. In this paper we build upon and extend prior research examining the impact of an offender's drug use on sentences imposed on drug trafficking offenders. Methods: We used data from three U.S. District Courts and a methodologically sophisticated approach (i.e., path analysis) to test for the direct and indirect (i.e., through pretrial detention and receipt of a substantial assistance departure) effects of an offender's drug use history and use of drug at the time of the crime, to determine if the effects of drug use varies by the type of drug, and to test for the moderating effect of type of crime. Results: We found that although the offender's history of drug use did not affect sentence length, offenders who were using drugs at the time of the crime received longer sentences both as a direct consequence of their drug use and because drug use at the time of the crime increased the odds of pretrial detention and increased the likelihood of receiving a substantial assistance departure. We also found that the effects of drug use varied depending on whether the offender was using crack cocaine or some other drug and that the type of offense for which the offender was convicted moderated these relationships. Conclusions: Our findings illustrate that there is a complex array of relationships between drug use and key case processing decisions in federal courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision of the Second Circuit in United States v. Finnerty (Finnerty lit) was the culmination of a number of District Court decisions that found that specialists on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) could not be held liable for fraud under Rule 10b-5 for interpositioning, whereby they put themselves between buy and sell limit orders, in violation of NYSE rules, and profited on the spread. Finnerty III and its District Court sibling decisions were wrongly decided. Specialists presented a uniquely thorny issue of agency law to the Federal Courts in New York. This issue was under-analyzed by the Federal Prosecutors and left the courts without a coherent theory of fiduciary duty for specialists. This Note will demonstrate that there is a fiduciary relationship between specialists and their public customers and will untangle that relationship to show that it prohibits interpositioning and that interpositioning was fraud under Rule 10b-5. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses concerns relating to in-sourcing decisions before the U.S. district courts and reflects the tensions that exist in potential forums for resolving such disputes. It focuses on the jurisdictional tension between the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the Administrative Dispute Resolution Act's (ADRA) modification of the Tucker Act. It recommends that decisions to in-source should be reviewable, and suggests a possible strategy for challenging such decisions.

The article provides an update on the Circuit Court Case Jefferson County School District R-1 v. Elizabeth E. including the history of the case, a summary of facts and an analysis on the reasoning behind the Court's decision. Topics discussed an evaluation of Elizabeth who was then found eligible for special education as a student with serious emotional and related services and conclusion that the district failed to provide free appropriate public education (FAPE).

This article reviews the results of a survey of district court judges in Nevada, which is part of a National Science Foundation-supported dissertation on felony sentencing. For six weeks in spring 2014, a survey was conducted of Nevada district court judges who had sentenced offenders from 2007-2009. These judges were asked about their professional backgrounds and experience and were presented with questions that probed their ways of thinking (cognitive styles) and their sensitivity to the way they were viewed by others. The purpose of the survey was to better understand the characteristics of judges as legal decision makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]