The United States Code, Prima Facie Evidence, and Positive Law

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Whisner
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-396
Author(s):  
Zachary Baron Shemtob

Following the 2006 retirement of Sandra Day O'Connor and the confirmation of Samuel Alito to succeed her, Roman Catholics formed a majority on the United States Supreme Court for the first time in this institution's 210-year history. This Catholic majority was further strengthened by the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor in 2009. Perhaps even more remarkably, by the time of Elena Kagan's first case in October of 2010, not a single Protestant sat on the nation's highest judicial body.By way of comparison, in 1960 the Court consisted of seven Protestants, one Catholic and one Jew; in 1985, eight Protestants and one Catholic sat on the Court. This phenomenon is further reflected in judicial appointments. Since 1985, only one Protestant has been appointed,4 Justice David Souter, compared to seven Catholics and three Jews. The prima facie reason for this transformation is simple: President Reagan began the Protestant erosion by appointing two Catholics; George H.W. Bush followed by appointing a Catholic; and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama chose only Jewish and Catholic nominees. The deeper reasons, which are considerably more complex, are the focus of this article.


1977 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-130
Author(s):  
Julius J. Marke

Title 17 of the United States Code (Copyright Act of 1909) was amended in its entirety by Public Law 94–553 (90 Stat. 2541), on October 19, 1976. The new Statute specifies that, with particular exceptions, its provisions are to enter into force on January 1, 1978. Until then, the Copyright Act of 1909, as amended, remains in force. As a result, any cause of action in copyright arising before December 31, 1977 will be governed by the 1909 law. There is a three-year statute of limitations in which such an action may be brought. Hence, the 1909 law can be applicable in these cases until 1981.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Carlson ◽  
Faraz Dadgostari ◽  
Michael A. Livermore ◽  
Daniel N. Rockmore

This paper introduces a novel linked structure-content representation of federal statutory law in the United States and analyzes and quantifies its structure using tools and concepts drawn from network analysis and complexity studies. The organizational component of our representation is based on the explicit hierarchical organization within the United States Code (USC) as well an embedded cross-reference citation network. We couple this structure with a layer of content-based similarity derived from the application of a “topic model” to the USC. The resulting representation is the first that explicitly models the USC as a “multinetwork” or “multilayered network” incorporating hierarchical structure, cross-references, and content. We report several novel descriptive statistics of this multinetwork. These include the results of this first application of the machine learning technique of topic modeling to the USC as well as multiple measures articulating the relationships between the organizational and content network layers. We find a high degree of assortativity of “titles” (the highest level hierarchy within the USC) with related topics. We also present a link prediction task and show that machine learning techniques are able to recover information about structure from content. Success in this prediction task has a natural interpretation as indicating a form of mutual information. We connect the relational findings between organization and content to a measure of “ease of search” in this large hyperlinked document that has implications for the ways in which the structure of the USC supports (or doesn’t support) broad useful access to the law. The measures developed in this paper have the potential to enable comparative work in the study of statutory networks that ranges across time and geography.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Carlson ◽  
Faraz Dadgostari ◽  
Michael A. Livermore ◽  
Daniel Rockmore

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