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Dilemmas of civil war -- The shape of dictatorship -- Komuch -- The politics of the Eastern Front -- Between Red and White -- The end of the Party of Socialist Revolutionaries -- "Renegades of Socialism" and the making of Bolshevik political culture

During the 1996 term, the United States Supreme Court made a candid confession about its voting practices. In Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida, the Court overruled Pennsylvania v. Union Gas Co. and recognized that when a justice defers to the majority against his or her own reasoning inconclusive precedent results. Union Gas was particularly unusual because Justice White switched his vote to assure a result in a three-remedy case where none of the three remedies had the support of a majority. In Seminole Tribe, the Court admitted Union Gas "has, since its issuance, been of questionable precedential value, largely because a majority of the Court expressly disagreed with the rationale of the plurality." Accordingly, the Court recognized the problems created when a justice votes against his or her own reasoning to ensure a result. While scholars frequently have analyzed the strategic voting practices of legislators, similar analysis of voting on judicial panels is relatively new. Frank Easterbrook was the first scholar to apply Arrow's Theorem systematically to the Supreme Court's voting practice, and several scholars followed his lead. After Justice White's vote in Union Gas, Professor John Rogers warned the Court against abdicating its role as a reasoned decision maker. He concluded, however, that the contradictory vote in Union Gas was aberrational. More recently, Professors David Post and Steven Salop published an article encouraging multimember courts to abandon their traditional practice of outcome voting and instead to adopt a system of issue voting.' Shortly thereafter, Professors Lewis Kornhauser and Lawrence Sager urged appellate courts to adopt neither outcome voting nor issue voting as a rule. Rather, they suggested appellate courts should take a metavote on whether outcome or issue voting should control each case." Professor Maxwell Stearns advanced the debate over appellate court voting in a trilogy of articles published over the past two years. These articles apply social choice theory to the ...

Congress enacted the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act ('EMTALA" or "the Act") in 1986 to prevent hospi- tals from "dumping" patients due to an improper economic motive. Patient dumping occurs when a hospital emergency room either refuses to admit an indigent and uninsured patient with an emergency condition or improperly transfers this patient to another hospital. Congress enacted EMTALA in response to the widespread practice of hospitals dumping indigent and uninsured patients. Yet despite the Act's explicit legislative intent to prevent patient dumping, the language of EMTALA extends protection to "any individual" who enters a hospital's emergency room. Initially, EMTALA requires hospitals to provide emergency patients with an "appropriate medical screening examination." If the patient is diagnosed with an "emergency medical condition," the hospital must either stabilize the patient's condition or transfer the patient after fulfilling several statutory requirements. As a result of the inconsistency between the Act's legislative intent and its broad language, the federal courts have used two different standards to define a cause of action under EMTALA. Several federal district courts have narrowly construed the Act in light of its legislative history, allowing a cause of action only in cases involving economic dumping. On the other hand, the federal circuit courts have broadly applied EMTALA's statutory language, permitting "any individual" who alleges improper medical treatment to sue under the statute. This judicial expansion of the Act has encroached upon other federal laws enacted to remedy instances of non-economic discrimination. Congress designed EMTALA to remedy economic discrimination against indigent and uninsured patients by hospitals; yet, most federal courts have overlooked the Act's legislative purpose by allowing paying patients to challenge their emergency treatment under the Act. Thus the federal courts have done little to improve indigent patients' access to emergency care. ...