Mr. Wertheimer said that even a seemingly modest decision in the new case, one directed only at overall limits, could have radical consequences.
By contrast, Mr. Obama's modest decision last year, ably executed by Ms. Napolitano, to defer the deportations of thousands of young immigrants with clean records stands out as a model of sound policy and political courage.
It is true that the Union would not exist in its present form without the "méthode Monnet," as it is sometimes called, after Jean Monnet, Europe's founding father under whose guidance the first modest decisions about integrating the European coal and steel industry were taken in the early 1950s.
Only a modest number of decision support rules were triggered in our evaluation.
Only a modest number of clinical decision support rules were triggered for a collection of 943 public genetic profiles.
Because of the strict criteria we used, only a modest number of clinical decision support rules were triggered for the collection of 943 public genetic profiles: An average of 188 SNPs in each genetic profile matched one of the polymorphisms in the ontology, and nearly 6 decision support rules were, on average, triggered by each profile.
Another human rights lawyer, Carmen Hertz, called the decision today "a modest victory" for General Pinochet.
For about thirty minutes late on Friday, during a slightly shamefaced press conference announcing that the authorities had shut down all of Boston to catch a teenage fugitive and then failed to catch him, it looked like there might be a modest media backlash against the decision to put an entire American metropolis on lockdown to hunt a single bomber.
"The standstill decision is a modest victory for Time Warner Cable and other cable operators opposed to the provision, but the panel's denial of their free speech arguments represents a missed opportunity as it would have strengthened the cable industry's broader campaign against programming regulation," said Christopher King, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus Telecom Equity Research.
On this basis, we suggest that our results represent a modest first step toward understanding decision making in such complex but quotidian situations.
