Scholars have devoted a great deal of research to investigating the role and influence of the U.S. solicitor general (SG) as amicus curiae in the Supreme Court. Yet, we know little about the SG's decision to file an amicus brief and how this relates to the SG's success on the merits. We fill this void by examining legal, political, and administrative factors that affect the SG's decision to participate as amicus curiae. We subject our hypotheses to empirical testing using data on the 1953 to 1999 Supreme Court terms by linking the SG's decision to file an amicus brief to the SG's ultimate success on the merits, employing a Heckman-style selection model. We find that the SG's decision to file an amicus brief is influenced by legal, political, and administrative considerations, suggesting that the SG is best viewed through the incorporation of a variety of theoretical perspectives.

The power to nominate and confirm federal judges is shared by Congress and the president, yet few works explicitly address the role that Congress plays in shaping the preselection pool for judicial nominees. In this article, we illuminate this debate by exploring judicial nomination requests from Members of Congress to the Eisenhower and Ford Administrations. In explaining who is nominated, the characteristics of the nominee matter more than the characteristics of the nominator, with the party affiliation of a nominee being the strongest predictive factor. Institutional characteristics are more prevalent at the confirmation stage, where the Senate relied more heavily on its members and the judicial experience of nominees than did presidents in nominating them. Given our results, partisanship appears to have mattered earlier than presumed in judicial nominations, with even ostensibly nonpartisan presidents such as Eisenhower understanding the importance of appointing like-minded individuals to lifetime positions on the bench.

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Trauma in the formative years of life often leads to deleterious consequences. Effective treatment of traumatized children and adolescent is of paramount importance. A mental health professional must be equipped with special expertise to deal with this problem. To work with traumatized children and adolescent is difficult. It is often a team work incorporating different approaches. A professional in isolation will not be able to offer effective services to these group of people.When a traumatized child, feels that he has no control of a situation, he will predictably get more symptomatic. If a child is given some choice or some element of control in an activity or in an interaction, he will feel safer, comfortable and will be able to feel, think and act in a positive way. The book "Children and Adolescent in Trauma: Creative Therapeutic approaches" offers insight into this baffling subject.The editor of this book, Chris Nicholson, is a lecturer in the Centre for psychoanalytic studies at the University of Essex. Nicholson has vast experience of working in a range of Children's service. Michael Erwin is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Kent. Kedar Nath Dwivedi is a visiting professor at the London Metropolitan University and Director of the International Institute of Child and Adolescent Mental Health. Formerly he served as a consultant child psychiatrist at Northampton General Hospital. The contributors of this book also include psychotherapist, psychiatric nurse and manager of inpatient adolescent unit and art therapist. So, the vast experiences of these professionals working with traumatized children are put together in this comprehensive book.