In recent years the American public has witnessed several hard-fought battles over nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. In these heated confirmation fights, candidates' legal and political ...philosophies have been subject to intense scrutiny and debate.Citizens, Courts, and Confirmationsexamines one such fight--over the nomination of Samuel Alito--to discover how and why people formed opinions about the nominee, and to determine how the confirmation process shaped perceptions of the Supreme Court's legitimacy.
Drawing on a nationally representative survey, James Gibson and Gregory Caldeira use the Alito confirmation fight as a window into public attitudes about the nation's highest court. They find that Americans know far more about the Supreme Court than many realize, that the Court enjoys a great deal of legitimacy among the American people, that attitudes toward the Court as an institution generally do not suffer from partisan or ideological polarization, and that public knowledge enhances the legitimacy accorded the Court. Yet the authors demonstrate that partisan and ideological infighting that treats the Court as just another political institution undermines the considerable public support the institution currently enjoys, and that politicized confirmation battles pose a grave threat to the basic legitimacy of the Supreme Court.
Does understanding how U.S. Supreme Court justices actually decide cases undermine the institutional legitimacy of the nation's highest court? To the extent that ordinary people recognize that the ...justices are deciding legal disputes on the basis of their own ideological biases and preferences (legal realism and the attitudinal model), the belief that the justices merely ``apply'' the law (mechanical jurisprudence and the myth of legality) is difficult to sustain. Although it is easy to see how the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, the most unaccountable of all American political institutions, is nurtured by the view that judicial decisionmaking is discretionless and mechanical, the sources of institutional legitimacy under legal realism are less obvious. Here, we demonstrate, using a nationally representative sample, that the American people understand judicial decisionmaking in realistic terms, that they extend legitimacy to the Supreme Court, and they do so under the belief that judges exercise their discretion in a principled and sincere fashion. Belief in mechanical jurisprudence is therefore not a necessary underpinning of judicial legitimacy; belief in legal realism is not incompatible with legitimacy.
Conventional wisdom holds that the American people are woefully ignorant about law and courts. In light of this putative ignorance, scholars and other commentators have questioned whether the public ...should play a role in the judicial process—for example, whether public preferences should matter for U.S. Supreme Court confirmation processes. Unfortunately, however, much of what we know—or think we know— about public knowledge of the Supreme Court is based upon flawed measures and procedures. So, for instance, the American National Election Study, a prominent source of the conclusion that people know little if anything about the U.S. Supreme Court, codes as incorrect the reply that William Rehnquist is (was) a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court; respondents, to be judged knowledgeable, must identify Rehnquist as the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (which, of course, technically, he was not). More generally, the use of open-ended recall questions leads to a serious and substantial underestimation of the extent to which ordinary people know about the nation's highest court. Our purpose in this paper is to revisit the question of how knowledgeable the American people are about the Supreme Court. Based on two national surveys— using more appropriate, closed-ended questions—we demonstrate that levels of knowledge about the Court and its justices are far higher than nearly all earlier surveys have documented. And, based on an experiment embedded in one of the national surveys, we also show the dramatic effect of question-form on estimates of levels of knowledge. Finally, we draw out the implications of political knowledge for the degree to which people support the U.S. Supreme Court. Our findings indicate that greater knowledge of the Court is associated with stronger loyalty toward the institution. We conclude by reconnecting these findings to “positivity theory,” which asserts that paying attention to courts not only provides citizens information, but also exposes them to powerful symbols of judicial legitimacy.
The HeartMate 3 (HM3) Left Ventricular Assist System (LVAS) (Abbott) is a centrifugal, fully magnetically levitated, continuous-flow blood pump engineered to enhance hemocompatibility and reduce ...shear stress on blood components. The MOMENTUM 3 trial (Multicenter Study of MagLev Technology in Patients Undergoing Mechanical Circulatory Support Therapy With HeartMate 3) compares the HM3 LVAS with the HeartMate II (HMII) LVAS (Abbott) in advanced heart failure refractory to medical management, irrespective of therapeutic intention (bridge to transplant versus destination therapy). This investigation reported its primary outcome in the short-term cohort (n=294; 6-month follow-up), demonstrating superiority of the HM3 for the trial primary end point (survival free of a disabling stroke or reoperation to replace the pump for malfunction), driven by a reduced need for reoperations. The aim of this analysis was to evaluate the aggregate of hemocompatibility-related clinical adverse events (HRAEs) between the 2 LVAS.
We conducted a secondary end point evaluation of HRAE (survival free of any nonsurgical bleeding, thromboembolic event, pump thrombosis, or neurological event) in the short-term cohort (as-treated cohort n=289) at 6 months. The net burden of HRAE was also assessed by using a previously described hemocompatibility score, which uses 4 escalating tiers of hierarchal severity to derive a total score for events encountered during the entire follow-up experience for each patient.
In 289 patients in the as-treated group (151 the HM3 and 138 the HMII), survival free of any HRAE was achieved in 69% of the HM3 group and in 55% of the HMII group (hazard ratio, 0.62; confidence interval, 0.42-0.91;
=0.012). Using the hemocompatibility score, the HM3 group demonstrated less pump thrombosis requiring reoperation (0 versus 36 points,
<0.001) or medically managed pump thrombosis (0 versus 5 points,
=0.02), and fewer nondisabling strokes (6 versus 24 points,
=0.026) than the control HMII LVAS. The net hemocompatibility score in the HM3 in comparison with the HMII patients was 101 (0.67±1.50 points/patient) versus 137 (0.99±1.79 points/patient) (odds ratio, 0.64; confidence interval, 0.39-1.03;
=0.065).
In this secondary analysis of the MOMENTUM 3 trial, the HM3 LVAS demonstrated greater freedom from HRAEs in comparison with the HMII LVAS at 6 months.
URL: http://clinicaltrials.gov. Unique identifier: NCT02224755.
Portuguese-speaking countries (PSC) share the influence of the Portuguese culture but have socioeconomic development patterns that differ from that of Portugal.
To describe trends in cardiovascular ...disease (CVD) morbidity and mortality in the PSC between 1990 and 2016, stratified by sex, and their association with the respective sociodemographic indexes (SDI).
This study used the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2016 data and methodology. Data collection followed international standards for death certification, through information systems on vital statistics and mortality surveillance, surveys, and hospital registries. Techniques were used to standardize causes of death by the direct method, as were corrections for underreporting of deaths and garbage codes. To determine the number of deaths due to each cause, the CODEm (Cause of Death Ensemble Model) algorithm was applied. Disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and SDI (income per capita, educational attainment and total fertility rate) were estimated for each country. A p-value <0.05 was considered significant.
There are large differences, mainly related to socioeconomic conditions, in the relative impact of CVD burden in PSC. Among CVD, ischemic heart disease was the leading cause of death in all PSC in 2016, except for Mozambique and Sao Tome and Principe, where cerebrovascular diseases have supplanted it. The most relevant attributable risk factors for CVD among all PSC are hypertension and dietary factors.
Collaboration among PSC may allow successful experiences in combating CVD to be shared between those countries.
During left ventricular assist device implantation, a surgical tunneling technique to keep the entire driveline (DL) velour portion in the subcutaneous tunnel, resulting in a silicone-skin interface ...(SSI) at the exit site, has been adopted by many centers. To assess long-term freedom from DL infection associated with this technique, a multicenter SSI registry was initiated. It was hypothesized that the modified tunneling technique is associated with at least 50% reduction in DL infection at 1 year post-implant compared with the velour-to-skin method used in the HeartMate II (HMII) Destination Therapy (DT) trial.
SSI is a retrospective and prospective registry of patients who have received the HMII device. Results are reported from the retrospective cohort, which consists of 200 patients who were implanted during the period 2009-2012 with the SSI tunneling method and on HMII support for at least 10 months at the time of enrollment. The prevalence and incidence of DL infection after left ventricular assist device implantation in the SSI retrospective cohort were determined and compared with a control group of 201 patients also on HMII support for at least 10 months from the HMII DT clinical trial who were implanted during the period 2007-2009 using the traditional method in which a small section of the velour portion of the DL was externalized.
The 1-year and 2-year prevalence rates of DL infection were 9% and 19% in the SSI patient group compared with 23% and 35% in the control group (hazard ratio 0.49, 95% confidence interval 0.33-0.73, p < 0.001). The event-per-patient year was 0.11 and 0.22 for the SSI and control groups, respectively (p < 0.001). Based on a multivariate analysis, age and DL exit side were the only independent variables associated with DL infection. Effects of management changes over the eras were not studied and could have contributed to the findings.
These results suggest that leaving the entire DL velour portion below the skin is associated with 50% reduction in DL infection compared with results from the HMII DT trial.
This article investigates citizen perceptions of the impartiality and legitimacy of courts, focusing on a state (West Virginia) that has recently been a battleground for conflict over campaign ...support, perceived conflicts of interest, and loss of impartiality. We employ an experimental vignette embedded within a representative sample to test hypotheses about factors affecting perceived judicial impartiality. Perhaps not surprising is our finding that campaign contributions threaten the legitimacy of courts. More unexpected is evidence that contributions offered but rejected by the candidate have similar effects to contributions offered and accepted. And, although recusal can rehabilitate a court/judge to some degree, the effect of recusal is far from the complete restoration of the institution’s impartiality and legitimacy. The processes by which citizens form and update their opinions of judges and courts seem to involve preexisting attitudes, normative expectations of judges, and perceptions of contextual factors associated with judicial decision making.
On the Legitimacy of National High Courts Gibson, James L.; Caldeira, Gregory A.; Baird, Vanessa A.
The American political science review,
06/1998, Letnik:
92, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The purpose of this research is to examine theories of diffuse support and institutional legitimacy by testing hypotheses about the interrelationships among the salience of courts, satisfaction with ...court outputs, and diffuse support for national high courts. Like our predecessors, we are constrained by essentially cross-sectional data; unlike them, we analyze mass attitudes toward high courts in eighteen countries. Because our sample includes many countries with newly formed high courts, our cross-sectional data support several longitudinal inferences, using the age of the judicial institution as an independent variable. We discover that the U.S. Supreme Court is not unique in the esteem in which it is held and, like other courts, it profits from a tendency of people to credit it for pleasing decisions but not to penalize it for displeasing ones. Generally, older courts more successfully link specific and diffuse support, most likely due to satisfying successive, nonoverlapping constituencies.
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