Law Commons^™

Why Theories Of Law Have Little Or Nothing To Do With Judicial Restraint, Philip E. Soper

Articles

The question I explore here, stated in its broadest form, is this: What is the connection between theory and practice between academic claims about how judges should decide cases and the actual behavior of judges as revealed in the opinions they write? More particularly, do theories about the nature of law have any implications for the question whether a judge should adopt an "activist" or a "restrained" approach to deciding cases? As you might infer from my title, I defend here what I call "the skeptical thesis" in answer to both the general and particular questions. Judges pay little or …

'A Time To Build' - William W. Cook And His Architects: Edward York And Philip Sawyer, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

The following narrative outlines the role of donor William W. cook and the architects who built the Law Quadrangle 70 years ago. The report is excerpted and adapted from 94 Law Library Journal 395-425 (2002-26). The author is director of the University of Michigan Law School's Law Library.

How Many Copies Are Enough? Using Citation Studies To Limit Journal Holdings, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Mr. Brown introduces the University of Michigan Law Library’s use of citation study literature to develop a new policy regarding the number of duplicate copies of law review titles to be held in the library’s collection. The specifics of the new policy are described

Memorial: Beverley J. Pooley (1934-2001), Margaret A. Leary

Articles

Beverley J. Pooley died at the age of sixty-seven on August 23, 2001, of kidney failure due to complications from pancreatic cancer. His death came shockingly fast, for he had only learned how seriously ill he was the week before. The bare facts about Bev's life cannot begin to describe what he was to the local community, the University of Michigan, and the law school world. Born in England in 1934, he earned B.A. and LL.B. degrees from Cambridge University; and LL.M., S.J.D., and M.A. in Library Science degrees from the University of Michigan. During that time he served in …

Alternatives To Economic Sanctions, Christine M. Chinkin

Book Chapters

Considering the merits of non-coercive alternatives to economic sanctions inevitably risks the charges of idealism and naIvete. However a number of speakers in this conference have raised considerable doubts about the efficacy of sanctions: even on their own terms sanctions rarely work and the material costs to non-targeted states and the implications for human rights make their justification problematic, even when they can in some sense be said to have worked. It therefore makes sense at least to give consideration to some non- coercive alternatives, either in conjunction with sanctioning policies or separate from them. The other alternative is the …

Building A Foreign Law Collection At The University Of Michigan Law Library, 1910-1960, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

Ms. Leary describes the vision, energy, imagination, and techniques of the dedicated people who built an eminent foreign law collection at the University of Michigan Law Library. She also uses Michigan as an example to illustrate the development of libraries and librarianship nationally.

Sex, Gender, And September 11, Hilary Charlesworth, Christine M. Chinkin

Articles

The October 2001 issue of the American Journal ofInternational Law contained several editorials on the international law implications of the hijackings of September 11, 2001, and their aftermath.' In one respect these editorials resemble other writings on these events in academic and popular media: questions of sex and gender are largely overlooked.' In our view, however, concepts of sex and gender provide a valuable perspective on these devastating actions.' We use the term "sex" here to refer to issues about women as distinct biological beings from men, and the term "gender" to encompass social understandings of femininity and masculinity. Although …

Introduction To "Books", Margaret A. Leary

Articles

It's well known that graduate William B. Cook's generosity provided the Law School with its trademark Gothic Law Quadrangle. It is less universally known that Cook endowed the Law School with a trust to support faculty research, and had a strong interest in the nature of that research. He chose to call the library building "Legal Research" and to inscribe above the main entrance "Learned and cultured lawyers are safeguards of the republic." Cook often said that the lack of "intellectual leadership 1s the greatest problem which faces America," and he wanted this Law School to provide that missing leadership. …

Sentimental Stereotypes: Emotional Expectations For High-And Low-Status Group Members, Larissa Z. Tiedens, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Batja Mesquita

Articles

Three vignette studies examined stereotypes of the emotions associated with high- and low-status group members. In Study 1a, participants believed that in negative situations, high-status people feel more angry than sad or guilty and that low-status people feel more sad and guilty than angry. Study 1b showed that in response to positive outcomes, high-status people are expected to feel more pride and low-status people are expected to feel more appreciation. Study 2 showed that people also infer status from emotions: Angry and proud people are thought of as high status, whereas sad, guilty, and appreciative people are considered low status. …

Memorial: Margaret Althea Goldblatt (1948-2000), Margaret A. Leary

Articles

Margaret Goldblatt, who died on June 15, 2000, in Cape Town, South Africa, after a year-long battle with cancer, was a rare combination of librarian and entrepreneur. She had both a sense of humor and a sense of professionalism that endeared her to those who knew her. Many of her colleagues knew her only through telephone and e-mail communications, for she worked the last several years from the office of Ward and Associates, located in the home she shared with her husband Peter Ward and her two children, Clea Goldblatt, age 21, and Zachary Ward, age 11.

After The Dna Wars: Skirmishing With Nrc Ii, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

This article traces some of the controversies surrounding DNA evidence and argues that although many have been laid to rest by scientific developments confirmed in the National Research Council's second DNA report, there remain several problems which are likely to lead to continued questioning of standard ways prosecutors present DNA evidence. Although much about the report is to be commended, it falls short in several ways, the most important of which is in its support for presenting random match probabilities independent of plausible error rates. The article argues that although one can sympathize with the NRC committee's decision as an …

The Honest Scientist's Guide To Dna Evidence, Richard O. Lempert

Book Chapters

Thank you for your invitation to participate in the DNA symposium. As you know DNA has never been a prime research focus of mine, and I have been so preoccupied with my own work on ITPT (intertemporal personal transportation) that I thought I must decline. Happily, however, the two projects came together, for I recently had an amazing breakthrough during which by coincidence I stumbled across a book entitled A Century of DNA Testing and holocopied (a fancy form of Xeroxing) the following few pages for you.

The Honest Scientist's Guide To Dna Evidence, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

The honest scientist recognizes that she herself is a test instrument, and a fallible one at that. Subjectivity inescapably enters into any human endeavor, and should not be denied. DNA testing is rife with subjective elements, no place more so than at the crucial stage of deciding whether a match exists. On the one hand, non-matching extraneous bands may sometimes be properly disregarded and patterns that do not quite meet objective matching criteria may be appropriately regarded as incriminatory matches. On the other hand, band patterns that do meet objective matching criteria may be treated as exonerative depending on how …

Comment: Theory And Practice In Dna Fingerprinting, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

Throughout her useful paper on DNA identification, Professor Roeder properly attends to both theory and practice. Thus she acknowledges the theoretical soundness of certain criticisms that have been made of the standard paradigm used to evaluate DNA random match probabilities but argues that in practice these criticisms matter little. I am thinking here of the arguments that those cautioning against overweighing DNA evidence have made regarding the undeniable existence of population substructure and its potential implications for independence assumptions supporting the application of the product rule and for the use of convenience samples, such as data garnered from no more …

Dna, Science And The Law: Two Cheers For The Ceiling Principle, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

The ceiling principle is an intentionally conservative way of estimating the frequency with which individuals who share particular alleles appear in the general population. It establishes frequencies for each allele by taking random samples of 100 individuals from each of 15 to 20 populations and using the largest frequency with which the allele is found in any of these populations or 5 percent, whichever is larger, as an estimate of the allele's frequency in the population of interest. These frequencies are then multiplied to yield an estimate of the likelihood that a randomly selected person would exhibit the same allelic …

The Suspect Population And Dna Identification, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

Forensic DNA analysis typically proceeds by first determining whether alleles (one of two or more alternative forms of a gene) found in DNA apparently left by the perpetrator of a crime at a crime scene (the "evidence sample") match alleles extracted from a sample of the suspected criminal's blood (the "suspect sample"). If alleles drawn from the two sources match, the next step is to provide information about the probative value of the match by estimating the probability that alleles extracted from the blood of some random individual would have matched the alleles in the evidence sample. Thinking in terms …

The Case Of The Disappearing Briefs: A Study In Preservation Strategy, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

Federal appellate court records and briefs are significant to researchers in many disciplines, but academic law libraries are discarding them. Ms. Leary chronicles the demise of paper holdings in law libraries, the rise of microforms, and the contents and usage of the National Archives and Records Administration's files. She then derives principles for preservation strategies that may apply to other categories of legal material.

Why Do Jury Research?, Richard O. Lempert

Book Chapters

Inside the Juror presents the most interesting and sophisticated work to date on juror decision making from several traditions - social psychology, behavioural decision theory, cognitive psychology, and behavioural modeling. The authors grapple with crucial questions, such as: why do jurors who hear the same evidence and arguments in the courtroom enter the jury room with disagreements about the proper verdict? how do biases and prejudices affect jurors' decisions? and just how 'rational' is the typical juror? As an introduction to the scientific study of juror decision making in criminal trials, Inside the Juror provides a comprehensive and understandable summary …

Democratic Discussion, Don Herzog, Donald R. Kinder

Book Chapters

"Democracy," remarked H. L. Mencken, "is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." Mencken found American politics a droll spectacle and showered contempt on the dullards he named "the booboisie." Plenty of other intelligent and perceptive observers have concluded that ordinary citizens are flatly incapable of shouldering the burdens of democracy. Uninformed and uninterested, absorbed in the pressing business of private life, unable to trace out the consequences of political action, citizens possess neither the skills nor the resources required for what Walter Bagehot pithily named "government by discussion." …

On Integrated Pollution Control, James E. Krier

Articles

Integrated pollution control, or IPC, can be defined for now as an approach to environmental regulation that "seeks particularly to link air, water, and waste programs. Its concern is institutional changes that reduce total risk to the environment from pollutants." 8 This sounds remarkably appealing, which perhaps explains IPC's recurring popularity. As we shall see, it enjoyed a brief celebrity about twenty years ago, and it is once again in vogue-especially within the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Is the Agency's recent interest in IPC a good thing? We worry that it is not. First of all, IPC has an …

Telling Tales In Court: Trial Procedure And The Story Model, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

There are three ways in which stories may figure prominently at trials. First, litigants may tell stories to jurors. Not only is there some social science evidence that this happens, but trial lawyers have an instinctive sense that this is what they do. Ask a litigator to describe a current case and she is likely to reply, "Our story is ... " Second, jurors may try to make sense of the evidence they receive by fitting it to some story pattern. If so, the process is likely to feed back on itself. That is, jurors are likely to build a …

Some Caveats Concerning Dna As Criminal Identification Evidence: With Thanks To The Reverend Bayes, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

The conference panel at which this paper was originally presented was structured along the lines of a debate. The three speakers who were supposed to advocate the use of DNA evidence were labeled, as is customary, Proponents. But those who were supposed to take the negative side were not called Opponents. Rather they were labeled Caveators. I do not know who is responsible for this label, but I think it gets things exactly right. To my mind anyone considering DNA as criminal identification evidence should be a Caveator. The promise and utility of DNA analysis in identifying the perpetrators of …

Approaching The Constitution, Don Herzog

Reviews

These are sumptuously produced, oversized volumes: one pictures them, as I suspect some shrewd accountant at the press did, decorating the shelves of lawyers' offices. Their pages are crammed full of primary texts, two columns on each page, in an alarmingly small but somehow readable typeface. Some texts are bare snippets; others wind on luxuriantly for many pages. The editors have set a cutoff point: no text from after 1835 appears. Like much else about these volumes, that decision reflects a set of theoretical commitments about the Constitution that I want to question. Not that these volumes are explicitly cast …

Unpleasant Facts: The Supreme Court's Response To Empirical Research On Capital Punishment, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

Slowly at first, and then with accelerating frequency, the courts have begun to examine, consider, and sometimes even require empirical data. From 1960 to 1981, for example, use of the terms "statistics" and "statistical" in Federal District and Circuit Court opinions increased by almost 15 times.1 Of course, citation rates indicate only that a topic is considered worthy of mention, not that it is taken seriously, or even understood. Nonetheless, in a number of areas, such as jury composition and employment discrimination, the courts have come to rely on empirical data as a matter of course.

In the last 25 …

Making Sense Of Modern Jurisprudence: The Paradox Of Positivism And The Challenge For Natural Law, Philip E. Soper

Articles

Karl Llewellyn once said, referring to Roscoe Pound's work m jurisprudence, that it was difficult to tell on what level the writing proceeded: sometimes it seemed to be little more than bedtime stones for a tired bar; at other tunes it appeared to be on the level of the after-dinner speech or a thought provoking essay, neither of which were quite the "considered and buttressed scholarly discussion" that one expected to find. Llewellyn's complaint serves as a warning, though a somewhat ambiguous one, to those who give lectures on jurisprudence.

On the one hand, I do not plan to present …

How To Argue About Health Care, Don Herzog

Articles

Despite the aggressive title of this article, my goals are modest. I begin by explaining briefly what should at any rate be obvious: that health care policies inescapably raise moral and political difficulties, difficulties that no technical fix could resolve. I move on to puzzle over the connections between some of the more abstract issues of moral and political theory and medical policy: here I urge that we develop a more sustained taste for exploring the moral conflicts embedded in our current practices. Finally, I suggest a strategy for making nitty-gritty facts-from the concrete world of third-party payment, expensive technology, …

Some Questions For Republicans, Don Herzog

Articles

Even a sleepy historiographer of political theory of some future day will notice the most dramatic revision of the last 25 years or so. I refer of course to the discovery-and celebration-of civic humanism. The devilish Machiavelli of Elizabethan times has been gently set aside for "the divine Machiavel," the one who writes, "I love my native city more than my soul." And historians of political thought have lovingly traced the transmission of civic humanism from Florence to England and America, giving us a brand new past. America, we now know, was not the unthinkingly Lockean land served up by …

Alternative Methodologies In Contemporary Jurisprudence: Comments On Dworkin, Philip E. Soper

Articles

I have two brief points to make. Both involve recent developments in jurisprudence, by which I mean by and large the subject that Ronald Dworkin has just been discussing. Indeed, the first point is little more than an acknowledgement of the debt that is owed to Dworkin, not only for his specific contributions to this field, but for the implications of his work for law teaching generally.

Environmental Regulation And The Constitution, James E. Krier

Book Chapters

Indirectly, at least, the Constitution provides the federal government with power to regulate on behalf of environ-mental quality, but it also sets limits on the power. It sets limits, likewise, on the regulatory power of the states. What it does not do, at present, is grant the ‘‘constitutional right to a clean environment’’ so avidly sought in the hey-day of environmental concern, the decade of the 1970s. Thus, the one unique aspect of the general topic consid-ered here has no doctrinal standing; the remaining aspects are matters of doctrine, but they are not unique to envi-ronmental regulation. It is quite …

Legal Theory And The Obligation To Obey, Philip E. Soper

Articles

Contributions to this symposium will undoubtedly share, with other recent discussions of the issue, the assumption that one does not need to decide what law is before deciding whether there is an obligation to obey it. More precisely, the assumption seems to be that our ordinary, pre-analytic understanding of "law" provides a completely adequate base for discussions about law's moral authority. The more refined disputes about the nature of law that dominate analytical jurisprudence can thus be ignored.