Lawyers for the seven claimants accuse the government of adopting an "extreme and unprecedented" position.
In a Supreme Court brief, the 26 states challenging the law describe the expansion of Medicaid as "an extreme and unprecedented abuse of Congress's spending power".
As Greenberg points out, this was "an extreme and unprecedented position, one with sweeping consequences for all laws, both military and civilian, concerning the treatment of prisoners".
Another new paper also published in Geophysical Research Letters by scientists at the University of California, Irvine likewise recognizes the extreme and unprecedented nature of California's current drought, and focuses on the risks that these events pose in the present and future.
Appearing with Representative Vitali, Dr. Mann criticized those who would deny climate change and mankind's responsibility for it, even in the face of recent weather extremes "One often hears the misleading claim that no single event, regardless of how extreme or unprecedented, can be blamed on climate change," he said.
In a response that typifies Republican reaction to Obama's unilateral moves, former Republican Attorneys General Edwin Meese and John Ashcroft called the move "an extreme and unprecedented deviation from the historical norm".
"What we just witnessed was an extreme, virtually unprecedented action based on election year politics rather than fact," Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the oversight panel, said in a statement.
"But the fact that we're talking about not just extreme but unprecedented conditions — mid- to upper 70s over a large swath of the eastern US on Christmas Eve, something we haven't seen before — speaks to the exacerbating effects of human-caused climate change".
The problems in Boston were extreme but not unprecedented.
Many commentators have suggested that we are suffering from unprecedented extreme weather.
