Law Commons^™

The Past As A Colonialist Resource, Deepa Das Acevedo

Faculty Articles

Originalism’s critics have failed to block its rise. For many jurists and legal scholars, the question is no longer whether to espouse originalism but how to espouse it. This Article argues that critics have ceded too much ground by focusing on discrediting originalism as either bad history or shoddy linguistics. To disrupt the cycle of endless “methodological” refinements and effectively address originalism’s continued popularity, critics must do two things: identify a better disciplinary analogue for originalist interpretation and advance an argument that moves beyond methods.

Anthropology can assist with both tasks. Both anthropological analysis and originalist interpretation are premised on …

Offshore Entanglements, Martin W. Sybblis

Faculty Articles

For decades, scholars have struggled to determine how to deploy laws and legal institutions to spur economic prosperity. But, without knowing which legal rules and institutions to prioritize for a particular social context, the outcomes have been generally unsatisfactory. The case of offshore financial centers provides fresh and compelling new insights into this puzzle. This Article uses the sociological concept of community economic identity (“CEI”) to understand why some offshore financial centers prioritize investments in legal institutions that bolster their offshore finance enterprises while others do not. CEI refers to a community’s shared identity that is linked to a specific …

The First Woman Dean Of A Texas Law School: Barbara Bader Aldave At St. Mary's University, Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

Long-time St. Mary's law professor Vincent Johnson details the arrival and tenure of Barbara Bader Aldave as Dean of St. Mary's University School of Law.

A Quarter Century Of Challenges And Progress In Education, And An Agenda For The Next Quarter Century, Albert H. Kauffman

Faculty Articles

As a native Texan who attended intentionally segregated Texas public schools, then an effectively segregated Texas public law school, litigated many cases against discrimination in Texas education, and now teaches Texas education law, I have what I think to be informed opinions on where we have been, where we are going, and what we should do next. I will briefly describe our sad history of discrimination in segregation, school finance, testing, higher education, and lack of responsiveness to newer issues in education at all levels. I will then summarize some of our ongoing challenges and some possible approaches that I …

“The Glorious Liberty Of The Children Of God”: Toward A Christian Defense Of Human Rights, John Witte Jr.

Faculty Articles

It will come as a surprise to some human rights lawyers to learn that Christianity was a deep and enduring source of human rights and liberties in the Western legal tradition. Our elementary textbooks have long taught us that the history of human rights began in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Human rights, many of us were taught, were products of the Western Enlightenment—creations of Grotius and Pufendorf, Locke and Rousseau, Montesquieu and Voltaire, Hume and Smith, Jefferson and Madison. Rights were the mighty new weapons forged by American and French revolutionaries who fought in the name of political …

The Mystery Of The Leavenworth Oaths, M H. Hoeflich, Stephen M. Sheppard

Faculty Articles

Lawyers have sworn an oath to be admitted to the Bar since the beginnings of the Anglo-American legal profession. The oath serves several extremely important purposes. First, it is the formal act that admits an individual into the Bar and confers upon the oath taker the right to perform the duties of an attorney in the jurisdiction in which the oath is given. Second, the oath admits the new attorney to the broader world of the legal profession and signifies that the new attorney has been judged by the oath giver as worthy of the right to practice law. Third, …

Ethical Lawyering: The Role Of Honor, Conscience, And Codes (Reviewing Michael S. Ariens, The Lawyer’S Conscience: A History Of American Lawyer Ethics), Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

Michael Ariens’ new book, The Lawyer’s Conscience: A History of American Lawyer Ethics, is a monumental work, rooted in his decades of excellent scholarship in the fields of attorney professional responsibility and legal history. The Lawyer’s Conscience captures the great sweep and key features of the roughly 250-year period in American legal ethics running from colonial times to the present day. Richly detailed and vividly presented, the story takes the reader on a grand tour of the landmark events and changing ideas that have defined the aspirations, responsibilities, and accountability of members of the American legal profession.

Back To The Sources? What’S Clear And Not So Clear About The Original Intent Of The First Amendment, John Witte Jr.

Faculty Articles

This Article peels through these layers of founding documents before exploring the final sixteen words of the First Amendment religion clauses. Part I explores the founding generation’s main teachings on religious freedom, identifying the major principles that they held in common. Part II sets out a few representative state constitutional provisions on religious freedom created from 1776 to 1784. Part III reviews briefly the actions by the Continental Congress on religion and religious freedom issued between 1774 and 1789. Part IV touches on the deprecated place of religious freedom in the drafting of the 1787 United States Constitution. Part V …

The Fall Of An American Lawyer, Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

John Randall is the only former president of the American Bar Association to be disbarred. He wrote a will for a client, Lovell Myers, with whom Randall had been in business for over a quarter-century. The will left all of Myers’s property to Randall, and implicitly disinherited his only child, Marie Jensen. When Jensen learned of the existence of a will, she sued to set it aside. She later filed a complaint with the Iowa Committee on Professional Ethics and Conduct. That complaint was the catalyst leading to Randall’s disbarment.

Randall had acted grievously in serving as Lovell Myers’s attorney. …

Anti-Discrimination Ethics Rules And The Legal Profession, Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

“Reputation ought to be the perpetual subject of my Thoughts, and Aim of my Behaviour. How shall I gain a Reputation! How shall I Spread an Opinion of myself as a Lawyer of distinguished Genius, Learning, and Virtue.” So wrote twenty-four-year-old John Adams in his diary in 1759. He had been a licensed lawyer for just three years at that time and had already believed himself to be hounded by “Petty foggers” and “dirty Dablers in the Law”—unlicensed attorneys who, Adams claimed, fomented vexatious litigation for the fees they might earn.

Adams believed his embrace of virtue, along with genius …

Media Paratext And Constitutional Interpretation, Benjamin J. Priester

Faculty Articles

In the fields of media studies and fan studies, the concept of paratext is an analytical paradigm for understanding how audiences consume and interpret media texts, such as a novel or movie. Amid today's media-rich society, it is all but impossible to encounter a media text in isolation. Rather, we also invariably interact with a wide variety of associated paratexts, from official materials like trailers or marketing to unofficial materials like reviews or fan reactions, which play a role in shaping our interpretation of the core media text. This concept of media paratext provides a compelling analogy for constitutional interpretation. …

Ostracism And Democracy, Alex Zhang

Faculty Articles

The 2020 Presidential Election featured an unprecedented attempt to undermine our democratic institutions: allegations of voter fraud and litigation about mail-in ballots culminated in a mob storming of the Capitol as Congress certified President Biden’s victory. Former President Trump now faces social-media bans and potential disqualification from future federal office, but his allies have criticized those efforts as the witch-hunt of a cancel culture that is symptomatic of the unique ills of contemporary liberal politics.

This Article defends recent efforts to remove Trump from the public eye, with reference to an ancient Greek electoral mechanism: ostracism. In the world’s first …

Testing Privilege: Coaching Bar Takers Towards "Minimum Competency" During The 2020 Pandemic, Afton Cavanaugh

Faculty Articles

The year 2020 was challenging for the bar exam. The longstanding argument that the bar exam is not a fair measure of the minimum competence of someone to practice law was cast into harsh relief and the truth-that the bar exam tests the privilege of its examinees-became startlingly apparent. Not only did 2020 kick off with a devastating global pandemic, but we also saw the rage against systemic racial injustice reach a boiling point just as we were charged with staying in our homes to avoid contracting COVID-19. With a pandemic raging, overt White supremacy on the rise, and racial …

Damnatio Memoriae And Black Lives Matter, Alex Zhang

Faculty Articles

Police brutality and killings of Black Americans have recently sparked nationwide protests. Among the many expressions of anger and indignation, one stands out as a unique feature of this wave of the social movement: public scrutiny of civic symbols. Protestors have defaced, torn down, and called for the removal of monuments that represent our country’s racist past, as well as structural racial injustice today. Protestors toppled a statue of George Washington in Portland and spray-painted on it the label “Genocidal Colonist,” while statues of Christopher Columbus were found beheaded in Boston, yanked from a pedestal in St. Paul, and tossed …

Arthur C. Y. Yao (1906-2004): A Pioneer Chinese Professor At St. Mary's University School Of Law, Robert H. Hu

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Slavery And Freedom In Texas: Stories From The Courtroom, 1821-1871 (Book Review), Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Borders Of The Law: Critical Legal Histories Of The North American West (Book Review), Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Other Rights Revolution: Conservative Lawyers And The Remaking Of American Government (Book Review), Michael Ariens

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Magna Carta And The Beginning Of Modern Legal Thought, Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

As the Magna Carta, England's Great Charter of Liberties, marks its eighth centennial, it is appropriate to ask what's in it. The answer, it turns out, lives up to the legend. What's in the Magna Carta is the beginning of modern legal thought. The Great Charter set the expectations that for 800 years have shaped the development of the law in England, America, and around the globe. Like a blazing light piercing the medieval darkness, the Magna Carta illuminated the importance of legal principles, fair procedures, proportional punishment, official accountability, and respect for human dignity. It was unlike any legal …

A Prequel To Law And Revolution: A Long Lost Manuscript Of Harold J. Berman Comes To Light, John Witte Jr., Christopher J. Manzer

Faculty Articles

The late Harold Berman was a pioneering scholar of Soviet law, legal history, jurisprudence, and law and religion; he is best known today for his monumental Law and Revolution series on the Western legal tradition. Berman wrote a short book, Law and Language, in the early 1960s, but it was not published until 2013. In this early text, he adumbrated many of the main themes of his later work, including Law and Revolution. He also anticipated a good deal of the interdisciplinary and comparative methodology that we take for granted today, even though it was rare in the …

The Texas Supreme Court: A Narrative History, 1836–1986 (Book Review), Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

The historical material and resources available for American legal historians is both too much and too little. Hundreds of published case opinions became thousands of opinions by the end of the 1820s, leading lawyers to conclude that no one could know the entirety of the law. Yet this cascade of information is also too little, because the work of treatise writers and magazine editors of the time was ruthlessly focused on then-existing legal concerns.

For these reasons, James L. Haley works within difficult strictures in his book, The Texas Supreme Court: A Narrative History, 1836–1986. Because his story is about …

The Past As Prologue To The Present: Managing The Oregon And California Forest Lands, Michael Blumm, Tim Wigington

Faculty Articles

This article is a brief review of the convoluted history of what are known as the Oregon and California forest lands, federal lands that were once the subject of a 19th century federal railroad grant, then became the focus of widespread land fraud and official corruption, which led to the Supreme Court halting land sales and Congress taking back the lands, situated in eighteen Oregon counties. Federal management of the lands in the 20th century emphasized timber harvesting, and this dominant use of the lands led to environmental lawsuits and the Endangered Species Act listing of the northern spotted owl …

Teaching American Legal History Through Storytelling, Michael S. Ariens

Faculty Articles

Distinct from facts and truths, the power of storytelling can serve as a method of teaching American Legal History. A course in American Legal History can facilitate discussion into whether the rule of law has been the rule or exception in the history of American law. Integral to this overarching story are three storylines that surface throughout the course: the development of law in American political history; the ideological underpinnings of legal doctrine development; and the rise and decline of different approaches to legal thought and their effect on legal education.

The course begins with a chronological overview of the …

The Prehistory Of Fair Use, Matthew Sag

Faculty Articles

This article proceeds as follows: Part I begins with a brief summary of the fêted case Folsom v. Marsh and its place in the development of American copyright law. Folsom v. Marsh has been criticized for expanding copyright protection beyond acts of mere mechanical reproduction to include an abstract concept of the work’s value. Of course, this critique is premised on the belief that the scope of copyright prior to Folsom v. Marsh’s intervention was so narrow that it tolerated almost all secondary works. Part II exposes the frailty of this premise.

Specifically, Part II explores the foundation for the …

Slavery, The Rule Of Law, And The Civil War, George Van Cleve

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Classic Rule Of Faith And Credit, David Engdahl

Faculty Articles

Since the late nineteenth century, orthodox doctrine under the Constitution's Full Faith and Credit Clause has presumed that the interpretation of that Clause set forth in Justice Joseph Story's 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States was essentially sound. This article argues, however, that Justice Story's view had been endorsed by almost no one before him and actually contradicted the "classic rule" of faith and credit, which Justice Story had articulated in 1813. The Supreme Court, moreover, consistently reiterated the "classic rule" despite Justice Story's change of mind, continuing to do so even after his death. By the …

The Hidden Influence Of Jewish Law On The Common Law Tradition: One Lost Example, Michael J. Broyde

Faculty Articles

Professor Berman is undoubtedly correct that the surviving literature shows little such influence of Jewish jurisprudence. Over the course of numerous conversations I had with Professor Berman at Emory, we discussed another possibility, namely that the Jewish tradition indeed had a distinct influence on the common law; however, due to the general lack of enthusiasm for the Jewish legal tradition throughout the medieval Christian world, even when Jewish sources were consulted, they were not cited. I wish to show what I think is one such example --the enigmatic origins of the common law rule that the holder of lost property …

Prophets, Priests, And Kings: John Milton And The Reformation Of Rights And Liberties In England, John Witte Jr.

Faculty Articles

In this Article, I focus on the development of rights talk in the pre-Enlightenment Protestant tradition. More particularly, I show how early modem Calvinists-those Protestants inspired by the teachings of Genevan reformer John Calvin (1509-1564)-developed a theory of fundamental rights as part and product of a broader constitutional theory of resistance and military revolt against tyranny. With unlimited space, I would document how various Calvinist groups from 1550 to 1700 helped to define and defend each and every one of the rights that would later appear in the American Bill of Rights and how these Calvinists condoned armed revolution to …

The Fundamental Goal Of Antitrust: Protecting Consumers, Not Increasing Efficiency, Jack Kirkwood

Faculty Articles

This article defines the relevant economic concepts, summarizes the legislative histories, analyzes recent case law in more depth than any prior article, and explores the most likely bases for current popular support of the antitrust laws. All these factors indicate that the ultimate goal of antitrust is not to increase the total wealth of society, but to protect consumers from behavior that deprives them of the benefits of competition. When conduct presents a conflict between protecting consumers and improving the efficiency of the economy (e.g., a merger that raises prices but reduces costs), no court in recent years has chosen …

The Adventures Of Blackness In Western Culture: An Epistolary Exchange On Old And New Identity Wars, Robert S. Chang, Adrienne D. Davis

Faculty Articles

Through a series of letters, Professors Robert Chang and Adrienne Davis examine the politics of positionality in law and literary criticism. They use the scholarly debates and conversations around critical race theory and feminist legal theory as a starting point to formulate some thoughts about Critical Race Feminism ("CRF") and its future. The authors use the epistolary form as a literary device to allow them to collaborate on this project while maintaining their own voices. Thus, the letters are not dated. The letters pay particular attention to various border crossings: male attempts to engage in feminist literary criticism, white attempts …