<p> The European recognition of a Right to be Forgotten and the legal debate surrounding it has exposed fundamental differences between the protection of personal privacy in the United States and Europe. The international character of the World Wide Web and the Internet elevates this debate to more than an academic discussion: it has important consequences for American-European relations when it comes to international trade, protection of intellectual property rights, and even national security. In my research I ask if a path dependence analysis can shed a new light on the American rejection of the inclusion of the European Right to be Forgotten into privacy law. I use the distinction between the &ldquo;liberty&rdquo; conception of privacy and the &ldquo;dignity&rdquo; conception of privacy that has been identified by previous authors. With developments in privacy law in several European jurisdictions as a contrast, I trace the American development of privacy protection and I identify the critical junctions and reinforcing mechanisms that put it at odds with the Right to be Forgotten. My analysis shows that the American &ldquo;liberty&rdquo; conception of privacy does not allow for accepting the European Right to be Forgotten into the American legal framework, because the United States uses a different system for protecting privacy of individuals. Under this framework, the right to privacy is clearly fenced off from other rights, whereas in Europe, several rights may collide and a balancing test between these individual rights will be employed. The Right to be Forgotten was born in the context of this balancing test. My path dependence analysis shows that the American &ldquo;liberty&rdquo; conception of privacy rights leaves no room for a balance against other individual rights and thus no room for the Right to be Forgotten. My prediction is, however, that a different, more restricted version of the Right to be Forgotten will find its way into the American legal system at some point.</p>

<p> Seventeen states allow for a judicial peremptory challenge of a trial judge. Seven of these states require that a new judge be assigned to the case without any showing of bias, prejudice or impartiality. The remaining ten states require some showing, primarily through an affidavit or certification, which meets requirements set forth by the statute or rule. Distinctions between the various challenge procedures were examined. State jurisprudence addressing the competing constitutional principles of maintaining a litigant&rsquo;s right to a fair and impartial tribunal and the presumption of a trial judge&rsquo;s impartiality was examined within the context of the doctrine of separation of powers, improper delegation of judicial power, and analogies to the peremptory strike of a juror. Having found no constitutional infirmities, except perhaps under circumstances unique to the evolution of a state&rsquo;s particular rule or statute, the decision of whether to remove by a peremptory challenge a presumptively impartial judge should be left to the policy branch of government&mdash;the legislature.</p>

<p> Lower court compliance with the superior courts is now a norm in the judicial system of the United States. This dissertation will examine the development of the Supreme Court's ability to influence the decisions by lower courts. My general theory is that lower court compliance with the Supreme Court became more of a certainty as the federal judicial system developed statutorily, particularly after 1875. I will test the impact that three judicial reforms had (and continue to have) on Supreme Court power over lower courts: the Jurisdiction and Removal Act of 1875, the Judiciary Act of 1891, and the Judges Act of 1925. These reforms, I will argue, added characteristics to the judicial system that help predict compliance, all of which are still present in the system and can be shown to have an effect on compliance in contemporary times. These characteristics include the availability of federal forums for the implementation of constitutional policies, the authoritative communication of Court policies by intermediate courts to trial level courts, and the ability of the Court to select cases that allow it the opportunity to announce clear policy. </p><p> To test my theory, I will use a variety of historically important Supreme Court policies and employ a coding scheme for lower court cases to test whether a case presents an instance of compliance or non-compliance with the specific Supreme Court policy.</p>

<p> While justices of the U.S. Supreme Court routinely claim they do not deliver speeches to audiences outside the Court, or that the content of their remarks is unimportant, scholars have long recognized that the justices speak frequently off the bench. Despite this recognition, studies of judicial speech view it largely as a potential transgression of legal norms, risking the images of neutrality and independence that are widely seen as the primary bases of the Court&rsquo;s legitimacy; few studies have explored judicial speech in any detail, and surprisingly little is known about the actual content of the justices&rsquo; speeches. In this dissertation, I pose two primary questions: first, what do the justices say, and second, what does the content of judicial speech tell us about institutional legitimacy? Reviewing approximately 400 speeches by the justices of the Warren Court (1953&ndash;1969), I find the justices&rsquo; speeches generally appear as any one of four primary themes: advocating future policy and signaling outside actors to prepare for implementation, in advance of a major ruling by the Court; defending the Court&rsquo;s rulings on the basis of projecting favorable images of democracy abroad; defending the Court&rsquo;s rulings on the basis of constitutional claims and understandings and defending against broader attacks on judicial authority, such as court-curbing legislation; and last, articulating idealized visions of democracy and future politics. Further, I find evidence of these themes in the speeches of the justices of the Roberts Court in 2012. Contrary to the judicial &ldquo;lockjaw&rdquo; conception of speech as a threat to neutrality and legitimacy, I find judicial speech, while shaped by legal norms, frequently draws upon values and structures associated with democracy, enabling the justices to rework and construct political narratives about the Court and its rulings in speeches that attend to the Court&rsquo;s institutional legitimacy.</p>

<p> WebSig is a digital signature scheme for the web that uses Resource Description Framework (RDF) graphs to express its documents, document metadata, and signature data in a way that leverages existing trustable digital signature schemes to create signatures on computable documents that are trustable and minimally repudiable. WebSig is a proof of concept that shows that a digital signature scheme for RDF can be trustable across any possible representation of an RDF document and minimize the opportunities for repudiation of those signatures. We demonstrate this by showing how digital signature scheme that are attributable, verifiable, linkable, revisable, and portable, are also computable and trustable digital signature schemes. We also introduce evaluation criteria for those five qualities and demonstrate how WebSig provides all five. WebSig supports the verifiable signing of any RDF graph through the use of another contribution, the Functional Requirements for Information Resources (FRIR) information identity framework. FRIR is a provenance-driven identity framework that can provide interrelated identities for RDF graphs and other information resources. The RDF Graph Digest Algorithm 1 (RGDA1), a third contribution, provides an algorithm that can create platform-independent, cryptographically secure, reproducible identifiers for all RDF graphs. FRIR and the RGDA1 both supply the means to securely identify the signed document and any supporting RDF graphs, and are essential to supplying all five qualities needed to provide computable and trustable signatures. WebSig builds off of existing technologies and vocabularies from the domains of cryptography, computer security, semantic web services, semantic publishing, library science, and provenance.</p><p> This dissertation&rsquo;s contributions will be presented as follows: 1) Sufficiency proof that attributable, verifiable, portable, linkable, revisable digital signature schemes are trustable, computable, and minimally repudiable; 2) Functional Requirements for Information Resources (FRIR), a provenance-enabled, trustable, computable identity framework for information resources; 3) experimental evidence that RDF Graph Digest Algorithm 1 (RGDA1) provides reproducible identifiers for all RDF graphs in average case polynomial time; and 4) WebSig, a framework that lets users create legally-binding electronic documents that are both trustable and computable.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Princeton University, 2006. / (UnM)AAI3208880. Adviser: Keith Whittington. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-02, Section: A, page: 0701.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves - ). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thèse--Université de Lyon. / Issued also without thesis note. "Index bibliographique": p. [vii]-xv.

Thesis (PH.D.)--Syracuse University, 2003. / "Publication number AAT 3081634."

<p> Traditional democratic political theorists promote the idea that Supreme Court exercises of judicial review create a <i>counter-majoritarian difficulty </i>, theoretically threatening the foundation of American democracy. Nevertheless, Alexander M. Bickel and other writers, while accepting this premise, seek to reconcile the judicial review power with democratic principles. This thesis rejects the existence of a <i>difficulty</i>. It proposes a historically-based approach for studying democratic theory which considers the elective reality among state judiciaries, and then including these judges&rsquo; decision making in theoretical discussions. The fact that state court judges are subject to popular vote earns them a substantial degree of democratic legitimacy because they are closer to people than appointed federal counterparts. They more frequently adjudicate common issues affecting peoples&rsquo; everyday lives, and they far outnumber U.S. Supreme Court Justices. These predominantly elected judges also interact with the public when they periodically step into the political arena to engage in campaign activities (i.e., election, re-election, or retention). </p><p> The pervasive nature of the state judicial role and judge elections acquaint the populace with who these judges are and what they do in ways that are unimaginable for the few and remote Supreme Court appointees. As a result, the thesis questions theorists&rsquo; proclivity to analyze the counter-majoritarian issue by considering only the Supreme Court&rsquo;s potential impact on the public sentiment. The Supreme Court lens, it will be argued, is too narrow and unrepresentative of the many and complex state court decisions that result in social control and regularly impact the public mind. This thesis remedies the omission of state court decisions from the analysis. </p><p> As a part of this investigation, the thesis reviews the nineteenth century transformation of the state judicial office from a legislatively-appointed position to one that became subject to popular vote. During the post-Jacksonian era of democratization, state constitution makers committed to remake state governments by rescuing their political institutions from the claws of the ill-fated experiment of legislatively dominant state governments. Recurrent economic depression, poverty, and instances of government corruption early in the century, led voters to demand fundamental reform. Leading into the 1850s, reformers accepted the important truth that the dominant-legislative model lacked needed checks and balances against public abuse. They slowly recognized that a balanced tripartite system was essential for effective governance. </p><p> Judiciaries needed to be strengthened if judges were going to assist in securing roughly balanced state government. Abandoning appointments and embracing judicial review and elections led to needed separation and independence of judiciaries from adjoining branches. These reforms also empowered judges to oversee and maintain adjoining branches within newly defined constitutional spending and lawmaking limits. This also bolstered the ability of judges to protect individual rights against government intrusion. Newly empowered judiciaries thus promoted governmental equilibrium against legislatures and executives whose powers were also more clearly defined. Understanding these reforms holds a key to recognizing the taming of formerly dominant legislatures. Considering this combination of changes also reveals how apparently divergent elements (i.e., elections and review power) may be reasonably credited with saving state governments from ruinous corruption and promoting democratic legitimacy. The proposed state-centric analytic model requires theorists to reconsider prior approaches to democratic political theory, including the federal Supreme Court view. The refocus on state court decision making and elections permits more precise consideration of crucial questions. For example, it is important to see, and document, the extent to which American courts exercise consequential judicial review, and to appreciate whether the public actually sees such exercises as problematic, as the Supreme Court view asserts. This approach also helps to illuminate how judges&rsquo; participation in campaigns affects public views of legitimacy. The proposed approach offers a richer evidence-base (i.e., state court exercises of the power) on which to base assertions about whether judicial review (and elections)&mdash;rather than being a deviant force&mdash;actually harmonizes democracy with the American system for the fair administration of justice.</p><p>