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Articles 31 - 60 of 103
Full-Text Articles in Law
Constitutional Expectations, Richard A. Primus
Constitutional Expectations, Richard A. Primus
Articles
The inauguration of Barack Obama was marred by one of the smallest constitutional crises in American history. As we all remember, the President did not quite recite his oath as it appears in the Constitution. The error bothered enough people that the White House redid the ceremony a day later, taking care to get the constitutional text exactly right. Or that, at least, is what everyone thinks happened. What actually happened is more interesting. The second time through, the President again departed from the Constitution's text. But the second time, nobody minded. Or even noticed. In that unremarked feature of …
How Should We Study District Judge Decision-Making?, Pauline T. Kim, Margo Schlanger, Christina L. Boyd, Andrew D. Martin
How Should We Study District Judge Decision-Making?, Pauline T. Kim, Margo Schlanger, Christina L. Boyd, Andrew D. Martin
Articles
Understanding judicial decision-making requires attention to the specific institutional settings in which judges operate. The choices available to judges are determined not only by the law and facts of the case but also by procedural context. The incentives and constraints shaping judges’ decision-making will vary depending on, for example, whether they have a life-appointment or are elected; whether they hear cases alone or with colleagues; and whether and under what circumstances their decisions might be altered, overturned, or undone by the actions of others. The basic insight that the institutional context matters has led to increasingly sophisticated studies of how …
Owen J. Roberts, Richard D. Friedman
Owen J. Roberts, Richard D. Friedman
Book Chapters
Roberts, Owen Josephus (1875-1955). Lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court justice. Roberts was born in Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1895 and from its law school in 1898. He taught there part-time beginning almost immediately until 1919, reaching the rank of full professor in 1907. While operating a profitable dairy farm, Roberts practiced law privately, punctuated by a three-year stint beginning in 1901 as first assistant district attorney of Philadelphia County. Tall and robust, he made a striking figure in both classroom and courtroom.
Charles Evans Hughes, Richard D. Friedman
Charles Evans Hughes, Richard D. Friedman
Book Chapters
Hughes, Charles Evans (1862-1948). Lawyer, politician, diplomat, and chief justice of the United States. Hughes was born in Glens Falls, N.Y., the son of a Baptist preacher from the English- Welsh border country who changed congregations from time to time. Young Hughes spent his earliest years in several locations in New York and New Jersey before the family settled in Brooklyn. A precocious child, he was educated both at home and in public school. At age 14, he began college at Madison (now Colgate) University, a Baptist institution. After his sophomore year, he transferred to Brown, which also had a …
From Bush V. Gore To Namudno: A Response To Professor Amar, Ellen D. Katz
From Bush V. Gore To Namudno: A Response To Professor Amar, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
In his Dunwody Lecture, Professor Akhil Amar invites us to revisit the Bush v. Gore controversy and consider what went wrong. This short essay responds to Professor Amar by taking up his invitation and looking at the decision through a seemingly improbable lens, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last June in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. One (NAMUDNO) v. Holder. Among its many surprises, NAMUDNO helps illuminate the Court’s fundamental error nine years ago. Professor Amar forcefully argues that the mistrust with which the Justices in the Bush v. Gore majority viewed the Florida Supreme Court was both unjustified …
Bargaining In The Shadow Of Rate-Setting Courts, Daniel A. Crane
Bargaining In The Shadow Of Rate-Setting Courts, Daniel A. Crane
Articles
Judges will tell you that they are comparatively poor rate regulators. The specialized, technical competence and supervisory capacity that public utilities commissions enjoy are usually absent from judicial chambers. Nonetheless, when granting antitrust remedies-particularly remedies for monopolistic abuse of intellectual property-courts sometimes purport to act as rate regulators for the licensing or sale of the defendant's assets. At the outset, we should distinguish between two forms ofjudicial rate setting. In one form, a court (or the FTC in its adjudicative capacity) grants a compulsory license and sets a specific rate as part of a final judgment or an order. The …
Limits Of Interpretivism, Richard A. Primus
Limits Of Interpretivism, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Justice Stephen Markman sits on the Supreme Court of my home state of Michigan. In that capacity, he says, he is involved in a struggle between two kinds of judging. On one side are judges like him. They follow the rules. On the other side are unconstrained judges who decide cases on the basis of what they think the law ought to be. This picture is relatively simple, and Justice Markman apparently approves of its simplicity. But matters may in fact be a good deal more complex.
Why Counting Votes Doesn't Add Up: A Response To Cox And Miles' Judging The Voting Rights Act, Ellen D. Katz, Anna Baldwin
Why Counting Votes Doesn't Add Up: A Response To Cox And Miles' Judging The Voting Rights Act, Ellen D. Katz, Anna Baldwin
Articles
In Judging the Voting Rights Act, Professors Adam B. Cox and Thomas J. Miles report that judges are more likely to find liability under section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) when they are African American, appointed by a Democratic president, or sit on an appellate panel with a judge who is African American or a Democratic appointee. Cox and Miles posit that their findings “contrast” and “cast doubt” on much of the “conventional wisdom” about the Voting Rights Act, by which they mean the core findings we reported in Documenting Discrimination in Voting: Judicial Findings Under Section 2 …
When Should Original Meanings Matter?, Richard A. Primus
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.
The Internationalization Of Lay Legal Decision-Making: Jury Resurgence And Jury Research, Richard O. Lempert
The Internationalization Of Lay Legal Decision-Making: Jury Resurgence And Jury Research, Richard O. Lempert
Articles
When I first began to study the jury more than thirty years ago, the topic of this Journal issue, jury systems around the world, was unthinkable. The use of juries, especially in civil litigation, had long been in decline, to the point of near extinction in England, the land of their birth, and the live question was whether the jury system would endure in the United States. It seemed clear that juries would not continue in their classic form, as many U.S. states, with the Supreme Court's eventual approval, mandated juries of less than twelve people and allowed verdicts to …
Double-Consciousness In Constitutional Adjudication, Richard A. Primus
Double-Consciousness In Constitutional Adjudication, Richard A. Primus
Articles
Constitutional theorists are familiar with epistemic and consequentialist reasons why judges might allow their decision making to be shaped by strongly held public opinion. The epistemic approach treats public opinion as an expert indicator, while the consequentialistapproach counsels judges to compromise legally correct interpretations so as not to antagonize a hostile public. But there is also a third reason, which we can think ofas constitutive. In limited circumstances, the fact that the public strongly holds a given view can be one of the factors that together constitute the correct answer to a constitutional question. In those circumstances, what the public …
Judicial Power And Mobilizable History, Richard A. Primus
Judicial Power And Mobilizable History, Richard A. Primus
Articles
One contribution that law professors can make to constitutional discourse, I suggest, is the nurturing of new mobilizable histories. A "mobilizable history," as I will use the term, is a narrative, image, or other historical source that is sufficiently well-known to the community of constitutional decisionmakers so as to be able to support a credible argument in the discourse of constitutional law. It draws upon materials that are within the collective memory of constitutional interpreters; indeed, a necessary step in nurturing a new mobilizable history is to introduce new information into that collective memory or to raise the prominence of …
Mapp V. Ohio: The First Shot Fired In The Warren Court's Criminal Procedure 'Revolution', Yale Kamisar
Mapp V. Ohio: The First Shot Fired In The Warren Court's Criminal Procedure 'Revolution', Yale Kamisar
Book Chapters
Although Earl Warren ascended to the Supreme Court in 1953, when we speak of the Warren Court's "revolution" in American criminal procedure we really mean the movement that got underway half-way through the Chief Justice's sixteen-year reign. It was the 1961 case of Mapp v. Ohio, overruling Wolf v. Colorado and holding that the state courts had to exclude illegally seized evidence as a matter of federal constitutional law, that is generally regarded as having launched the so-called criminal procedure revolution.
From Laredo To Fort Worth: Race, Politics And The Texas Redistricting Case, Ellen D. Katz
From Laredo To Fort Worth: Race, Politics And The Texas Redistricting Case, Ellen D. Katz
Articles
LULAC v. Perry held that Texas violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act when it displaced nearly 100,000 Latino residents from a congressional district in Laredo to protect the Republican incumbent they refused to support. At the same time, the Justices let stand the dismantling of a so-called “coalition” district in Fort Worth where African-American voters comprising a minority of the district’s population allegedly enjoyed effective control in deciding the district’s representative. Only Justice Kennedy supported the outcome in both Laredo and Fort Worth. His opinion marks the first time that he, or indeed a majority of the Justices, …
The Totality Of The Circumstances Of The Debtor's Financial Situation In A Post-Means Test World: Trying To Bridge The Wedoff/Culhane & White Divide, John A. E. Pottow
The Totality Of The Circumstances Of The Debtor's Financial Situation In A Post-Means Test World: Trying To Bridge The Wedoff/Culhane & White Divide, John A. E. Pottow
Articles
Bankruptcy Judge Eugene Wedoff and Creighton Law School professors Marianne Culhane and Michaela White engage in a spirited debate over a series of law review articles about the proper scope of motions to dismiss a debtor's petition under section 707(b) of the freshly revised Bankruptcy Code. It is an interesting and provocative dialogue, with both sides advancing their respective positions persuasively. As a result, I find myself in the unfortunate position of wanting to agree with both. Since that is impossible, however, this brief article is my attempt to find a middle ground between their two positions. It does so …
Crawford Surprises: Mostly Unpleasant, Richard D. Friedman
Crawford Surprises: Mostly Unpleasant, Richard D. Friedman
Articles
Crawford v. Washington should not have been surprising. The Confrontation Clause guarantees a criminal defendant the right "to be confronted with the witnesses against him." The doctrine of Ohio v. Roberts, treating the clause as a general proscription against the admission of hearsay-except hearsay that fits within a "firmly rooted" exception or is otherwise deemed reliable-had so little to do with the constitutional text, or with the history or principle behind it, that eventually it was bound to be discarded. And the appeal of a testimonial approach to the clause seemed sufficiently strong to yield high hopes that ultimately the …
How Earl Warren's Twenty-Two Years In Law Enforcement Affected His Work As Chief Justice, Yale Kamisar
How Earl Warren's Twenty-Two Years In Law Enforcement Affected His Work As Chief Justice, Yale Kamisar
Articles
Before becoming governor of California, Earl Warren had spent his entire legal career, twenty-two years, in law enforcement. Professor Kamisar maintains that this experience significantly influenced Warren's work as a Supreme Court justice and gave him a unique perspective into police interrogation and other police practices. This article discusses some of Warren's experiences in law enforcement and searches for evidence of that experience in Warren's opinions. For example, when Warren was head of the Alameda County District Attorney's Office, he and his deputies not only relied on confessions in many homicide cases but also themselves interrogated homicide suspects. The seeds …
Earl Warren: Law Enforcement Leads To Defendants' Rights, Yale Kamisar
Earl Warren: Law Enforcement Leads To Defendants' Rights, Yale Kamisar
Articles
Before becoming governor of California, Earl Warren spent 22 years in law enforcement: five as a deputy district attorney (1920- 25); thirteen as head of the Alameda County district attorney's office (1925-38); and four as state attorney general (1939-42). My thesis is that Warren's many years in law enforcement significantly affected his work as Chief Justice of the United States.
Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. And The Counterrevolution In The Federal Securities Laws, Adam C. Pritchard
Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. And The Counterrevolution In The Federal Securities Laws, Adam C. Pritchard
Articles
The confirmation of Lewis F. Powell, Jr., to the Supreme Court coincided with a dramatic shift in the Court's approach to securities law. This Article documents Powell's influence in changing the Court's direction in securities law. Powell's influence was the product of his extensive experience with the securities laws as a corporate lawyer, which gave him much greater familiarity with that body of law than his fellow Justices had. That experience also made him skeptical of civil liability, particularly class and derivative actions. Powell's skepticism led him to interpret the securities law in a consistently narrow fashion to reduce liability …
Constitutional Sunsetting?: Justice O'Connor's Closing Comments On Grutter, Vikram David Amar, Evan H. Caminker
Constitutional Sunsetting?: Justice O'Connor's Closing Comments On Grutter, Vikram David Amar, Evan H. Caminker
Articles
Most Supreme Court watchers were unsurprised that Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's vote proved pivotal in resolving the University of Michigan affirmative action cases; indeed, Justice O'Connor has been in the majority in almost every case involving race over the past decade, and was in the majority in each and every one of the 5-4 decisions the Court handed down across a broad range of difficult issues last Term. Some smaller number of observers were unsurprised that Justice O'Connor decided (along with the four Justices who in the past have voted to allow latitude with regard to race-based affirmative action programs) …
Why Theories Of Law Have Little Or Nothing To Do With Judicial Restraint, Philip E. Soper
Why Theories Of Law Have Little Or Nothing To Do With Judicial Restraint, Philip E. Soper
Articles
The question I explore here, stated in its broadest form, is this: What is the connection between theory and practice between academic claims about how judges should decide cases and the actual behavior of judges as revealed in the opinions they write? More particularly, do theories about the nature of law have any implications for the question whether a judge should adopt an "activist" or a "restrained" approach to deciding cases? As you might infer from my title, I defend here what I call "the skeptical thesis" in answer to both the general and particular questions. Judges pay little or …
Justice Frank Murphy And American Labor Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Justice Frank Murphy And American Labor Law, Theodore J. St. Antoine
Articles
Working people and disfavored groups were central concerns of Frank Murphy, the last Michigan Law School graduate to sit on the United States Supreme Court. In the pages of this Review, just over a half century ago, Archibald Cox wrote of him: "It was natural ...th at his judicial work should be most significant in these two fields [labor law and civil rights] and especially in the areas where they coalesce."' In this Essay, after a brief overview of Murphy the man, his days at the University of Michigan, and his career prior to the Court appointment, I shall review …
Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel
Free-Standing Due Process And Criminal Procedure: The Supreme Court's Search For Interpretive Guidelines, Jerold H. Israel
Articles
When I was first introduced to the constitutional regulation of criminal procedure in the mid-1950s, a single issue dominated the field: To what extent did the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment impose upon states the same constitutional restraints that the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments imposed upon the federal government? While those Bill of Rights provisions, as even then construed, imposed a broad range of constitutional restraints upon the federal criminal justice system, the federal system was (and still is) minuscule as compared to the combined systems of the fifty states. With the Bill of Rights provisions …
Trying To Make Peace With Bush V. Gore (Symposium: Bush V. Gore Issue 2001), Richard D. Friedman
Trying To Make Peace With Bush V. Gore (Symposium: Bush V. Gore Issue 2001), Richard D. Friedman
Articles
The Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, shutting down the recounts of Florida's vote in the 2000 presidential election and effectively awarding the election to George W. Bush, has struck many observers, including myself, as outrageous.' Decisions of the Supreme Court should be more than mere reflections of ideological or partisan preference thinly camouflaged behind legalistic language. It would therefore be pleasant to be able to believe that they are more than that. Accordingly, Judge Richard Posner's analysis,2 in which he defends the result reached by the Court-though not the path by which it got there-is particularly welcome. Though …
Cardozo The [Small R] Realist, Richard D. Friedman
Cardozo The [Small R] Realist, Richard D. Friedman
Reviews
In Part I of this Review, I will discuss aspects of Cardozo's life and character. In Part II, I will discuss Cardozo's jurisprudential theory as revealed in his lectures and essays. In Part IlI, I will suggest how we gain a better perspective on his judicial opinions by understanding not only that theory but also the man and his life.
Political Questions, Judicial Questions, And The Problem Of Washington V. Glucksberg, Carl E. Schneider
Political Questions, Judicial Questions, And The Problem Of Washington V. Glucksberg, Carl E. Schneider
Other Publications
Over a century and a half ago, Alexis de Tocqueville famously said, "Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question." Physician-assisted suicide superbly illustrates Tocqueville's acute observation. For a number of years, assisted suicide was the prototype of a (nonpartisan) political question. Interest groups brought it to public attention. Public discussion of it flourished. Legislatures debated it. Citizens in several states decided in referenda whether to make it legal. Almost suddenly, however, this classic political process was transformed into a judicial one by the startling and strongly stated …
Making Biomedical Policy Through Constitutional Adjudication:The Example Of Physician-Assisted Suicide, Carl E. Scheider
Making Biomedical Policy Through Constitutional Adjudication:The Example Of Physician-Assisted Suicide, Carl E. Scheider
Book Chapters
Throughout most of American history no one would have supposed biomedical policy could or should be made through constitutional adjudication. No one would have thought that the Constitution spoke to biomedical issues, that those issues were questions of federal policy, or that judges were competent to handle them. Today, however, the resurgence of substantive due process has swollen the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment, the distinction between federal and state spheres is tattered, and few statutes escape judicial vetting. Furthermore, Abraham Lincoln's wish that the Constitution should "become the political religion of the nation" has been granted. "We now reverently …
Festschrift: Lee Loevinger, Layman E. Allen
Festschrift: Lee Loevinger, Layman E. Allen
Articles
Lee Loevinger is well-known and recognized for his outstanding achievements as a Minnesota Supreme Court Justice, as Assistant United States Attorney General for Antitrust, and as a superb practicing attorney. Perhaps less appreciated are his extraordinary contributions to the intersection of law and science generally and more particularly to the nurturing of the application of computer technology to law in its infancy.
In Memoriam: Lewis F. Powell, Jr., Christina B. Whitman
In Memoriam: Lewis F. Powell, Jr., Christina B. Whitman
Articles
At the time of his resignation, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. was justly praised as a moderate, flexible jurist - open-minded, suspicious of ideology, most often found at the center of a divided Supreme Court. Yet Justice Powell was a man of deeply conservative instincts. Suspicious of invitations to expand the scope of individual constitutional rights, he was a participant and even a leader in the Court's reassertion of a federalism that emphasized deference to states and in its reinvigoration of restrictions on access to federal courts. His jurisprudence was all of a piece. Justice Powell's reluctance to expand federal …
Taking Decisions Seriously, Richard D. Friedman
Taking Decisions Seriously, Richard D. Friedman
Reviews
The New Deal era is one of the great turning points of American constitutional history. The receptivity of the Supreme Court to regulation by state and federal governments increased dra- matically during that period. The constitutionalism that prevailed before Charles Evans Hughes became Chief Justice in 1930 was similar in most respects to that of the beginning of the twen- tieth century. The constitutionalism that prevailed by the time Hughes’ successor Harlan Fiske Stone died in 1946 is far more related to that of the end of the century. How this transformation occurred is a crucial and enduring issue in …