Ruckelshaus Decides

DDT Wars ◽  
2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles F. Wurster

All parties to the hearings knew that on June 14, 1972, at exactly 10 a.m., the door of the EPA administrator’s office would open and out would come someone to distribute copies of the decision on the future of DDT. Nobody knew what was in it, but all parties figured there would be something they would not like and would therefore want to appeal it to an appeals court. Appeals could be heard by any of several federal appellate courts around the country. More important, the first appeal made to any court would likely determine the location or venue where the appeal would be heard. The DDT proponents knew they had done poorly in the DC Court of Appeals, so they wanted to get their appeal out of DC; surely the cotton belt would be best. So they were waiting for that door to open with an open telephone line to the 5th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Louisiana. We knew what they were up to, so we were determined to file our appeal very quickly with the US Court of Appeals for DC, where we had done very well. That was not a simple procedure. Cell phones did not exist in those days. The EPA administrator’s door opened, the papers came out, and both appeals were rushed to the respective courts of appeal. Not a second was wasted to see what was in the decision. EDF attorney Bill Butler flashed the appeal on a pay phone, which had an open line to another pay phone in the DC Court of Appeals building near the clerk’s office, where EDF secretary Marie Bauman filed the EDF appeal. Each side claimed it had gotten to its preferred appeals court first. The DDT proponents said the case would move to New Orleans for the appeal. Much controversy and confusion ensued. Finally, it was decided that the clocks were not properly synchronized and that EDF had won the rapid communication derby: The case would stay in Washington, DC.

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-184
Author(s):  
Amy Garrigues

On September 15, 2003, the US. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit held that agreements between pharmaceutical and generic companies not to compete are not per se unlawful if these agreements do not expand the existing exclusionary right of a patent. The Valley DrugCo.v.Geneva Pharmaceuticals decision emphasizes that the nature of a patent gives the patent holder exclusive rights, and if an agreement merely confirms that exclusivity, then it is not per se unlawful. With this holding, the appeals court reversed the decision of the trial court, which held that agreements under which competitors are paid to stay out of the market are per se violations of the antitrust laws. An examination of the Valley Drugtrial and appeals court decisions sheds light on the two sides of an emerging legal debate concerning the validity of pay-not-to-compete agreements, and more broadly, on the appropriate balance between the seemingly competing interests of patent and antitrust laws.


1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-205
Author(s):  
choeffel Amy

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld, in Presbyterian Medical Center of the University of Pennsylvania Health System v. Shalala, 170 F.3d 1146 (D.C. Cir. 1999), a federal district court ruling granting summary judgment to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) in a case in which Presbyterian Medical Center (PMC) challenged Medicare's requirement of contemporaneous documentation of $828,000 in graduate medical education (GME) expenses prior to increasing reimbursement amounts. DHHS Secretary Donna Shalala denied PMC's request for reimbursement for increased GME costs. The appellants then brought suit in federal court challenging the legality of an interpretative rule that requires requested increases in reimbursement to be supported by contemporaneous documentation. PMC also alleged that an error was made in the administrative proceedings to prejudice its claims because Aetna, the hospital's fiscal intermediary, failed to provide the hospital with a written report explaining why it was denied the GME reimbursement.


Author(s):  
Matthew D. Thibeault

In this article, I explore John Philip Sousa’s historic resistance to music technology and his belief that sound recordings would negatively impact music education and musical amateurism. I review Sousa’s primary arguments from two 1906 essays and his testimony to the US Congress from the same year, based on the fundamental premise that machines themselves sing or perform, severing the connection between live listener and performer and thus rendering recordings a poor substitute for real music. Sousa coined the phrase “canned music,” and I track engagement with this phrase among the hundreds of newspapers and magazines focused on Sousa’s resistance. To better understand the construction of Sousa’s beliefs, I then review how his rich musical upbringing around the US Marine Band and the theaters of Washington DC lead to his conception of music as a dramatic ritual. And I examine the curious coda of Sousa’s life, during which he recanted his beliefs and conducted his band for radio, finding that in fact these experiences reinforced Sousa’s worries. The discussion considers how Sousa’s ideas can help us better to examine the contemporary shift to digital music by combining Sousa’s ideas with those of Sherry Turkle.


F1000Research ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 157
Author(s):  
Yasir Sepah ◽  
Lubna Samad ◽  
Arshad Altaf ◽  
Muhammad Sohail Halim ◽  
Nithya Rajagopalan ◽  
...  

Aspiration during any kind of injection is meant to ensure that the needle tip is at the desired location during this blind procedure. While aspiration appears to be a simple procedure, it has generated a lot of controversy concerning the perceived benefits and indications. Advocates and opponents of aspiration both make logically sound claims. However, due to scarcity of available data, there is no evidence that this procedure is truly beneficial or unwarranted. Keeping in view the huge number of injections given worldwide, it is important that we draw attention to key questions regarding aspiration that, up till now, remain unanswered. In this review, we have attempted to gather and present literature on aspiration both from published and non-published sources in order to provide not only an exhaustive review of the subject, but also a starting point for further studies on more specific areas requiring clarification. A literature review was conducted using the US National Institute of Health’s PubMed service (including Medline), Google Scholar and Scopus. Guidelines provided by the World Health Organization, Safe Injection Global Network, International Council of Nursing, Center for Disease Control, US Federal Drug Agency, UK National Health Services, British Medical Association, Europe Nursing and Midwifery Council, Public Health Agency Canada, Pakistan Medical Association and International Organization of Standardization recommendations 7886 parts 1-4 for sterile hypodermics were reviewed for relevant information. In addition, curricula of several medical/nursing schools from India, Nigeria and Pakistan, the US pharmacopeia Data from the WHO Program for International Drug Monitoring network in regard to adverse events as a result of not aspirating prior to injection delivery were reviewed. Curricula of selected major medical/nursing schools in India, Nigeria and Pakistan, national therapeutic formularies, product inserts of most commonly used drugs and other possible sources of information regarding aspiration and injections were consulted as well.


1989 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-432 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Eleanor Innes

The social indicators movement has been a disappointment to its originators. By the late 1970s, at least in the US, the great hopes for social indicators to become a major influence on public policy had been tempered. The outpouring of literature using the term ‘social indicators’ dwindled. Policy scientists turned their attention to other topics or found new labels for their interests. The Social Science Research Council closed its Social Indicators Research Center in Washington, DC and stopped publishing its newsletter. And in the US no annual social report seemed likely to be institutionalized. Many observers decided the social indicators movement was a failure.


Author(s):  
Heikki Pihlajamäki ◽  
Marju Luts-Sootak

Legal transfers (or transplants, receptions) of legal phenomena sometimes take place even within one single realm. This especially applies to the conglomerate states of the early modern period where different regions of one realm often had different laws and legal cultures. Livland – covering roughly the northern part of present-day Latvia and the southern part of Estonia – became part of Sweden through the Treaty of Altmark in 1629. From the social and political viewpoint, Livland was vastly distinct from Sweden proper. Livland was a feudal society par excellence, a land with mighty land-owning magnates and a peasantry tied to the land. Sweden, in turn, came late in developing feudal structures. The legal culture in Livland also differed vastly from that of Sweden proper. Since the Middle Ages, a German-speaking nobility and citizenry had settled in Livland. This brought the same legal order and judicial proceedings to Livland that were in effect in other northern German regions. This, among other things, meant that Livland participated in the reception of Roman law, which never influenced Sweden to the same extent. The model of the Swedish high court, such as it was created in Stockholm in 1614, was duplicated in other parts of the realm, including the Livonian court in Dorpat in 1630. The statutes regulating the Dorpat High Court were similar to those governing the Svea High Court, albeit with some differences. The most important of those differences was that the Livonian courts, including the Dorpat High Court, were to follow different legal sources than the courts in Sweden proper. In Livland, local law, the German gemeines Recht and the European ius commune were all accepted as binding legal sources. The differences in practice were more significant than those in the statutes. The Livonian court turned out to be less of an appeals court than the Svea High Court. In Livland, the access of peasants to the appeals court was effectively barred because their cases were rarely heard even in the lower courts – they were heard in the manorial courts instead, which survived under Swedish rule. In comparison to Sweden proper, judicial culture in Livland was in the hands of learned lawyers to a far greater extent, who dominated both civil procedure and accusatorial criminal procedure. In both categories, the procedure was written and dominated by lawyers. Although learned discussions took place at the Svea Court as well, in Dorpat, learned judicial culture was taken a step further. In criminal procedure, clearly the biggest difference was that judicial torture was living law in Livland until the 1680s, with the High Court giving formal permission for the lower courts to apply torture. In Sweden, torture emerged in the early seventeenth century, but was never legalised. The high court of appeals was a phenomenon, which came in many shapes and sizes. The same idea was transferred from one realm to another, and the same basic structure was multiplied within the realms. The products of legal transfer, the courts in action, could turn out differently, however. This often happened deliberately, as the idea of a high court sometimes needed tailoring to suit particular local circumstances. Sometimes the product took a different shape unexpectedly, because the local circumstances simply made it different. This could even happen within one and the same realm.


Paper Trails ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 53-74
Author(s):  
Cameron Blevins

During the 1860s and 1870s the US Post underwent a period of breakneck, unstable expansion in the western United States. Chapter 3 details the efforts of postal administrators to track all of these changes through a new mapmaking initiative under a cartographer named Walter Nicholson. The Topographer’s Office offers a window into the efforts of government officials in Washington, DC, to administer the nation’s western periphery. Nicholson’s postal maps were highly sought after across the federal government, offering valuable spatial information about the region that was often in short supply. Yet the struggles of Nicholson and his employees to keep pace with the never-ending flurry of changes to the region’s postal network is a testament to the ongoing barriers to centralized oversight imposed by the geography of the American West.


2021 ◽  
pp. 171-207
Author(s):  
Steven W. Usselman

Based on statistical and textual analysis of the 148 patent cases heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals from its creation through 1925, this chapter suggests that the appeals judges created a legal environment highly favorable to innovative West Coast enterprises. Their rulings consistently sided with local patent holders and alleged infringers over litigants from outside the circuit. Cases involving only local parties produced more mixed results, as judges sought to mediate disputes among competing regional suppliers, while insulating small proprietors from risks of infringement. Through these means, the appeals court actively shaped competition and influenced the course of innovation in such emergent fields as oil drilling and refining, hydraulic machinery, and food processing. The distinctiveness of Pacific Coast patent law diminished after 1915 under influence of a federal judiciary stacked with protégés of ex-President William Howard Taft, who became Chief Justice in 1921.


Author(s):  
Nancy K. Bristow

In 1972 the families of Phillip Gibbs, James Earl Green, and three students injured in the Jackson State shootings, filed suit against Mississippi, its former governor, the city of Jackson and its mayor, leadership of both the highway patrol and city police, and the patrolmen and policemen who had fired their weapons. White defense attorneys worked to recast the police and Jackson’s white citizens as the shooting’s victims and coupled presumed black criminality with accusations about civil rights activism. Jackson’s black community was not surprised when the all-white jury found for the defendants. A federal appeals court disagreed, finding law enforcement officers had overreacted in an “excessive and unjustifiable use of force” but maintained no damages could be paid because the state and its officers were protected by “sovereign immunity.” When the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case, the last legal recourse of the Jackson State victims ended.


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