The case of Bush v. Gore stands out as the seminal decision that
decided the disputed presidential election of 2000. For legal researchers, it was a herald of a different sort. With the citation in the per curiam opinion to an online newspaper article, Bush v. Gore fired the first salvo in the death of twentieth-century authority. While courts in the past relied on a select group of print resources, legal researchers today are moving towards a more internet-based research platform.

This Article will focus on the shift from traditional print-based authority to a more online and democratic way of using authority to create law. There are still pitfalls in this new world, but the death of traditional authority can be seen with some cautious optimism, because it allows practitioners to choose from a much larger base of authority than what used to be available.

For a substantial part of women’s lives, regulating fertility is a primary project. This Article depicts the life course of women’s procreative choice through a series of complex visual representations of data derived from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the National Survey of Family Growth 2002. These graphic representations illustrate that preventing procreation, through a variety of choices, including contraception, sterilization, abortion, abstinence, and partner choice, occupies most of a woman’s fertile years, as compared with childbirth.

On December 9, 2009, the Knesset voted to advance legislation requiring that the handover of any land under the administrative and judicial authority of the State of Israel pass a national referendum. The legislation—termed the Golan Heights and Jerusalem Referendum Bill—passed its first reading by a margin of sixty-eight to twenty-two (with one abstention). It now returns to committee for revisions and then must pass second and third readings, in a process that could take months.

If the bill becomes law, it is expected to impede Israel from ceding the Golan Heights to Syria in a peace treaty. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War and, in 1981, effectively annexed it over objections from the international community. Since then, the Golan Heights has been heavily developed by Israel and now many Israelis regard it as indispensable. For at least a decade, Israeli polls have shown strong popular resistance to a withdrawal from the Golan Heights, with nearly two-thirds of Israeli Jews in opposition.