Law Commons^™

Article Iii, Judicial Restraint, And This Supreme Court, Joseph S. Diedrich

SMU Law Review

Article III of the U.S. Constitution establishes a federal judiciary with powers and functions separate and distinct from the other branches. During its October 2017 Term, the U.S. Supreme Court decided three cases that turned on an interpretation of Article III power: Patchak v. Zinke, Oil States Energy Services v. Greene’s Energy Group, and Gill v. Whitford.

This Article argues that in each of those three cases, a majority of the

Court coalesced around a unifying principle of judicial restraint. By “judicial restraint,” this Article refers to the principle that the judiciary should respect and defer to the elected branches. …

Twitter And The #So-Calledjudge, Elizabeth G. Thornburg

SMU Law Review

Two-hundred-eighty characters may be insufficient to deliver a treatise on the judiciary, but it is more than enough to deliver criticism of the third branch of government. Today, these tweeted critiques sometimes come not from the general public but from the President himself. Attacks such as these come at a challenging time for court systems. We live in a highly politicized, polarized society. This polarization is reflected in attitudes toward the courts, particularly the federal courts. Unfortunately, public doubts about the court system come at a time when public understanding of the structure of government, and especially the court system, …

Judges, Juries, And Reviewing Courts, William V. Dorsaneo Iii

SMU Law Review

The purposes of this paper are to evaluate the standard and scope of appellate evidentiary review of fact findings made by juries and trial judges under Texas law, and to describe and to criticize the recent treatment of the duty and causation issues in tort litigation by the Texas Supreme Court. The court has not acknowledged that the standards of evidentiary review applied to jury findings have been changed and one prominent scholar has concluded otherwise, but an examination of the court's recent jurisprudence reveals that significant changes have been made in the application of the no-evidence standard of review …