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Full-Text Articles in Law

Interrogation Of Detainees: Extending A Hand Or A Boot?, Amos N. Guiora Dec 2008

Interrogation Of Detainees: Extending A Hand Or A Boot?, Amos N. Guiora

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The current "war on terror" provides the Bush administration with a unique opportunity to both establish clear guidelines for the interrogation of detainees and to make a forceful statement about American values. How the government chooses to act can promote either an ethical commitment to the norms of civil society, or an attitude analogous to Toby Keith's "American Way," where Keith sings that "you'll be sorry that you messed with the USofA, 'Cuz we'll put a boot in your ass, It's the American Way."


Nothing Improper? Examining Constitutional Limits, Congressional Action, Partisan Motivation, And Pretextual Justification In The U. S. Attorney Removals, David C. Weiss Nov 2008

Nothing Improper? Examining Constitutional Limits, Congressional Action, Partisan Motivation, And Pretextual Justification In The U. S. Attorney Removals, David C. Weiss

Michigan Law Review

The forced mid-term resignations of nine U.S. Attorneys was an unprecedented event in American history. Nearly one year after the administration executed the removals, the House Judiciary Committee was still reviewing and publicizing emails, memoranda, and other documents in an effort to understand how the firings were effectuated. This Note examines many of those documents and concludes that the removals were likely carried out for partisan reasons. It then draws on the Constitution, Supreme Court precedent, and separation of powers principles to argue that Congress is constitutionally empowered to enact removal limitations for inferior officers such as U.S. Attorneys so …


Money As Property: The Effects Of Doctrinal Misallocation On Campaign Finance Reform, Maneesh Sharma May 2008

Money As Property: The Effects Of Doctrinal Misallocation On Campaign Finance Reform, Maneesh Sharma

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

By applying First Amendment jurisprudence to campaign finance measures, this Note argues that the Supreme Court has misallocated campaign finance within its doctrinal scheme. This doctrinal misallocation has stymied the ability of legislatures to enact effective reforms to reduce the role of money in politics. This Note argues that money in the political process more closely resembles property than speech and should therefore be analyzed under a less stringent property review. This Note concludes by proposing a standard of review developed from the Court's property jurisprudence.


An "Unintended Consequence": Dred Scott Reinterpreted, Sam Erman Apr 2008

An "Unintended Consequence": Dred Scott Reinterpreted, Sam Erman

Michigan Law Review

Austin Allen's monograph marks the 150th anniversary of the decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford with a revisionist interpretation of that oft-examined case. Many scholars have portrayed the case as a proslavery decision that fanned sectional fires. After all, the Court held that blacks were not U.S. citizens and that Congress was impotent to bar slavery in U.S. territories. Allen, by contrast, understands the case primarily as a judicial attempt to rationalize federal commerce and slavery jurisprudences. Part I argues that this ambitious reinterpretation enriches, but does not topple, existing Dred Scott historiography. In the case of the Court's citizenship …


From Pedagogical Sociology To Constitutional Adjudication: The Meaning Of Desegregation In Social Science Research And Law, Anne Richardson Oakes Jan 2008

From Pedagogical Sociology To Constitutional Adjudication: The Meaning Of Desegregation In Social Science Research And Law, Anne Richardson Oakes

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

In the United States following the case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) federal judges with responsibility for public school desegregation but no expertise in education or schools management appointed experts from the social sciences to act as court advisors. In Boston, MA, educational sociologists helped Judge W. Arthur Garrity design a plan with educational enhancement at its heart, but the educational outcomes were marginalized by a desegregation jurisprudence conceptualized in terms of race rather than education. This Article explores the frustration of outcomes in Boston by reference to the differing conceptualizations of desegregation in law and social science. …


Let's Not Jump To Conclusions: Approaching Felon Disenfranchisement Challenges Under The Voting Rights Act, Thomas G. Varnum Jan 2008

Let's Not Jump To Conclusions: Approaching Felon Disenfranchisement Challenges Under The Voting Rights Act, Thomas G. Varnum

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 invalidates voting qualifications that deny the right to vote on account of race or color. This Article confronts a split among the federal appellate courts concerning whether felons may rely on Section 2 when challenging felon disenfranchisement laws. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals allows felon disenfranchisement challenges under Section 2; however, the Second and Eleventh Circuits foresee unconstitutional consequences and thus do not. After discussing the background of voting rights jurisprudence, history of felon disenfranchisement laws, and evolution of Section 2, this Article identifies the points of contention among the …


Ideological Endowment: The Staying Power Of The Electoral College And The Weaknesses Of The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, Daniel P. Rathbun Jan 2008

Ideological Endowment: The Staying Power Of The Electoral College And The Weaknesses Of The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, Daniel P. Rathbun

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

The National Popular Vote (“NPV”) movement is designed to eliminate the federalist impact of the Electoral College without amending the Constitution. By fashioning an interstate compact to grant participating states’ electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, NPV proponents suppose they can induce states to forfeit their electoral “weights” and replace the current, federalist election process with a fully majoritarian one. But by leaving the Electoral College in place, the NPV movement is setting itself up for a double pushback: first, in the form of immediate legal resistance, and second, through states’ long-term involvement in a meaningfully …


Can Glucksberg Survive Lawrence? Another Look At The End Of Life And Personal Autonomy, Yale Kamisar Jan 2008

Can Glucksberg Survive Lawrence? Another Look At The End Of Life And Personal Autonomy, Yale Kamisar

Articles

In Washington v. Glucksberg, the Court declined to find a right to physician-assisted suicide ("PAS") in the Constitution. Not a single Justice dissented. One would expect such a ruling to be quite secure. But Lawrence v. Texas, holding that a state cannot make consensual homosexual conduct a crime, is not easy to reconcile with Glucksberg. Lawrence certainly takes a much more expansive view of substantive due process than did Glucksberg. It is conceivable that the five Justices who made up the Lawrence majority-all of whom still sit on the Court-might overrule Glucksberg. For various reasons, …


Public Rights, Social Equality, And The Conceptual Roots Of The Plessy Challenge, Rebecca J. Scott Jan 2008

Public Rights, Social Equality, And The Conceptual Roots Of The Plessy Challenge, Rebecca J. Scott

Articles

This Article argues that the test case that gave rise to the 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson is best understood as part of a wellestablished, cosmopolitan tradition of anticaste activism in Louisiana rather than as a quixotic effort that contradicted nineteenth-century ideas of the boundaries of citizens' rights. By drawing a dividing line between civil and political rights, on the one hand, and social rights, on the other, the Supreme Court construed challenges to segregation as claims to a "social equality" that was beyond the scope of judicially cognizable rights. The Louisiana constitutional convention of 1867-68, however, had defined …


Is A Forensic Laboratory Report Identifying A Substance As A Narcotic 'Testimonial'?, Richard D. Friedman Jan 2008

Is A Forensic Laboratory Report Identifying A Substance As A Narcotic 'Testimonial'?, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

Is a state forensic analyst's laboratory report, prepared for use in a criminal proceeding and identifying a substance as cocaine, "testimonial" evidence and so subject to the demands of the Confrontation Clause as set forth in Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004)?


Does An Accused Forfeit The Confrontation Right By Murdering A Witness, Absent A Purpose To Render Her Unavailable?, Richard D. Friedman Jan 2008

Does An Accused Forfeit The Confrontation Right By Murdering A Witness, Absent A Purpose To Render Her Unavailable?, Richard D. Friedman

Articles

If an accused murdered a witness, should he be deemed to have forfeited the right under the Sixth Amendment "to be confronted with" the witness, absent proof that the accused committed the murder for the purpose of rendering her unavailable as a witness?


Scrutiny Land, Randy E. Barnett Jan 2008

Scrutiny Land, Randy E. Barnett

Michigan Law Review

Scrutiny Land is the place where government needs to justify to a court its restrictions on the liberties of the people. In the 1930s, the Supreme Court began limiting access to Scrutiny Land. While the New Deal Court merely shifted the burden to those challenging a law to show that a restriction of liberty is irrational, the Warren Court made the presumption of constitutionality effectively irrebuttable. After this, only one road to Scrutiny Land remained: showing that the liberty being restricted was a fundamental right. The Glucksberg Two-Step, however, limited the doctrine of fundamental rights to those (1) narrowly defined …


Limiting A Constitutional Tort Without Probably Cause: First Amendment Retaliatory Arrest After Hartman, Colin P. Watson Jan 2008

Limiting A Constitutional Tort Without Probably Cause: First Amendment Retaliatory Arrest After Hartman, Colin P. Watson

Michigan Law Review

Federal law provides a cause of action for individuals who are the target of adverse state action taken in retaliation for their exercise of First Amendment rights. Because these constitutional torts are "easy to allege and hard to disprove," they raise difficult questions concerning the proper balance between allowing meaningful access to the courts and protecting government agents from frivolous and vexatious litigation. In its recent decision in Hartman v. Moore, the U.S. Supreme Court tipped the scales in favor of the state in one subset of First Amendment retaliation actions by holding that plaintiffs in actions for retaliatory …


A Call For The End Of The Doctrine Of Realignment, Jacob S. Sherkow Jan 2008

A Call For The End Of The Doctrine Of Realignment, Jacob S. Sherkow

Michigan Law Review

In Indianapolis v. Chase National Bank, 1941, the Supreme Court established the doctrine of realignment, requiring federal courts to examine the issues in dispute and realign each party as plaintiff or defendant if necessary. Due to the complete diversity requirement, realignment gave the federal courts the ability to both create and destroy diversity jurisdiction. Since 1941, the federal courts have struggled to interpret the central holding in Indianapolis, and have created several competing "tests" for realignment. This confusion has made the doctrine of realignment unworkable. Realignment along with each of the present tests-encourages jurisdictional abuses by forcing the federal …


Waiting For The Other Shoe: Hudson And The Precarious State Of Mapp, David A. Moran Jan 2008

Waiting For The Other Shoe: Hudson And The Precarious State Of Mapp, David A. Moran

Articles

I have no idea whether my death will be noted in the New York Times. But if it is, I fear the headline of my obituary will look something like: "Professor Dies; Lost Hudson v. Michigan' in Supreme Court, Leading to Abolition of Exclusionary Rule." The very existence of this Symposium panel shows, I think, that my fear is well-grounded. On the other hand, I am not quite as fearful that Hudson foreshadows the complete overruling of Mapp v. Ohio2 and Weeks v. United States3 as I was when I published an article just three months after the Hudson decision …


Requiem For Section 1983, Paul D. Reingold Jan 2008

Requiem For Section 1983, Paul D. Reingold

Articles

Section 1983 no longer serves as a remedial statute for the people most in need of its protection. Those who have suffered a violation of their civil rights at the hands of state authorities, but who cannot afford a lawyer because they have only modest damages or seek only equitable remedies, are foreclosed from relief because lawyers shun their cases. Today civil rights plaintiffs are treated the same as ordinary tort plaintiffs by the private bar: without high damages, civil rights plaintiffs are denied access to the courts because no one will represent them. Congress understood that civil rights laws …


Mandatory Arbitration: Why It's Better Than It Looks, Theodore J. St. Antoine Jan 2008

Mandatory Arbitration: Why It's Better Than It Looks, Theodore J. St. Antoine

Articles

"Mandatory arbitration" as used here means that employees must agree as a condition of employment to arbitrate all legal disputes with their employer, including statutory claims, rather than take them to court. The Supreme Court has upheld the validity of such agreements on the grounds that they merely provide for a change of forum and not a loss of substantive rights. Opponents contend this wrongfully deprives employees of the right to a jury trial and other statutory procedural benefits. Various empirical studies indicate, however, that employees similarly situated do about as well in arbitration as in court actions, or even …


Pharma's Nonobvious Problem, Rebecca S. Eisenberg Jan 2008

Pharma's Nonobvious Problem, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

This Article considers the effect of the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in KSR International Co. v. Teleflex, Inc. on the nonobviousness standard for patentability as applied to pharmaceutical patents. By calling for an expansive and flexible analysis and disapproving of the use of rigid formulas in evaluating an invention for obviousness, KSR may appear to make it easier for generic competitors to challenge the validity of drug patents. But an examination of the Federal Circuit's nonobviousness jurisprudence in the context of such challenges reveals that the Federal Circuit has been employing all along the sort of flexible …


When Should Original Meanings Matter?, Richard A. Primus Jan 2008

When Should Original Meanings Matter?, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Constitutional theory lacks an account of when each of the familiar sources of authority-text, original meaning, precedent, and so on-should be given weight. The dominant tendency is to regard all sources as potentially applicable in every case. In contrast, this Article proposes that each source of authority is pertinent in some categories of cases but not in others, much as a physical tool is appropriate for some but not all kinds of household tasks. The Article then applies this approach to identify the categories of cases in which original meaning is, or is not, a valid factor in constitutional decisionmaking.


Stoneridge Investment Partners V. Scientific-Atlanta: The Political Economy Of Securities Class Action Reform, Adam C. Pritchard Jan 2008

Stoneridge Investment Partners V. Scientific-Atlanta: The Political Economy Of Securities Class Action Reform, Adam C. Pritchard

Articles

I begin in Part II by explaining the wrong turn that the Court took in Basic. The Basic Court misunderstood the function of the reliance element and its relation to the question of damages. As a result, the securities class action regime established in Basic threatens draconian sanctions with limited deterrent benefit. Part III then summarizes the cases leading up to Stoneridge and analyzes the Court's reasoning in that case. In Stoneridge, like the decisions interpreting the reliance requirement of Rule 10b-5 that came before it, the Court emphasized policy implications. Sometimes policy implications are invoked to broaden the reach …


The California Greenhouse Gas Waiver Decision And Agency Interpretation: A Response To Galle And Seidenfeld, Nina A. Mendelson Jan 2008

The California Greenhouse Gas Waiver Decision And Agency Interpretation: A Response To Galle And Seidenfeld, Nina A. Mendelson

Articles

Professors Brian Galle and Mark Seidenfeld add some important strands to the debate on agency preemption, particularly in their detailed documentation of the potential advantages agencies may possess in deliberating on preemption compared with Congress and the courts. As they note, the quality of agency deliberation matters to two different debates. First, should an agency interpretation of statutory language to preempt state law receive Chevron deference in the courts, as other agency interpretations may, or should some lesser form of deference be given? Second, should a general statutory authorization to an agency to administer a program and to issue rules …


Judicial Compensation And The Definition Of Judicial Power In The Early Republic, James E. Pfander Jan 2008

Judicial Compensation And The Definition Of Judicial Power In The Early Republic, James E. Pfander

Michigan Law Review

Article III's provision for the compensation of federal judges has been much celebrated for the no-diminution provision that forecloses judicial pay cuts. But other features of Article Ill's compensation provision have largely escaped notice. In particular, little attention has been paid to the framers' apparent expectation that Congress would compensate federal judges with salaries alone, payable from the treasury at stated times. Article III's presumption in favor of salary-based compensation may rule out fee-based compensation, which was a common form of judicial compensation in England and the colonies but had grown controversial by the time of the framing. Among other …