Digital Commons Network^™

Redefining Reproductive Rights And Justice, Leah Litman

Michigan Law Review

Review of Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories edited by Melissa Murray, Katherine Shaw, and Reva B. Siegel.

The Misplaced Trust In The Doj's Expertise On Criminal Justice Policy, Shon Hopwood

Michigan Law Review

Review of Rachel Elise Barkow's Prisoners of Politics: Breaking the Cycle of Mass Incarceration.

Books Have The Power To Shape Public Policy, Barbara Mcquade

Michigan Law Review

In our digital information age, news and ideas come at us constantly and from every direction—newspapers, cable television, podcasts, online media, and more. It can be difficult to keep up with the fleeting and ephemeral news of the day.

Books, on the other hand, provide a source of enduring ideas. Books contain the researched hypotheses, the well-developed theories, and the fully formed arguments that outlast the news and analysis of the moment, preserved for the ages on the written page, to be discussed, admired, criticized, or supplanted by generations to come.

And books about the law, like the ones reviewed …

Judging Judicial Elections, Michael S. Kang, Joanna M. Shepherd

Michigan Law Review

Melinda Gann Hall’s new book Attacking Judges: How Campaign Advertising Influences State Supreme Court Elections suggests what seems impossible to many of us—a powerful defense of today’s partisan judicial elections. As judicial races hit new levels of campaign spending and television advertising, there has been a flood of criticism about the increasing partisanship, negativity, and role of money. In view of the “corrosive effect of money on judicial election campaigns” and “attack advertising,” the American Bar Association (ABA) recommends against judicial elections, which are currently used to select roughly 90 percent of state judges. Justice O’Connor, who has championed judicial-election …

Purple Haze, Clare Huntington

Michigan Law Review

It takes only a glance at the headlines every political season-with battles over issues ranging from abortion and abstinence-only education to same-sex marriage and single parenthood-to see that the culture wars have become a fixed feature of the American political landscape. The real puzzle is why these divides continue to resonate so powerfully. In Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture, Naomi Cahn and June Carbone offer an ambitious addition to our understanding of this puzzle, illustrating pointedly why it is so hard to talk across the political divide. In a telling anecdote in the …

In Defense Of Lawyers, Geoffrey C. Hazard Jr.

Michigan Law Review

A Review of A Nation Under Lawyers: How the Crisis In the Legal Profession is Transforming American Society by Mary Ann Glendon

The Future Of Liberal Legal Scholarship, Ronald K.L. Collins, David M. Skover

Michigan Law Review

Earl Warren is dead.

A generation of liberal legal scholars continues, nevertheless, to act as if the man and his Court preside over the present. While this romanticism is understandable, it exacts a high price in a world transformed.

The following commentary is a reconstructive criticism written from the perspective of two liberals concerned about the future of "legal liberalism." We present our views as a commentary to emphasize their preliminary character; they represent our current assessment of where liberals stand and where they might redirect their energies.

A Job For The Judges: The Judiciary And The Constitution In A Massive And Complex Society, Neil K. Komesar

Michigan Law Review

This article attempts that task by exploring the elements of institutional choice in constitutional law. Part I takes an overview of the general division of decisionmaking responsibility between the political processes and the courts. It also examines the failures of existing theories to take account of this division of responsibility. Part II identifies two theories of political malfunction - those circumstances in which political processes are subject to significant doubt or distrust and, therefore, prime candidates for judicial review. Part III examines the characteristics - limits, biases, and abilities - of the judiciary and the potential for judicial response to …

Policymaking And Politics In The Federal District Courts, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Policymaking and Politics in the Federal District Courts by Robert A. Carp and C.K. Rowland

Urban Politics And The Criminal Courts, Milton Heumann

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Urban Politics and the Criminal Courts by Martin A. Levin

The Politics Of Federal Judicial Administration, Paul D. Carrington

Michigan Law Review

A Review of The Politics of Federal Judicial Administration by Peter Graham Fish

Legal Knowledge Of Michigan Citizens, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

This empirical study of the legal knowledge of Michigan citizens arose in response to the paucity of research in the area, especially in Michigan, where no such study had previously been conducted, and the contradictory findings of those earlier studies that had been conducted. Its findings may have implications for future efforts to educate the public and may provide some clues as to whether and why certain segments of the population are deficient in legal knowledge.

Mr. Justice Powell And The Emerging Nixon Majority, A.E. Dick Howard

Michigan Law Review

In recent years, we have come to expect the debate over Supreme Court nominations to reflect ideological passions in the Government and the country at large; the Fortas, Haynsworth, and Carswell cases remain fresh in memory. In the hearings on the nominations of Lewis F. Powell, Jr., and William H. Rehnquist to the Court, Senate Democratic liberals made clear their intention to probe not only the nominees' integrity and legal qualifications, but also their judicial philosophies. It was ironic, therefore, to watch as liberal members of the Judiciary Committee, through their questions and comments at the confirmation hearings, made Powell, …

The Warren Court And The Political Process, William M. Beaney

Michigan Law Review

Our complex political system creates endless opportunity to debate the proper roles and powers of each of our principal political institutions. Students of the Supreme Court who quarrel over the proper role of the Court sometimes forget that the powers of the President and the proper place of Congress have also been subject to fierce controversy throughout our history, and that the political tension between the national government and the states has provided a persistent theme from the beginning of the Republic. It must never be forgotten that the system provided by the Framers was not designed to produce efficient …

The Privy Council And Private Law In The Tudor And Stuart Periods: I, John P. Dawson

Michigan Law Review

It has been often said that the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England were pre-eminently the age of conciliar government. The activities of the Tudor Privy Council extended into every phase of national life and were responsible, more than any other single factor, for the effective organization of an English national state. These activities continued under the first two Stuarts, with no break in institutional development, though they widened the gulf between Crown and people and hastened a revolution.

The Courts, The Press, And The Public, Stuart H. Perry

Michigan Law Review

It was with especial gratification that I accepted this invitation to speak. It is a pleasure to be with you, and it affords me an opportunity to contribute to a discussion of matters that are of great importance to your profession and my own and to the public. Perhaps I should not thus separate myself from your profession. I am still at least nominally a member of the bar, and though it is many years since I last appeared in court I have a keen and sympathetic interest in legal matters and enjoy my contacts with the bench and bar …

Judges In The British Cabinet And The Struggle Which Led To Their Exclusion After 1806, Arthur Lyon Cross

Michigan Law Review

Among the anomalies in the queer and devious course of Eng- £ lish constitutional progress few have been more striking than the number of reforms which have been due to the Conservatives.. One of no little significance was brought about during that period of political stagnation-the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. This was the exclusion of judges from the Cabinet, as the result of a political struggle in which the forces of opposition, though temporarily defeated, formulated a policy which was destined henceforth to prevail.

The Recall And The Political Responsibility Of Judges, W. F. Dodd

Michigan Law Review

The movement for the recall of State officers is one which has became important only within the past three or four years. The first application of the recall as a modem institution in the United States appears to have been in Los Angeles in 19o3, where the institution was adopted in the amendment of the charter framed by that city. From Los Angeles the recall as applicable only to municipal officers spread to other California cities, and has now been rather widely adopted in other States. The first State constitutional amendment with respect to the recall, that of California in …