Montana recently joined Oregon and Washington as the only states in the nation to legalize the choice among terminally ill adults to hasten death by self-administering a lethal dose of drugs prescribed by a physician. Unlike Oregon and Washington, however, Montana's legalization of physician aid in dying (PAID) resulted not from public consideration of a statewide initiative, but from the judicial resolution of a lawsuit, Baxter v. Montana. As originally conceived, a trial judge reasoned that the unenumerated right to PAID is embraced by enumerated state constitutional rights to privacy and dignity. On appeal, Montana's supreme court jettisoned this construct, and, in its place, fashioned a legal home for PAID out of state homicide, consent defense, and end-of-life statutes. Central to this court's statutory rendering is the finding that state law, allowing terminally ill Montanans sustained by life support to withdraw such treatment and die, discriminates against terminally ill Montanans not sustained by life support who seek death; these classes are similar, the justices reckoned, entitling both to choose death. This analysis examines Montana's courting of PAID, offering textual examination of state trial and appellate court opinions, an accounting of legal strategies advanced in amici curiae briefs, and commentary about the problems and prospects with Baxter's holding. I argue, ultimately, that the equality principles statutorily conceived in Baxter (1) could be parroted in the vast majority of states that both criminalize assisted suicide and enumerate constitutional equal protection guarantees, and (2) could replace sub silentio the equal protection paradigm applied to “physician-assisted suicide” by the United States Supreme Court in its landmark Vacco v. Quill ruling.

This essay represents our latest annual update of the biopolitical literature and of related developments (see also Somit et al., 1980; Peterson, Somit, and Slagter, 1982; Peterson, Somit, and Brown, 1983; Peterson and Somit, 1984). Our count for 1984 is 78 items: 3 monographs or books (Axelrod, 1984; Blank 1984f; Vanhanen, 1984a), 13 articles, 2 chapters in a book, 44 conference papers, 16 review essays, commentaries, etc., and 0 master's theses or Ph.D. dissertations.

Tomonori Morikawa, James E. Hanley, and John Orbell have argued that natural selection leads populations who play Hawk-Dove, a game-theoretic stylization of confrontation, to develop the capacity for various “orders of recognition.” Such an argument requires a model linking game play to the presence or absence of various cognitive mechanisms. Morikawa and colleagues present such a model but, I argue, leave it incomplete, unable to sustain the conclusions they wish to defend. The development of a more fully specified model would significantly assist future studies of cognitive structures related to game play.

Despite the Supreme Court ruling in the Johnson Controls case that fetal protection policies that exclude women from workplaces deemed hazardous to the fetus are in clear violation of the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Amendment, the issue of fetal health remains on the policy agenda. This article summarizes the rationale behind fetal protection policies and the current scientific evidence over workplace hazards. It also discusses the disparate court response to these policies before Johnson Controls and the confusing regulatory framework. Finally, it makes a case for including consideration of the paternal contribution to fetal injury in the workplace and calls for a balanced approach to accommodate both women's rights to employment and society's interest in healthy children.

Under the ongoing monitoring and verification (OMV) program mandated by Security Council Resolution 715, the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM) has installed more than a hundred remote-controlled video cameras at Iraqi “dual-capable” facilities—that is, facilities that have legitimate commercial applications but that could also be misused to produce nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons and long-range ballistic missiles. Since January 1995, these cameras have collected optical data for analysis at UNSCOM's Baghdad Monitoring and Verification Center, located on the third floor of the former Canal Hotel (Smith, 1994).

The use of chemical and biological weapons on the battlefield is considered by most commentators — and by international law — as more abhorrent than the use of nearly all other weapons, including ones meant either to kill secretly or to kill terribly, as do fire or burial alive. I ask why this is so. I explore this question through the study of imagery patterns in Western literature and campaigns against food contamination and environmental pollution. I find that the norm against chemical and biological weapons builds upon a taboo against poisons, a prohibition widely accepted in military manuals as distinguishing soldierly conduct from criminal conduct, especially those forms of conduct made criminal by the employment of treachery, invisibility, and transformation.

Recent research contends that the behavioral immune system, operating largely outside conscious awareness, motivates individuals to exhibit higher levels of prejudice toward unfamiliar out-groups. This research finds that individual variance in disgust sensitivity correlates with support for political policies that facilitate the avoidance of out-groups. We were interested in developing less intrusive indicators of disgust sensitivity via olfactory measures (i.e., ratings of disgusting odors) and behavioral measures (e.g., willingness to touch disgusting objects) and studying the association between measures of disgust sensitivity and in-group bias among children and adults. We submitted a registered report to conduct this research and received an in-principle acceptance. Unfortunately, unforeseen events impaired our data collection, leaving us with a limited sample (nchildren = 32, nadults = 29) and reducing our ability to draw reliable conclusions from our results. In this essay, we describe our motivation and plan of research, the events that made completing the research impossible, and our preliminary results. In doing so, we hope to offer support for studying the effects of the behavioral immune system, even in ways that we did not originally plan. We conclude with a reflection on the value of registered reports for advancing science.

The Principle of Competitive Exclusion, first articulated by Gause in 1934, states that two species or populations cannot inhabit the same niche: one will consistently out-compete the other. Of four possible outcomes, the logistic equations that describe such interaction present only one possibility for coexistence, that being when the density-dependent mechanisms of one population become activated before intergroup competition eliminates the other. In applying Gause's Principle as an explanatory model to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this research explores the present bantustanization of the West Bank as a logical outcome of interspecific competition, but sees the competition coefficients of the equations as the key factors in promoting a stable equilibrium.