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The foundations of modern administrative law were laid in 1980, with the disparate opinions of a sharply divided Court in Industrial Union Department, AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute (commonly referred to as the “Benzene Case”). Consider four points. (1) The Benzene Case is now understood to be the first contemporary appearance of the Major Questions Doctrine. (2) The Benzene Case marked the return of the nondelegation doctrine, signaled most plainly by then-Justice William Rehnquist’s elaborate concurring opinion but also by a favorable reference in the plurality opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens and an open-minded sentence from Justice Lewis Powell. (3) The Benzene Case is the origin of contemporary cost-benefit default principles, permitting or requiring agencies to exempt de minimis risks, to consider costs, and to engage in some form of cost-benefit balancing, unless Congress has squarely said otherwise. (4) The Benzene Case essentially defined “significant risk,” with a precise numerical definition (one in one thousand) that persists at the Department of Labor to this day. At the same time, a close analysis of the plurality opinion in the Benzene Case shows that it is best understood as a specification, above all, of the Absurdity Canon—a Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States for the modern administrative state—with the specific purpose of ensuring against the imposition of high costs for small benefits, and thus of requiring a kind of proportionality between costs and benefits. So understood, the Benzene Case had, and continues to have, an important and salutary effect on regulatory programs. Its significant and much broader current role, more than four decades after the opinions were issued, is an intriguing case study in doctrinal development, and in particular, how Supreme Court decisions can plant small seeds that become big trees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite having a central constitutional function of determining the validity of legislation, the High Court of Australia adopts a variety of principles and doctrines that can result in it declining to resolve constitutional questions. One way this can occur is by only deciding constitutional questions when they are ‘necessary to do justice in the case and to determine the rights of parties’. Although this practice has been followed since the Court’s earliest days, it was only recently labelled the ‘prudential approach’ to resolving constitutional questions by the plurality in Mineralogy Pty Ltd v Western Australia. This article seeks to identify the different ways in which the prudential approach can be followed and why the High Court adopts the practice. It will then turn to analyse the High Court’s adherence to the practice during the tenure of Kiefel CJ, arguing that the Court’s application would benefit from greater clarity and consistency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the question of plurality of mathematical styles, i.e., whether a fundamental mathematical work is characterised by a single style or by a multitude of styles; and, whether the unity of a subject in mathematics in its development is the outcome of a single style or several styles. The question is studied (a) within a single mathematical work and (b) through the study of the same problem over time and illustrated on Menelaus's Sphaerica and the isoperimetric problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Supreme Court's doctrinal statements governing nonmajority opinions demonstrate inconsistencies and confusion belied by the Justices' behaviors modeling the narrowest grounds doctrine. And yet, lower courts are bound by stated doctrine, beginning with Marks v. United States, not rules of construction inferred from judicial conduct. This Article simplifies the narrowest grounds rule, reconciling doctrinal formulations with observed behaviors, avoiding the implicit command: "Watch what we do, not what we say." The two most recent cases considering Marks, Ramos v. Louisiana and Hughes v. United States, obfuscate three central features: (1) when the doctrine does or does not apply; (2) how it applies in proper cases; and (3) the precedential status of narrowest grounds opinions in the Supreme Court. Individual Supreme Court Justices capture discrete doctrinal elements; none convey a general theoretical understanding of the rule's scope and meaning. In Ramos, the more recent of the two cases, six Justices invite lower courts to treat fractured Supreme Court cases as overruling past majority opinions. Three Justices convey that a single Justice cannot control on narrowest grounds. Two Justices treat narrowest grounds opinions as precedent in the Supreme Court. Each proposition is in tension with observed behaviors in other cases even in the Ramos term. In June Medical Services v. Russo, Chief Justice Roberts alone issued a controlling narrowest grounds opinion, with none of the Justices raising a fuss. By declining to join Roberts's opinion, the four liberal Justices ensured a fractured ruling, thereby preserving a broader 2016 abortion precedent. In Bostock v. Clayton County, the same cohort joined Justice Gorsuch's strained textualist construction of Title VII, forging a majority embracing sexual orientation and transgender status within the meaning of sex. These rulings convey that a single Justice can control under Marks and that majority opinions hold precedential status beyond narrowest grounds decisions in the Supreme Court. This Article models narrowest grounds, introducing the essential doctrinal element of dimensionality. A simple model, comporting with behavioral modeling by the Justices themselves, reveals that fractured cases with opinions aligned along one relevant dimension necessarily yield a narrowest grounds opinion, and fractured cases implicating more than one relevant dimension do not. The analysis unlocks each of the preceding questions and resolves several additional puzzles. Modeling narrowest grounds provides clarity for lawyers, scholars, and jurists, off and on the Supreme Court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the United States Patent and Trademark Office ("PTO") sought to control results in adjudication by its Patent Trial and Appeals Board ("PTAB") through a process commonly described as "panel stacking." In a "strong form" of this practice, the PTO Director or Director's delegee generated a new panel of administrative judges to conduct rehearing proceedings after an initial panel produced a decision with which the Director or delegee disagreed. This Essay contends that this strong-form practice raises constitutional concerns under the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause. Consequently, the doctrine of constitutional avoidance instructs that courts should understand the Patent Act to preclude strong-form panel stacking. Judges and commentators have repeatedly erred by citing a plurality opinion on panel stacking in In re Alappat as if the plurality opinion authoritatively held that the Patent Act authorizes panel stacking. This Essay seeks to correct that misconception and shows that, once one takes account of constitutional concerns, the Alappat judges' recognition of statutory ambiguity effectively condemns strong-form panel stacking, rather than "blessing" it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thoughtful commentators on Islamic law often point out that Islamic law exhibits great interpretational diversity. Typically, this plurality is evidenced by the range of opinions or articulations of the rule in the face of any question or issue. At the level of sources, accounts of Islamic law have often emphasized the reliance on a set of major sources or roots of law, with other lesser sources. Scholarly works have acknowledged that matters are more complex than this and that different Muslim traditions may employ a different range of sources. Nonetheless, source plurality, and in particular how this source plurality is expressed in minority traditions, is underexplored. Focusing on the case of contemporary Nizari Ismaili law this Article will help to demonstrate the expression of source plurality in Islamic law. In so doing, this discussion aims to enrich the understanding of plurality in Islamic law to include not only the plurality of answers or rules on different issues but also the plurality of sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the perspective on modernity potential enabling human freedom, plurality and universalism by Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt. It discusses the engagement in the totalizing systems of thought and historical teleologies without compromise with relativistic particularism and the point of intersection between modern and contemporary.

The article discusses the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit's ruling in the 2018 case Manning v. Caldwell which deals with the plurality decision rule that was established by America's Supreme Court (USSC) in the 1977 Marks v. United States case which deals with case holdings, and it mentions then-USSC Justice Byron White's concurrence in the 1968 criminal law matter Powell v. Texas. Virginia's interdiction statute is assessed.

The author analyses strong and weak points of the Church media in Slovakia. Her conclusions are based on more than ten previous researches in the field of Church and media, realized on the Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Slovakia. She states, that Slovak church media are exclusively pastoral, wilfully resigning to the evangelization function. Marginal evangelization attempts (such as in Radio Lumen in the late 1990s) have failed. This means, inter alia, that they do not do journalism in its original sense. They act as public relations bodies of the bishop's conferences and as an extension of spiritual service of the church to the believers. The competent decision-makers (i.e. church hierarchy) are not willing to subsidize evangelization medium, because the currently accepted doctrine is to use 'their own' media space to spread 'their own' messages. Thus, opening complex topics, covering opinion plurality and encouraging discussion, is regarded as harmful. This function is, in the last years, substituted by the commercial project of the Conservative daily Postoj, but this is neither a church nor religious medium. As the researches show, also the request of believing audience for independent critical Church medium is disputable. The audience is - disregarding age - divided between the audience of the official church media and decent secular media. Between these two groups exists a relatively strong antagonism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on Anne de Graville's Rondeaux, a rewriting of Alain Chartier's Belle dame sans mercy, transmitted by the single manuscript Paris, BnF, fr. 2253. Firstly, the analysis of both the layout and the re-elaboration techniques will allow us to observe that the work brings to the stage a plurality of voices, which correspond to socially well-defined characters, according to the interpretation of the rhetorical conception of the "character", theorized in the tenth chapter of the Instructif de seconde rhétorique. Furthermore, a thematic investigation based on some lexical choices will show that a particular attention is reserved to the presence of images evoking the game of roles between the lady and the knight; we will finally advance the hypothesis that the Rondeaux take part in a virtual "collaborative community" diachronically engaged in the rewriting of Chartier's masterpiece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses several aspects of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's views about America's rule of law and takings (eminent domain) law claims under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Majority and plurality opinions are addressed, along with Scalia's decisions in takings cases such as Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council. American jurisprudence and Scalia's U.S. Supreme Court voting history are assessed.

The article discusses extended families in relation to the plurality opinion that was issued in the 1977 U.S. Supreme Court family law case Moore v. City of East Cleveland, and it mentions then-American Supreme Court Justice Justice William Brennan’s concurring opinion in the case.

Understanding the precedential significance of Supreme Court plurality decisions is a task that has long confounded lower court judges. Surprisingly, the Supreme Court has offered little direct guidance on this question apart from a single sentence in Marks v. United States, which instructed that where the Justices fail to converge on a single majority rationale, the “holding of the Court may be viewed as that position taken by those Members who concurred in the judgments on the narrowest grounds.” But this single, cryptic directive from a decision handed down more than four decades ago offers little meaningful guidance to lower courts struggling to apply the “narrowest grounds” rule to the Court’s fractured majority decisions. This Article suggests a new approach to plurality precedent that focuses on connecting the lower courts’ precedential obligations to the actual majority agreements among the Justices from which plurality decisions result. The defining feature of a plurality decision is an agreement among a majority of Justices on the appropriate judgment in a particular case without a corresponding majority agreement on the reasons why that judgment was correct. As such, the judgment itself provides the natural focal point for determining the lower courts’ precedential obligations. By focusing on the Court’s judgment and the rationales for that judgment endorsed by the various factions of concurring Justices, lower courts can identify a universe of subsequent cases that are sufficiently “like” the precedent case to demand consistent treatment—namely, those cases in which each of the judgment-supportive rationales would compel the same result. This approach binds lower courts without constraining them to follow a rationale that was endorsed by only a minority faction on the Court. The approach thus promises to constrain lower courts’ decisionmaking to some extent while identifying a domain of bounded discretion in which such courts remain free to continue working through the complicated legal questions the Court was unable to answer definitively in the original plurality decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change governance is extremely challenging because of both the intrinsic difficulty of the issues at stake and the plurality of values and worldviews. For these reasons, the ethical concerns that characterise climate change should also be meaningfully addressed through a specific version of procedural justice. Accordingly, in this article we adopt an impure notion of procedural justice. On this theoretical basis, we define relevant fairness criteria and contextualise them for climate governance systems. Then, we empirically justify fairness criteria against a critical and divisive element for the future governance of the Green Climate Fund, i.e., the no-objection procedure. The article concludes with some considerations prompted by the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After ten years of publication of the "Manifesto for education" we can af- firm that it did not seek to be a model for the future of education nor was it conceived to be, but nevertheless tried to express something "about" education and something "for" The education. In that sense, the "Manifesto" tried to express real and incessant concerns, for which "it is worth fighting," whenever we consider that "fighting" is perhaps too strong a notion in a world characterized by tension and conflict. In the lines that are expressed below, we share some reflections about said manifesto, being aware that its traces and concerns are latent in those who consider education as a space of complete freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in the 2014 case McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission which deals with the nation's campaign finance laws, and it addresses several of the jurisprudential and policy mistakes that were made by the controlling plurality in the case. Judicial precedent and the impact of money on American politics are examined, along with political power and the democratic system of government in the U.S. A strict scrutiny standard of review is examined.

The article discusses the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit's decision in Reed Elsevier Inc. ex rel. LexisNexis Div. v. Crockett and also explores the precedential value of U.S. Supreme Court plurality opinions. It reveals the complexity of class arbitration which introduces higher stakes and more procedures than bilateral arbitration. The article further argues that Reed Elsevier highlights a shift away from Bazzle and persuasiveness than any single plurality opinion.

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court's (USSC's) ruling in the case McCutcheon v. United States Federal Election Commission (FEC) which deals with the First Amendment to the nation's Constitution, freedom of speech rights in America, and the legal aspects of aggregate political contribution limits. The difference between expenditures and contributions is addressed in the 1976 USSC case Buckley v. Valeo. Plurality opinions and U.S. constitutional law are also examined.

In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, a plurality of the Supreme Court held that portions of the Affordable Care Act exceeded federal authority under the Spending Clause. With that holding, Sebelius became the first Supreme Court decision since the New Deal to limit an act of Congress on spending-power grounds, rounding out the "New Federalism" limits on federal power first initiated by the Rehnquist Court in the 1990s. The new Sebelius doctrine constrains the federal spending power in contexts involving changes to ongoing intergovernmental partnerships with very large federal grants. However, the decision gives little direction for evaluating when the amount of change or funding reaches the threshold of spending-power coercion. Sebelius thus leaves open important unanswered questions about the contours of the new limit and how it will impact intergovernmental bargaining. This Article assesses the Sebelius doctrine by testing its application in a legal realm in which spending-power bargaining features prominently: federal environmental law. Methodically applying the new limit to the major environmental programs of cooperative federalism, the analysis concludes that all should withstand legal challenge—even a potentially vulnerable provision of the Clean Air Act. The review sheds light not only on environmental law after Sebelius, but also the many other realms of American governance that engage spending-power bargaining, such as public education, civil rights law, social service programs, and civic infrastructure. The Article concludes that the impacts of the doctrine will be most palpable in the dynamics of intergovernmental bargaining. States will have more leverage when negotiating design and enforcement terms within spending-power partnerships. However, the federal government may adapt by relying on spending-power bargaining less often and with less at stake, even in contexts where states may prefer spending partnerships to the alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the U.S. Supreme Court Case Salinas v. Texas wherein the Fifth-Amendment protection was narrowed by excluding the pre-arrest context with law enforcement from Fifth Amendment. Topics include the Supreme Court disagreeing with the reasoning of federal circuits, narrowing of the rules pertaining to a defendant's right to silence, protection of a criminal defendant's right to silence, and issue of a plurality opinion which needed invocation by the criminal defendant.

The 5. 26 car racing event demonstrates the characteristics of framing contests of Weibo as public sphere. While Shenzhen police endeavours to construct a non-scapegoating frame, the media establish either questioning frame or a frame of traffic accident. However, the netizens on Weibo have built oppositional interpretative frames (i, e,) unjust police, abnormal background and unequal rights), preferred interpretative frames (i, e,) recognizing the police, chastising the popular mind and doubting the victims' natives), and negotiated interpretative frames vacillating in between. It is such process of framing contest that highlights the openness and plurality of Weibo as a public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of section 101 of the U.S. Patent Act in determining the patent eligibility. Topics discussed include decision of the Federal Circuit court on the case Accenture Global Services GmbH v. Guidewire Software Inc., claims of patent eligibility in the case by the plaintiff and plurality opinions of the federal courts in the case CLS Bank International v. Alice Corp. It further discusses the motion of summary judgment brought by Accenture.

The article discusses the need to accept the plurality of institutions and diversity of goods within political community in order to achieve genuine civic education in the public schools.

The article discusses plurality opinions and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit's (USCOA's) ruling in the 2013 case United States v. James which deals with the admission of an expert's records in a court proceeding and defendant Richard James' rights under the U.S. Constitution's Confrontation Clause (UCCC). According to the article, the U.S. Supreme Court's judgment in the case Williams v. Illinois, which addresses expert witness testimony and the UCCC, lacks precedential value.

An essay is presented on U.S. Supreme Court (USSC) Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her dissenting opinion in the 2012 case Coleman v. Court of Appeals of Maryland which deals with sex equality in America, the self-care provision of the nation's Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, and the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Other topics include plurality opinions, sick leave laws in America, and the U.S. Constitution's Equal Protection Clause.

The article discusses a recent plurality decision by the Minnesota Supreme Court in the case of Dickhoff ex rel. Dickhoff v. Green. Topics mentioned include the loss of chance of recovery caused by a medical professional's negligence, the formula for awarding damages due to malpractice, and the dissenting opinion written by the minority.

The article focuses on the impact of the constitutional law on the spending clause ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in reference to the Supreme Court case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius (NFIB v. Sebelius). Topics discussed include role of the Congress in developing the rules for the Medicaid, judicial opinion of the lower courts in the case and the plurality opinion on the court case. It further discusses the needs of expanding the Medicaid programs.

The Supreme Court's recent decision in J. Mclntyre Machinery v. Nicastro had the potential to resolve nearly two decades of confusion in personal jurisdiction doctrine. Confronted with the earlier Asahi plurality opinions, which had established competing "stream of commerce" theories, the Court produced a fractured 4-2-3 opinion that resolved little beyond holding that the New Jersey courts could not exercise personal jurisdiction over the defendant in the instant case. In this Article, I consider one dimension of the doctrinal deadlock that the Supreme Court produced in Nicastro: the concept of specific jurisdiction itself. In recent cases, most notably in Nicastro, the Court has become obsessed with the general and abstract contours of the relationship between a defendant and the forum state. However, one of the most important aspects of the distinction between general and specific jurisdiction is the relatedness between the lawsuit and the forum state. In conceptualizing relatedness at the highest level of generality, the Supreme Court has characterized the relatedness problem in a way that is nearly impossible to answer in any concrete case that comes before it. In other words, the Supreme Court has let the petfect become the enemy of the good. Instead of producing a flexible, workable, if not entirely global or perfect rule, the Court has given the lower courts hardly any rule at all. This Article suggests that in order to break the stream of commerce stalemate, the Supreme Court should refocus specific jurisdiction doctrine so that it produces concrete answers to the two dimensions of the relatedness problem. It further argues that Justice Brennan's stream of commerce position from Asahi remains the most viable path for specific jurisdiction analysis. The expansive scope of the Brennan position fits well with modern understandings of commerce and the domestic and international sale and distribution of goods. Moreover, in tandem with a robust fairness analysis, the stream of commerce position will allow courts to examine the two dimensions of relatedness in a useful, concrete, and doctrinally consistent manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the regulatory initiatives to ensure plurality of the media and independent information sources in Great Britain. It examines the rationality for promoting media pluralism and outlines the rules on media ownership and media plurality test in the Enterprise Act 2002. It also explores the ways in which the competing interests in the predictability and effectiveness of regulatory initiatives and interventions can be balanced and the potential creation of certainty for the media industry by incorporating effective metrics. It suggests the need to strengthen these metrics with additional information on regularity and duration of intervention and the degree of multi-sourcing.

The article examines the U.S. Supreme Court case Salazar v. Buono and several opinions that make up the plurality ruling of the nine Justices. It discusses various statutes implemented by the U.S. Congress to counter the holdings of the Court decisions. It reflects on the effect Justice John Paul Stevens had on the Supreme Courts' jurisprudence especially with regard to Buono decision. It highlights various positive and negative aspects of plurality opinions.

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the issue of personal jurisdiction over alien corporations in products liability cases. J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. v. Nicastro was the Court's first statement on the issue in twenty-four years. The opinion, handed down almost ten years after the injury that gave rise to the litigation, could not command a majority of the Justices. Writing for a plurality, Justice Kennedy set forth a strict standard that required that a manufacturer's products be specifically targeted at a given forum state for jurisdiction to be proper. This Note argues that, while Kennedy's opinion did not necessarily violate the letter of jurisdictional doctrine--for in reality, there is no discernible letter--it violated the spirit. In analyzing the origins, development, and application of personal jurisdiction over the centuries, this Note concludes that the current palette of jurisdictional tests is not sufficient to meet the demands of fairness in cases like Nicastro. Using simple tort concepts as analogues, this Note advances a new test capable of doing justice without violating due process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze in a complex and transdisciplinary perspective, the plurality in the formation in Cyberspace, outlining, thus, contributions to debate cyberlaw. Indeed, the machine will be addressed in a neovitalista perspective Levy). In this sense, machines are not restricted to a tangle of electronic components, but as belonging to strata such as physical, biological, social, technical, etc, associating itself continuously with other types of machines, which with leads to the need to think about them as plurality. From this diversity, it is crystallized the reference universe called cyberspace, bringing social and legal implications. From this, it arises the need to devise the cyberlaw in a perspective that respects the multidimensionality and complexity of the legal phenomenon called cyberspace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the assessment of the relationship between the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) and Shady Grove Orthopedic Associates case. It says that the court's decision of Shady Grove go together with the Erie jurisprudence by the court as well as following the workable way for courts that apply the rules in diversity cases. It adds the increase in new original filings of class results in federal court as a result of CAFA.

Plurality decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court demand interpretation, especially because they tend to occur when the Court faces important but divisive legal issues. Most courts, agencies, and scholars have assumed that federal agencies are in no better position to interpret plurality decisions than the lower federal courts when confronted with a potentially precedential Supreme Court plurality decision-the agency must construe the Justices' various opinions in search of a controlling rationale. In so doing, however, the agency eschews any claim to Chevron deference because it is no longer implementing a statute pursuant to congressionally delegated authority. Instead, it is merely an agency interpreting a court. This Article argues that pursuant to the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in National Cable & Telecommunications Ass'n v. Brand X internet Services, federal agencies have another option when dealing with a Supreme Court plurality decision regarding either a statute that the agency implements or the agency's prior interpretation of that statute. In the right circumstances, these post-plurality agencies can invoke their original congressionally delegated authority to implement the statute and issue new regulations that should be entitled to Chevron deference. Post-plurality agencies thus face a deference conundrum: they can defer to a fractured Supreme Court decision at the expense of their own claims to interpretive authority, or they can-admittedly with some risk in the next round of judicial review-reclaim interpretive deference for themselves. In assessing the deference conundrum, the exact character of the plurality decision is important. This Article includes a typology of Supreme Court plurality decisions involving agency-mediated statutes. When the Chevron/Brand X framework applies, however, agencies have the opportunity, and arguably the duty, to eliminate the confusion and inconsistency that plurality decisions promote by issuing clarifying and nationally uniform rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article emphasizes the various characters of legal phenomena, which are discoverable just from different aspects. The article approaches the problem of multidisciplinarity on the basis of some considerations of a concrete research. After that, it introduces the necessity of multidisciplinary tendencies as indirect consequences of Western analytical thinking. It outlines that evolution of legal philosophy results in a special plurality within jurisprudence. The article attempts to sketch the structure of multidisciplinary legal inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The plurality opinion in Stop the Beach Renourishment v. Florida Department of Environmental Protection articulated a new doctrine of "judicial takings" and purported to justify it with arguments drawing on text, history, precedent, and "common sense." This Article argues that the opinion makes a mockery of such forms of interpretation, represents raw pursuit of an ideological agenda, and indicates why the regulatory takings doctrine, more generally, should be abandoned or limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses the issues concerning the minimum contacts test discussed at the U.S. Supreme Court. It highlights the two cases of J. McIntyre Machinery Ltd. v. Nicastro and Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations S.A v. Brown which marked almost a quarter of century to discuss the minimum contacts test at the U.S. court. Moreover, it states that the incoherence of the minimum contacts test has never evident than it is in the two cases and showed clearly in the J. McIntyre plurality opinion.

The article discusses plurality decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court as of January 2011, focusing on an apparent increase in the number of court decisions which feature five or more justices agreeing on a single result, but failing to agree on a single rationale. An examination of the impact of ideological, legal, and collegial factors on the voting preferences of U.S. Supreme Court Justices is also provided.

The article focuses on the applications of the U.S. Supreme Court for the Troxel v. Granville case and its hesitance to announce grandparent visitation statutes unconstitutional. It states that a plurality of the U.S. Supreme Court held that a state nonparent visitation statute was unconstitutional as applied to Tommie Granville, who disagreed with the amount of visitation asked by the paternal grandparents of her daughter. The plurality was unconstitutional as applied to the case.

Inspired by an increasing interest in the history and theory of mass communication studies, the case of Finland is presented in five consecutive stages, which partly reflect features specific to the country and partly more universal developments. A crucial turn took place in the late 1960s, stimulated by policy developments in the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE), and leading to a unique paradigm and to debates with proponents of paradigms produced later. By the late 1980s, many of the old divergences and contrasts have disappeared and an understanding has emerged that no single perspective can dominate the field. Yet there is interest in the prospects of a more synthetic approach, for which intellectual stimulation is coming from the crossroads of the three main disciplinary variants in European mass communication studies—Euro-American, French and German respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]