A new study by Harvard law professor Richard J. Lazarus found Sotomayor has not been assigned a major case in her six terms on the court. Roberts Jr. is, as The Washington Post put it, “a stickler for evenly distributing the workload of the Supreme Court, but he plays favorites among his eight colleagues when assigning the court’s most important decisions.” In particular, Roberts plays favorites with Roberts, assigning more key cases to himself than any other justice.   read more

The delay is “nearly without precedent over the last half-century,” according to Eric Ostermeier at Smart Politics. The 220-day vacancy will be “more than twice as long as the average vacancy among the 219 to occur in the chamber since 1965 and the second longest of the 123 vacancies to fall outside of an election year.” It will not be the longest vacancy since the 1960s, however. That distinction still belongs to Illinois’ 6th district, which went 447 days without a congressman.   read more

Disorders associated with marijuana use, including addiction, car accidents and emergency room visits, went up, from 1.5% to 2.9%. Young users were a particular concern of researchers. “When examined by age, young adults were at highest risk for marijuana use disorder in both surveys” said the study. "Clearly, concerns about this age group continue, with prevention and intervention...critically needed.” Nearly three of 10 marijuana users manifested a marijuana use disorder in 2012-2013.   read more

One of the more unusual explanations was filed by Representative Jeff Landry (R-Louisiana), who missed two votes in 2011 because, he said, he “completely lost track of time.” Representative Raúl Grijalva (D-Arizona) once missed a vote because he was arrested at an immigration rally on the National Mall. The congressman who has missed the most votes—22% of them—is Bobby Rush (D-Illinois), who was undergoing cancer treatment.   read more

One space law attorney believes that the U.S. is on shaky ground by giving any citizen or company permission to own space property. “It would be like you asking me for a piece of pie, and me saying, go over to my neighbor’s house and take a piece of their pie, and then come back and thank me for it,” said attorney Michael Listner, founder of Space Law and Policy Solutions. The bill also makes it illegal for mining companies to take ownership of any aliens it crosses paths with.   read more

Female defendants might get more lenient treatment when they conform to the traditional gender roles of housewife and mother, the researchers hypothesized. The study's authors found support for the “evil woman” theory, which suggests that this “chivalry” is reserved for certain groups of women who appear to be docile and in need of protection. The researchers also found women were 46% less likely to be detained before trial than men, with women given 54% lower bond amounts.   read more

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but national security is given as the reason for keeping some inventions a secret. Under the Invention Secrecy Act of 1951, the U.S. government can impose secrecy orders on patent applications if officials decide granting and publishing a patent would compromise national security. Statistics collected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office showed there were 95 new secrecy orders imposed last year. The government also rescinded 36 secrecy orders.   read more

Janice Rivera claimed Gomez held her against her will and pointed his weapon at the three men at the scene, striking one of them with his gun. Criminal charges against Gomez were eventually dismissed. But he was fired by his employer, prompting Gomez to sue the NYPD for false arrest, physical abuse and other claims. While the case was still making its way through the courts, Gomez was deployed to Afghanistan. When Gomez was out of the country his attorney, Trevor Reid, agreed to a settlement.   read more

The women claimed they were selected to help with the chauffeuring because they were told it would be “elegant” for females to drive “ladies and kids.” But then they were fired because the prince, who was then a deputy defense minister, reportedly wanted “no women drivers.” They were replaced by male chauffeurs. The women then sued Abdul-Aziz and Elbashir. The prince never responded to the lawsuit, and Elbashir quickly stopped responding as well.   read more

Contractor Kingsley discovered the offshoring and warned the Russian-made software made it possible for the Pentagon’s communications systems to be infected with viruses. He said Netcracker used the Russians because they worked for a third of the cost of U.S. programmers. "Numerous viruses were loaded onto the DISA network as a result of code written by the Russian programmers and installed...in the DISA secure system,” said Kingsley.   read more

“By making next year’s election a national holiday, President Obama would signal a strong national commitment to voting and help serve as a counter-balance to the 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the historic Voting Rights Act,” the groups said. “Since this decision, nearly every state has introduced bills to make voting harder...through discriminatory voter ID bills or drastic cuts to early voting days, same-day registration, and other suppressive measures.”   read more

From the 1950s through the 1980s, the number of “floating voters,” or swing voters, amounted to between 10% and 15% of the voting public. That figure has now fallen to about 5%, according to “Polarization and the Decline of the American Floating Voter” by Michigan State political scientist Corwin Smidt. He found that voters currently have stronger identification with political parties and are more consistently loyal to them.   read more

The problem was brought into sharp relief last year when a Tulalip boy killed four fellow students and himself with his father’s gun. The father, who had a restraining order against him, shouldn’t have been able to buy the gun but the order was never entered into federal databases."People with criminal records have been known to go from reservation to reservation. Without a one-stop place for information sharing, we’re all kind of working in the blind,” said tribal chairman Sheldon.   read more

The states with the highest death rates also have higher speed limits. All have top speed limits of at least 70 mph and some, like Montana, have top limits of 80 mph. For a time in the 1990s, Montana had no top speed limit, merely requiring motorists to drive in a “reasonable and prudent manner.” The researchers also found that states with poorer and less-educated populations had higher road death rates than those having populations with higher incomes and more education.   read more

There seems to be a disconnect between Americans’ perception of crime rates and the actual amount of crime in the United States. A new Gallup poll showed 70% of respondents believe crime has gone up since last year, when 63% said crime had risen from 2013 levels. But government data has shown a downward trend in crime rates from the mid-1990s to the current decade. Americans’ perceptions of crime “are not always on par with reality," said Gallup's Justin McCarthy.   read more

Researchers looked at the effects of people staying indoors and exposed to indoor pollution. Two dozen participants spent six eight-hour workdays in an environmentally controlled office space for the study. Some days they were exposed to conventional office building environments, which tend to have high concentrations of VOCs. Other days they remained in green office buildings with low VOC concentrations. “The results were striking,” wrote Reynard Loki.   read more