Law Commons^™

2022 Esther Clark Moot Court Competition Finals, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Circuit Personalities, Allison Orr Larsen, Neal Devins

Faculty Publications

The U.S. Courts of Appeals do not behave as one; they have developed circuit-specific practices that are passed down from one generation of judges to the next. These different norms and traditions (some written down, others not) exist on a variety of levels: rules governing oral argument and the publishing of opinions, en banc practices, social customs, case discussion norms, law clerk dynamics, and even selfimposed circuit nicknames. In this Article, we describe these varying “circuit personalities” and then argue that they are necessary to the very survival of the federal courts of appeals. Circuit-specific norms and traditions foster collegiality …

Judges, Judging And Otherwise: Do We Ask Too Much Of State Court Judges - Or Not Enough?, Michael C. Pollack

Articles

Ask the average person to imagine what a judge does, and the answer will most likely be something right out of a courtroom from Law & Order — or Legally Blonde, Just Mercy, My Cousin Vinny, Kramer vs. Kramer, or any of the myriad law-themed movies and television shows. A judge is faced with a dispute brought by some parties and their lawyers and is charged with resolving it, whether it be a breach of contract, a tort action, a competing claim over property, a disagreement about the meaning of a statute, some accusation that someone …

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 …

Foreword, Stephen Wermiel

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

It is an honor and a pleasure to help the American UniversityLegislationandPolicy Brief carry on its fine tradition of scholarly inquiry into important issues facing the nation, the legislatures and the public policy arena. AULPB is an important forum within WCL for student authors to examine cutting edge, timely issues. It is also a focal point, beyond the bounds of the WCL campus, for authors to consider a broad range of pressing issues that combine law and policy questions.

Law School News: Meet The Rbg Essay Contest Winners! 03-22-2022, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Filling Lower Court Vacancies In Congress' Lame Duck Session, Carl Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

In this midterm election year of 2022, the nation’s divided political parties are in a battle royale to win the exceedingly close Senate majority. One important explanation for the fight is that the party which assumes the next Senate majority will necessarily have considerable power to affect the confirmation of federal judges. For example, during Donald Trump’s presidency, Republicans controlled the Senate; therefore, the chief executive and the upper chamber proposed and confirmed fifty-four accomplished,
extremely conservative, young appeals court, and 174 district court, jurists. The Republican White House and Senate majority confirmed judges by rejecting or deemphasizing the rules …

Court Review: The Journal Of The American Judges Association, Vol. 58, No. 4, Eve M. Brank, David Dreyer, David Prince

Court Review: The Journal of the American Judges Association

Interview

Stresses of the Job in Modern Times: Coaching Resilience in Judges, Peer-to-Peer, an Interview with Jan Bouch; David Prince

Articles

Prosecutorial Misconduct: Assessment of Perspectives from the Bench, Saul M. Kassin, Stephanie A. Cardenas, Vanessa Meterko, and Faith Barksdale

Limiting Access to Remedies: Select Criminal Law and Procedure Cases from the Supreme Court’s 2021-22 Term, Eve Brensike Primus and Justin Hill

You Can Change Judging and Justice, Thomas R. French

The Online Courtroom: Leveraging Remote Technology in Litigation American Bar Association, Tort, Trial, and Insurance Practice Section, J. Gary Hastings

Departments

Editor’s Note, Eve Brank, David Dreyer, and David …

The Institutional Mismatch Of State Civil Courts, Colleen F. Shanahan, Jessica K. Steinberg, Alyx Mark, Anna E. Carpenter

Faculty Scholarship

State civil courts are central institutions in American democracy. Though designed for dispute resolution, these courts function as emergency rooms for social needs in the face of the failure of the legislative and executive branches to disrupt or mitigate inequality. We reconsider national case data to analyze the presence of social needs in state civil cases. We then use original data from courtroom observation and interviews to theorize how state civil courts grapple with the mismatch between the social needs people bring to these courts and their institutional design. This institutional mismatch leads to two roles of state civil courts …