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Articles 1 - 30 of 30
Full-Text Articles in Law
Social Facts, Legal Fictions, And The Attribution Of Slave Status: The Puzzle Of Prescription, Rebecca J. Scott
Social Facts, Legal Fictions, And The Attribution Of Slave Status: The Puzzle Of Prescription, Rebecca J. Scott
Articles
In case after case, prosecutors, judges and juries therefore still struggle to come up with a definition of slavery, looking for some set of criteria or indicia that will enable them to discern whether the phenomenon they are observing constitutes enslavement. In this definitional effort, contemporary jurists may imagine that in the past, surely the question was simpler: someone either was or was not a slave. However, the existence of a set of laws declaring that persons could be owned as property did not, even in the nineteenth century, answer by itself the question of whether a given person was …
It Is Time For Washington State To Take A Stand Against Holmes's Bad Man: The Value Of Punitive Damages In Deterring Big Business And International Tortfeasors, Jackson Pahlke
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
In Washington State, tortfeasors get a break when they commit intentional torts. Instead of receiving more punishment for their planned bad act, intentional tortfeasors are punished as if they committed a mere accident. The trend does not stop in Washington State—nationwide, punitive damage legislation inadequately deters intentional wrongdoers through caps and outright bans on punitive damages. Despite Washington State’s one hundred and twenty-five year ban on punitive damages, it is in a unique and powerful position to change the way courts across the country deal with intentional tortfeasors. Since Washington has never had a comprehensive punitive damages framework, and has …
Amendment Creep, Jonathan L. Marshfield
Amendment Creep, Jonathan L. Marshfield
Michigan Law Review
To most lawyers and judges, constitutional amendment rules are nothing more than the technical guidelines for changing a constitution’s text. But amendment rules contain a great deal of substance that can be relevant to deciding myriad constitutional issues. Indeed, judges have explicitly drawn on amendment rules when deciding issues as far afield as immigration, criminal procedure, free speech, and education policy. The Supreme Court, for example, has reasoned that, because Article V of the U.S. Constitution places no substantive limitations on formal amendment, the First Amendment must protect even the most revolutionary political viewpoints. At the state level, courts have …
An Empirical Study Of Implicit Takings., James E. Krier, Stewart E. Sterk
An Empirical Study Of Implicit Takings., James E. Krier, Stewart E. Sterk
Articles
Takings scholarship has long focused on the niceties of Supreme Court doctrine, while ignoring the operation of takings law "on the ground" in the state and lower federal courts, which together decide the vast bulk of all takings cases. This study, based primarily on an empirical analysis of more than 2000 reported decisions ovcr the period 1979 through 2012, attempts to fill that void. This study establishes that the Supreme Court's categorical rules govern almost no state takings cases, and that takings claims based on government regulation almost invariably fail. By contrast, when takings claims arise out of government action …
A Legal Obituary For Ramiro, Sheri Lynn Johnson
A Legal Obituary For Ramiro, Sheri Lynn Johnson
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Most death penalty lawyers who practice long enough will watch the execution of a client. It is always, always terrible, but not always terrible in the same way. With each client’s execution, a lawyer is confronted with the death of a human being—not an accidental death, not an inevitable death, but an avoidable one—and with his or her own failure to prevent that death. Some executions also involve a very personal loss for the lawyer because of their relationship with the client. Other executions are horrific because things go awry and impose extreme suffering on the executed individual. No matter …
Shedding Light On The "Going Dark" Problem And The Encryption Debate, John Mylan Traylor
Shedding Light On The "Going Dark" Problem And The Encryption Debate, John Mylan Traylor
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
In an effort to protect the enormous volume of sensitive and valuable data that travels across the Internet and is stored on personal devices, private companies have created encryption software to secure data from criminals, hackers, and terrorists who wish to steal it. The greatest benefit of encryption also creates the biggest problem: Encryption software has become so secure that often not even the government can bypass it. The “Going Dark” problem—a scenario in which the government has obtained the legal authority to search a suspected criminal’s encrypted device but lacks the technical ability to do so—is becoming increasingly common. …
Branded: Trademark Tattoos, Slave Owner Brands, And The Right To Have "Free" Skin, Shontavia Johnson
Branded: Trademark Tattoos, Slave Owner Brands, And The Right To Have "Free" Skin, Shontavia Johnson
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
Though existing for several millennia in various cultures, body modification through tattooing is becoming more popular in the United States. Twenty percent of Americans have at least one tattoo, and among Millennials this number grows to almost forty percent. As the popularity of tattoos has increased in recent years, so too have questions revolving around concepts of intellectual property and the plausible limitations of any rights stemming therefrom. This Article addresses the implications, for both the tattooist and the tattooed, of using trademarked designations as tattoos. Neither the courts nor Congress have definitively answered the question of how traditional trademark …
Predicate Offenses, Foreign Convictions, And Trusting Tribal Courts, Alexander S. Birkhold
Predicate Offenses, Foreign Convictions, And Trusting Tribal Courts, Alexander S. Birkhold
Michigan Law Review Online
Concerns about the reliability of criminal justice systems in foreign countries have resulted in uneven treatment of foreign convictions in U.S. courts. Federal courts, however, have historically accepted tribal court convictions as predicate offenses under recidivist statutes. But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently rejected the uncounseled convictions obtained against Michael Bryant, Jr., a serial domestic abuser, in the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Court. The court dismissed a federal indictment that had been brought against Bryant under 18 U.S.C § 117, which makes it a felony to commit domestic violence against a spouse or partner in Indian country if the …
Inventing Equal Sovereignty, Leah M. Litman
Inventing Equal Sovereignty, Leah M. Litman
Michigan Law Review
The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder relied on the “fundamental principle” and “historic tradition” of equal sovereignty to hold one of the Voting Rights Act’s key provisions unconstitutional. Yet almost three years after Shelby County, and despite a recent wave of equal sovereignty challenges to major federal programs, the equal sovereignty principle remains largely unexamined. This Article seeks to provide some clarity—both to establish the contours of the equal sovereignty doctrine and to evaluate whether it is a sound rule of constitutional federalism. The principle of equal sovereignty, as initially articulated by courts and subsequently …
How The Ada Regulates And Restricts Solitary Confinement For People With Mental Disabilities, Margo Schlanger
How The Ada Regulates And Restricts Solitary Confinement For People With Mental Disabilities, Margo Schlanger
Other Publications
In a landmark decision two decades ago, United States District Judge Thelton Henderson emphasized the toxic effects of solitary confinement for inmates with mental illness. In Madrid v. Gomez, a case about California’s Pelican Bay prison, Judge Henderson wrote that isolated conditions in the Special Housing Unit, or SHU, while not amounting to cruel and unusual punishment for all prisoners, were unconstitutional for those “at a particularly high risk for suffering very serious or severe injury to their mental health . . . .” Vulnerable prisoners included those with pre-existing mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and brain damage. Henderson concluded that …
To Seek A Newer World: Prisoners’ Rights At The Frontier, David M. Shapiro
To Seek A Newer World: Prisoners’ Rights At The Frontier, David M. Shapiro
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
Prisoners’ rights lawyers have long faced a dismal legal landscape. Yet, 2015 was a remarkable year for prison litigation that could signal a new period for this area of law—the Supreme Court handed down decisions that will reverberate in prison jurisprudence for decades to come. New questions have been asked, new avenues opened. This piece is about what the Court has done recently, and what possibilities it has opened for the future. More broadly, I suggest that the Court may be subjecting prison officials to greater scrutiny and that this shifting judicial landscape reflects an evolving social discourse about prison …
Think Of The Children: Using Iied To Reformulate Disturbing Speech Restrictions, Richard Lorren Jolly
Think Of The Children: Using Iied To Reformulate Disturbing Speech Restrictions, Richard Lorren Jolly
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
The Colorado State Court of Appeals recently upheld an injunction restricting public displays of aborted fetuses. The court held that the restriction passed strict scrutiny because the state had a compelling interest in protecting children from the psychological harm of “disturbing images” and the injunction was narrowly tailored. This marked the first time an injunction had been upheld on this rationale. This Note critiques that holding and others. It contends that while some federal and state courts have recognized the interest in protecting the psychological wellbeing of children from disturbing speech as compelling, the interest is not supported by precedent. …
Milkovich V. Lorain Journal Twenty-Five Years Later: The Slow, Quiet, And Troubled Demise Of Liar Libel, Leonard Niehoff, Ashley Messenger
Milkovich V. Lorain Journal Twenty-Five Years Later: The Slow, Quiet, And Troubled Demise Of Liar Libel, Leonard Niehoff, Ashley Messenger
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
In Milkovich v. Lorain Journal Co., the Supreme Court held that there is no separate constitutional protection for statements of opinion. It also held that an accusation that an individual lied is a statement of fact actionable in defamation. Lower courts have, correctly in our view, essentially ignored both holdings. In Part I we discuss Milkovich and the infirmities in its reasoning. In Part II we discuss the complex nature of lies and accusations of lies and argue that Milkovich failed to account for that complexity. In Part III we discuss the strategies the lower courts have used to …
The Firing Squad As "A Known And Available Alternative Method Of Execution" Post-Glossip, Deborah W. Denno
The Firing Squad As "A Known And Available Alternative Method Of Execution" Post-Glossip, Deborah W. Denno
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
This Article does not address the medical debate surrounding the role of midazolam in executions; the problems associated with using the drug have been persuasively argued elsewhere. Nor does it question the soundness of the Glossip Court’s “alternative method of execution” requirement. Rather, this Article’s proposed reform is a constitutionally acceptable alternative that meets the Glossip Court’s standard, rendering moot—at least for the purposes of the following discussion—very real concerns regarding the validity of that dictate. Part I of this Article pinpoints several areas where the Glossip Court goes wrong in glaringly inaccurate or misleading ways, given the vast history …
The Incest Horrible: Delimiting The Lawrence V. Texas Right To Sexual Autonomy, Y. Carson Zhou
The Incest Horrible: Delimiting The Lawrence V. Texas Right To Sexual Autonomy, Y. Carson Zhou
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Is the criminalization of consensual sex between close relatives constitutional in the wake of Lawrence v. Texas and Obergefell v. Hodges? Justice Scalia thought not. The substantive due process landscape has changed dramatically in response to the LGBTQ movement. Yet, when a girl in a sexual relationship with her father recently revealed in an anonymous interview with New York Magazine that they were planning to move to New Jersey, one of the only two states where incest was legal, the New Jersey legislature introduced with unprecedented speed a bill criminalizing incest. But who has the couple harmed? The very …
Building Labor's Constitution, Kate Andrias
Building Labor's Constitution, Kate Andrias
Articles
In the last few years, scholars have sought to revitalize a range of constitutional arguments against mounting economic inequality and in favor of labor rights. They urge contemporary worker movements to lay claim to the Constitution. But worker movements, for the most part, have not done so. This Essay takes seriously that choice. It examines reasons for the absence of constitutional argumentation by contemporary worker movements, particularly the role of courts and legal elites in our constitutional system, and it contends that labor’s ongoing statutory and regulatory reform efforts are essential prerequisites to the development of progressive constitutional labor rights. …
Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson
Contemporary Practice Of The United States Relating To International Law, Kristina Daugirdas, Julian Davis Mortenson
Articles
In this section: • Iran and United States Continue to Implement Nuclear Deal, Although Disputes Persist • United States Continues to Challenge Chinese Claims in South China Sea; Law of the Sea Tribunal Issues Award Against China in Philippines-China Arbitration • U.S. Navy Report Concludes That Iran’s 2015 Capture of U.S. Sailors Violated International Law • United States Justifies Its Use of Force in Libya Under International and National Law • U.S. Drone Strike Kills Taliban Leader in Pakistan • U.S. Government Releases Casualty Report, Executive Order, and Presidential Policy Guidance Related to Its Counterterrorism Strike Practices • The Department …
Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr
Testing Racial Profiling: Empirical Assessment Of Disparate Treatment By Police, Sonja B. Starr
Articles
In this Article, I explore why measuring disparate-treatment discrimination by police is so difficult, and consider the ways that researchers' existing tools can make headway on these challenges and the ways they fall short. Lab experiments have provided useful information about implicit racial bias, but they cannot directly tell us how these biases actually affect real-world behavior. Meanwhile, for observational researchers, there are various hurdles, but the hardest one to overcome is generally the absence of data on the citizen conduct that at least partially shapes policing decisions. Most crime, and certainly most noncriminal "suspicious" or probable-cause-generating behavior, goes unreported …
Soundings And Silences, Laurence H. Tribe
Soundings And Silences, Laurence H. Tribe
Michigan Law Review Online
My work over the years has included both studying existing constitutions, particularly that of the United States, and assisting others with the drafting of new constitutions—from the Marshall Islands to the Czech Republic to South Africa. Among the things I noticed was that those undertakings, although distinct, were related—and related most significantly in the way that formative decisions about what to say and what not to say in a new constitution have bearing on later decisions about how to interpret what a constitution says or fails to say. My decision to pay special attention to the various roles of silence …
Confessions In An International Age: Re-Examining Admissibility Through The Lens Of Foreign Interrogations, Julie Tanaka Siegel
Confessions In An International Age: Re-Examining Admissibility Through The Lens Of Foreign Interrogations, Julie Tanaka Siegel
Michigan Law Review
In Colorado v. Connelly the Supreme Court held that police misconduct is necessary for an inadmissible confession. Since the Connelly decision, courts and scholars have framed the admissibility of a confession in terms of whether it successfully deters future police misconduct. As a result, the admissibility of a confession turns largely on whether U.S. police acted poorly, and only after overcoming this threshold have courts considered factors pointing to the reliability and voluntariness of the confession. In the international context, this translates into the routine and almost mechanic admission of confessions— even when there is clear indication that the confession …
Black-Box Immigration Federalism, David S. Rubenstein
Black-Box Immigration Federalism, David S. Rubenstein
Michigan Law Review
In Immigration Outside the Law, Hiroshi Motomura confronts the three hardest questions in immigration today: what to do about our undocumented population, who should decide, and by what legal process. Motomura’s treatment is characteristically visionary, analytically rich, and eminently fair to competing views. The book’s intellectual arc begins with its title: “Immigration Outside the Law.” As the narrative unfolds, however, Motomura explains that undocumented immigrants are “Americans in waiting,” with moral and legal claims to societal integration.
Constitutional Avoidance As Interpretation And As Remedy, Eric S. Fish
Constitutional Avoidance As Interpretation And As Remedy, Eric S. Fish
Michigan Law Review
In a number of recent landmark decisions, the Supreme Court has used the canon of constitutional avoidance to essentially rewrite laws. Formally, the avoidance canon is understood as a method for resolving interpretive ambiguities: if there are two equally plausible readings of a statute, and one of them raises constitutional concerns, judges are instructed to choose the other one. Yet in challenges to the Affordable Care Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and other major statutes, the Supreme Court has used this canon to adopt interpretations that are not plausible. Jurists, scholars, and legal commentators have criticized …
Face-To-Face With Facial Recognition Evidence: Admissibility Under The Post-Crawford Confrontation Clause, Joseph Clarke Celentino
Face-To-Face With Facial Recognition Evidence: Admissibility Under The Post-Crawford Confrontation Clause, Joseph Clarke Celentino
Michigan Law Review
In Crawford v. Washington, the Supreme Court announced a major change in Confrontation Clause doctrine, abandoning a decades-old framework that focused on the common law principles of hearsay analysis: necessity and reliability. The new doctrine, grounded in an originalist interpretation of the Sixth Amendment, requires courts to determine whether a particular statement is testimonial. But the Court has struggled to present a coherent definition of the term testimonial. In its subsequent decisions, the Court illustrated that its new Confrontation Clause doctrine could be used to bar forensic evidence, including laboratory test results, if the government failed to produce the …
Congress And The Reconstruction Of Foreign Affairs Federalism, Ryan Baasch, Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash
Congress And The Reconstruction Of Foreign Affairs Federalism, Ryan Baasch, Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash
Michigan Law Review
Though the Constitution conspicuously bars some state involvement in foreign affairs, the states clearly retain some authority in foreign affairs. Correctly supposing that state participation may unnecessarily complicate or embarrass our nation’s foreign relations, the Supreme Court has embraced aggressive preemption doctrines that sporadically oust the states from discrete areas in foreign affairs. These doctrines are unprincipled, supply little guidance, and generate capricious results. Fortunately, there is a better way. While the Constitution permits the states a limited and continuing role, it never goes so far as guaranteeing them any foreign affairs authority. Furthermore, the Constitution authorizes Congress to enact …
Anti-Incarcerative Remedies For Illegal Conditions Of Confinement, Margo Schlanger
Anti-Incarcerative Remedies For Illegal Conditions Of Confinement, Margo Schlanger
Articles
Opposition to mass incarceration has entered the mainstream. But except in a few states, mass decarceration has not, so far, followed: By the end of 2014 (the last data available), nationwide prison population had shrunk only 3% off its (2009) peak. Jail population, similarly, was down just 5% from its (2008) peak. All told, our current incarceration rate - 7 per 1,000 population - is the same as in 2002, and four times the level in 1970, when American incarceration rates began their rise. Our bloated prisoner population includes many groups of prisoners who are especially likely to face grievous …
Separations Of Wealth: Inequality And The Erosion Of Checks And Balances, Kate Andrias
Separations Of Wealth: Inequality And The Erosion Of Checks And Balances, Kate Andrias
Articles
American government is dysfunctional: Gridlock, filibusters, and expanding presidential power, everyone seems to agree, threaten our basic system of constitutional governance. Who, or what, is to blame? In the standard account, the fault lies with the increasing polarization of our political parties. That standard story, however, ignores an important culprit: Concentrated wealth and its organization to achieve political ends. The only way to understand our current constitutional predicament—and to rectify it—is to pay more attention to the role that organized wealth plays in our system of checks and balances. This Article shows that the increasing concentration of wealth and political …
Debunking Humphrey's Executor, Daniel A. Crane
Debunking Humphrey's Executor, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
The Supreme Court’s 1935 Humphrey’s Executor decision paved the way for the modern administrative state by holding that Congress could constitutionally limit the President’s powers to remove heads of regulatory agencies. The Court articulated a quartet of features of the Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC”) statutory design that ostensibly justified the Commission’s constitutional independence. It was to be nonpartisan and apolitical, uniquely expert, and performing quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial, rather than executive, functions. In recent years, the staying power of Humphrey’s Executor has been called into question as a matter of constitutional design. This Essay reconsiders Humphrey’s Executor from a different angle. …
Is Theocracy Our Politics? Thoughts On William Baude's 'Is Originalism Our Law?', Richard A. Primus
Is Theocracy Our Politics? Thoughts On William Baude's 'Is Originalism Our Law?', Richard A. Primus
Articles
In Is Originalism Our Law?, William Baude has made a good kind of argument in favor of originalism. Rather than contending that originalism is the only coherent theory for interpreting a constitution, he makes the more modest claim that it happens to be the way that American judges interpret our Constitution. If he is right—if originalism is our law—then judges deciding constitutional cases ought to be originalists. But what exactly would the content of that obligation be? Calling some interpretive method “our law” might suggest that judges have an obligation to decide cases by reference to that method. But the …
Commentary On The Emerging Constitutional Indigenous Peoples Land Rights In Tanzania, Daniel Halberstam
Commentary On The Emerging Constitutional Indigenous Peoples Land Rights In Tanzania, Daniel Halberstam
Articles
The pastoralists and hunter-gatherer indigenous peoples in Tanzania continue lobbying their recognition as such and protection of their land rights. This article discusses the extent to which the indigenous peoples are legally recognized and the state of their security of land tenure. With the hindsight of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007 and the 2003 Report of the African Commission Working Group of Experts on Indigenous Population, this article probes the emerging indigenous land rights within the broader understating of the minority rights in the Draft Constitution of Tanzania 2014 as well as the Draft Policy …
Why Enumeration Matters, Richard A. Primus
Why Enumeration Matters, Richard A. Primus
Michigan Law Review
The maxim that the federal government is a government of enumerated powers can be understood as a “continuity tender”: not a principle with practical consequences for governance, but a ritual statement with which practitioners identify themselves with a history from which they descend. This interpretation makes sense of the longstanding paradox whereby courts recite the enumeration principle but give it virtually no practical effect. On this understanding, the enumerated-powers maxim is analogous to the clause that Parliament still uses to open enacted statutes: “Be it enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty.” That text might imply that the Queen is …