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Full-Text Articles in Law

Wasting The Corporate Waste Doctrine: How The Doctrine Can Provide A Viable Solution In Controlling Excessive Executive Compensation, Steven Clayton Caywood Jan 2010

Wasting The Corporate Waste Doctrine: How The Doctrine Can Provide A Viable Solution In Controlling Excessive Executive Compensation, Steven Clayton Caywood

Michigan Law Review

In the midst of the global recession of the late 2000s, there was an outcry against corporate executives and what the public deemed to be their excessive compensation. Although this anger is still featured in today's headlines, it is nothing new. In fact, excessive executive compensation complaints arose when the very concept of a corporation was still new. Most of the complaints that the public has leveled have had little effect on boards of directors' decisions. Occasionally, however the outcry is so great that the public compels a company's leadership to take action. This happened early in 2009 when American …


Front Matter Jan 2010

Front Matter

Michigan Law Review

No abstract provided.


Front Matter Jan 2010

Front Matter

Michigan Law Review

No abstract provided.


Engineering The Endgame, Ellen D. Katz Jan 2010

Engineering The Endgame, Ellen D. Katz

Michigan Law Review

This Article explores what happens to longstanding remedies for past racial discrimination as conditions change. It shows that Congress and the Supreme Court have responded quite differently to changed conditions when they evaluate such remedies. Congress has generally opted to stay the course, while the Court has been more inclined to view change as cause to terminate a remedy. The Article argues that these very different responses share a defining flaw, namely, they treat existing remedies as fixed until they are terminated. As a result, remedies are either scrapped prematurely or left stagnant despite dramatically changed conditions. The Article seeks …


New Pleading, New Discovery, Scott Dodson Jan 2010

New Pleading, New Discovery, Scott Dodson

Michigan Law Review

Pleading in federal court has a new narrative. The old narrative was one of notice, with the goal of broad access to the civil justice system. New Pleading, after the landmark Supreme Court cases of Twombly and Iqbal, is focused on factual sufficiency, with the purpose of screening out meritless cases that otherwise might impose discovery costs on defendants. The problem with New Pleading is that factual insufficiency often is a poor proxy for meritlessness. Some plaintifs lack sufficient factual knowledge of the elements of their claims not because the claims lack merit but because the information they need is …


Front Matter Jan 2010

Front Matter

Michigan Law Review

No abstract provided.


Relative Doubt: Familial Searches Of Dna Databases, Erin Murphy Jan 2010

Relative Doubt: Familial Searches Of Dna Databases, Erin Murphy

Michigan Law Review

The continued growth of forensic DNA databases has brought about greater interest in a search method known as "familial" or "kinship" matching. Whereas a typical database search seeks the source of a crime-scene stain by making an exact match between a known person and the DNA sample, familial searching instead looks for partial matches in order to find potential relatives of the source. The use of a familial DNA search to identify the alleged "Grim Sleeper" killer in California brought national attention to the method, which has many proponents. In contrast, this Article argues against the practice of familial searching …


When A Company Confesses, Christopher Jackson Jan 2010

When A Company Confesses, Christopher Jackson

Michigan Law Review

Under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, a defendant is normally obligated to attend all of the proceedings against her. However Rule 43(b)(2) carves out an exception for organizational defendants, stating that they "need not be present" if represented by an attorney. But on its face, the language of 43(b)(2) is ambiguous: is it the defendant or the judge who has the discretion to decide whether the defendant appears? That is, may a judge compel the presence of an organizational defendant? This Note addresses the ambiguity in the context of the plea colloquy, considering the text of several of the …


Pleading With Congress To Resist The Urge To Overrule Twombly And Iqbal, Michael R. Huston Jan 2010

Pleading With Congress To Resist The Urge To Overrule Twombly And Iqbal, Michael R. Huston

Michigan Law Review

In Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, the Supreme Court changed the rhetoric of the federal pleading system. Those decisions have been decried by members of the bar, scholars, and legislators as judicial activism and a rewriting of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Such criticism has led members of both houses of Congress to introduce legislation to overrule the decisions and return to some variation of the "notice pleading" regime that existed before Twombly. This Note argues that both of the current proposals to overrule Twombly and Iqbal should be rejected. Although the bills take different …


Front Matter Jan 2010

Front Matter

Michigan Law Review

No abstract provided.


A Review Of Richard A. Posner, How Judges Think (2008), Jeffrey S. Sutton Jan 2010

A Review Of Richard A. Posner, How Judges Think (2008), Jeffrey S. Sutton

Michigan Law Review

I was eager to enter the judiciary. I liked the title: federal judge. I liked the job security: life tenure. And I could tolerate the pay: the same as Richard Posner's. That, indeed, may have been the most flattering part of the opportunity-that I could hold the same title and have the same pay grade as one of America's most stunning legal minds. Don't think I didn't mention it when I had the chance. There is so much to admire about Judge Posner-his lively pen, his curiosity, his energy, his apparent understanding of: everything. He has written 53 books, more …


The Vitality Of The American Sovereign, Todd E. Pettys Jan 2010

The Vitality Of The American Sovereign, Todd E. Pettys

Michigan Law Review

The proposition that "the people" are the preeminent sovereign in the United States has long been a tenet of American public life. The authors of the Declaration of Independence characterized the American people's sovereignty as a "self-evident" truth when announcing the colonies' decision to sever their ties with Great Britain, the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention in 1787 invoked the people's sovereignty when framing the nation's Constitution, and Americans today exercise their sovereignty each time they cast their ballots on Election Day. Yet what prerogatives, precisely, does the people's sovereignty entail? In modern America, where neither a bloody revolution nor …


Front Matter Jan 2010

Front Matter

Michigan Law Review

No abstract provided.


Structure And Precedent, Jeffrey C. Dobbins Jan 2010

Structure And Precedent, Jeffrey C. Dobbins

Michigan Law Review

The standard model of vertical precedent is part of the deep structure of our legal system. Under this model, we rarely struggle with whether a given decision of a court within a particular hierarchy is potentially binding at all. When Congress or the courts alter the standard structure and process offederal appellate review, however, that standard model of precedent breaks down. This Article examines several of these unusual appellate structures and highlights the difficulties associated with evaluating the precedential effect of decisions issued within them. For instance, when Congress consolidates challenges to agency decision making in a single federal circuit, …


Visionary Pragmatism And The Value Of Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, Danielle Keats Citron, Leslie Meltzer Henry Jan 2010

Visionary Pragmatism And The Value Of Privacy In The Twenty-First Century, Danielle Keats Citron, Leslie Meltzer Henry

Michigan Law Review

Part I of our Review discusses the central premises of Understanding Privacy, with particular attention paid to Solove's pragmatic methodology and his taxonomy of privacy. We introduce his pluralistic approach to conceptualizing privacy, which urges decision makers to assess privacy problems in context, and we explore his view that meaningful choices about privacy depend on an appreciation of how privacy benefits society as a whole. We also describe how Solove's taxonomy aims to account for the variety of activities that threaten privacy. In Part II, we analyze the strengths of Solove's pragmatism by demonstrating its functionality and flexibility in …


Voting As Veto, Michael S. Kang Jan 2010

Voting As Veto, Michael S. Kang

Michigan Law Review

This Article introduces an alternate conception of voting as vetobased on "negative preferences" against a voter's least preferred outcomes-that enriches voting theory and practice otherwise dominated by a conception of voting as a means of expressing a voter's ideal preferences. Indeed, the familiar binary choices presented in American political elections obscure the pervasiveness of negative preferences, which are descriptively salient in voting under all types of circumstances. Negative preferences have been overlooked, despite their theoretical and practical importance across many domains, leaving important questions unexplored in the literature. The Article develops a normative and positive account of voting as veto …


Katrina, Federalism, And Military Law Enforcement: A New Exception To The Posse Comitatus Act, Sean Mcgrane Jan 2010

Katrina, Federalism, And Military Law Enforcement: A New Exception To The Posse Comitatus Act, Sean Mcgrane

Michigan Law Review

In the days following Hurricane Katrina, as lawlessness and violence spread throughout New Orleans, the White House considered invoking the Insurrection Act so that members of the U.S. military could legally perform law enforcement functions inside the flooded city. This Note contends that the White House's decision not to invoke the Act was substantially driven by federalism concerns-in particular, concerns about intruding on Louisiana's sovereignty. But, this Note further contends, in focusing so heavily on these state sovereignty concerns, the White House largely ignored the other side of the 'federalism coin "-namely, enabling the federal government to act where national …