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A court administration striving to guarantee the independence and professionalism of the court and judges requires attention to judicial ethics. Judicial ethics as a system of professional values and as an institutional instrument of judiciary is an integral part of court administration which is based on the principle of self-regulation. The importance of court administration requires a scientific approach to its elements. Therefore, this article begins by providing analysis of the main objectives of judicial ethics and a comparative study on the European practices establishing judicial ethics. It also provides a systematic list of the basic principles of the conduct of judges that are established in different international standards and legal systems of different European countries. By analysing documents of different international institutions and codes of ethics of European countries, the author identifies a systematic structure and the fundamental starting point of modern judicial ethics. The methods of descriptive comparative analysis and observation of recent developments are dominant in this study. Reacting to the scientific problems and current needs of legal communities with regard to the enforcement of judicial ethics, the article presents approaches that could lead to increased effectiveness of ethics in the judiciary, as well as to the development of methods of enforcement of judicial ethics. The purpose of this article is not just to disclose the main international standards and regulations on judicial ethics in Europe, but also to make it practically valuable for developers of judicial ethics, taking into consideration the fact that recently many countries have been trying to reform and improve ethical systems in the judiciary. Given the limited scope of this article, other important elements of court administration and developing a comparative study of the content of judicial ethics and the jurisprudence of its implementation will be presented in future publications.

The endorsement test for Establishment Clause violations does more than protect impressionable children, despite powerful criticisms that has been leveled at it. Here, Samaha remarks that with the departure of Justice O'Connor--the author and most committed supporter of the endorsement notion--there is a good chance that the test will retire along with her. Further, whatever are the appropriate doctrinal implications, an anti-sorting perspective focuses on questions that matter, pinpointing live social phenomena in a modern, dynamic, and religiously diverse nation.

Frequently, and in numerous doctrinal contexts, the Supreme Court has justified its rulings with reference to a concern that the decisions of government - whether adjudicative, legislative, or executive - appear to be made in accordance with proper principles or procedures. Focusing on the appearance of impropriety raises a host of normative concerns. some might argue that resting on appearances, which are inevitably subjective, introduces an impermissible amount of indeterminacy into constitutional doctrine. Other skeptics might question the appropriateness of worrying about government's perceived legitimacy, and thus its effectiveness, in the course of interpreting provisions of the Constitution that seem to speak more to individual rights. Still others might contend that, simply put, the Supreme Court ought to concern itself with what is, rather than what merely appears to be. This analysis suggests that the appropriateness of the Court's use of apparent-impropriety concerns must be determined not categorically but contextually.

A forty-five minute drive south from Salt Lake City is the city of Pleasant Grove, Utah, and within the city sits Pioneer Park—the site of a local controversy that launched a landmark expansion of the doctrine known as “government speech.” A passerby would not necessarily guess at such significance. The park is somewhat hidden, and its expanse is limited, taking up only part of a small city block and totaling only a couple square acres. Its attractions are a hodgepodge of monuments and historical markers, including an old granary, a wishing well, and a privately donated Ten Commandments msonument.

This article responds to two important recent treatments of abortion rights. I will mainly discuss Ronald Dworkin's recent writings concerning abortion: his article \"Unenumerated rights: whether and how Roe should be overruled,\" and his book Life's Dominion. In these writings Dworkin presents a novel view of what the constitutional and moral argument surronding abortion is really about. Both debates actually turn, he argues, on the question of how to interpret the widely shared idea that human life is sacred. At the heart of the abortion debate is the essentially religious notion that human life has value which transcends its value to any particular person; abortion is therefore at bottom a religious issue. Dworkin hopes to use this analysis to show that the religion clauses of the First Amendment provide a \"textual home\" for a woman's right to choose abortion. I wish to scrutinize this suggestion here; I want to probe the precise consequences for abortion rights of such an understanding of their basis. I will argue that the consequences are more radical than Dworkin seems to realize. The other work I will examine here is the important 1992 Supreme Court decision on abortion, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The controlling opinion in that case, written jointly by Justices Kennedy, O'Connor, and Souter, strongly reaffirmed Roe v. Wade, but also upheld most of the provisions of a Pennsylvania statute that had mandated various restrictions on abortion. The justices' basis for upholding these restictions was their introduction of a new constitutional standard for abortion regulations, an apparently weaker standard than those that had governed previous Supreme Court abortion decisions. I think there is a flaw in Casey's new constitutional test for abortion regulations, and I will explain, when we turn to Casey, what it is and why it bears a close relation to Dworkin's reluctance to carry his argument as far as it seems to go.

Watching just a handful of oral arguments at the u.s. Supreme Court quickly leads to the recognition that only a few immutable rules of the road exist, separating the truly outstanding oral advocates from the really terrible ones. A small cadre of attorneys—the Supreme Court’s Harlem Globetrotters—argues the vast majority of the high-profile cases at the high court. This group of lawyers frequently mops up the Court with the earnest criminal defense attorneys, overworked state attorneys general, and well-meaning trial lawyers who have shepherded their cases all the way up from the lower courts. It’s not that the

Niagara district magistrate Bartholomew Tench was strolling along the bank of the Welland Canal early in the afternoon of Sunday, 14 November 1833, heading towards Gravelly Bay (Port Colborne) when, as he later recalled, he observed several men, five at least, employed in shingling a home belonging to a person named Smith. At roughly the same moment his attention was called to the men at work by one Jenner, a miller. The subsequent exchange was recorded in a deposition made by the magistrate. ‘Have you not seen the King’s Proclamation to prevent such work on the Sabbath?’ To which deponent

One way a government may endorse or support particular religious ideas is by displaying signs with religious words or by using religious symbols. Were all a state’s official buildings to have inscribed “Jesus, our Redeemer,” or to display crosses in prominent places, that would recognize Christianity. The interesting, and constitutionally troublesome, issues arise in more ambiguous situations, in which it is unclear either whether words or symbols are religious or whether the state supports the religious message that they indisputably convey. The Supreme Court has decided six important cases involving religious messages in public places. We will examine those in