Law Commons^™

How To Look Like A Lawyer, Ann Juliano

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

Law schools often claim that they are teaching students “how to think like a lawyer.” What is less touted, however, is that students are learning how to look like a lawyer. They receive this message from multiple sources (faculty, alumni, peers, the career office) concerning a variety of situations: class, interviews, moot court, trial team, symposia and conferences. For law students who are first generation, these sources may be the only avenue (apart from the entertainment industry) of determining how to look like a lawyer. For law students who are transgender or gender non-binary, dress code advice dispensed along …

Reflections On A Light Unseen, Vincent Rougeau

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

I am very pleased to have an opportunity to offer some reflections on the manuscript for A Light Unseen by Professors John Breen and Lee Strang. It is an extraordinarily comprehensive look at the history of Catholic law schools in the United States. That aspect of the work alone makes it an important contribution to the scholarship on Catholic higher education in this country, and I am sure it will become an essential resource for scholars and educators across a wide range of fields. Nevertheless, A Light Unseen is much more than a history. It also raises a critical …

Brett Kavanaugh Vs. The Exonerated Central Park Five: Exposing The President's "Presumption Of Innocence" Double Standard, Sofia Yakren

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

In the service of Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the United States Supreme Court, the President of the United States (and Republican Senators) both misappropriated and further eroded the already compromised concepts of due process and presumption of innocence. This Essay uses the prominent “Central Park Five” case in which five teenagers of color were wrongly convicted of a white woman’s widely-publicized beating and rape to expose the President’s disparate use of the presumption along race and status lines. This narrative is consistent with larger systemic inequities that leave poor black and brown criminal defendants less likely to benefit …

Hearing Women: From Professor Hill To Dr. Ford, Stephanie M. Wildman

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

One of the recent traumas, another skirmish in today’s civilian conflict over what kind of society America will be, arose from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony about sexual assault she had endured. Her composed, measured statement during the nowJustice Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearing exemplified bravery in the face of adversity. The Senate and the nation’s response to her testimony underscored the high stakes in the ongoing ideological conflict, beyond the obvious prize of a Supreme Court seat. Constituents in the current ideological battle had differing reactions to Ford’s testimony and to this hearing, reflecting a range of views about …

"I Still Like Smear": The Senate Judiciary Committee's Obstructing Politics Surrounding The Kavanaugh Hearing And A Solution To The Chaos That Ensued, Frank J. Tantone

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

The incredible events and raucous behavior by members of the Committee that colored Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation process rose to a level of intensity and virulence never seen before in this specific area of American government and politics. Nevertheless, the most analogous situation that somewhat closely reflects the events that transpired in 2018 occurred seventeen years earlier. President George H.W. Bush, on July 1, 1991, nominated then District of Columbia Circuit Court Judge, Clarence Thomas, to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. Thomas’s confirmation hearing was also opposed from the outset but by civil rights and feminist organizations …

How The Boogeyman Saved Brett Kavanaugh, Cathren Page

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

We love to hate these boogeymen. When the societal narrative creates these invisible boogeymen, people can pour their rage against sexual abuse into these faceless antagonists. At the same time, the enraged survivors and protectors avoid conflicts with family, neighbors, colleagues, and social acquaintances who might actually commit or enable sexual abuse. We can dodge sticky questions regarding how a churchgoer, a judge, or an Ivy Leaguer could have committed a heinous act. The survivors can avoid all the victim-blaming backlash, threats of violence, and invalidation that accompanies reporting a sexual offense. Moreover, having less power on their own, …

The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House: Kavanaugh's Confirmation Hearing And The Perils Of Progressive Punitivism, Hadar Aviram

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

This essay proceeds in four parts. In Part I, I problematize the idea of the accused’s demeanor as evidence of guilt, remorse, or entitlement, arguing that we tend to overestimate our ability to deduce internal states of mind from people’s behavior and expressions. Part II assesses the potential (or lack thereof) of public performances of reckoning to produce a valuable expression of remorse, discussing the value of contingent apologies. Part III expands the framework to examine the way our politically fractured field responds to partisan efforts to excoriate culprits, arguing that “starting a national conversation” on the basis of …

Comments On Steven Smith, Pagans And Christians In The City, Michael P. Moreland

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

One of the most interesting aspects of this generally very interesting book was the discussion of sexual morality in paganism and Christianity. I have thought for a while that much of the contemporary debate about religious freedom is not about religious freedom in a generic sense but instead about religious freedom in a very particular context—sex. But that is a descriptive point—much more challenging is trying to give an account of why sex should have come to be (or as Smith’s argument implies, has long been) the battlefield on which much of the fight over religious freedom takes place. …

Dialoguing With Paganism, Helen M. Alvare

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

Professor Smith’s comparison of ancient and contemporary beliefs in the “immanent sacred” works well. By this I mean that it’s quite plausible, and accounts for quite a few contemporary claims, disputes, and movements in both law and culture.

The book’s implications for law are likely too complicated to allow for anything like its straightforward application in today’s religion clause contests. Still, it might indirectly assist traditional believers to lower the temperature of, or even avoid, such contests. I develop each of these points below.

Augustine's "Two Cities" And Steven Smith's Pagans And Christians, Brian Dunkle, S.J.

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

Although there are many modern voices juxtaposing pagans and Christians, I want to focus on an ancient source, Augustine of Hippo’s City of God (against the Pagans), which is one of the inspirations for Smith’s title. While the bishop of Hippo shows up occasionally in Smith’s account—indeed, his conversion is central to Chapter Five, Looking beyond the World: The Christian Revolution—Augustine’s description of the “two cities,” Babylon and Jerusalem, makes only a brief appearance. So as a scholar of both historical theology and Augustine (and as someone innocent of constitutional legal theory), I suggest that the City …

A Tale Of Two Cities: Religious Freedom In A Secular Age, Anna Su

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

Understanding the terms under which Christianity and paganism could coexist in antiquity thus gives us a semblance of an answer to the question posed early on in the book. In ancient Rome, Pliny asks why Christians were being subjected to legal sanctions, while in our present time, Douglas Laycock asks why people—referring to same-sex couples suing wedding photographers, florists, and bakers who object on religious grounds to their union—would insist on these services they neither need nor want? The paganism of ancient Rome welcomed a plurality of cults and religions but only up to a certain point. When Christians …

Many Cities, One Nation: A Response To Steven Smith's Pagans And Christians In The City, Bruce P. Frohnen

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

In his treatment of contemporary legal issues and, more deeply, his analysis of the manner in which changing religious assumptions and goals shape the culture from which law naturally grows, Smith has provided both a strong critique of contemporary “secular” pieties and an explanation for the culture wars so often derided or minimized by those most determined to deconstruct traditional culture. Still, I would argue that Smith’s wide-ranging, radical rethinking of contemporary social disorder does not go far enough. As Smith’s discussion of contemporary judicial treatment of social structure makes clear, today’s legal elites are at heart totalitarian in …

Christians And Pagans, Abner S. Greene

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

In this response paper, I will offer four thoughts. First, I’m not sure the contemporary picture is best described as pagans vs. Christians. Second, I question the subtle move throughout the book from a generative/creative understanding of God to seeing God as normative, as supervening in human affairs regarding right and wrong conduct. Third, I push back on the notion that theistic belief (or, perhaps, the very existence of God) is necessary to ground meaning and value. Fourth, I discuss some modern-day U.S. constitutional issues that Smith discusses as examples of pagans persecuting Christians: (a) state-sponsored religious symbols, (b) …

Ironies In The City: Reflections On Steven Smith's Pagans And Christians In The City, Perry Dane

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

Nevertheless, some deep ironies and puzzles run through the text of Pagans and Christians. Smith is too careful and subtle to ignore these undercurrents entirely. But it will be worth bringing them to the surface, not only for their own sake but because they might help suggest an alternative to Smith’s most rough-edged claims. My aim in this essay is not merely to nitpick. Any work as magisterial as Smith’s book will generalize and elide along the way. But I do hope by the accumulation of details to suggest a fundamental worry that goes to the most charged …

Employing Trafficking Laws To Capture Elusive Leaders Of Destructive Cults, Robin Boyle Laisure

Faculty Publications

In the 1970s and ‘80s in the United States, American newspapers raised public awareness about cults. Capturing headlines were articles about women, and later men, who followed Charles Manson to the extreme length of committing “Helter Skelter,” a cold-blooded killing spree. Cult activity continued to exist, out of sight and unobserved, until culminating in tragedy when it would, again, become the topic of a news story. Even when cults did not achieve “front-page” status in the news, they continued to recruit adults and raise children born into the group.

Destructive cults are the focus of this paper. Cults continue to …

Disclosure As Distribution, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

This brief response to the work of Professors Omri Ben-Shahr and Carl Schneider on mandated disclosure regimes investigates the normative criteria underlying their claim that those regimes are failures. Specifically, it unpacks the pieces of those authors' implicit cost-benefit analysis, revealing inherently normative judgments about desert and responsibility at the core of their (or any) critique of disclosure regimes. Disclosure regimes may aim to improve human decisionmaking behaviors, but those behaviors are influenced in non-deterministic ways by cognitive capacities that are heterogeneously distributed among subjects of the regimes. Accordingly, any claim regarding the normative desirability of disclosure regimes (or any …

The Causal Context Of Disparate Vote Denial, Janai S. Nelson

Faculty Publications

For nearly fifty years, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 ("VRA") and its amendments have remedied racial discrimination in the electoral process with unparalleled muscularity. Modern vote denial practices that have a disparate impact on minority political participation, however, increasingly fall outside the VRA's ambit. As judicial tolerance of disparate impact claims has waned in other areas of law, the contours of Section 2, one of the VRA's most powerful provisions, have also narrowed to fit the shifting landscape. Section 2's "on account of race" standard to determine discrimination in voting has evolved from one of quasi-intent determined by a …

The Cplr At Fifty: A View From Academia, Vincent C. Alexander

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

First and foremost, teaching students in an advanced civil procedure course that concentrates on the CPLR helps them prepare for civil litigation in all of the state courts of New York. As we all know, New York has numerous civil courts of original subject matter jurisdiction--a distressing feature for students and litigants alike. What is sometimes overlooked, however, is that the CPLR governs the procedure in all of those courts unless some specific statute says otherwise. Even for students who intend to practice law in other states, an in-depth study of the CPLR will enhance their ability to cope …

Self-Replicating Technologies, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

Self-replicating technologies pose a challenge to the legal regimes we ordinarily rely on to promote a balance between innovation and competition. This Article examines recent efforts by the federal courts to deal with the leading edge of this policy challenge in cases involving the quintessential self-replicating technology: the seed. In a recent series of cases involving the invocation of the patent exhaustion defense by purchasers of Monsanto’s “Roundup-Ready” genetically engineered herbicide-resistant crop technologies, farmers have argued that Monsanto’s patent rights do not extend to the second generation of soybeans grown from a patented first-generation seed. In each case, the Federal …

The First Amendment, Equal Protection, And Felon Disenfranchisement: A New Viewpoint, Janai S. Nelson

Faculty Publications

This Article engages the equality principles of the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause to reconsider the constitutionality of one of the last and most entrenched barriers to universal suffrage—felon disenfranchisement. A deeply racialized problem, felon disenfranchisement is additionally and independently a legislative judgment as to which citizen's ideas are worthy of inclusion in the electorate. Relying on a series of cases involving state interests in protecting the ballot and promoting its intelligent use, this Article demonstrates that felon disenfranchisement is open to attack under the Supreme Court's fundamental rights jurisprudence when it is motivated by a desire to …

State-Sponsored Religious Displays In The U.S. And Europe: Introduction, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

On June 22, 2012, the Center for Law and Religion proudly hosted, together with the Department of Law at Libera Universita Maria SS. Assunta (LUMSA), an international conference, State-Sponsored Religious Displays in the U.S. and Europe. Held at LUMSA's campus in Rome, Italy, the conference brought together leading American and European scholars, judges, and government officials to address the legality of public religious displays in different nations. Professor Silvio Ferrari of the University of Milan delivered the Conference Introduction. Panels included Cultural or Religious? Understanding Symbols in Public Places; The Lautsi Case and the Margin of Appreciation; and State-Sponsored Religious …

Marks, Morals, And Markets, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

The prevailing justification for trademark law depends on economic arguments that cannot account for much of the law's recent development, nor for mounting empirical evidence that consumer decisionmaking is inconsistent with assumptions of rational choice. But the only extant theoretical alternative to economic analysis is a Lockean "natural rights" theory that scholars have found even more unsatisfying. This Article proposes a third option. I analyze the law of trademarks and unfair competition as a system of moral obligations between producers and consumers. Drawing on the contractualist tradition in moral philosophy, I develop and apply a new theoretical framework to evaluate …

Speaking Of Moral Rights: A Conversation Between Eva E. Subotnik And Jane C. Ginsburg, Eva E. Subotnik, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Publications

This piece is the transcription of a conversation between two law faculty members speaking about moral rights in the digital age. Prof. Subotnik questions Prof. Ginsburg about some of the legal and technological developments that have occurred since Prof. Ginsburg’s 2001 essay, Have Moral Rights Come of (Digital) Age in the United States?. "If moral rights have come of digital age, should their realization be achieved by conveying more information about the copy, or by controlling the copy itself?" This question is now asked from the vantage point of 2012, ten years since Prof. Ginsburg first posed it.

Interpretive Divergence All The Way Down: A Response To Aaron-Andrew P. Bruhl And Ethan J. Leib, Elected Judges And Statutory Interpretation, 79 U Chi L Rev 1215 (2012), Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

This article is a response to the law review article cited in its title. It focuses on a corollary question raised by the article's analysis: if one takes seriously the proposition that it may make sense for elected judges to interpret statutes differently than do appointed judges, should judicial opinions written by elected judges look substantially different from those written by appointed judges? Part I examines the relative roles of judicial opinions written by elected versus appointed judges in a world in which divergence is practiced. Part II explores specific ways in which we might want or expect an elected …

Accentuate The Normative: A Response To Professor Mckenna, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

In his article, “A Consumer Decision-Making Theory of Trade-mark Law,” 98 Va. L. Rev. 67 (2012), Professor Mark McKenna makes two significant claims. The first is that the dominant Law and Economics theory of trademark law—the search-costs theory of the Chicago School—is in some way connected to recent undesirable expansions of trademark rights. The second is that a preferable theory of trademark law—one that would result in more tightly circumscribed and socially beneficial notions of trademark rights—would take consumer decision making, rather than search costs, as its guiding principle. I find myself sympathetic to these arguments, and yet I believe …

Rehnquist's Missing Letter: A Former Law Clerk's 1955 Thoughts On Justice Jackson And Brown, John Q. Barrett, Brad Snyder

Faculty Publications

"I think that Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed." That's what Supreme Court law clerk William H. Rehnquist wrote privately in December 1952 to his boss, Justice Robert H. Jackson. When the memorandum was made public in 1971 and Rehnquist's Supreme Court confirmation hung in the balance, he claimed that the memorandum reflected Jackson's views, not Rehnquist's. Rehnquist was confirmed, but his explanation triggered charges that he had lied and smeared the memory of one of the Court's most revered justices. This Essay analyzes a newly discovered document—a letter Rehnquist wrote to Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1955, …

Fear And Loathing In Trademark Enforcement, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

Much academic commentary these days concludes that trademark enforcement has become overly aggressive. Commentators argue that the increasingly expansive claims of rights by well-funded trademark owners are unreasonable, and thus that lawsuits asserting those rights amount to trademark bullying. But I think many, if not most, trademark practitioners would take the contrary view that enforcement can only barely keep up with the constantly evolving and worsening threats to their clients' brands, particularly internationally and online. The purpose of this Essay is to try and bridge these two positions by critiquing each one from the perspective of the other. The first …

Overcoming Our Global Disability In The Workforce: Mediating The Dream, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

The unparalleled global support for the 2008 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities ("CRPD") highlights the global schism between the public extolling of human rights for individuals with disabilities and the private castigating of such individuals in their daily lives and in the workforce. The CRPD explicitly mandates that work is a right accorded to individuals with disabilities, and global employers are now being challenged to implement that right. Yet, in order to ensure meaningful, universal compliance with its directives, the CRPD imposes affirmative duties on Supporting States to develop a customized, workable plan that effectively …

The Anti-Messiness Principle In Statutory Interpretation, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

Many of the Supreme Court's statutory interpretation opinions reflect a juisprudential aversion to interpreting statutes in a manner that will prove "messy" for implementing courts to administer. Yet the practice of construing statutes to avoid "messiness" has gone largely unnoticed in the statutory interpretation literature. This Article seeks to illuminate the Court's use of "anti-messiness" arguments to interpret statutes and to bring theoretical attention to the principle of "messiness" avoidance. The Article begins by defining the concept of anti-messiness and providing a typology of common anti-messiness arguments used by the Supreme Court. It then considers some dangers inherent in the …

Against Theories Of Punishment: The Thought Of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

This paper reflects critically on what is the near-universal contemporary method of conceptualizing the tasks of the scholar of criminal punishment. It does so by the unusual route of considering the thought of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a towering figure in English law and political theory, one of its foremost historians of criminal law, and a prominent public intellectual of the late Victorian period. Notwithstanding Stephen's stature, there has as yet been no sustained effort to understand his views of criminal punishment. This article attempts to remedy this deficit. But its aims are not exclusively historical. Indeed, understanding Stephen's ideas …