Law Commons^™

Civil Protective Orders In Integrated Domestic Violence Court: An Empirical Study, Erika Rickard

Erika Rickard

New York's Integrated Domestic Violence (IDV) Court was created to streamline the judicial process and promote efficiency and victim safety in cases of domestic violence. One would expect this collaboration and concerted effort on improving the justice system for victims of domestic violence would yield faster results than under the traditional system. The data presented here indicate just the opposite: IDV Courts take longer to address motions for civil protective orders, and are not significantly more likely to grant such orders than traditional matrimonial courts. Delays in the civil protective order process suggest that the problem-solving court may not be …

Book Review Of Current Issues In Constitutional Litigation: A Context And Practice Casebook (Carolina Academic Press 2011), Christy Whitfield

Sarah E. Ricks

This is a book review of Current Issues in Constitutional Litigation: A Context & Practice Casebook (Carolina Academic Press 2011). My perspective is unique because I have worked with and watched this casebook evolve – I was assigned an early draft of the casebook as a law school student taking a constitutional litigation course, I worked as a research assistant on a later version of the casebook, and now, several years later, I have viewed the final result of the casebook as a practicing attorney. As a former law clerk and now as an attorney advisor in the beginning years …

Economic Evolution, Jurisdictional Revolution, Dustin Buehler

Dustin Buehler

In June 2011, the Supreme Court issued its first personal jurisdiction decision in two decades. In J. McIntyre Machinery, Ltd. v. Nicastro, the Court considered whether the placement of a product in the “stream of commerce” subjects a nonresident manufacturer to personal jurisdiction in states where the product is distributed. The Court issued a fractured opinion with no majority rule, with some justices expressing reluctance to “refashion basic jurisdictional rules” without additional information on “modern-day consequences.” This Article explores the consequences of these rules by providing the first law-and-economics analysis of personal jurisdiction. A descriptive analysis initially demonstrates that jurisdictional …

A Farewell To Harms: Presuming Irreparable Injury In Constitutional Litigation, Anthony Disarro

Anthony DiSarro

Although it is an essential element to obtaining injunctive relief, most federal circuit courts have held that irreparable injury can be presumed in constitutional cases. The Supreme Court has not addressed a presumption of irreparable harm in the constitutional context but it has disapproved of the practice for federal statutory claims. This article argues that the presumption is improper. The history of the injunctive remedy in this country suggests that irreparable injury is an essential element of proof that should be applied in all cases. Indeed, although constitutional rights are of paramount importance in our legal system, the fact that …

The Reality Of Eu-Conformity Review In France, Juscelino F. Colares

Juscelino F. Colares

French High Courts embraced review of national legislation for conformity with EU law in different stages and following distinct approaches to EU law supremacy. This article tests whether adherence to different views on EU law supremacy has resulted in different levels of EU directive enforcement by the French High Courts. After introducing the complex French systems of statutory, treaty and constitutional review, this study explains how EU-conformity review emerged among these systems and provides an empirical analysis refuting the anecdotal view that different EU supremacy theories produce substantial differences in conformity adjudication outcomes. These Courts' uniformly high rates of EU …

When A Jury Can’T Say No: Presumed Damages For Constitutional Torts, Anthony Disarro

Anthony DiSarro

Although the Supreme Court has twice rejected presumed damages as a remedy for constitutional violations, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has endorsed the remedy at least for certain constitutional torts that result in a “loss of liberty”. Presumed damages for constitutional wrongs is difficult to reconcile with much of our present remedial jurisprudence. The remedy seems contrary to Supreme Court pronouncements that compensatory damages are be the primary means to obtain a monetary remedy for injuries sustained from constitutional violations, and that nominal damages should be awarded when no such damages are proved. Presuming damages represents an …

Removing A Garnishment Proceeding To Federal Court May Be Easier Than You Think, Thomas M. Wood

Thomas M Wood

Garnishment proceedings commencing after even a year of litigation between non-diverse parties in state court actions are still removable in most jurisdictions. Two recent district court opinions from Alabama and Mississippi re-affirm this prevailing view. The threshold question these courts have faced is whether the garnishment action is separate and independent, or merely ancillary, to the main civil action against the alleged insured. Here is a typical example:

A sues B in tort. B may seek insurance coverage from C, and C denies coverage for B but does not elect to file a action for declaratory judgment on the coverage …

Criminal Affirmance: Going Beyond The Deterrence Paradigm To Examine The Social Meaning Expressed By Exercising Discretion To Decline Prosecution Of Elite Crime, Mary K. Ramirez

mary k ramirez

Criminal Affirmance: Going Beyond the Deterrence Paradigm to Examine the Social Meaning Expressed by Exercising Discretion to Decline Prosecution of Elite Crime Professor Mary Kreiner Ramirez Article Abstract Recent financial scandals and the relative paucity of criminal prosecutions in response suggest a new reality in the criminal law system: some wrongful actors appear above the law and immune from criminal prosecution. As such, the criminal prosecutorial system affirms much of the wrongdoing giving rise to the crisis. This leaves the same elites undisturbed at the apex of the financial sector, and creates perverse incentives for any successors. Further, this undermines …

Museum And Royalties: A Proposal To Facilitate Loans, Daniella Fischetti

Daniella Fischetti

This paper will consider the ways in which the principles of copyright may be extended to otherwise unprotected works thereby allowing for a system of royalties, similar to that used by ASCAP or BMI in the music industry, applicable to cultural property located outside its source county and of disputed provenance and legal controversy. While a system of royalties is predicated on the ownership of a copyright of a work in a fixed, tangible form, antiquities and other types of cultural property predate copyright, placing them in the public domain. By comparing the underlying ideas of copyright and intellectual property …

Judges Who Settle, Hillary A. Sale

Hillary A Sale

This Article develops a construct of judges as gatekeepers in corporate and securities litigation, focusing on the last-period, or settlement stage of the cases. Many accounts of corporate scandals have focused on gatekeepers and the roles they played or, in some cases, abdicated. Corporate gatekeepers, like investment bankers, accountants, and lawyers, function as enablers and monitors. They facilitate transactions and enable corporate actors to access the financial and securities markets. Without them the transactions would not happen. In class actions and derivative litigation, judges are the monitors and enablers. They are required to oversee the litigation arising from bad transactions …

Rulemaking, Litigation Culture And Reform In Federal Courts, Edward D. Cavanagh

Edward D. Cavanagh

Abstract This article examines the role of litigation culture in establishing standards for the conduct of litigation in the federal courts. It argues that culturally based practices are firmly embedded in the federal civil justice system. The practice culture in a particular district may be the source of local rules or may serve as a gap-filler to provide standards where written rules do not exist or are not cost-effective to draft. Rules at odds with cultural practices face resistance from the bench and bar. Culturally rooted practices are not easily dislodged, and a mere amendment to the Federal Rules is …

Jury Selection And The Coase Theorem, Dru Stevenson

Dru Stevenson

The thesis of this article is that jury selection is unique among the components of the litigation process, in that zero negotiation or bargaining occurs between the parties over the substantive or procedural events that unfold – despite the absence of any prohibitions on such negotiation. This lack of bargaining is particularly striking given that the litigants are in the same room, where they could discuss things face to face. Negotiation, whether over the ultimate outcome or over specific issues within the case, pervades every other segment of litigation, from the pre-filing phase until after the verdict. It is therefore …

The Disappearing Opt-Out Right In Punitive Damages Class Actions, Richard Frankel

Richard Frankel

The tension between protecting defendants from multiple punitive damages awards for a single act and ensuring that wronged plaintiffs can recover punitive damages is one of the most pressing problems in punitive damages law today. Numerous commentators have proposed non-opt-out class actions for punitive damages as the best solution to the “multiple punishment” problem because they subject defendants to a single collective punitive damages award that can be distributed equitably across all injured plaintiffs. This Article challenges that position. It argues that mandatory classes improperly deprive class plaintiffs of their right to opt out and pursue their own individual claims …

Judges Who Settle, Hillary A. Sale

Hillary A Sale

This Article develops a construct of judges as gatekeepers in corporate and securities litigation, focusing on the last-period, or settlement stage of the cases. Many accounts of corporate scandals have focused on gatekeepers and the roles they played or, in some cases, abdicated. Corporate gatekeepers, like investment bankers, accountants, and lawyers, function as enablers and monitors. They facilitate transactions and enable corporate actors to access the financial and securities markets. Without them the transactions would not happen. In class actions and derivative litigation, judges are the monitors and enablers. They are required to oversee the litigation arising from bad transactions …

Iqbal's Retro Revolution, Benjamin P. Cooper

Benjamin P Cooper

The Supreme Court’s decisions in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ascroft v. Iqbal have revolutionized the law on pleading, by shifting from a liberal notice pleading standard to a new heightened “plausibility” regime. The abundant scholarship about these cases consistently posits that Iqbal’s plausibility standard is completely novel and devoid of any historical precedent. This Article argues that, contrary to this conventional wisdom, although Iqbal is revolutionary (in the sense that it marks a sharp break with what immediately preceded it), the post-Iqbal era is not entirely new. Rather, the current pleading regime bears a sharp resemblance to the …

State E-Discovery Today: An Assessment And Update Of Rulemaking, Thomas Y. Allman

Thomas Y. Allman

Discovery of information in electronic form for use in civil litigation in the United States has assumed major importance in the state courts, where the great bulk of litigation occurs. This paper analyzes the 37 states that have formally acted against the backdrop of the key issues facing litigants utilizing electronically stored information, with a particular emphasis on the author's view, as a former General Counsel, that the time has come to embody rationale principles of preservation and spoliation in the rules at both the federal and state level.

A Crowning Achievement In Protecting High Ranking Officials From Unreasonable Depositions: The Impact Of The Crown Central Test, Scott A. Mager

scott a mager

In an increasingly litigious society, the attempt to first set depositions of high-ranking corporate executives, who are often referred to as “apex officials,” has become commonplace. While these executives rarely have personal knowledge of the facts and issues surrounding a given case, broad-stroked claims against parent companies and lax discovery rules seem to serve as a launching pad to harass executives and extort settlements through threats of—and in many cases the actual taking of—depositions from chief executive officers, chief operating officers, chief financial officers, or other apex executives. In recent years, courts across the country have sought to articulate the …

In Defense Of The Substance-Procedure Dichotomy, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Jennifer S. Hendricks

John Hart Ely famously observed, “We were all brought up on sophisticated talk about the fluidity of the line between substance and procedure,” but for most of Erie’s history, the Supreme Court has answered the question “Does this state law govern in federal court?” with a “yes” or a “no.” Beginning, however, with Gasperini v. Center for Humanities, and continuing with Semtek v. Lockheed and Shady Grove v. Allstate, a shifting coalition of justices has pursued a third path. Instead of declaring state law applicable or inapplicable, they have claimed for themselves the prerogative to fashion law that purportedly accommodates …

The Created, The Fallen, And The Redeemed—The Symbolism Of The Federal Rules Of Evidence, Christopher G. Hastings, Nelson P. Milller, Curt A. Benson

Christopher G Hastings

The Federal Rules of Evidence, taken as a whole, represent an ethical system—not just norms, values, or cultural constructs but, moreover, a genuine way of comprehending the world consistent with our best understanding of how it would, if not constrained, truly operate. Underlying each rule are assumptions about the nature and dispositions of lawyers, clients, witnesses, jurors, and judges, as well as the nature of evidence itself. Those assumptions symbolize what the rules’ promulgators understand to be the imperatives of justice in a system peopled by the created, the fallen, and the redeemed. Citing each of the 67 Federal Rules …

The False Promise Of The Converse-1983 Action, John F. Preis

John F. Preis

The federal government is out of control. At least that’s what many states will tell you. Not only is the federal government passing patently unconstitutional legislation, but its street-level officers are ignoring citizens’ constitutional rights. How can states stop this federal juggernaut? Many are advocating a “repeal amendment,” whereby two-thirds of the states could vote to repeal federal legislation. But the repeal amendment will only address unconstitutional legislation, not unconstitutional actions. States can’t repeal a stop-and-frisk that occurred last Thursday. States might, however, enact a so-called “converse-1983” action. The idea for converse-1983 laws has been around for some time but …

To Be, Rather Than To Seem: Analysis Of Trustee Fiduciary Duty In Reorganization And Its Implications On The New Chinese Bankruptcy Law, Xiao-Chuan Charlie Weng

Xiao-chuan Charlie Weng

Reorganization trustees play a crucial role in bankruptcy procedure. The trustees try to resurrect deteriorating businesses by managing remaining resources for the benefit of beneficiaries, usually unsecured creditors and shareholders. More or less, a trustee’s role is similar to that of the officers/managers of a solvent company. Fiduciary duty arises between the residual claimers, the stakeholders on the one hand, and the operator, the trustee on the other hand. Astonishingly, under current U.S. bankruptcy law, reorganization trustee’s fiduciary duty is not well defined, although this duty has been widely litigated. The vagueness is primarily due to misinterpretation of the Mosser …

The Medical Device Federal Preemption Trilogy: Salvaging Due Process For Injured Patients, Demetria D. Frank-Jackson

Demetria D Frank-Jackson

Ignoring over a century of tort law precedence, ultimately leaving thousands of people all over the country injured by medical devices without remedy, the prevailing jurisprudence on medical device federal preemption is both current and relevant. Due to the inherent ambiguity of the preemption provision Medical Device Amendments of 1976, where contemporary medical device litigation had its beginnings, the regulatory nature of common law tort claims against medical device manufacturers has been overwhelming called into question. Given this socio-judicial backdrop, the Article focuses on two rapidly developing areas of law: (1) preemption of certain medical device claims following the U.S. …

Feeling At Home: Law, Cognitive Science, And Narrative, Lea B. Vaughn

Lea B Vaughn

What is the “how and why” of law’s affinity for narrative? In order to explain why the use of stories is such an effective teaching and presentation strategy in the law, this paper will consider theories and accounts from cognitive as well as evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and, briefly, cultural anthropology. This account seeks to address “how” narrative helps us learn and use the law as well as “why” we are so compelled to use stories in teaching and in practice.

Brain science, simplified here, suggests that the first task is to “grab” someone’s attention. Emotionally charged events are more likely …

The Administration Of Tax Expenditures: The Case Of The Earned Income Tax Credit, Jonathan P. Schneller

Jonathan P Schneller

This paper argues that in light of tax expenditures' political popularity and consistent growth, tax expenditure analysis should shift its ambitions from the elimination of tax expenditures to their reform. One particularly promising avenue for reform is administrative, as the tax system provides a poor platform for the administration of complex programs with policy objectives unrelated to revenue collection. This paper argues that scholars and policymakers should borrow "hybrid" administrative practices from non-tax programs and apply them to tax expenditures as necessary to advance a given tax expenditure's non-tax policy objectives. It explores this idea via an in-depth case study …

Originalism As An Anchor For The Sixth Amendment, Jeffrey L. Fisher

Jeffrey L Fisher

Originalism is sometimes criticized as merely a means to justify conservative results. And cases do indeed exist in which the Supreme Court has divided along liberal-conservative lines, and conservatives have played originalism as a purported trump card. Last Term’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, interpreting the Second Amendment as including an individual right to bear arms, is a recent example.

When it comes to criminal procedure, however, things are not so simple. This Essay examines two lines of cases: first, those involving the Court's reinvigoration of the Sixth Amendment right to jury trial, and second, those involving the …

Redefining Human Rights Lawyering Through The Lens Of Critical Theory: Lessons For Pedagogy And Practice, Deborah M. Weissman, Caroline Bettinger-Lopez, Davida Finger, Meetali Jain

Deborah M. Weissman

In recent years, human rights clinics have mushroomed across United States law schools, specializing in work ranging from direct representation of asylum seekers in U.S. courts, to international litigation, to project-based advocacy that includes fact-finding visits and production of reports documenting human rights violations throughout the world. Increasingly, those human rights clinics have begun to address human rights within the United States, and not just in places beyond our borders. At the same time, domestic poverty law clinics are increasingly looking to human rights norms in framing some of their advocacy, which often takes the forms of direct legal services, …

No Sirve Continued: Mexico Modifies Its Hague Service Convention Declarations, Charles B. Campbell

Charles B. Campbell

The brief article reports on Mexico's modifications to its Hague Service Convention declarations in 2011. It is a follow-up to No Sirve: The Invalidity of Service of Process Abroad by Mail or Private Process Server on Parties in Mexico Under the Hague Service Convention, 19 Minn. J. Int'l L. 107 (2010).