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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Ultimate Injustice: When A Court Misstates The Facts, Anthony D'Amato
The Ultimate Injustice: When A Court Misstates The Facts, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
This essay deals with what "the law" did to Dr. Branion, an American citizen, after the jury convicted him of murder in 1968. Under the American legal system, a defendant is entitled to have his case reviewed by a higher court, and, under certain circumstances, if the appellate review is unsuccessful, to present a petition for habeas corpus to a state or federal court. I will focus primarily on the stage of his litigation with which I am most familiar: his pursuit of a habeas remedy in federal court between 1986 and 1989. I will try to explain how one …
Aspects Of Deconstruction: Refuting Indeterminacy With One Bold Thought, Anthony D'Amato
Aspects Of Deconstruction: Refuting Indeterminacy With One Bold Thought, Anthony D'Amato
Faculty Working Papers
Deconstruction has already happened on the Supreme Court. Not only can no member of the Court really believe that "the law" (self-invented by the very Court it is supposed to govern!) can constrain the result in any individual case, but its members have also convinced themselves that they have no time to be concerned with dispensing justice to the parties. The justificatory legal language used in judicial opinions is not what our law teachers told us it was. The justificatory legal language is not provided to explain—much less constrain—the result in the case. Rather, it is a mode of couching …