Law Commons^™

Vol. 54, No. 2, September 16, 2003, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

•Bigger and Better: Class of 2006 Profile •Greetings From the Editor's Desk •Remembering 9/11: Then and Now •Speaker Offers New Insights on Middle East •y Life as a 1L: Beverly Hills 48109 •Getting Involved: Student Groups Welcome 1Ls at Student Organization Fair •Judge Brudo Simma Delivers Special Lecture •Maybe It's Really Different This Year •Anti-Discrimination Policy Inhibits Student Choice •Michiganders Unite: State Bar Has Much to Offer •Crossword

An Agency Costs Theory Of Trust Law, Robert H. Sitkoff

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

This Article develops an agency costs theory of the law of private trusts, focusing chiefly on donative trusts. The agency costs approach offers fresh insights into recurring problems in trust law including, among others, modification and termination, settlor standing, fiduciary litigation, trust-investment law and the duty of impartiality, trustee removal, the role of so-called trust "protectors," and spendthrift trusts. The normative claim is that the law of trusts should minimize the agency costs inherent in locating managerial authority with the trustee and the residual claim with the beneficiaries, but only to the extent that doing so is consistent with the …

What Counts As Fraud? An Empirical Study Of Motions To Dismiss Under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, Adam C. Pritchard, Hillary Sale

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

This article presents the findings of a study of the resolution of motions to dismiss securities fraud lawsuits since the passage of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act in 1995. Our sample consists of decisions on motions to dismiss in securities class actions by district and appellate courts in the Second and Ninth Circuits for cases filed after the passage of the Reform Act to the end of 2002. These circuits are the leading circuits for the filing of securities class actions and are generally recognized as representing two ends of the securities class action spectrum. Post-PSLRA, the Second Circuit …

Legislating Chevron, Elizabeth Garrett

Michigan Law Review

One of the most significant administrative law cases, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, lnc., is routinely referred to as the "counter-Marbury." The reference suggests that Chevron's command to courts to defer to certain reasonable agency interpretations of statutes is superficially an uneasy fit with the declaration in Marbury v. Madison that "[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." According to the consensus view, Chevron deference is consistent with Marbury, as long as Congress has delegated to agencies the power to make policy by interpreting ambiguous statutory language or filling …

Comparative Constitutionalism In A New Key, Paul W. Kahn

Michigan Law Review

Law is a symbolic system that structures the political imagination. The "rule of law" is a shorthand expression for a cultural practice that constructs a particular understanding of time and space, of subjects and groups, as well as of authority and legitimacy. It is a way of projecting, maintaining, and discovering meaning in the world of historical events and political possibilities. The rule of law - as opposed to the techniques of lawyering - is not the possession of lawyers. It is a characterization of the polity, which operates both descriptively and normatively in public perception. Ours, we believe, is …

Foreword: A Silk Purse?, John T. Noonan Jr.

Michigan Law Review

On March 2, 1801, President John Adams appointed forty-two persons to be justices of the peace in the District of Columbia. John Marshall, doubling as Secretary of State as well as Chief Justice, failed to deliver the commissions. Adams's term expired. James Madison, Marshall's successor as Secretary of State, withheld seventeen of the commissions. In 1802, William Marbury and three other appointees to this minor office brought mandamus against Madison in the Supreme Court. Madison was ordered to show cause why the writ should not issue. Congress abolished the June sitting of the Court. Only in 1803 was the case …

Judging The Next Emergency: Judicial Review And Individual Rights In Times Of Crisis, David Cole

Michigan Law Review

As virtually every law student who studies Marbury v. Madison learns, Chief Justice John Marshall's tactical genius was to establish judicial review in a case where the result could not be challenged. As a technical matter, Marbury lost, and the executive branch won. As furious as President Jefferson reportedly was with the decision, there was nothing he could do about it, for there was no mandate to defy. The Court's decision offered no remedy for Marbury himself, whose rights were directly at issue, and whose rights the Court found had indeed been violated. But over time, it became clear that …

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 …

The Irrepressible Myth Of Marbury, Michael Stokes Paulsen

Michigan Law Review

Nearly all of American constitutional law today rests on a myth. The myth, presented as standard history both in junior high civics texts and in advanced law school courses on constitutional law, runs something like this: A long, long time ago - 1803, if the storyteller is trying to be precise - in the famous case of Marbury v. Madison, the Supreme Court of the United States created the doctrine of "judicial review." Judicial review is the power of the Supreme Court to decide the meaning of the Constitution and to strike down laws that the Court finds unconstitutional. As …

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 …

Alternative Forms Of Judicial Review, Mark Tushnet

Michigan Law Review

The invention in the late twentieth century of what I call weak-form systems of judicial review provides us with the chance to see in a new light some traditional debates within U.S. constitutional law and theory, which are predicated on the fact that the United States has strong-form judicial review. Strong- and weak-form systems operate on the level of constitutional design, in the sense that their characteristics are specified in constitutional documents or in deep-rooted constitutional traditions. After sketching the differences between strong- and weak-form systems, I turn to design features that operate at the next lower level. Here legislatures …

Following The Man On The Clapham Omnibus: Social Science Evidence In Malpractice Litigation, Richard O. Lempert

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

This article responds to proposals to admit statistical evidence from empirical studies of actual health care practices to prove prevailing health practice standards in malpractice litigation by arguing that the case for doing so has numerous weaknesses that advocates of admitting such data commonly ignore. A fundamental concern is that the standard of practice defense co-evolved with prevailing modes of proof and might have been different had proof through experts not allowed for an aspirational as well as an empirical element to reach the jury. The article also argues that generating reliable statistical evidence of standard medical practice can be …

Vol. 54, No. 1, July 2, 2003, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

•The New Face of Michigan Law: A Conversation with Dean Caminker •Just a Little Patience •SFF Continues Hotel Voucher Program •Returning 3Ls Discuss Working in Detroit as a Summer Associate •Summer Emails from Cambodia •Boston Firm Helps ''Legal Eagles'' Get Their Wings •Crossword Puzzle

Border Patrol, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

Recently, the Supreme Court has encountered cases that concern perhaps our weightiest bioethical issue-how medical care is to be rationed. But this does not mean that the Court must therefore assess the justice of rationing, as many people incited by many journalists now fondly and firmly believe. In explaining why, we begin with a story about how Learned Hand remembered saying one day to Justice Holmes, "Well, sir, goodbye. Do justice!" Holmes turned quite sharply and said: "That is not my job. My job is to play the game according to the rules." If the Court doesn't do justice, what …

Legal Transitions, Rational Expectations, And Legal Progress, Kyle D. Logue

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

This paper was written for a symposium on legal transitions. The central question in the transitions literature is whether or to what extent the government should provide compensation for (or seek in some way to ameliorate) the losses of wealth occasioned by unexpected changes in the law or social policy. This Article argues that the prevailing normative framework for evaluating legal transitions - the consequentialist or economic framework - relies critically on two assumptions: the assumption that private parties (whose incentives are sought to be affected by the choice of transition norm) will behave with rational expectations and the assumption …

Failure To Advise Non-Citizens Of Immigration Consequences Of Criminal Convictions: Should This Be Grounds To Withdraw A Guilty Plea?, John J. Francis

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this Article, Professor Francis argues that non-citizen criminal defendants should be afforded greater latitude in withdrawing guilty pleas, when those pleas are made without awareness of potential immigration consequences. Moreover, the Article highlights the roles both judges and attorneys should play in ensuring that non-citizens do not enter into such uninformed pleas.

Noting that courts have characterized deportation as a collateral consequence of a criminal conviction, the article argues that deportation, following the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1996, is unique in its severity and certainty. Many of the same due process considerations which underpin the …

On The Need For Reform Of The H-1b Non-Immigrant Work Visa In Computer-Related Occupations, Norman Matloff

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The H-1B program authorizes non-immigrant visas under which skilled foreign workers may be employed in the U.S., typically in computer-related positions. Congress greatly expanded the program in 1998 and then again in 2000, in response to heavy pressure from industry, which claimed a desperate software labor shortage. After presenting an overview of the H-1B program in Parts II and III, the Article will show in Part IV that these shortage claims are not supported by the data. Part V will then show that the industry's motivation for hiring H-lBs is primarily a desire for cheap, compliant labor. The Article then …

Asylum, Social Group Membership And The Non-State Actor: The Challenge Of Domestic Violence, Michael G. Heyman

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article argues that the current approaches to asylum claims based on "social group" membership under the U.N. convention Relation to the Status of Refugees are deeply flawed. The Refugee Convention confers asylum on persons persecuted for their membership in a particular social group. Courts have struggled with the boundaries of the social group definition, and there appears to be no coherent way to reconcile all of the court decisions on what groups qualify as social groups under the Refugee Convention.

This Article suggests that courts adopt a consistent definition of what constitutes a social group. The definition proposed in …

The Qualities Of Mercy: Maximizing The Impact Of U.S. Refugee Resettlement, Daniel J. Steinbock

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Resettlement in the US. bestows a life changing benefit on thousands of overseas refugees. Because American refugee acceptance can never reach more than a tiny fraction of the world's millions of persecuted or oppressed, however, allocating this bounty requires the US. to choose the lucky few from the worthy many. Since the creation in 1980 of a permanent program of refugee resettlement, three different, and often conflicting, purposes have contended for its trove of immigration-like admissions slots. These are the removal of people from danger or hardship, the furtherance of a cluster of foreign policy objectives, and the facilitation of …

Ghost Workers In An Interconnected World: Going Beyond The Dichotomies Of Domestic Immigration And Labor Laws, Ruben J. Garcia

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Beginning with the September 11, 2001 ("9/11 ") terrorist attacks, the labor movement's plans to organize immigrant workers and achieve immigration reform have met serious challenges. After 9/11, the political climate surrounding immigrants put the AFL-CIO s hopes for legislative reform on hold, because of socially perceived connections between immigrants and terrorism. Then, in a March 2002 decision titled Hoffman Plastic Compounds, Inc. v. NLRB, the U.S. Supreme Court held that undocumented immigrant workers could not collect back pay under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) when their rights to join unions are violated. According to the Court, back pay …

The Effect Of Expungement On Removability Of Non-Citizens, James A.R. Nafziger, Michael Yimesgen

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

For most of the twentieth century, a non-citizen was generally not subject to removal on the basis of a criminal conviction which had been expunged by the state that rendered the conviction. During that time, the definition of a "conviction" for purposes of immigration law was borrowed from the law of the state which rendered the criminal conviction. In the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IRIRA) of 1996 Congress sought to provide a more uniform definition of the term "conviction" sufficient to justify an order of removal under the immigration law. The IIRIRA does not mention expungement, however. …

Reinforcing Representation: Congressional Power To Enforce The Fourteenth And Fifteenth Amendments In The Rehnquist And Waite Courts, Ellen D. Katz

Michigan Law Review

A large body of academic scholarship accuses the Rehnquist Court of "undoing the Second Reconstruction," just as the Waite Court has long been blamed for facilitating the end of the First. This critique captures much of what is meant by those generally charging the Rehnquist Court with "conservative judicial activism." It posits that the present Court wants to dismantle decades' worth of federal antidiscrimination measures that are aimed at the "reconstruction" of public and private relationships at the local level. It sees the Waite Court as having similarly nullified the civil-rights initiatives enacted by Congress following the Civil War to …

First Amendment Equal Protection: On Discretion, Inequality, And Participation, Daniel P. Tokaji

Michigan Law Review

The tension between equality and discretion lies at the heart of some of the most vexing questions of constitutional law. The considerable discretion that many official decisionmakers wield raises the spectre that violations of equality norms will sometimes escape detection. This is true in a variety of settings, whether discretion lies over speakers' access to public fora, implementation of the death penalty, or the recounting of votes. Is the First Amendment violated, for example, when a city ordinance gives local officials broad discretion to determine the conditions under which political demonstrations may take place? Is equal protection denied where the …

Building A Home For The Laws Of The World: Part 1: Bates, Cook, And Coffey, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

The following feature is an edited version of "Building a Foreign Law Collection at the University of Michigan Law Library, 1910-1960."© Margaret A. Leary, 2002, which originally appeared at 94 Law Library Journal 395-425 (2002), and appears here with permission of the author. The first part of the article appears here; the conclusion will appear in the next issue of Law Quadrangle Notes.

The New Imperialism: Violence, Norms, And The "Rule Of Law", Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks

Michigan Law Review

The past decade has seen a surge in American and international efforts to promote "the rule of law" around the globe, especially in postcrisis and transitional societies. The World Bank and multinational corporations want the rule of law, since the sanctity of private property and the enforcement of contracts are critical to modern conceptions of the free market. Human-rights advocates want the rule of law since due process and judicial checks on executive power are regarded as essential prerequisites to the protection of substantive human rights. In the wake of September 11, international and national-security experts also want to promote …

Government Responsibility For The Acts Of Jailhouse Informants Under The Sixth Amendment, Maia Goodell

Michigan Law Review

Once a criminal investigation has identified a suspect, and adversarial proceedings have begun, the Sixth Amendment confers a right to be represented by counsel at the "critical stages" of the process. The Supreme Court has made clear that the government cannot circumvent this requirement merely by designating a civilian informant to engage in questioning on its behalf. Less clear is when the government is responsible for the actions of an informant; particularly in the case of jailhouse informants, incarcerated individuals who question fellow inmates, government responsibility is a difficult issue for which no clear legal standard has emerged. An examination …

Against Preemption: How Federalism Can Improve The National Legislative Process, Roderick Hills

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

How easily should courts infer that federal statutes preempt state law? An ongoing debate exists on the question in Congress and among scholars and judges. One side calls for judges to protect federalism by adopting a rule of statutory construction that would bar preemption absent a clear statement of preemptive intent. Opponents argue against such a "clear statement" rule by arguing that state control over preemptable topics is often presumptively inefficient, because common-law juries lack expertise and because states are prone to imposing external costs on their neighbors. This article sidesteps these debates over preemption and instead argues that, quite …

Insuring Against Terrorism And Crime, Saul Levmore, Kyle D. Logue

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

The attacks of September 11th produced staggering losses of life and property. They also brought forth substantial private insurance payouts, as well as federal relief for the City of New York and for the families of individuals who perished on that day. The losses suffered in and after the attacks, and the structure of the relief effort, have raised questions about the availability of insurance against terrorism, the role of government in providing for, subsidizing, or ensuring the presence of such insurance, and the interaction between relief and the incentives for future precaution taking. In response to such losses, and …

The Impossibility Of Citizenship, Peter J. Spiro

Michigan Law Review

These are interesting times at the constitutional margins. Questions about where the Constitution takes up and leaves off are more frequently in play; one can no longer so readily assume the Constitution to supply an authoritative metric as we confront prominent cases of nonapplication. At the same time, the increasing robustness of international norms has prompted a vigorous reconsideration of their relationship to domestic ones. Where the twentieth century was marked by deep segmentation among national legal regimes, with minimal transboundary interpenetration, recent years have seen the advent of complex, overlapping regimes: subnational, national, regional, and global, public, and private. …

The New Leviathan, Dennis Patterson

Michigan Law Review

Reputation in any field is an elusive phenomenon: part notoriety, part honor, part fame, part critical assessment. Even in legal scholarship it has an uneven, unpredictable quality. It is hard to imagine a book by a law professor that has had more immediate impact on world leaders than Philip Bobbitt's The Shield of Achilles. Much of the national-security strategy devised by the U.S. administration after the September 11 attacks expresses ideas Bobbitt conceived long before; and from a different point on the political spectrum is the Archbishop of Canterbury, whose televised nationwide address in January explicitly took the book as …