Law Commons^™

But We Didn’T Agree To That!: Why Class Proceedings Should Not Be Implied From Silent Or Ambiguous Arbitration Clauses After Lamps Plus, Inc. V. Varela, Andrea Demelo Laprade

Catholic University Law Review

The application of class arbitrability when a contract is silent on the matter remains a mystery. The Supreme Court has not clarified its stance on class arbitrability and preemptive effects of the Federal Arbitration Act on state law when applied to determine if class arbitrability is available. The purpose of this Paper is to address how the Lamps Plus v. Varela decision created more confusion about the question of class arbitrability. It argues that the failure to address the particulars of the availability of class arbitration will perpetuate litigation on this issue. This Paper suggests that the FAA’s purpose supports …

How To Conclude A Brief, Brian Wolfman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay discusses the "conclusion" section of an appellate brief and its relationship to problems of argument ordering in multi-issue appeals. The essay first reviews the relevant federal appellate rules--Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 28(a)(9) and Supreme Court Rule 24.1(j)--and explains the author's preference for short, precise, remedy-oriented conclusions, shorn of repetitive argument. It illustrates these points with examples from recently filed appellate briefs. The essay then turns to problems of argument ordering in multi-issue appellate briefs, with an emphasis on ending with a bang not a whimper, while sticking with the short, non-argumentative conclusion. The argument-ordering discussion is also …

Submission Of Amicus Curiae Observations In The Case Of The Prosecutor V. Dominic Ongwen, Erin Baines, Kamari M. Clarke, Mark A. Drumbl

Scholarly Articles

The important questions laid out by the Appeals Chamber in this case highlight the need for the proper delineation and interplay between mental illness and criminal responsibility under international law. Specifically, this case represents a watershed moment for the Appeals Chamber to set a framework for adjudicating mental illness in the context of collectivized child abuse and trauma. This is especially true for former child soldiers who occupy both a victim and alleged perpetrator status.

Framework For Enhanced Applicability Of The Egyptian Public Procurement Law To International Administrative Construction Contracts, Amr Abu Helw

Theses and Dissertations

Local governments and public authorities conclude contracts for the purpose of acquisition of goods, delivery of services and construction of public facilities like bridges, infrastructures and public buildings. A public contract is an agreement to perform particular tasks financed by government funds to the benefit of the whole community. Private entities and corporations are subject to stricter standards in their dealings with the government than in private transactions. Conversely, the government must deal fairly and equitably with those who it contracted with to achieve successful implementation of the projects. On October 3, 2018, a new Egyptian public procurement law, namely, …

One Vote, Two Votes, Three Votes, Four: How Ranked Choice Voting Burdens Voting Rights And More, Brandon Bryer

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Rejecting Word Worship: An Integrative Approach To Judicial Construction Of Insurance Policies, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Erik S. Knutsen

University of Cincinnati Law Review

Insurance coverage litigation is a quest for discerning meaning: Does the insurance policy cover the loss at issue? Construing the insurance policy, courts attempt to give legal effect to what the document purports to command. But what were the intentions and expectations of insurer and insured? Do those intentions even matter? Or is only the written text of the policy relevant to the coverage result? Courts addressing these questions typically frame the interpretative choice as one of strict textualism versus contextual functionalism.

In many, perhaps even most situations, text and context align to create an “easy” case. If a factory …

Challenging Solitary Confinement Through State Constitutions, Alison Gordon

University of Cincinnati Law Review

Eighth Amendment jurisprudence has resulted in limited scrutiny of solitary confinement despite the known harms associated with the practice. The two-part test established by the federal courts to evaluate Eighth Amendment claims and limitations on challenging prison conditions under the Prison Litigation Reform Act can make it difficult to establish that solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment.

State constitutional challenges to solitary confinement are underexplored. Nearly all state constitutions contain an equivalent provision to the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. State courts need not be bound by federal jurisprudence in interpreting the scope of the state …

Life Without Parole Is Replacing The Death Penalty -- But For Those Who Don’T Have The Possibility Of Parole, Their Future Is Bleak., Jessica Lerner

Capstones

Across the country, life sentences are increasingly being used to replace the death penalty, according to a recent study by The Sentencing Project. Nearly 162,000 people are serving life sentences – one out of every nine in prison, the study found – and for those like Darrell Powell, who don’t have the possibility of parole, their future is bleak.

https://jlerner.exposure.co/life-without-parole-is-replacing-the-death-penalty?source=share-jlerner

Qualitative Leveraging Natural Language Processing To Establish Judge Incrimination Statistics To Educate Voters In Re-Elections, Aurian Ghaemmaghami, Paul Huggins, Grace Lang, Julia Layne, Robert Slater

SMU Data Science Review

The prevalence of data has given consumers the power to make informed choices based off reviews, ratings, and descriptive statistics. However, when a local judge is coming up for re-election there is not any available data that aids voters in making data-driven decision on their vote. Currently court docket data is stored in text or PDFs with very little uniformity. Scaling the collection of this information could prove to be complicated and tiresome. There is a demand for an automated, intelligent system that can extract and organize useful information from the datasets. This paper covers the process of web scraping …

The Arkansas Code And Georgia V. Public.Resource.Org, Daniel Bell

Arkansas Law Notes

The United States Supreme Court decided Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc. (“PRO”) in late April, 2020, a case with major implications for those who rely on the Arkansas statutes. The case addressed whether extra materials Georgia includes in its official statutes, the annotations, can be copyrighted, or if they are in the public domain and can be freely distributed without permission. The case pitted two important competing interests against each other: the ability of citizens to freely access the official versions of laws of their state, versus the interests of a third-party publisher in being compensated for its work. Arkansas produces …

Boom Or Bust: Ensuring The Georgia State-Wide Business Court Fulfills Its Constitutional Promise, Roya Naghepour

Georgia Law Review

The United States judiciary includes specialized court systems within its baseline civil and criminal justice structure that provide more efficient and expert adjudication in a wide variety of areas. Since the creation of the Delaware Court of Chancery in 1792, many states have established specialized business courts with jurisdiction over commercial and corporate disputes. Today, many states have business court models, all choosing to employ some version of a specialized forum for corporate and commercial issues for the sake of judicial efficiency. The Georgia State-wide Business Court was established in 2019 with limited jurisdiction over narrow categories of commercial disputes. …

Ai In Adjudication And Administration, Cary Coglianese, Lavi M. Ben-Dor

Brooklyn Law Review

The use of artificial intelligence has expanded rapidly in recent years across many aspects of the economy. For federal, state, and local governments in the United States, interest in artificial intelligence has manifested in the use of a series of digital tools, including the occasional deployment of machine learning, to aid in the performance of a variety of governmental functions. In this Article, we canvass the current uses of such digital tools and machine-learning technologies by the judiciary and administrative agencies in the United States. Although we have yet to see fully automated decision-making find its way into either adjudication …

Structural Barriers To Inclusion In Arbitrator Pools, Nicole G. Iannarone

Washington Law Review

Critics increasingly challenge mandatory arbitration because the pools from which decisionmakers are selected are neither diverse nor inclusive. Evaluating diversity and inclusion in arbitrator pools is difficult due to the black box nature of mandatory arbitration. This Article evaluates inclusion in arbitrator pools through a case study on securities arbitration. The Article relies upon the relatively greater transparency of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) forum. It begins by describing the unique role that small claims securities arbitration plays in maintaining investor trust and confidence in the securities markets before describing why ensuring that the FINRA arbitrator pool is both …

Prosecuting The Phone Scammer When Extradition Fails And Concurrent Jurisdiction Exists, Michelle Lepkofker

Brooklyn Journal of International Law

Advancements in technology allow people to place phone calls half a world away via the internet. This technology has made it easier and cheaper for consumers to communicate, but it has also made it easier for scammers to reach more unsuspecting victims. In 2020, TrueCaller, an app designed to block scam phone calls, successfully blocked, and identified 31.3 billion spam calls in 20 countries. In the same year, Americans alone lost a total of USD $ 29.8 billion to scam calls. This Note argues that phone scams continue to be lucrative, in part, because criminal prosecutions of transnational crimes are …

Without A Voice, Without A Forum: Finding Iirira Section 1252(G) Unconstitutional, Amanda Simms

Brooklyn Law Review

The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) abrogates sovereign immunity in certain circumstances to allow private individuals, regardless of citizenship, to sue the United States for specific torts committed by government officials. Yet when two lawful permanent residents—located in different parts of the country—separately tried to sue the government for wrongful removal, one court dismissed the suit for lack of subject matter jurisdiction while the other court did not. These decisions, though reaching opposite conclusions, both relied on federal immigration statute 8 U.S.C. § 1252(g) in order to determine whether judicial review of immigrants’ removal orders is precluded. This note argues …

Docket Selection And Judicial Responsiveness: The Use Of Ai In The Colombian Constitutional Court, Pablo Rueda Saiz

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

This Article addresses some of the limitations of AI as a tool to preselect a long or shortlist of cases for a court at the apex of the judicial system to review. It focuses on the Colombian Constitutional Court, as an example of a court at the apex of the judicial system that has been historically responsive to claims for fundamental rights. Docket selection is an example of a classification problem using supervised learning, in which a machine groups data according to preestablished characteristics.

This Article draws from two different bodies of literature to analyze the consequences of using AI …

The Myth Of The Great Writ, Leah M. Litman

Articles

Habeas corpus is known as the “Great Writ” because it supposedly protects individual liberty against government overreach and guards against wrongful detentions. This idea shapes habeas doctrine, federal courts theories, and habeas-reform proposals.

It is also incomplete. While the writ has sometimes protected individual liberty, it has also served as a vehicle for the legitimation of excesses of governmental power. A more complete picture of the writ emerges when one considers traditionally neglected areas of public law that are often treated as distinct—the law of slavery and freedom, Native American affairs, and immigration. There, habeas has empowered abusive exercises of …

Vacatur Pending En Banc Review, Ruby Emberling

Michigan Law Review

When a case becomes moot on appeal, as when the parties settle, two primary Supreme Court cases guide the appellate court’s decision about whether to vacate the lower-court opinion. The Court has said that vacatur, an equitable remedy, promotes fairness to parties who were not responsible for the mootness because it erases adverse legal outcomes the litigants were prevented from appealing. Beyond this, vacatur is inadvisable since it eliminates precedential decisions and harms the judiciary’s efficiency and legitimacy. Yet this doctrinal order has not been uniformly brought to bear on the highly similar question of whether to vacate when a …

Supreme Court Institute Annual Report, 2020-2021, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute

SCI Papers & Reports

During the U.S. Supreme Court’s October Term (OT) 2020—corresponding to the 2020-2021 academic year— the Supreme Court Institute (SCI) provided moot courts for advocates in 57 of the 58 cases argued at the Supreme Court, offered our annual press and student term preview programs, and continued to integrate the moot court program into the Law Center curriculum. As in past Terms, the varied affiliations of advocates mooted reflect SCI’s commitment to assist advocates without regard to the party represented or the position advanced.

Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of hosting all OT 2020 …

Survey Of State Laws Governing Continuances And Stays In Eviction Proceedings, Ryan Sullivan

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

The Survey contains both a cumulative and detailed account of the laws and rules of each state governing continuances, adjournments, and stays in residential eviction proceedings. The Survey compares the laws of each state on several aspects, including the standard for obtaining a continuance, the allowable length of the continuance, whether a bond must be paid, and any other restriction or limitation placed on the party seeking to continue an eviction proceeding. The Survey also includes a listing of state statutes that provide a residential tenant a right to redeem the property upon payment of rent prior to the execution …

Constitutional Rights In The Time Of Covid-19: Sf Public Defender Sues Sf Superior Court, Alleging Violations Of Detainees’ Sixth Amendment Rights, Golden Gate University School Of Law

GGU Law Review Blog

“One of the most oppressive things a state can do is to take away your freedom and then deny you what’s necessary to win it back,” said Manojar Raju, San Francisco Public Defender, during a rally held on the front steps of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice.

On September 14, 2021, Raju filed a lawsuit against the Superior Court of California and the city of San Francisco. The lawsuit alleges that the San Francisco Superior Court has been routinely violating citizens’ Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial.

In fact, as of August 30, 2021, there are about 429 people …

Justifying The Supreme Court’S Standards Of Review, R. Randall Kelso

St. Mary's Law Journal

Abstract forthcoming.

The Washington Post Interviews Vinay Harpalani: The Courts Have Served As An Anti-Democratic Force For Much Of U.S. History, Vinay Harpalani, David A. Love

Faculty Scholarship

Certainly there are examples in which the high court has upheld the rights of the marginalized and disadvantaged. However, as Vinay Harpalani, associate professor of law at the University of New Mexico, has noted, “even when the U.S. Supreme Court makes rulings that seem to favor people of color, those rulings usually serve the interests of wealthy, elite White Americans.”

Harpalani cited how the Brown decision stemmed in part from Cold War strategy and the need for the United States to appeal to people in African, Asian and Latin American countries. “Racial segregation at home did not bode well …

Weaponizing En Banc, Neal Devins, Allison Orr Larsen

Faculty Publications

The federal courts of appeals embrace the ideal that judges are committed to rule-of-law norms, collegiality, and judicial independence. Whatever else divides them, these judges generally agree that partisan identity has no place on the bench. Consequently, when a court of appeals sits “en banc,” (i.e., collectively) the party affiliations of the three-judge panel under review should not matter. Starting in the 1980s, however, partisan ideology has grown increasingly important in the selection of federal appellate judges. It thus stands to reason—and several high-profile modern examples illustrate—that today’s en banc review could be used as a weapon by whatever party …

Advocates Say Isds Is Necessary Because Domestic Courts Are ‘Inadequate,’ But Claims And Decisions Don’T Reveal Systemic Failings, Maria Rocha, Martin Dietrich Brauch, Tehtena Mebratu-Tsegaye

Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment Staff Publications

Proponents of including investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions in treaties, contracts, and even national laws argue that ISDS is necessary because domestic courts are “inadequate.” Without this mechanism, foreign investors would be dependent on domestic courts and administrative mechanisms, which, proponents claim, are often inefficient, slow, biased, corrupt, and lacking in international law expertise, especially in developing countries. As one insight to analyze the “inadequate courts” argument, CCSI has examined treaty-based ISDS cases in which investors complained of domestic court proceedings or decisions, including the specific complaints and the tribunals’ analysis of those claims.

Foreword, Joseph Giarratano

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Taxation, Craig D. Bell

University of Richmond Law Review

This Article reviews significant recent developments in the laws affecting Virginia state and local taxation. Its Parts cover legislative activity, judicial decisions, and selected opinions and other pronouncements from the Virginia Department of Taxation (“Tax Department” or “Department of Taxation”) and the Attorney General of Virginia over the past year.

Part I of this Article addresses state taxes. Part II covers local taxes, including real and tangible personal property taxes, license taxes, and discrete local taxes.

The overall purpose of this Article is to provide Virginia tax and general practitioners with a concise overview of the recent developments in Virginia …

Strictly Speaking, What Needs To Change? A Review Of How Statutory Changes Could Bring Strict Products Liability To Virginia, Ryan C. Fowle

University of Richmond Law Review

Virginia remains one of five states that refuse to adopt strict products liability. To date, the Supreme Court of Virginia has declined to follow the path Justice Traynor set out nearly a century ago, as its recent decisions confirm its resistance to strict liability. However, given the change in control of the General Assembly following the elections of 2017 and 2019, the General Assembly is in new hands and may remain that way for some time. This new legislative majority, among its plans for new policies, may soon consider establishing strict products liability by statute. In doing so, Virginia would …

Wills, Trusts, And Estates, Katherine E. Ramsey, Sarah J. Brownlow

University of Richmond Law Review

The 2021 Virginia General Assembly did not pass any major laws governing estates or trusts this year. However, it did pass several legislative efforts related to the field and of which practitioners should be aware. Perhaps the most relevant update given the COVID-19 pandemic was the Legislature’s effort to modernize procedures for electronic notarizations and electronic recording of documents. Another new law was designed to improve retirement savings participation rates in the Commonwealth by requiring certain employers to enroll their employees by default in a new, state-facilitated individual retirement account program. The Legislature also passed several bills designed to make …

Guardall Security Group Limited V. Reinford Kabwe Caz Appeal No. 44/2019, Chanda Chungu

SAIPAR Case Review

The Court of Appeal dealt with a judgment of the Industrial Relations Division of the High Court which was passed more than one year after the matter was commenced. The Court of Appeal interpreted sections 85(3)(b) (ii) and 94 (1) of the Industrial and Labour Relations Act which prescribe that judgment should be within one (1) year of the filing of the complaint and sixty (60) days from close of trial.