Digital Commons Network^™

Combating Judicial Misconduct: A Stoic Approach, Michael D. Cicchini

Buffalo Law Review

Judicial ethics rules require criminal court judges to be competent, even-tempered, and impartial. In reality, however, many judges are grossly ignorant of the law, incredibly hostile toward the defense, and outright biased in favor of the state. Such acts of judicial misconduct pose serious problems for the criminal defense lawyer and violate many of the defendant’s statutory and constitutional rights.

This Article presents a framework for the defense lawyer to use in combating judicial misconduct. The approach is rooted in a principle of Stoic philosophy called “negative visualization.” That is, the lawyer should anticipate and visualize judicial incompetence, hostility, and …

Lawful Searches Incident To Unlawful Arrests: A Reform Proposal, Mark A. Summers

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Porous Bureaucracy: Legitimating The Administrative State In Taiwan, Anya Bernstein

Journal Articles

Scholars and politicians have sometimes presented bureaucracy as inherently conflicting with democracy. Notably, bureaucrats themselves are rarely consulted about that relationship. In contrast, I draw on interviews and participant observation to illuminate how government administrators understand their own place in democratic government in Taiwan, one of the few successful third-wave democracies. The administrators I work with root their own legitimacy not in separated powers or autonomous expertise, but in their ongoing collaboration with legislators and publics. They define their own accountability not just as executive legislative mandates but as producing them in the first place, and figure bureaucracy as a …

Attorney-Client Privilege: Expanding The Crime-Fraud Exception To Intentional Torts, Stacy Kochanowski

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Nondelegation And The Major Questions Doctrine: Displacing Interpretive Power, Marla D. Tortorice

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Drying Up The Slippery Slope: A New Approach To The Second Amendment, Stephanie Cooper Blum

Buffalo Law Review

Few issues are as divisive as guns in American society. In 2017, gun deaths in the United States reached their highest level in nearly forty years. The status quo is untenable as many gun rights groups feel that gun regulations are just a first step in a slippery slope of undermining the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms for self-defense. Conversely, many gun violence prevention activists insist that reasonable regulations concerning public safety can co-exist with the right to bear arms. This quagmire will never abate because on many levels both sides are right. For over 200 years, the courts …

Beyond Human Rights: The Legal Status Of The Individual In International Law. By Anne Peters. Cambridge, Uk: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. Xxxv, 602. Index, Tara J. Melish

Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

‘Otro Mundo Es Posible’: Tempering The Power Of Immigration Law Through Activism, Advocacy, And Action, Susan Bibler Coutin

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Transformative Constitutions And The Role Of Integrity Institutions In Tempering Power: The Case Of Resistance To State Capture In Post-Apartheid South Africa, Heinz Klug

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Transnational Law As Socio-Legal Theory And Critique: Prospects For “Law And Society” In A Divided World, Peer Zumbansen

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

What’S The Point Of The Rule Of Law?, Martin Krygier

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tempered Power, Variegated Capitalism, Law And Society, John Braithwaite

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Legislature At War: Bandits, Runaways And The Emergence Of A Virginia Doctrine Of Separation Of Powers, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Examination Of Agency Statutory Interpretation, Amy Semet

Journal Articles

How do administrative agencies interpret statutes? Despite the theoretical treatment scholars offer on how agencies construe statutes, far less is known empirically about administrative statutory interpretation even though agencies play a critical role in interpreting statutes. This Article looks behind the black box of agency statutory interpretation to review how administrative agencies use canons and other tools of statutory interpretation to decide cases. Surveying over 7,000 cases heard by the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) from 1993-2016, I analyze the statutory methodologies the Board uses in its decisions in order to uncover patterns of how the Board interprets statutes over …

Foreword: Tempering Power, Errol Meidinger

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law And Power In Health Care: Challenges To Physician Control, Mary Anne Bobinski

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Is China A “Rule-By-Law” Regime?, Kwai Hang Ng

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Time In Between: A Response To A Theory Of Civil Problem-Solving Courts, Daniel M. Coble

The Docket

As small claims courts grow in numbers and popularity, more issues are beginning to rise to the surface. These issues stem from a lack of understanding of the process, not following the court’s procedural rules, and many others revolving around pro se litigants. As criminal courts begin to shift how they treat the underlying issues of defendants, so are the ideas for how to handle civil litigants. Most of the solutions proposed for solving civil courts’ issues are admirable and likely to succeed. However, as a magistrate judge and former prosecutor who worked closely with South Carolina’s first homeless court, …

Crafted From Whole Cloth: Reverse Stash-House Stings And The Sentencing Factor Manipulation Claim, Molly F. Spakowski

Buffalo Law Review

Kenneth Flowers is currently serving a mandatory minimum sentence of 120 months imprisonment stemming from a conviction of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute five or more kilograms of cocaine. While the ten-year prison sentence is very real, the five-kilograms of cocaine is not, and never was. Mr. Flowers was caught-up in one of the elaborate and overused “reverse stash-house sting” operations employed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (“ATF”).

Mr. Flowers’ story is one of many similar cases resulting from the government operation conducted by the ATF known as a reverse stash-house sting operation. The …

The Implications Of Inequality For Fiscal Federalism (Or Why The Federal Government Should Pay For Local Public Schools), Brian Highsmith

Buffalo Law Review

In designing public policy, a question of first principle is the degree to which government services—and the mechanisms of collecting revenue to finance those services—should be centralized within and across political systems. To inform their assessments of where redistribution should properly occur, public finance researchers have, to date, worked backwards from different assumptions about the mobility of residents within the political community. Scholars have disagreed about the viability of local governments’ efforts to redistribute wealth—with traditionalists arguing that these efforts are made impossible by residential mobility, and recent reformists countering that limitations on mobility indeed allow for limited redistribution at …

Interpenetration Of Powers: Channels And Obstacles For Populist Impulses, Anya Bernstein

Journal Articles

Discussions of populism often focus on the most visible points of executive power: individual leaders. Yet individual leaders only accomplish things through administrative apparatuses that enable and support their power. Rejecting a political theology that imagines sovereignty as inhering in a single decision-maker, this article turns to political pragmatics focused on the people who populate the government. I draw on interviews with administrators in the government of two successful but quite different democracies. The first is the United States, an old, flagship democratic state. The second is Taiwan, which transitioned from a four-decade military dictatorship to a vibrant democracy in …

Anti-Sanctuary And Immigration Localism, Pratheepan Gulasekaram, Rick Su, Rose Cuison Villazor

Journal Articles

A new front in the war against sanctuary cities has emerged. Until recently, the fight against sanctuary cities has largely focused on the federal government's efforts to defund states like California and cities like Chicago and New York for resisting federal immigration enforcement. Thus far, localities have mainly prevailed against this federal anti-sanctuary campaign, relying on federalism protections afforded by the Tenth Amendment's anticommandeering and anticoercion doctrines. Recently, however, the battle lines have shifted with the proliferation of state-level laws that similarly seek to punish sanctuary cities. States across the country are directly mandating local participation, and courts thus far …

Decarcerating America: The Opportunistic Overlap Between Theory And (Mainly State) Sentencing Practice As A Pathway To Meaningful Reform, Mirko Bagaric, Daniel Mccord

Buffalo Law Review

Criminals engender no community sympathy and have no political capital. This is part of the reason that the United States has the highest prison population on earth, and by a considerable margin. Incarceration levels grew four-fold over the past forty years. Despite this, America is now experiencing an unprecedented phenomenon whereby many states are now simultaneously implementing measures to reduce prison numbers. The unusual aspect of this is that the response is neither coordinated nor consistent in its approach, but the movement is unmistakable. This ground up approach to reducing prison numbers suffers from the misgiving that it is an …

Broken Promises: The Hollow Dreams Of Human Trafficking, Philip H. Pierre

Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Married On Sunday, Evicted On Monday: Interpreting The Fair Housing Act's Prohibition Of Discrimination "Because Of Sex" To Include Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity, Joseph J. Railey

Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Cash Rules Everything Around The Money Bail System: The Effect Of Cash-Only Bail On Indigent Defendants In America's Money Bail System, Nicholas P. Johnson

Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Should Judges Convict Based On Their Speculations Of Guilt?, Doron Menashe, Eyal Gruner

Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Editorial Board, Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

Temptation's Page Flies Out The Door: Navigating Complex Systems Of Disability And The Law From A Therapeutic Jurisprudence Perspective, Michael L. Perlin, Mehgan Gallagher

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Make Sure You Belong!": A Critical Assessment Of Integration Requirements For Residential And Citizenship Rights In Europe, Tamar De Waal

Buffalo Human Rights Law Review

No abstract provided.