Law Commons^™

Ochoa, Big Ten Law Deans Pledge Support For Diversity Ahead Of Scotus Affirmative Action Ruling, The Indiana Lawyer

Christiana Ochoa (7/22-10/22 Acting; 11/2022-)

s the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to hand down a decision that could fundamentally alter affirmative action, a group of law school deans — including Dean Christiana Ochoa of the Indiana University Maurer School of Law — has issued a statement affirming the deans’ commitment to diversity.

The group of 15 deans represent Big Ten law schools, including IU Maurer. In their statement — which IU Maurer posted to its official Facebook page — the deans say they are “joining together to affirm our commitment to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion through legally permissible means, regardless of the outcome of …

Fraud On Any Market, Gregory Day, John T. Holden, Brian M. Mills

Indiana Law Journal

Claims of securities fraud had historically failed because investors seldom rely on false or misleading statements when transacting securities. To bolster confidence in securities markets, the U.S. Supreme Court adopted a doctrine called “fraud-on-the-market” so that duped investors can show detrimental reliance without ever encountering the fraudulent statements. The doctrine assumes that a stock’s price reflects all material information, meaning that an investor who bought tainted stock has constructively relied on the fraud.

Fraud-on-the-market is not only unavailable in other markets but is also embattled within securities law. The doctrine has endured volleys of criticisms about whether markets actually absorb …

Le Role Politique De La Cour Supreme, Toujours Recommence, Elisabeth Zoller

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Communication Breakdown: How Courts Do - And Don't - Respond To Statutory Overrides, Deborah A. Widiss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Earlier commentators, including many well-respected judges, have offered thoughtful suggestions for facilitating communication from courts to Congress about problems in statutes that Congress might want to address. My research explores the opposite question. How effective is communication from Congress back to courts? The answer is: Not very. Even when Congress enacts overrides, courts frequently continue to follow the prior judicial precedent. This is likely due more to information failure than willful disregard of controlling law. Nonetheless, a key aspect of the separation of powers is broken.

My research shows that when the Supreme Court overrules a prior decision, lower courts …

Ratification Of The Equal Rights Amendment: Lessons From Special Elections To The House Of Representatives In 1837, John Vlahoplus

Indiana Law Journal

In 1837 the House of Representatives considered a governor’s attempt to include a limitation in a writ issued to fill a vacancy in representation pursuant to Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution. The Representatives agreed almost unanimously that the limitation was unconstitutional and should be disregarded as mere surplusage rather than invalidating the writ and the election. This Article suggests that the similar Article V gives Congress only the power to propose amendments, without any limitation, and States the power to ratify amendments or not, without any power to rescind. Consequently, the time limit that Congress purported to impose …

Access To The Justices’ Papers: A Better Balance, Susan Demaine

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article explores the history of Supreme Court Justices’ papers and their status as private property. It discusses questions of access, the public’s interest in understanding the Court and its decisions, and the effect of the Justices’ papers on scholarship and popular research. Several options for encouraging greater openness are proposed.

Fading Extraterritoriality And Isolationism? Developments In The United States, Austen L. Parrish

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Having the opportunity to deliver the twelfth Snyder Lecture is a privilege in part because of the distinguished scholars who have given the lecture in the past. It is also a privilege because of Earl Snyder himself. Earl was visionary in supporting these cross-Atlantic intellectual exchanges and ahead of his time in appreciating the value of studying transnationalism in its many forms. Today, in that tradition, my aim is to give you a sense of how the procedural rules of international civil litigation are developing and changing in the United States, and how those developments in turn affect more traditional …

How Conservative Justices Are Undertermining Our Democracy (Or What's At Stake In Choosing Justice Scalia, Alan E. Garfield

Indiana Law Journal

In this essay, Professor Garfield contends that the conservative justices on the Supreme Court have allowed elected officials to manipulate laws to entrench themselves in office and to disenfranchise voters who threaten their power. The justices’ unwillingness to curb these abuses has largely redounded to the benefit of the Republican Party because Republicans control the majority of state legislatures and have used this power to gerrymander legislative districts and to enact voter‑suppressive laws such as voter ID laws. With Justice Antonin Scalia’s unexpected passing during the administration of a Democratic president, the conservatives’ control of the Court has been put …

Transatlantic Influences On American Corporate Jurisprudence: Theorizing The Corporation In The United States, Tara Helfman

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

In interpreting and evaluating the history of the Supreme Court's corporate jurisprudence, legal scholars have deployed three broad theories of corporate legal personality: the aggregate entity theory, the artificial entity theory, and the real entity theory. While these theories are powerful ways of conceptualizing the corporation, this article shows that they have not been as central to the Supreme Court's corporate jurisprudence as recent scholarship suggests. It instead argues that historic transformations in the high court's corporate jurisprudence are best understood in light of contemporary intellectual currents rather than through an expost facto application of the aggregate, artificial, and real …

Access To Justice?: A Study Of Access Restrictions On The Papers Of U.S. Supreme Court Justices, Susan David Demaine, Benjamin J. Keele

Articles by Maurer Faculty

For scholars of law, history, and government—and the American public—the papers of all Supreme Court Justices are of vital importance. They contribute to biographies, histories, and legal critiques. Our understanding of the Court and its decisions is enriched by access to the thinking of the justices. In turn, this knowledge informs our views on our laws and social order and helps shape the future of our legal, political, and even moral culture. Despite the importance of these papers, many justices who have donated their papers in the past 75 years or so have placed restrictions on access to the collection. …

Wiggle Room: Problems And Virtues Of The Inwood Standard, Rian C. Dawson

Indiana Law Journal

This Note investigates the origins of Inwood that led to the slim opinion with wide influence. It argues that the very vagueness for which scholars and practitioners have decried Inwood is the case's greatest virtue: Inwood provides a flexible standard that has allowed the common law to evolve and address new business models. Part I discusses the origins of contributory infringement in intellectual property. Part II investigates the Inwood case and the climate of trademark law at the time Inwood was litigated. It also dissects the majority opinion and Justice White's concurrance. Part III examines the Inwood standard's evolution at …

North Carolina State Board Of Dental Examiners V. Ftc: Aligning Antitrust Law With Commerce Clause Jurisprudence Through A Natural Shift Of State-Federal Balance Of Power, Marie Forney

Indiana Law Journal

The Supreme Court’s holding in North Carolina State Board of Dental Examiners v. FTC (NC Dental)1 in February 2015 demonstrates a natural shift in the balance of power from the states to the national government. As the country’s interstate and international economy has become more integrated, federal authority has likewise expanded.2 And although the federalism dichotomy has undergone periodic back-and-forth “swings” since the nation’s founding, the end result has been a net increase in federal power. NC Dental exemplifies this trend toward increasing national au-thority through the organic development of interstate commerce.

Academic Duty And Academic Freedom, Amy Gadja

Indiana Law Journal

On December 31, 1915, the newly formed American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and its Committee on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure accepted a set of guidelines designed to shape the organization and its work to protect academics against the termination power of their employer-universities. The “General Declaration of Principles,” drafted by approximately a dozen educators who were called from universities across the country, begins with a decided focus on the rights of individuals within the academy: “The term ‘academic freedom’ has traditionally had two applications,” the language reads at the start, “to the freedom of the teacher and to …

Content-Based Copyright Denial, Ned Snow

Indiana Law Journal

No principle of First Amendment law is more firmly established than the principle that government may not restrict speech based on its content. It would seem to follow, then, that Congress may not withhold copyright protection for disfavored categories of content, such as violent video games or pornography. This Article argues otherwise. This Article is the first to recognize a distinction in the scope of coverage between the First Amendment and the Copyright Clause. It claims that speech protection from government censorship does not imply speech protection from private copying. Crucially, I argue that this distinction in the scope of …

Erie And Preemption: Killing One Bird With Two Stones, Jeffrey Rensberger

Indiana Law Journal

The Supreme Court has developed a standard account of the Erie doctrine. The Court has directed different analyses of Erie cases depending upon whether the federal law in question is in the form of a federal rule (or statute) or is instead a judge-made law. But the cases applying the doctrine are difficult to explain using the standard account. Although the Court and commentators have noted that Erie is a type of preemption, they provide little, if any, rigorous analysis of Erie in light of preemption doctrines. This Article attempts to fill that void, offering an extended analysis of Erie …

Federalism And Family Status, Courtney G. Joslin

Indiana Law Journal

The myth of family law’s inherent localism is sticky. In the past, it was common to hear sweeping claims about the exclusively local nature of all family matters. In response to persuasive critiques, a narrower iteration of family law localism emerged. The new, refined version acknowledges the existence of some federal family law but contends that certain “core” family law matters—specifically, family status determinations—are inherently local. I call this family status localism. Proponents of family status localism rely on history, asserting that the federal government has always deferred to state family status determinations. Family status localism made its most recent …

Duty To Defend And The Rule Of Law, Gregory F. Zoeller

Indiana Law Journal

This Article challenges Eric Holder’s and William Pryor’s views and explains the proper role of a state attorney general when a party challenges a state statute. In short, an attorney general owes the state and its citizens, as sovereign, a duty to defend its statutes against constitutional attack except when controlling precedent so overwhelmingly shows that the statute is unconstitutional that no good-faith argument can be made in its defense. To exercise discretion more broadly, and selectively to pick and choose which statutes to defend, only erodes the rule of law. (introduction)

Banning The Bing: Why Extreme Solitary Confinement Is Cruel And Far Too Usual Punishment, Elizabeth Bennion

Indiana Law Journal

The United States engages in extreme practices of solitary confinement that maximize isolation and sensory deprivation of prisoners. The length is often indefinite and can stretch for weeks, months, years, or decades. Under these conditions, both healthy prisoners and those with preexisting mental-health issues often severely deteriorate both mentally and physically. New science and data provide increased insight into why and how human beings (and other social animals) deteriorate and suffer in such environments. The science establishes that meaningful social contacts and some level of opportunity for sensory enrichment are minimum human necessities. When those necessities are denied, the high …

The Federal Question In Patent-License Cases, Amelia Smith Rinehart

Indiana Law Journal

The patent law has long recognized a patent owner’s ability to license some interest in the patent by granting to others permission to tread upon the patent owner’s property rights without legal consequence. When one of the parties to a patent license decides to seek remedies from the other party for a license harm, the resulting litigation may be a patent-infringement case with a contract issue or a contract case with a patent issue. In most cases, the patent owner brings her suit against the licensee in federal court, alleging that the licensee breached the license contract and, as a …

Do Corporations Have Religious Beliefs?, Jason Iuliano

Indiana Law Journal

Despite two hundred years of jurisprudence on the topic of corporate personhood, the Supreme Court has failed to endorse a philosophically defensible theory of the corporation. In this Article, I attempt to fill that void. Drawing upon the extensive philosophical literature on personhood and group agency, I argue that corporations qualify as persons in their own right. This leads me to answer the titular question with an emphatic yes. Contrary to how it first seems, that conclusion does not warrant granting expansive constitutional rights to corporations. It actually suggests the opposite. Using the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate as a …

Review Of Covering The United States Supreme Court In The Digital Age, Susan David Demaine

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The Limits Of Child Pornography, Carissa Byrne Hessick

Indiana Law Journal

Although the First Amendment ordinarily protects the creation, distribution, and possession of visual images, the Supreme Court has declared that those protections do not apply to child pornography. But the Court has failed to clearly define child pornography as a category of speech. Providing a precise definition of the child pornography exception to the First Amendment has become increasingly important because recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the penalties associated with the creation, distribution, and possession of child pornography.

This Article proposes a clear definition of the child pornography exception. It argues that an image ought to fall …

Justice Scalia's Truthiness And The Virtues Of Judicial Center, Allen K. Rostron

Indiana Law Journal

Antonin Scalia is by far the Supreme Court’s greatest wit and most colorful personality. When I choose audio clips from the Court’s oral arguments to play in my constitutional law classes, I would like to offer a balanced sample of views from the left and right sides of the Court. But I cannot resist loading up on Scalia sound bites, because in almost every major case he serves up the sharpest questioning and most imaginative hypotheticals. His judicial opinions are also remarkably passionate and frank. If he thinks a lawyer’s or even a fellow Justice’s argument is nonsense, he will …

The Sins Of Hosanna-Tabor, Leslie Griffin

Indiana Law Journal

The Supreme Court has lost sight of individual religious freedom. In Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, the Court for the first time recognized the ministerial exception, a court-created doctrine that holds that the First Amendment requires the dismissal of many employment discrimination cases against religious employers. The Court ruled unanimously that Cheryl Perich, an elementary school teacher who was fired after she tried to return to school from disability leave, could not pursue an antidiscrimination lawsuit against her employer.

This Article criticizes Hosanna-Tabor as a profound misinterpretation of the First Amendment. The Court mistakenly protected religious institutions’ …

Defining Fetal Life: An Establishment Clause Analysis Of Religiously Motivated Informed Consent Provisions, Justin R. Olson

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Lochner Disembedded: The Anxieties Of Law In A Global Context, Peer Zumbansen

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This paper explores, in an inevitably cursory manner, some of the main challenges facing a legal theory of transnational governance today. In part building on and responding to William Twining's identification of key problems of law in a global context (2009; 2012), the following paper adopts a two-fold approach. One element is to suggest a conceptual architecture, which captures law in its transformational state through a focus on actors, norms, and processes. Second, the paper proposes case

studies as a central methodological device to explore the nature, scope, and function of governance-both legal and nonlegal-in a global context. Through the …

Step Aside, Mr. Senator: A Request For Members Of The Senate Judiciary Committee To Give Up Their Mics, Paul E. Vaglicia

Indiana Law Journal

In 1995, a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School dubbed the Supreme Court confirmation hearings “vapid and hollow” and added that they, as implemented, “serve little educative function, except perhaps to reinforce lessons of cynicism that citizens often glean from government.” Ironically, this same law professor, Elena Kagan, later endured the confirmation hearings as a nominee and currently sits as the 112th Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. While she may be one of the few to ever reach a seat on the High Court, she is not alone in her assessment of the Supreme Court’s lackluster …

Building The Federal Judiciary (Literally And Legally): The Monuments Of Chief Justices Taft, Warren And Rehnquist, Judith Resnik

Indiana Law Journal

The “federal courts” took on their now familiar contours over the course of the twentieth century. Three chief justices—William Howard Taft, Earl Warren, and William Rehnquist—played pivotal roles in shaping the institutional, jurisprudential, and physical premises. Taft is well known for promoting a building to house the U.S. Supreme Court and for launching the administrative infrastructure that came to govern the federal courts. Earl Warren’s name has become the shorthand for a jurisprudential shift from state toward federal authority; the Warren Court offered an expansive understanding of the role federal courts could play in enabling access for a host of …

Standing Lessons: What We Can Learn When Conservative Plaintiffs Lose Under Article Iii Standing Doctrine, Heather Elliott

Indiana Law Journal

The Supreme Court’s Article III standing doctrine has plagued liberal groups for nearly forty years. Recently, however, the doctrine has blocked a number of conservative lawsuits opposing gay marriage, the 2010 health care law, and the expansion of federal funding for stem cell research.

What can we learn from these cases? Because contemporary criticisms of standing doctrine have usually come from the left and defenses from the right, it is commonplace to associate arguments for broad standing with left-wing political agendas.

But, as some scholars have shown, a version of narrow standing helped liberals protect New Deal legislation in the …

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell," The Supreme Court, And Lawrence The "Laggard", Audrey K. Hagedorn

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.