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Jurisprudence

Series

2023

Judicial activism

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Judicial Resistance To New York's 2020 Criminal Legal Reforms, Angelo Petrigh Jan 2023

Judicial Resistance To New York's 2020 Criminal Legal Reforms, Angelo Petrigh

Faculty Scholarship

Scholars have examined judiciaries as organizations with their own culture and considered how this organizational culture can form a significant impediment to the implementation of reforms.22 There is a strong connection between judicial culture and a reform’s ability to accomplish its stated goals. Some go so far as to state that most reforms will fail because of the difficulty in altering judicial culture.23 These studies sometimes focus on legislators misunderstanding the actual effects of legislation when it was drafted, or on the failure to account for particularities in a law’s implementation by undervaluing the fragmentation, adversarial nature, and …


Shadow Amendments, William J. Aceves Jan 2023

Shadow Amendments, William J. Aceves

Faculty Scholarship

The Supreme Court’s jurisprudence surrounding the Alien Tort Statute (“ATS”) reflects the phenomenon of shadow amendments, an inevitable outcome of statutory construction. These judicial interpretations altered the ATS and narrowed its reach. Through repeated shadow amendments, the Court has moved the ATS far beyond its original thirty-three word configuration and understanding. These shadow amendments reflect an aggressive form of statutory construction, an ironic description for a Court that has long championed deference to Congress and fealty to legislative text. This dynamic is evident in Nestlé USA, Inc. v. Doe, the Court’s most recent ATS decision. But shadow amendments are …