Human Rights Watch World Report 2003, Human Rights Watch, January 14, 2003 . Read the full text of the report here. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Pierce County v. Guillen, Supreme Court of the United States, January 14, 2003 . Read the opinion here. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

In re J.M., Georgia Supreme Court, January 13, 2003 . Read the opinion here . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, January 8, 2003 . Read the opinion here . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

An Empirical Analysis of Maryland's Death Sentencing System with Respect to the Influence of Race and Legal Jurisdiction, University of Maryland, Professor Raymond Paternoster and Professor Robert Brame, January 2003 . Read the full text of the report here . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The Court’s authority — possessed of neither the purse nor the sword — ultimately rests on sustained public confidence in its moral sanction. Such feeling must be nourished by the Court’s complete detachment, in fact and appearance, from political entanglements and by abstention from injecting itself into the clash of political forces in political settlements. [...]

In past elections, so-called “faithless electors” cast innocuously eccentric votes that provided a quaint reminder of one of the archaic curiosities of the presidential selection process. After providing a rare element of surprise in the otherwise perfunctory Electoral College ritual, these independent spirits who voted for someone other than their party’s nominee would vanish from [...]

The most complicated bit of governmental machinery which the modern world has to exhibit is that which is employed in the selection of the chief executive officer…for the United States…It is almost marvelous that any people should have preserved political unity for a century under such a loose and decentralized system of election of its [...]

The dispute over the election has developed into a constitutional crisis. With George W. Bush claiming victory and Al Gore refusing to concede, the election’s outcome now seems destined to depend on judicial determination of complex and perhaps novel constitutional issues. Rather than attempting to resolve the actual vote count in the most equitable way [...]

The U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention in the disputed presidential election was virtually inevitable, despite wishful predictions by Democrats that the Court would not meddle with state election law. As countless commentators have pointed out, the electoral impasse provides yet another illustration of the wisdom of Alexis de Tocqueville’s overworked observation that “scarcely any political question [...]