Law Commons^™

Measuring Judicial Collegiality Through Dissent, Jonathan Remy Nash

Buffalo Law Review

While scholars frequently offer ideology as a primary explanation for judicial behavior, judges, and some scholars, emphasize the importance of collegiality on multimember courts. But there is disagreement over how to determine when collegiality is at work, and what type of multimember court is more likely to exhibit collegiality among its judges. Resolving these competing claims calls for a valid measure of collegiality.

This Article develops novel measures of collegiality based on dissenting judges’ expressions of collegiality towards judges in the majority. It uses judge-level and court-level databases to validate these measures by showing that the novel measures correlate with …

Standing For Democracy: Is Democracy A Procedural Right In Vacuo? A Democratic Perspective On Procedural Violations As A Basis For Article Iii Standing, Helen Hershkoff, Stephen Loffredo

Buffalo Law Review

Many commentators express concern that democracy in the United States is under threat, whether from the pressure of concentrated wealth and structural racism, government secrecy and authoritarian tendencies, an outdated constitutional structure and old-fashioned corruption, or perhaps a combination of them all. Against this background, this Article argues that the Supreme Court’s treatment of procedural rights for determining standing—the key that opens the door to federal court—is an overlooked factor in contributing to democratic erosion. According to the Court, violation of a congressionally conferred procedural right that does not safeguard some separate, non-procedural, concrete interest of plaintiff—a “procedural right in …

Statutory Interpretation And Chevron Deference In The Appellate Courts: An Empirical Analysis, Amy Semet

Journal Articles

What statutory methods does an appellate court use in reviewing decisions of an administrative agency? Further, in doing this review, are appellate judges more likely to use certain statutory methods when they expressly cite the Chevron two-step framework than if they do not? This Article explores the answers to these questions using an original database of over 200 statutory interpretation cases culled from more than 2,500 cases decided in appellate courts reviewing National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or the Board) adjudications from 1994 through 2020. In particular, the study examined the use of text, language canons, substantive canons, legislative history, …

Ford's Underlying Controversy, Christine P. Bartholomew, Anya Bernstein

Journal Articles

Personal jurisdiction—the doctrine that determines where a plaintiff can sue—is a mess. Everyone agrees that a court can exercise personal jurisdiction over a defendant with sufficient in-state contacts related to a plaintiff’s claim. This Article reveals, however, that courts diverge radically in their understanding of what a claim is. Without stating so outright, some courts limit the claim to a cause of action or its elements, while others understand it to encompass the controversy underlying the litigation. What is worse, few have noticed that these discrepancies even exist, much less explained why. This Article does just that. We show that …