Law Commons^™

Racial Diversity On The Bench: Beyond Role Models And Public Confidence, Sherrilyn A. Ifill

Faculty Scholarship

The lack of racial diversity on our nation’s courts threatens both the quality and legitimacy of judicial decision-making. Traditional arguments emphasizing the “role model” value of black judges and the need for black judges to help promote “public confidence” in the justice system have turned our attention away from the most important justification for judicial diversity: Diversity on the bench can enrich judicial decision-making by including a variety of voices and perspectives in the deliberative process. In this Article, the Author advocates racial diversity among judges as a critical means of achieving cultural pluralism in judicial decision-making.

Judicial diversity advocates …

Judicial Auditing, Matthew L. Spitzer, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents a simple framework for analyzing a hierarchical system of judicial auditing. We concentrate on (what we perceive to be) the two principal reasons that courts and/or legislatures tend to scrutinize the decisions of lower echelon actors: imprecision and ideological bias. In comparing these two reasons, we illustrate how each may yield systematically distinct auditing and reversal behaviors. While auditing for imprecision tends to bring about evenhanded review/reversal, auditing for political bias tends to be contingent on the first mover's chosen action. Examples of these tendencies can be found in a number of legal applications, including administrative law, …

The Chicago Conspiracy Trial: Character And Judicial Discretion, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

On October 29, 1969, sometime after two o'clock in the afternoon, following yet another heated exchange with defendant Bobby Seale in a courtroom full of spectators, reporters, and armed guards, Judge Julius Jennings Hoffman turned to a marshal and ordered: "Take that defendant into the room in there and deal with him as he should be dealt with in this circumstance."' Judge Hoffman described the aftermath:

In an attempt to maintain order in the courtroom, the Court thereupon ordered the defendant Seale removed from the courtroom at which time he was forcibly restrained by binding and gagging. The defendant Seale …