Law Commons^™

Designing Legal Experiences, Maximilian A. Bulinski, J.J. Prescott

Book Chapters

Technological advancements are improving how courts operate by changing the way they handle proceedings and interact with litigants. Court Innovations is a socially minded software startup that enables citizens, law enforcement, and courts to resolve legal matters through Matterhorn, an online communication and dispute resolution platform. Matterhorn was conceived at the University of Michigan Law School and successfully piloted in two Michigan district courts beginning in 2014. The platform now operates in over 40 courts and in at least eight states, and it has facilitated the resolution of more than 40,000 cases to date. These numbers will continue to grow …

Errors In Misdemeanor Adjudication, Samuel R. Gross

Articles

Millions of defendants are convicted of misdemeanors in the United States each year but almost none obtain exonerations, primarily because ordinarily exoneration is far too costly and time consuming to pursue for anything less than years of imprisonment. The National Registry of Exonerations lists all known exonerations in the United States since 1989 — 2,145 cases, as of the end of 2017; only 85 are misdemeanors, 4%. In all but one of these misdemeanor exonerations the defendants were convicted of crimes that never happened; by comparison, more than three-quarters of felony exonerees were convicted of actual crimes that other people …

Rethinking Criminal Contempt, John A.E. Pottow, Jason S. Levin

Articles

It is of course too early to tell whether we are in a new era of bankruptcy judge (dis)respectability. Only time will tell. But this Article performs a specific case study, on one discrete area of bankruptcy court authority, based upon a particular assumption in that regard. The assumption is this: certain high-salience judicial events-here, the recent Supreme Court bankruptcy judge decisions, coupled with earlier constitutional precedents involving the limits of Article III-can trigger overreaction and hysteria. Lower courts may read these Supreme Court decisions as calling into question the permissibility of certain bankruptcy court practices under the Constitution, and …

Refugees And Asylum, James C. Hathaway

Book Chapters

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European governments enacted a series of immigration laws under which international migration was constrained in order to maximise advantage for States. These new, largely self-interested laws clashed with the enormity of a series of major population displacements within Europe, including the flight of more than a million Russians between 1917 and 1922, and the exodus during the early 1920s of hundreds of thousands of Armenians from Turkey. The social crisis brought on by the de facto immigration of so many refugees - present without authorisation in countries where they enjoyed no protection …

Paper Thin: Freedom And Re-Enslavement In The Diaspora Of The Haitian Revolution, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

In the summer of 1809 a flotilla of boats arrived in New Orleans carrying more than 9,000 Saint-Domingue refugees recently expelled from the Spanish colony of Cuba. These migrants nearly doubled the population of New Orleans, renewing its Francophone character and populating the neighborhoods of the Vieux Carre and Faubourg Marigny. At the heart of the story of their disembarkation, however, is a legal puzzle. Historians generally tell us that the arriving refugees numbered 2,731 whites, 3,102 free people of color, and 3,226 slaves. But slavery had been abolished in Saint-Domingue by decree in 1793, and abolition had been ratified …

Slavery And The Law In Atlantic Perspective: Jurisdiction, Jurisprudence, And Justice, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

The four articles in this special issue experiment with an innovative set of questions and a variety of methods in order to push the analysis of slavery and the law into new territory. Their scope is broadly Atlantic, encompassing Suriname and Saint-Domingue/Haiti, New York and New Orleans, port cities and coffee plantations. Each essay deals with named individuals in complex circumstances, conveying their predicaments as fine-grained microhistories rather than as shocking anecdotes. Each author, moreover, demonstrates that the moments when law engaged slavery not only reflected but also influenced larger dynamics of sovereignty and jurisprudence.

Reinventar La Esclavitud, Garantizar La Libertad: De Saint-Domingue A Santiago A Nueva Orleáns, 1803-1809, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

From French and Creole to Spanish, the domain of the Napoleonic Empire to the king of Spain, crossing the strait separating the French colony of Saint-Domingue and the Spanish colony of Cuba entailed a change of language and government. Some 18,000 people made that transition between the spring and summer of 1803 during the Revolutionary War in Saint-Dominque. Six years later, many crossed the Gulf of Mexico from Cuba to New Orleans and the recently acquired Louisiana Territory under the authority of a territorial governor and the United States Congress. What would these crossings lead to for those who had …

Servitude, Liberté Et Citoyenneté Dans Le Monde Atlantique Des Xviiie Et Xixe Siècles: Rosalie De Nation Poulard…, Rebecca J. Scott, Jean Hebrard

Articles

On December 4, 1867, the ninth day of the convention to write a new post-Civil War constitution for the state of Louisiana, delegate Edouard Tinchant rose to propose that the convention should provide “for the legal protection in this State of all women” in their civil rights, “without distinction of race or color, or without reference to their previous condition.” Tinchant’s proposal plunged the convention into additional debates ranging from voting rights and equal protection to recognition of conjugal relationships not formalized by marriage.

This article explores the genesis of Tinchant’s conceptions of citizenship and women’s rights through three generations …

Operationalizing Deterrence Claims Management (In Hopsitals, A Large Retailer, And Jails And Prisons), Margo Schlanger

Articles

The theory that the prospect of liability for damages deters risky behavior has been developed in countless articles and books. The literature is far sparser, however, on how deterrence is operationalized. And prior work slights an equally important effect of damage actions, to incentivize claims management in addition to harm-reduction responses that are cost- rather than liabilityminimizing. This article works in the intersection of these two understudied areas, focusing on claims management steps taken by frequently sued organizations, and opening a window into the black box of deterrence to see how those steps may end up serving harm-reduction purposes as …

Jail Strip-Search Cases: Patterns And Participants, Margo Schlanger

Articles

Among Marc Galanter’s many important insights is that understanding litigation requires understanding its participants. In his most-cited work, Why the “Haves” Come Out Ahead, Galanter pioneered a somersault in the typical approach to legal institutions and legal change: Most analyses of the legal system start at the rules end and work down through institutional facilities to see what effect the rules have on the parties. I would like to reverse that procedure and look through the other end of the telescope. Let’s think about the different kinds of parties and the effect these differences might have on the way the …

Bankruptcy Noir, James J. White

Articles

In Bankruptcy Fire Sales, Professor LoPucki and Dr. Doherty do two things. First, they present provocative data about the relative payoff to be had in Chapter 11 by a full reorganization compared with the payoff from a section 363 sale without a full reorganization. Second, they give a yet more provocative explanation for their data. Taking a page from Professor LoPucki's recent book, they blame the meager return that they observe on 363 sales on the unprincipled behavior of the lawyers, managers, creditors, investment bankers, and even judges involved in the sales. Messrs. LoPucki and Doherty's data appear to …

A Taxing Settlement, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White

Articles

The following essay is based on the talk "Government, Citizens, and Injurious Industries: A Case Study of the Tobacco Litigation," delivered by Hanoch Dagan last May to the Detroit Chapter of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, and on the article "Governments, Citizens, and Injurious Industries," by Dagan and James J. White, '62, which appeared in 75.2 New York University Law Review 254-428 (May 2000). The authors hold conflicting view on the underlying issue of this topic: tobacco company product liability. Professor Dagan holds the position that tobacco companies are liable for harm done by their products; Professor …

Governments, Citizens, And Injurious Industries, Hanoch Dagan, James J. White

Articles

In this Article, Professors Hanoch Dagan and James White study the most recent challenge raised by mass torts litigation: the interference of governments with the bilateral relationship between citizens and injurious industries. Using the tobacco settlement as their case study, Dagan and White explore the important benefits and the grave dangers of recognizing governments' entitlement to reimbursement for costs they have incurred in preventing or ameliorating their citizens' injuries. They further demonstrate that the current law can help capture these benefits and guard against the entailing risks, showing how subrogation law can serve as the legal foundation of the governments' …

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. …

Information, Decisions, And The Limits Of Informed Consent, Carl E. Scheider, Michael H. Farrell

Book Chapters

For many years, the heart's wish of bioethics has been to confide medical decisions to patients and not to doctors. The favoured key to doing so has been the doctrine of informed consent. The theory of and hopes for that doctrine are well captured in the influential case of Caterbury v. Spence: '[t]rue consent to what happens to one's self is the informed exercise of a choice, and that entails an opportunity to evaluate knoledgeably the options available and the risks attendant upon each'.

The Anatomy Of A Clinical Law Course, James J. White

Other Publications

Since the summer of 1965 when the Michigan Supreme Court first authorized law student practice on the behalf of indigent persons, students at the University of Michigan Law School have been engaged in extensive practice on behalf of indigent persons in Washtenaw County. Between 75 and 125 second and third year students at the University of Michigan Law School each semester have worked at the Washtenaw County Legal Aid Clinic under the direction of the OEO Staff attorneys. Students receive neither credit nor pay for such work and their activities are not directly supervised by the faculty. That volunteer experience …