Law Commons^™

Funding Gideon's Promise By Viewing Excessive Caseloads As Conflicts Of Interests, Heidi R. Anderson

Heidi R Anderson

Some states recently have attempted to legislate around a defendant’s constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel via a novel two-step method. Step one is to allocate insufficient funds for public defense, which results in excessive caseloads for public defenders. Sadly, that step is nothing new. Step two—the one that has slipped by without sufficient notice or criticism—is to bar a public defender from withdrawing from representation based on his excessive caseload. Ultimately, this statutory two-step further entrenches the systematic deprivation of defendants’ Sixth Amendment rights to effective assistance.

In this article, I urge courts to “constitutionalize” the excessive caseload …

Extending Wrongful Death Damages To Kinship-Care Relationships, Sonya Harrell Hoener

Sonya Harrell Hoener

Millions of children are raised not by a biological parent but by grandparents or other relatives. These families face many difficulties not shared by traditional biological parent relationships, but have the same or even greater emotional bonds. Although many states have recognized the prevalence of these relationships, most states still ignore these relationships in the context of wrongful death actions. While all states and the federal government provide for recovery by family members in the event of wrongful death, the recovery is limited to immediate next-of-kin in most jurisdictions. In this article, I argue that legislatures should amend their wrongful …

The Mythical Right To Obscurity, Heidi R. Anderson

Heidi R Anderson

In several states, citizens who videotaped police misconduct and distributed the videos via the Internet recently were arrested for violating state wiretapping statutes. These arrests highlight a clash between two key interests—the public’s desire to hold the officers accountable via exposure and the officers’ desire to keep the information private. The arrests also raise an oft-debated privacy law question: When should something done or said in public nevertheless be legally protected as private?

For decades, the answer has been: “There can be no privacy in that which is already public.” However, given recent technological developments (e.g., cell phone cameras and …

The Path, Posner, And Persuasion: Jurisprudential Stances And Style In Judicial Writing And Their Influence On Legal Education, Amy C. Thorn

Amy C Thorn

No abstract provided.

Law As Faith: The Personal And Unconstitutional Journey From Rule Of Law To Law Of Rulism, Stephen Durden

Stephen Durden

With the goal of eliminating personal choice, Scalia, engaging in the quintessential Rulist approach, makes the personal choice to reinterpret the “Rule of Law as the Law of Rules.” Because he applies this approach to remaking the Supreme Law of the Land into the Supreme Rules of the Land, this essay takes to task the Rulist quixotic quest to eliminate personal predilection within constitutional interpretational methodology. This essay seeks to pull back the curtain to demonstrate that (1) Scalia’s rewrite of the words and meaning of the Rule of Law and (2) the ideal of the Law of Rules hide …