Law Commons^™

An Offer You Can't Refuse? Punishment Without Trial In Italy And The United States: The Search For Truth And An Efficient Criminal Justice System, Rachel A. Van Cleave

Publications

This Article compares the steps taken by Italy and the United States to reconcile the need for an efficient criminal justice system on the one hand, and the desire to achieve justice or discover the truth on the other. Plea bargaining in the United States has a significant history and has generated a substantial amount of literature critical of the device as violative of a criminal defendant's constitutional rights, particularly the right to be tried by a jury of one's peers. In addition, scholars have criticized the distortive effect of plea bargaining on the roles of the prosecutor, judge, and …

The Second Time As Tragedy: The Assisted Suicide Cases And The Heritage Of Roe V. Wade, Seth F. Kreimer

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

An Interdisciplinary Approach To Family Law Jurisprudence: Application Of An Ecological And Therapeutic Perspective, Barbara A. Babb

All Faculty Scholarship

Traditionally, the legal system has attempted to fashion morality in determining family legal issues rather than to devise legal remedies that accommodate how families live. This approach must change, and a new approach based on legal realism that effectuates the well-being of families and children must be developed. This article proposes an interdisciplinary approach based on an ecological and therapeutic jurisprudential paradigm to resolve family legal proceedings. An ecological approach, emanating from the ecology of human development social science paradigm, is one in which family law decision-makers consider factors beyond their conceptions of the family. This approach urges decision-makers to …

Suspect Linkage: The Interplay Of State Taxing And Spending Measures In The Application Of Constitutional Antidiscrimination Rules, Dan T. Coenen, Walter Hellerstein

Scholarly Works

This article examines an important and recurring question that courts frequently resolve, but rarely analyze: whether taxing and spending measures should be viewed together when a state imposes a nondiscriminatory tax but also affords relief to some taxpayers through government spending. The answer to this question will often determine whether the state's actions violate constitutional strictures against discriminatory taxation. The taxing measure and the spending measure will generally pass muster if viewed in isolation. After all, courts rarely invalidate nondiscriminatory taxing measures on constitutional grounds. And true government spending measures, if considered alone, plainly fall outside the reach of constitutional …

Book Review: Postmodern Legal Movements: Law And Jurisprudence At Century's End By Gary Minda, Chris Sagers

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Postmodem Legal Movements does two things. First, the bulk of the book provides an overview of American jurisprudence, from Christopher Columbus Langdell to the present. This overview is necessary because, in order to understand "postmodem forms of jurisprudence, we must first explore what came before postmodernism, that is, modernism" (p. 5). Second, the relatively short latter portion of the book presents an argument about the current state of American legal scholarship and its future. Minda's picture of contemporary legal thought is that of a paradigm shift in the making.

Postmodern Legal Movements will prove useful to those in search of …

The Hazards Of Tinkering With The Common Law Of Future Interests: The California Experience, Laura E. Cunningham

Articles

No abstract provided.

Judge Friendly And The Law Of Securities Regulation: The Creation Of A Judicial Reputation, Margaret V. Sachs

Scholarly Works

Few judges are more revered than the late Henry J. Friendly, a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1959 to 1986. Leading jurists and scholars have described him as "one of our wisest judges," "a legend in his own time," "the most remarkable legal mind of his generation," "the pre-eminent appellate judge of his era," and "the most distinguished judge in this country during his years on the bench."

Are great judicial reputations-like great literary and scientific reputations- also shaped by contingencies? Or does the legal profession for some reason stand apart? This …

Textualism's Selective Canons Of Statutory Construction: Reinvigorating Individual Liberties, Legislative Authority, And Deference To Executive Agencies, Bradford Mank

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article demonstrates that textualist Judges, most notably Justices Scalia, Thomas, and, to a lesser extent, Kennedy, have applied some canons too aggressively, and slighted others. Textualist Judges have overused clear-statement rules that narrow statutory meaning, especially as a means to promote federalism and states' rights. On the other hand, textualists have neglected canons that promote individual liberty or executive authority Because canons must be applied on a case-by-case basis and different canons can conflict, it is impossible to formulate one rule for how they should be applied. Nevertheless, the common textualist approach of selectively favoring some canons at the …

Taking Our Actual Constitution Seriously, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In this review, by concentrating on the general aim of Dworkin's book, I hope to contribute to the discussion this book is sure to generate. What does the "moral reading" of our Constitution amount to, and what alternative do we have to endorsing such a reading? I ask these questions from what I would call a jurisprudential
perspective. For, while I do teach Jurisprudence, I do not teach Constitutional Law, other than some constitutional law themes that find their way into my Property and Wills & Trusts courses. Accordingly, I am not well placed to review the details or
the …

Does Duncan Kennedy Wear Boxers Or Briefs? Does Richard Posner Ever Sleep? Writing About Jurisprudence, High Culture And The History Of Intellectuals (Review Essay), John Henry Schlegel

Book Reviews

Reviewing Neil Duxbury, Patterns of American Jurisprudence(1995).

Comment On Maccormick, William Ewald

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Judicial Review As A Tool For The Safeguard Of Human Rights: Prospects And Problems Of The U.S. Model In Malawi, Janet Laura Banda

LLM Theses and Essays

Judicial review is a judicial action that involves the review of an inferior legislative or executive act for conformity with a higher legal norm, with the possibility that the inferior norm may be invalidated or suspended if necessary. Although judicial review has been explicitly provided for in some written post-independence African constitutions, such review has not developed into a significant principle of African juridical democracy. This lack of development can be attributed to the emergence of dictatorships in the post-colonial era. However, Malawi’s weak judiciary system was remedied by the 1994 Constitution which gave the Malawian judiciary a central position, …

The Issue Of The Legal Validity Of Using Economic Sanctions To Enforce Human Rights, Thomas Hailu

LLM Theses and Essays

The international legal regime as it pertains to human rights is neither as established nor as definitive as it appears. It suffers from many disadvantages, the first and most important of which is the fact that the international legal regime has never been capable of effectively enforcing its rules or instituting appropriate remedies for its breaches. Some states have attempted to make up for this inability on behalf of international law by undertaking an enforcement mechanism either unilaterally or multilaterally; economic sanctions are often regarded as valuable tools of enforcement to be used against countries which are allegedly engaged in …

Who's Afraid Of Functional Claims - Reforming The Patent Law's 112, 6 Jurisprudence, Mark Weston Janis

Faculty Articles and Papers

No abstract provided.

Undead Laws: The Use Of Historically Unenforced Criminal Statutes In Non-Criminal Litigation, Hillary Greene

Faculty Articles and Papers

Long after criminal laws have lost their vigor in the context for which they were drafted, they may rise again elsewhere. The American legal system has yet to develop a coherent policy delineating when or if historically unenforced penal statutes can be invoked in non-penal contexts. This issue is particularly evident in cases where the relevant laws are caught between shifting moral sentiments. Fornication, for example, remains illegal in many states,' but it is rarely prosecuted. Should one of the participants in this criminal act contract a sexually transmitted disease and sue her partner in tort, however, these disused statutes …

Tyrannous Lex, Thomas E. Baker

Faculty Publications

Professor Baker presents a fundamentally unique question. Including all of the legal opinions, statutes and administrative rules, how much law do we have? Is there way to calculate a “Gross Legal Product” for the United States and what effect does this “GLP” have on the U.S. economy? What about all of the secondary legal sources? What do they add, if anything, to our ability to understand all of the law that is constantly being produced? All these and more are the subject of Professor Baker’s article.

Comparative Law And Comparative Literature: A Project In Progress, Mitchel De S.-O.-L'E. Lasser

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Reinvigorating Autonomy: Freedom And Responsibility In The Supreme Court's First Amendment Jurisprudence, Christina E. Wells

Faculty Publications

Part I of this Article explores the conception of autonomy that scholars have generally attributed to the Court and discusses problems with that conception. Part II sets forth an alternative, Kantian conception of autonomy and discusses its implications for a system of laws regulating free expression. Part III analyzes the Court's free speech jurisprudence and its autonomy rationale. It specifically examines both the Court's distinction between content-based and content-neutral regulations of speech and its approach to low-value speech, demonstrating that they reflect a Kantian notion of autonomy. Finally, Part IV discusses the implications of Kantian autonomy for hate speech regulation, …

A Real World Perspective On Choice Of Law, Robert A. Sedler

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Law And Phrenology, Pierre Schlag

Publications

As the intellectual credentials of American law become increasingly dubious, the question arises: how has this discipline been intellectually organized to sustain belief among its academic practitioners? This Commentary explores the nineteenth-century pseudo-science of phrenology as a way of gaining insight into the intellectual organization of American law. Although there are, obviously, significant differences, the parallels are at once striking and edifying. Both phrenology and law emerged as disciplinary knowledges through attempts to cast them in the form of sciences. In both cases, the "sciences" were aesthetically organized around a fundamental ontology of reifications and animisms -- "faculties" in the …

How Law Is Formal And Why It Matters, Robert S. Summers

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Transitional Jurisprudence: The Role Of Law In Political Transformation., Ruti Teitel

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Making Sausage: The Ninth Circuit's Opinion, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

As I write, the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear Compassion in Dying v. Washington and Quill v. Vacco, the two cases in which United States circuit courts of appeals held that a state may not constitutionally prohibit physicians from helping a terminally ill person who wishes to commit suicide to do so. These cases have already received lavish comment and criticism, and no doubt the Supreme Court's opinion will garner even more. Reasonably enough, most of this analysis addresses the merits of physician-assisted suicide as social policy. I, here, want to talk about how setting bioethical policy …

Non-Representational Jurisprudence: A Centennial Reading Of "The Path Of The Law", Robert E. Rodes

Journal Articles

This paper analyzes particular passages in Holmes's famous lecture, and notes important inconsistencies and failings in his approach. After arguing strongly that moral considerations should not enter into legal judgments, he criticizes legal judgments in the light of moral considerations. After defining law as a prediction of what the courts will do, he seems to criticize courts for getting the law wrong in their decisions. His advice to learn the legal profession by studying law from the standpoint of a bad man leaves out of account the numerous potential clients who wish to be law abiding citizens and to seal …

Good Of Marriage And The Morality Of Sexual Relations, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

This article examines the morality of sexual relations, referencing the views of many other scholars on the subject including Aquinas, Grisez, Noonan, and Koppelman.

What Price Peace: From Nuremberg To Bosnia To The Nobel Peace Prize, Malvina Halberstam

Articles

No abstract provided.

Writing In The Margins: Brennan, Marshall, And The Inherent Weaknesses Of Liberal Judicial Decision-Making (Essay), Donna F. Coltharp

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

The Empty Circles Of Liberal Justification, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.

In The Tribunal Of Conscience: Mills V. Wyman Reconsidered, Geoffrey R. Watson

Scholarly Articles

In this Article, Professor Watson explores the historical record surrounding Mills v. Wyman, 20 Mass (3 Pick) 207 (1825), one of the leading American cases on moral obligation in contract law. In Mills, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court refused to enforce a father's promise to compensate a Good Samaritan who had cared for the father's dying son. Professor Watson combs the historical evidence--court records, census reports, genealogical data, probate records, military rolls, and so on-and argues that the Mills court got both the facts and the law wrong. According to Professor Watson, the father did not make the promise in …

Law As The Continuation Of God By Other Means, Pierre Schlag

Publications

No abstract provided.