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University of Michigan Law School

2003

Judges

Articles 1 - 12 of 12

Full-Text Articles in Law

Mediated Popular Constitutionalism, Barry Friedman Aug 2003

Mediated Popular Constitutionalism, Barry Friedman

Michigan Law Review

There are divergent views in the legal academy concerning judicial review, but at their core these views share a common (and possibly flawed) premise. The premise is that the exercise of judicial review is countermajoritarian in nature. There is a regrettable lack of clarity in the relevant scholarship about what "countermajoritarian" actually means. At bottom it often seems to be a claim, and perhaps must be a claim, that when judges invalidate governmental decisions based upon constitutional requirements, they act contrary to the preferences of the citizenry. Some variation on this premise seems to drive most normative scholarship regarding judicial …

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Why Europe Rejected American Judicial Review - And Why It May Not Matter, Alec Stone Sweet Aug 2003

Why Europe Rejected American Judicial Review - And Why It May Not Matter, Alec Stone Sweet

Michigan Law Review

In this Article, I explore the question of why constitutional review, but not American judicial review, spread across Europe. I will also argue that, despite obvious organic differences between the American and European systems of review, there is an increasing convergence in how review actually operates. I proceed as follows. In Part I, I examine the debate on establishing judicial review in Europe, focusing on the French. In Parts II and III, I contrast the European and the American models of review, and briefly discuss why the Kelsenian constitutional court diffused across Europe. In Part IV, I argue that despite …

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Appellate Courts Inside And Out, Maxwell L. Stearns May 2003

Appellate Courts Inside And Out, Maxwell L. Stearns

Michigan Law Review

While the United States Supreme Court has been the object of seemingly endless scholarly commentary, the United States Courts of Appeals are just now coming into their own as a subject of independent academic inquiry. This is an important development when one considers that the vast bulk of relevant precedents governing most federal court litigation comes not from the Supreme Court, but rather from the United States Courts of Appeals. Because relatively few courts of appeals decisions are reviewed in the Supreme Court, with rare exception, the federal circuit courts provide the functional equivalent of that Court's proverbial "last word." …

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Who Cares About Courts? Creating A Constitutency For Judicial Independence In Africa, Mary L. Dudziak May 2003

Who Cares About Courts? Creating A Constitutency For Judicial Independence In Africa, Mary L. Dudziak

Michigan Law Review

While American scholars and judges generally assume that it is beneficial to insulate courts from politics, Jennifer Widner offers a contrasting perspective from another region of the world. In Building the Rule of Law: Francis Nyalali and the Road to Judicial Independence in Africa, Widner examines the role of courts and judicial review in democratization in Africa. She focuses on the role of one judge, a man who would see himself as embodying a role in Tanzania similar to that of Chief Justice John Marshall in the United States. Francis Nyalali, Chief Justice of the High Court of Tanzania, worked …

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Patriotism: Do We Know It When We See It?, A. Wallace Tashima May 2003

Patriotism: Do We Know It When We See It?, A. Wallace Tashima

Michigan Law Review

In a small, triangular plot, a short distance north of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., is the recently dedicated "National Japanese American Memorial to Patriotism." One of the primary purposes of the memorial is to recall publicly the forced removal of Japanese Americans from the Pacific coast at the beginning of World War II and their imprisonment in government internment camps for the duration of the war. The incident is worth recalling, of course, if for no other reason than as a constant reminder that we must not let a similar tragedy befall any other group of Americans. But one …

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Interpretation And Institutions, Cass R. Sunstein, Adrian Vermeule Feb 2003

Interpretation And Institutions, Cass R. Sunstein, Adrian Vermeule

Michigan Law Review

Suppose that a statute, enacted several decades ago, bans the introduction of any color additive in food if that additive "causes cancer" in human beings or animals. Suppose that new technologies, able to detect low-level carcinogens, have shown that many potential additives cause cancer, even though the statistical risk is often tiny - akin to the risk of eating two peanuts with governmentally-permitted levels of aflatoxins. Suppose, finally, that a company seeks to introduce a certain color additive into food, acknowledging that the additive causes cancer, but urging that the risk is infinitesimal, and that if the statutory barrier were …

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Reply: The Institutional Dimension Of Statutory And Constitutional Interpretation, Richard A. Posner Feb 2003

Reply: The Institutional Dimension Of Statutory And Constitutional Interpretation, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule argue in Interpretation and lnstitutions that judicial interpretation of statutes and constitutions should take account both of the institutional framework within which interpretation takes place and of the consequences of different styles of interpretation; they further argue that this point has been neglected by previous scholars. The first half of the thesis is correct but obvious; the second half, which the authors state in terms emphatic to the point of being immodest, is incorrect. Moreover, the authors offer no feasible suggestions for how the relation between interpretation and the institutional framework might be studied better …

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Interpretive Theory In Its Infancy: A Reply To Posner, Cass R. Sunstein, Adrien Vermeule Feb 2003

Interpretive Theory In Its Infancy: A Reply To Posner, Cass R. Sunstein, Adrien Vermeule

Michigan Law Review

In law, problems of interpretation can be explored at different levels of generality. At the most specific level, people might urge that the Equal Protection Clause forbids affirmative action, or that the Food and Drug Act applies to tobacco products. At a higher level of generality, people might argue that the Equal Protection Clause should be interpreted in accordance with the original understanding of its ratifiers, or that the meaning of the Food and Drug Act should be settled with careful attention to its legislative history. At a still higher level of generality, people might identify the considerations that bear …

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Obligations Impaired: Justice Jonathan Jasper Wright And The Failure Of Reconstruction In South Carolina, Caleb A. Jaffe Jan 2003

Obligations Impaired: Justice Jonathan Jasper Wright And The Failure Of Reconstruction In South Carolina, Caleb A. Jaffe

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Part I of this article, on the historiography of South Carolina Reconstruction, explains the difficulty scholars have had in uncovering the documentary history of Reconstruction, and outlines the development of historical interpretations of Reconstruction from the Nineteenth century Redeemer-era accounts to the revisionists of the 1970's. Part II provides brief biographies of both Justice Wright and William James Whipper. Parts III and IV track the different approaches of Whipper and Wright on two vital issues of their day: (1) whether to repudiate all private debts relating to slavery; and (2) how to construct a homestead law to protect cash-poor landowners. …

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Why Theories Of Law Have Little Or Nothing To Do With Judicial Restraint, Philip E. Soper Jan 2003

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 …

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Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. And The Counterrevolution In The Federal Securities Laws, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2003

Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. And The Counterrevolution In The Federal Securities Laws, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

The confirmation of Lewis F. Powell, Jr., to the Supreme Court coincided with a dramatic shift in the Court's approach to securities law. This Article documents Powell's influence in changing the Court's direction in securities law. Powell's influence was the product of his extensive experience with the securities laws as a corporate lawyer, which gave him much greater familiarity with that body of law than his fellow Justices had. That experience also made him skeptical of civil liability, particularly class and derivative actions. Powell's skepticism led him to interpret the securities law in a consistently narrow fashion to reduce liability …

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Constitutional Sunsetting?: Justice O'Connor's Closing Comments On Grutter, Vikram David Amar, Evan H. Caminker Jan 2003

Constitutional Sunsetting?: Justice O'Connor's Closing Comments On Grutter, Vikram David Amar, Evan H. Caminker

Articles

Most Supreme Court watchers were unsurprised that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's vote proved pivotal in resolving the University of Michigan affirmative action cases; indeed, Justice O'Connor has been in the majority in almost every case involving race over the past decade, and was in the majority in each and every one of the 5-4 decisions the Court handed down across a broad range of difficult issues last Term. Some smaller number of observers were unsurprised that Justice O'Connor decided (along with the four Justices who in the past have voted to allow latitude with regard to race-based affirmative action programs) …

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