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Full-Text Articles in Law

Brown And Lawrence (And Goodridge), Michael J. Klarman Dec 2005

Brown And Lawrence (And Goodridge), Michael J. Klarman

Michigan Law Review

One year shy of the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Justices issued another equality ruling that is likely to become a historical landmark. In Lawrence v. Texas, the Court invalidated a state law that criminalized same-sex sodomy. This article contrasts these historic rulings along several dimensions, with the aim of shedding light on how Supreme Court Justices decide cases and how Court decisions influence social reform movements. Part I juxtaposes Brown and Lawrence to illustrate how judicial decisionmaking often involves an uneasy reconciliation of traditional legal sources with broader social and political mores and …


Deterrence Versus Brutalization: Capital Punishment's Differing Impacts Among States, Joanna M. Shepherd Nov 2005

Deterrence Versus Brutalization: Capital Punishment's Differing Impacts Among States, Joanna M. Shepherd

Michigan Law Review

Policymakers' false beliefs about capital punishment's universal deterrent effect may have caused many people to die needlessly. If deterrence is capital punishment's purpose then, in the majority of states where executions do not deter crime, executions kill convicts uselessly. Moreover, in the many states where the brutalization effect outweighs the deterrent effect, executions not only kill convicts needlessly but also induce the additional murders of many innocent people. After Part II discusses capital punishment's recent history in the United States, Part III reviews the conflict in recent studies on capital punishment and deterrence. Part IV explores differences in states' applications …


Search And Persuasion In Trademark Law, Barton Beebe Aug 2005

Search And Persuasion In Trademark Law, Barton Beebe

Michigan Law Review

The consumer, we are led to believe, is the measure of all things in trademark law. Trademarks exist only to the extent that consumers perceive them as designations of source. Infringement occurs only to the extent that consumers perceive one trademark as referring to the source of another. The most "intellectual" of the intellectual properties, trademarks are a property purely of consumers' minds. The simple idealist ontology underlying trademark law is largely responsible for the law's characteristic instability. Since 1992, the Supreme Court has considered - and in some cases, reconsidered - seven trademark cases. The Court's copyright cases garner …


Police And Democracy, David Alan Sklansky Jun 2005

Police And Democracy, David Alan Sklansky

Michigan Law Review

Part I of the Article describes the emergence in postwar America of a particular understanding of a democracy, an understanding generally referred to as "democratic pluralism," "analytic pluralism," "pluralist theory," or simply "pluralism." We will spend a fair bit of time unpacking pluralism, because its fine points will prove important when we turn to the task of tracing its reflections in criminal procedure. That task is taken up in Part II, which examines the ways in which the central tenets of democratic pluralism found echoes in criminal procedure - construed broadly to include not only jurisprudence and legal scholarship but …


Addressing Imperfections In The Tax System: Procedural Or Substantive Reform?, Leandra Lederman, Stephen W. Mazza May 2005

Addressing Imperfections In The Tax System: Procedural Or Substantive Reform?, Leandra Lederman, Stephen W. Mazza

Michigan Law Review

Books about tax administration tend to fall into one of two broad categories: those that paint the Internal Revenue Service ("IRS") as an agency peopled by corrupt, out-of-control bureaucrats who take pleasure in seeing innocent taxpayers suffer, and those that tell readers how to structure their affairs to minimize the risk of incurring an IRS employee's wrath during a tax audit. Perfectly Legal, the full title of which communicates David Cay Johnston's intent to focus on the tax system, does neither of those things. Instead, it is a book much like The Great American Tax Dodge, which explained …


Equality, Objectivity, And Neutrality, Alafair S. Burke May 2005

Equality, Objectivity, And Neutrality, Alafair S. Burke

Michigan Law Review

When is homicide reasonable? That familiar, yet unanswered question continues to intrigue both courts and criminal law scholars, in large part because any response must first address the question, "reasonable to whom?" The standard story about why that threshold question is both difficult and interesting usually involves a juxtaposition of "objective" and "subjective" standards for judging claims of reasonableness. On the one hand, the story goes, is a "subjective" standard of reasonableness under which jurors evaluate the reasonableness of a criminal defendant's beliefs and actions by comparing them to those of a hypothetical reasonable person sharing all of the individual …


National Identity In A Multicultural Nation: The Challenge Of Immigration Law And Immigrants, Kevin R. Johnson, Bill Ong Hing May 2005

National Identity In A Multicultural Nation: The Challenge Of Immigration Law And Immigrants, Kevin R. Johnson, Bill Ong Hing

Michigan Law Review

Samuel Huntington's provocative new book Who Are We?: The Challenges to National Identity is rich with insights about the negative impacts of globalization and the burgeoning estrangement of people and businesses in the United States from a truly American identity. The daunting question posed by the title of the book is well worth asking. After commencing the new millennium with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, U.S. military torture of Iraqi prisoners, indefinite detentions of U.S. citizens declared by the President to be "enemy combatants," and a massive domestic "war on terror" that has punished and frightened Arab, Muslim, and other …


For Whom Does The Bell Toll: The Bell Tolls For Brown?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig May 2005

For Whom Does The Bell Toll: The Bell Tolls For Brown?, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Michigan Law Review

Fifty years after the landmark decision Brown v. Board of Education, black comedian and philanthropist Dr. Bill Cosby astonished guests at a gala in Washington, D.C., when he stated, "'Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. (Black people] have got to take the neighborhood back . . . . (Lower economic Blacks] are standing on the comer and they can't speak English.'" Cosby, one of the wealthiest men in the United States, complained about "lower economic" Blacks "not holding up their end in this deal." He then asked the question, "'Well, Brown …


From Race To Class Struggle: Re-Problematizing Critical Race Theory, E San Juan Jr. Jan 2005

From Race To Class Struggle: Re-Problematizing Critical Race Theory, E San Juan Jr.

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The misconstrual of "class" as a theoretical and analytic concept for defining group or individual identity has led, especially during the Cold War period, to its confusion with status, life-style, and other ideological contingencies. This has vitiated the innovative attempt of CRT to link racism and class oppression. We need to reinstate the Marxist category of class derived from the social division of labor that generates antagonistic class relations. Class conflict becomes the key to grasping the totality of social relations of production, as well as the metabolic process of social reproduction in which racism finds its effectivity. This will …


The Passage Of Community Property Laws, 1939-1947: Was "More Than Money" Involved?, Jennifer E. Sturiale Jan 2005

The Passage Of Community Property Laws, 1939-1947: Was "More Than Money" Involved?, Jennifer E. Sturiale

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

Part I of this article reviews the legal landscape that provided the backdrop against which Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Pennsylvania later adopted community property laws. It also examines the tax consequences of the two Supreme Court cases, Lucas v. Earl and Poe v. Seaborn, that resulted in the disparate tax treatment of married couples in common law and community property law states. Part II briefly reviews the subsequent passage of community property laws by Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Pennsylvania; the passage of a federal tax reduction bill that provided for equal treatment of community property law and …


Vultures In Eagles' Clothing: Conspiracy And Racial Fantasy In Populist Legal Thought, Angela P. Harris Jan 2005

Vultures In Eagles' Clothing: Conspiracy And Racial Fantasy In Populist Legal Thought, Angela P. Harris

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Article has three interrelated aims. First, I will briefly describe the online world of the legal populists. My second aim in this Article is to give an account of legal populism that connects it with the American tradition of conspiracy theory and with the political consciousness of survivalism. My third and final aim in this Article is to examine, as David Williams has done in a wonderful series of articles, the relationship between the nation dreamed of by many legal populists and the one inhabited by state-sanctioned legal insiders.


Black Musical Traditions And Copyright Law: Historical Tensions, Candace G. Hines Jan 2005

Black Musical Traditions And Copyright Law: Historical Tensions, Candace G. Hines

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Note begins with a discussion of copyright law and then examines Black musical traditions and how they have conflicted with American copyright law through the years. Part I explains the history of American copyright law and its theoretical underpinnings. Part II relates common Black musical traditions in more detail. Part III illustrates how the foundations of Black musical traditions can be found in Negro Spirituals. Part IV outlines the notion of Black music as it evolved in ragtime. Part V describes how copyright undermined the traditions of blues, jazz, and R&B. Part VI explains how rock 'n' roll's prominence …


Does The Supreme Court Matter? Civil Rights And The Inherent Politicization Of Constitutional Law, Matthew D. Lassiter Jan 2005

Does The Supreme Court Matter? Civil Rights And The Inherent Politicization Of Constitutional Law, Matthew D. Lassiter

Michigan Law Review

More than a decade ago, in a colloquium sponsored by the Virginia Law Review, scholars of the civil rights movement launched a fierce assault on Michael J. Klarman's interpretation of the significance of the Supreme Court's famous school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Klarman's "backlash thesis," initially set forth in a series of law review and history journal articles and now serving as the centerpiece of his new book, revolves around two central claims. First, he argues that the advancements toward racial equality generally attributed to Brown were instead the inevitable products of long-term political, …


The Law And Culture Of The Apology In Korean Dispute Settlement (With Japan And The United States In Mind), Ilhyung Lee Jan 2005

The Law And Culture Of The Apology In Korean Dispute Settlement (With Japan And The United States In Mind), Ilhyung Lee

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article addresses the apology in civil dispute settlement in Korea, Japan's neighbor across the East Sea, using the U.S.-Japan comparative discussion as a helpful frame of reference. Part I provides the necessary background on the meaning of the apology and the leading commentary along the U.S.-Japan axis, beginning with the work of Wagatsuma and Rosett. Culture appears in this discussion in two regards. First, a question arises as to whether the very meaning of the apology as noted in the commentary reflects the U.S. cultural orientation, or instead has universal application. Second, some argue that cultural norms explain the …


"Dragonslaying." Review Of Democracy Defended, By G. Mackie, Donald J. Herzog Jan 2005

"Dragonslaying." Review Of Democracy Defended, By G. Mackie, Donald J. Herzog

Reviews

Early in the Iliad, the Achaians convene an assembly. There are a lot of them and they're unruly, too. "[Tihe place of their assembly was shaken, and the earth groaned / as the people took their positions and there was tumult. Nine heralds / shouting set about putting them in order, to make them cease their / clamour and listen to the kings beloved of Zeus."' Clutching the scepter that has come to him ultimately from Zeus, the very symbol of his right to speak and be heard, Agamemnon bitterly proposes that the Achaians give up. Nine years of struggle …


The Sacred Way Of Tibetan Crt Kung Fu: Can Race Crits Teach The Shadow's Mystical Insight And Help Law Students "Know" White Structural Oppression In The Heart Of The First-Year Curriculum? A Critical Rejoinder To Dorothy A. Brown, Reginald Leamon Robinson Jan 2005

The Sacred Way Of Tibetan Crt Kung Fu: Can Race Crits Teach The Shadow's Mystical Insight And Help Law Students "Know" White Structural Oppression In The Heart Of The First-Year Curriculum? A Critical Rejoinder To Dorothy A. Brown, Reginald Leamon Robinson

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Part I of this Article uses a quasi-parable, in which Dorothy Brown is a Tibetan Master who teaches law students CRT Kung Fu, the monastic fighting skills by which they will acquire the Shadow's mystical insight to "know" the heart of the first-year curriculum. Part II challenges the organizing principles and content on which Brown's Critical Race Theory purports to critically interrogate traditional legal doctrine, applying a New Age Philosophical critique as well as agency theory to crack dealing in Spanish Harlem. I use this case study to argue that crack dealers deliberately and purposefully choose extra-legal economic opportunities, even …


Detroit Area Study On Financial Services: What? Why? How?, Michael S. Barr Jan 2005

Detroit Area Study On Financial Services: What? Why? How?, Michael S. Barr

Articles

The following article is based on a talk give by Assistant Professor of Law Michael S. Barr to the University of Texas Law School-Harvard Law School Joint Conference on Commercial Law Realities in Austin, Texas, in April. Barr was selected by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, Survey Research Center to be the faculty investigator for the Detroit Area Study, which the University has conducted for more than 50 years. Barr is using the study to explore the financial services needs of low- and moderate-income households, building on his groundbreaking analysis in Banking the Poor. Barr raised a …


Credit Where It Counts: The Community Reinvestment Act And Its Critics, Michael S. Barr Jan 2005

Credit Where It Counts: The Community Reinvestment Act And Its Critics, Michael S. Barr

Articles

Despite the depth and breadth of U.S. credit markets, low- and moderate-income communities and minority borrowers have not historically enjoyed full access to credit. The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) was enacted in 1977 to help overcome barriers to credit that these groups faced. Scholars have long leveled numerous critiques against CRA as unnecessary, ineffectual, costly, and lawless. Many have argued that CRA should be eliminated. By contrast, I contend that market failures and discrimination justify governmental intervention and that CRA is a reasonable policy response to these problems. Using recent empirical evidence, I demonstrate that over the last decade CRA …