Law Commons^™

Massachusetts Needs More Ex-Public Defenders As Judges, Sadiq Reza

Shorter Faculty Works

Four to one.

That is the ratio of former prosecutors to public defenders who sit on the seven-person Supreme Judicial Court, our highest state court.

On our 25-member Appeals Court, which sits one level below the SJC and is the final word in the vast majority of criminal cases, the count is worse: 16 to three. But two of those former public defenders also worked as prosecutors before reaching the bench; and two other appellate judges, while never formal prosecutors, worked in the Attorney General's Office (i.e., in other law enforcement roles).

This staggering imbalance of experience and outlook is …

The Future Of Facts: The Politics Of Public Health And Medicine In Abortion Law, Aziza Ahmed, Jason Jackson

Faculty Scholarship

While a great deal of public scrutiny has focused on how information circulates through online outlets including Twitter and Facebook, less attention has been devoted to how more traditional institutions traffic in factual assertions for the sake of setting a particular distributional agenda into motion.[1] Of these more traditional institutions, courts play a central role in legitimating legal and factual claims in the process of applying and clarifying legal rules. In public health-related adjudication, courts play at least two important roles: first, judges and juries make decisions between competing sets of public health and medical claims and second, courts …

Crowdsourcing & Data Analytics: The New Settlement Tools, Christopher Robertson, Bernard Chao, David Yokum

Faculty Scholarship

By protecting the right to a jury, the State and Federal Constitutions recognize the fundamental value of having civil and criminal disputes resolved by laypersons. However actual trials are relatively rare, in part because parties seek to avoid the risks and cost of trials, and courts seek to clear dockets efficiently. Even as settlement may be desirable, it is sometimes difficult to resolve a dispute. Parties naturally view their cases from different perspectives, and these perspectives often cause both sides to be overly optimistic, seeking unreasonably large or unreasonably small resolutions.

This article describes a novel method of incorporating layperson …

Rethinking Notice, Jack M. Beermann

Shorter Faculty Works

APA § 553 (b)(3) requires agencies engaged in informal rulemaking to provide notice of "either the terms or substance of the proposed rule or a description of the subjects and issues involved." In most cases, agencies publish the complete text of their proposed rules, together with a preamble describing the need for the rule and the major considerations of policy and law that are raised by the proposal. Comments often convince agencies to make changes to their proposed rules. This, of course, is the whole point of the process. Difficulties arise, however, when, in reaction to comments, agencies promulgate rules …

When Courts Refuse To Frame The Law And Others Frame It To Their Will, Susan P. Koniak

Faculty Scholarship

In the aftermath of Kaye, Scholer, Fierman, Hays & Handler's settlement with the government,¹ two versions of the story have emerged. The most popular version features the government actors as villains-villains with new and lethal weapons at their disposal, willing to enforce law that has leapt full grown from their heads like Zeus' child, law of which the rest of the civilized world was unaware. The counterstory, less often told but not without adherents, casts the lawyers of Kaye, Scholer as the villains: unscrupulous and greedy lawyers ready to break any rule, defile any process, twist any truth on …

Choosing Judges The Democratic Way, Larry Yackle

Faculty Scholarship

A generation ago, the pressing question in constitutional law was the countermajoritarian difficulty.' Americans insisted their government was a democratic republic and took that to mean rule by a majority of elected representatives in various offices and bodies, federal and local. Yet courts whose members had not won election presumed to override the actions of executive and legislative officers who had. The conventional answer to this apparent paradox was the Constitution, which arguably owed its existence to the people directly. Judicial review was justified, accordingly, when court decisions were rooted firmly in the particular text, structure, or historical backdrop of …

The Tax Benefit Of Bliss, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years the Supreme Court has limited its substantive decisions in federal income tax matters.^I For the most part, the handful of tax cases it has considered each year deal with collection, liens, or other issues peripheral to doctrinal development in the tax area.² The Court's recent decision in Diedrich v. Commissioner,³ however, dealt with a realization question involving net gifts; and its grant of certiorari consolidating the cases of Bliss Dairy, Inc. v. United States and Hillsboro National Bank v. Commissioner⁴ promises a continuing interest in substantive tax law. Bliss Dairy will enable the …