Law Commons^™

Computationally Assessing Suspicion, Wesley M. Oliver

Law Faculty Publications

Law enforcement officers performing drug interdiction on interstate highways have to decide nearly every day whether there is reasonable suspicion to detain motorists until a trained dog can sniff for the presence of drugs. The officers’ assessments are often wrong, however, and lead to unnecessary detentions of innocent persons and the suppression of drugs found on guilty ones. We propose a computational method of evaluating suspicion in these encounters and offer experimental results from early efforts demonstrating its feasibility. With the assistance of large language and predictive machine learning models, it appears that judges, advocates, and even police officers could …

Let The Right Ones In: The Supreme Court's Changing Approach To Justiciability, Richard L. Heppner

Law Faculty Publications

The power of federal courts to act is circumscribed not only by the limits of subject matter jurisdiction, but also by various justiciability doctrines. Article III of the Constitution vests the judicial power of the United States in the Supreme Court and such inferior courts as Congress creates. That power is limited to deciding cases and controversies. It does not permit federal courts to provide advisory opinions when there is not a real dispute between the parties. Based on that constitutional limit, and related prudential concerns, the Court has developed a variety of justiciability requirements limiting which cases can be …

A "Mere Shadow" Of A Conflict: Obscuring The Establishment Clause In Kennedy V. Bremerton, Ann L. Schiavone

Law Faculty Publications

In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Roberts Court continued its move to carve out larger spaces for religious practice and expression in public spheres. But in so doing it left lower courts and school districts with many more questions than answers concerning what the Establishment Clause means and what it requires of them.

Foreword: New Supreme Court Cases: Duquesne Law Faculty Explains, Wilson Huhn

Law Faculty Publications

On September 30, 2022, several members of the faculty of the Thomas R. Kline School of Law of Duquesne University presented a Continuing Legal Education program, New Supreme Court Cases: Duquesne Law Faculty Explains, reviewing these developments. Duquesne Law Review graciously invited the faculty panel to contribute their analysis of these cases from the Supreme Court's 2021- 2022 term for inclusion in this symposium issue of the Law Review.

An Alternative To The Independent State Legislature Doctrine, Bruce Ledewitz

Law Faculty Publications

One of the most momentous actions taken by the United States Supreme Court in the last term was not deciding a case but granting review at the end of the term in Moore v. Harper, the North Carolina congressional redistricting case. This is the case in which the Supreme Court appears likely to adopt some version of the Independent State Legislature Doctrine (Doctrine). In this essay, I will describe the actual case and the Doctrine. But I will also be offering an alternative to the Doctrine, one that I believe achieves some of the goals that the Justices who …

Analysis Of Carson V. Makin, Wilson Huhn

Law Faculty Publications

Many school districts in the State of Maine lack high schools, so the children in those districts must attend another school selected by their parents. In 1873 the State of Maine enacted a tuition assistance program that offers a stipend to participating schools to partially defray the cost of educating children from districts that lack a high school. In 1981 the State of Maine enacted a law that categorically excludes sectarian schools’ from participating in the tuition assistance program.

Three sets of parents sued the Commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, asserting that the exclusion of sectarian schools, from …

Privacy: Pre- And Post-Dobbs, Rona Kaufman

Law Faculty Publications

The United States Supreme Court has interpreted the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to include a fundamental right to familial privacy. The exact contours of that right were developed by the Court from 1923 until 2015. In 2022, with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, the Supreme Court abruptly changed course and held that the right to terminate a pregnancy is no longer part of the right to privacy previously recognized by the Court. This essay seeks to place Dobbs in the context of the Court’s family privacy cases in an effort to understand the Court’s …

No Balancing For Anticonstitutional Government Conduct, Bruce Ledewitz

Law Faculty Publications

Noted Supreme Court critic Eric Segall has been criticizing the majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen for its failure to engage in any kind of means-end balancing in striking down a New York gun control measure--balancing that he argues the Court has engaged in since the Reconstruction era. Segall is hardly the only American law professor to level this charge. But the lack of balancing in Bruen is neither unprecedented nor methodologically innovative. It certainly does not reflect a victory of originalism. Instead, the Bruen decision stands firmly in the tradition that courts do …

Dobbs Is Not A Religion Case, Bruce Ledewitz

Law Faculty Publications

I was unhappy, but not surprised, to see Canopy Forum including Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overruled Roe v. Wade, in a call for submissions under the rubric, “Law and Religion in Pressing Supreme Court Cases.” I was not surprised because, for years, many critics have labeled pro-life opposition to Roe a purely religious viewpoint. But there is nothing inherently religious about qualms concerning abortion, nor is there anything specifically religious in the Dobbs majority opinion.

El Juicio Político O Impeachment En Los Estados Unidos, Robert S. Barker

Law Faculty Publications

I. El origen ingles -- II. La constitución de los estados unidos -- III. El primer caso: Blount -- IV. El caso Chase -- V. El caso Johnson -- VI. El caso Belknap -- VII. La controversia Watergate, 1972-1974 -- VIII. Los casos Clinton y Trump -- IX. Los casos contra jueces de tribunales federales inferiores, 1873-2010 -- X. El caso Walter Nixon -- XI. Cuestiones no resueltas -- XII. Conclusión -- XIII. Bibliografía.

Appealing Compelled Disclosures In Discovery That Threaten First Amendment Rights, Richard L. Heppner Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

Last year, the Supreme Court held in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta that a California anti-fraud policy compelling charities to disclose the identities of their major donors violated the First Amendment. That holding stems from the 1958 case NAACP v. Alabama where the Court held that a discovery order compelling the NAACP to disclose the names of its members violated the First Amendment right of free association because of the members’ justifiable fear of retaliation.

In the over sixty years since NAACP v. Alabama, the Court has only decided a handful of cases about how compelled disclosures of …

Foreword: A Century Since Suffrage: How Did We Get Here? Where Will We Go? How Will We Get There?, Rona Kaufman

Law Faculty Publications

One hundred years have passed since (white) women attained the right to vote. In the century since the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, American women have transitioned from an existence as mere objects of history to becoming active subjects of history. In 2019 and 2020, many programs and conferences were organized to celebrate the achievements of America's women and commemorate the 100th anniversary of women's suffrage. The Section on Women in Legal Education hosted a program at the January 2020 American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting titled, “A Century Since Suffrage: How Did We Get Here? Where Will We …

Conceptualizing Appealability: Resisting The Supreme Court's Categorical Imperative, Richard L. Heppner Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

This paper draws on insights from cognitive psychology to understand how courts conceive of categories of orders. Cognitive psychologists have shown that people understand the world using not only "classical categories" based on logical definitions, but also "conceptual categories" based on fuzzier, intuitive concepts of similarity and typicality. This paper approaches appealability as a two-step process-first, categorizing the order and, second, applying the appropriate doctrine. Previous interventions have focused on whether different doctrines use rules or standards at the second step. This paper focuses on the initial categorization step.

This paper makes two contributions to the study of federal appealability. …

Ai Report: Humanity Is Doomed. Send Lawyers, Guns, And Money!, Ashley M. London

Law Faculty Publications

AI systems are powerful technologies being built and implemented by private corporations motivated by profit, not altruism. Change makers, such as attorneys and law students, must therefore be educated on the benefits, detriments, and pitfalls of the rapid spread, and often secret implementation of this technology. The implementation is secret because private corporations place proprietary AI systems inside of black boxes to conceal what is inside. If they did not, the popular myth that AI systems are unbiased machines crunching inherently objective data would be revealed as a falsehood. Algorithms created to run AI systems reflect the inherent human categorization …

Scotus Gerrymandering Case: Roberts Didn't Defend Constitutional Democracy, Bruce Ledewitz

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Statutory Damages And Standing After Spokeo V. Robins, Richard L. Heppner Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

In Spokeo v. Robins, the U.S. Supreme Court held that courts may no longer infer the existence of an injury in fact—and thus constitutional standing—from a statute’s use of a particular remedy, such as a statutory or liquidated damages provision. But Spokeo also directed courts to consider whether Congress intended to identify an intangible harm and elevate it to the status of a “concrete” injury in fact when deciding standing questions. This article argues that courts can and should continue to pay close attention to the structure and language of statutory remedial provisions in making that assessment. The article proposes …

The Arab Spring: An Essay On Revolution And Constitutionalism. By Antoni Abat I Ninet And Mark Tushnet. Elgar. [Book Review], Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

An American audience may not know Professor Ninet, but they surely are aware of Professor Tushnet, who has achieved the distinction of being both on the far left of the legal profession and on its more conservative front. In its earliest inception, Critical Legal Studies (“CLS”), as Gary Minda explains,

attempted to recreate a ‘left intelligentsia’ in American law. Except for the legal realists of the thirties and forties, and a handful of sixties Marxists, there has never been a serious ‘leftist’ presence in American legal education. To establish a left intelligentsia in American law one would have to break …

La Cour Constitutionnelle Roumaine. Premiers Pas. (The Romanian Constitutional Court. First Steps), Dana Neacsu

Law Faculty Publications

As a panel member, Constitutional Law Study and Research Group, University of Aix-Marseille III, France this Paper covered the early jurisprudence of the Romanian Constitutional Court (September 1993) (in French)