Nanomedicine is yielding new and improved treatments and diagnostics for a range of diseases and disorders. Nanomedicine applications incorporate materials and components with nanoscale dimensions (often defined as 1-100 nm, but sometimes defined to include dimensions up to 1000 nm, as discussed further below) where novel physiochemical properties emerge as a result of size-dependent phenomena and high surface-to-mass ratio. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics are a subset of nanomedicine products that enter the human body. These include drugs, biological products (biologics), implantable medical devices, and combination products that are designed to function in the body in ways unachievable at larger scales. Nanotherapeutics and in vivo nanodiagnostics incorporate materials that are engineered at the nanoscale to express novel properties that are medicinally useful. These nanomedicine applications can also contain nanomaterials that are biologically active, producing interactions that depend on biological triggers. Examples include nanoscale formulations of insoluble drugs to improve bioavailability and pharmacokinetics, drugs encapsulated in hollow nanoparticles with the ability to target and cross cellular and tissue membranes (including the bloodbrain barrier) and to release their payload at a specific time or location, imaging agents that demonstrate novel optical properties to aid in locating micrometastases, and antimicrobial and drug-eluting components or coatings of implantable medical devices such as stents.

I seek to counter a view commonly held by scholars that the Burger Court is pragmatic in its constitutional choices in contrast to the Warren Court, which is viewed as ideological. I propose a methodology to study the effects of process values and rights values held by members of the Burger Court on their decision making. To view its decision making as pragmatic, without awareness of underlying values of process and rights, results in an oversimplified view and leads to the unwarranted conclusion that the Burger Court is case-specific in making constitutional choices. I limit my discussion to separation of church and state cases, primarily in the area of aid to parochial education, because traditionally scholars have emphasized the pragmatic nature of Burger Court choices in this area. A finding of consistency of values in justices' orientations in this area suggests that the methodology reported here might have general utility in the study of Supreme Court decision making.

Robert Kagan has three main objectives in writing this book: to demonstrate that the American systems of criminal and civil law, social welfare, and environmental regulation are dominated by “adversarial legalism,” to critique and explain why it has taken hold in the United States, and to make proposals for reform in light of findings in the United States and the advanced capitalist nations of Europe, the Commonwealth, and Japan.