Law Commons^™

A Trusting Public: How The Public Trust Doctrine Can Save The New York Forest Preserve, Katherine R. Leisch

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Student Publications

The public trust doctrine was instituted in England as a permanent limitation on the powers of the Crown. The well-established doctrine was brought to America and applied equally in the states even after the states seceded from England. The doctrine has since served as an indestructible check on the government. Article XIV of the New York State Constitution ensures protection of its wilderness in perpetuity, solidifying the forest preserve as part of the public trust. The paper traces the beginnings of the public trust doctrine and its eventual application Article XIV. The author contemplates the indestructibility of the Forest Preserve …

The Inconvenience Of A “Constitution [That] Follows The Flag … But Doesn’T Quite Catch Up With It”: From Downes V. Bidwell To Boumediene V. Bush, Pedro A. Malavet

UF Law Faculty Publications

Boumediene v. Bush, resolved by the U.S. Supreme Court in June of 2008, granted habeas corpus rights, at least for the time being, to the persons detained at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station. The majority partially based its ruling on the doctrine of the Insular Cases, first set forth in the 1901 decision in Downes v. Bidwell. Additionally, the four dissenting justices agreed with the five in the majority that the plurality opinion of Justice Edward Douglass White in Downes – as affirmed by a unanimous court in 1922 in Balzac v. People of Porto Rico – is still the dominant …

Seeking Truth On The Other Side Of The Wall: Greenleaf’S Evangelists Meet The Federal Rules, Naturalism, And Judas, Nancy J. Kippenhan

Faculty Publications and Presentations

An inquiry that seeks truth by accepting only natural answers excludes the possibility of the sacred or supernatural, building a wall that forecloses a complete exploration for the truth it seeks. Without analysis, critics dismiss sources presenting supernatural explanations, and those who believe sacred works have no factual foundation accept without investigation any popular theory that appears attractive. The rules of evidence expressly seek truth, wherever it lies. Noted legal scholar Simon Greenleaf used evidentiary principles to demonstrate the factual credibility of the Gospels in his Testimony of the Evangelists. This Article examines Greenleaf’s analysis, applying current rules of evidence …

The Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act At Twenty: Has Full Protection Made A Difference?, David Shipley

Scholarly Works

Even though our copyright statutes were silent about architecture until 1990, it was well established that plans, blueprints and models were copyrightable writings under the 1909 Act's category of "drawings or plastic works of a scientific or technical character," and then as "pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works" under the 1976 Act. The scope of an architect's copyright protection was, however, quite limited. The unauthorized copying of plans or blueprints constituted infringement, but most authorities concluded that plans were not infringed by using them, without the architect's permission, to construct the building they depicted. Moreover, the prevailing view was that an …

A Tale Of Prosecutorial Indiscretion: Ramsey Clark And The Selective Non-Prosecution Of Stokely Carmichael, Lonnie T. Brown

Scholarly Works

During the height of the Vietnam War and one of the most volatile periods of the civil rights movement, then-Attorney General Ramsey Clark controversially resisted intense political pressure to prosecute Black Power originator and antiwar activist Stokely Carmichael. Taken in isolation, this decision may seem courageous and praiseworthy, but when considered against the backdrop of Clark’s contemporaneous prosecution of an all-white group of similarly situated anti-draft leaders (the so-called Boston Five), his exercise of prosecutorial discretion becomes suspect. Specifically, the Boston Five were prosecuted in 1968 for conspiracy to aid and abet draft evasion, a charge for which the evidence …

Max Weber On Property: An Effort In Interpretive Understanding, Laura R. Ford

Cornell Law School J.D. Student Research Papers

This article reviews Max Weber’s scholarly work pertaining to property, beginning with his first dissertation and ending with the compilation that is Economy and Society. Three phases of Weber’s work are described in detail: a legal phase, an economic-historical phase, and a sociological phase. It is argued that the sociological phase represents the culmination of the two prior phases, drawing on material and arguments from those earlier phases. In the sociological phase of his writing, it is argued that Weber developed a theory of property that is capable of accounting for that phenomenon in all of its dimensions: structural, material, …

South/North Exchange Of 2009 - Territorial Projections Of Law From The Left: Cities, Communities And Transnational Spaces. The Case Of Mexico In The Context Of The Global South, Miguel Rabago Dorbecker

Pace International Law Review Online Companion

No abstract provided.

Kate Chase, The "Sphere Of Women's Work," And Her Influence Upon Her Father's Dissent In Bradwell V. Illinois, Richard Aynes

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Kate Chase was said to be the most beautiful and the most intelligent woman of her age. Her father, Salmon P. Chase, is remembered today as Lincoln’s secretary of the treasury and as a chief judge of the U. S. Supreme Court. In his own time, Chase was considered one of the nation’s political giants; Abraham Lincoln described him as “one and a half times bigger than any other man” he had ever known. Carl Schurz’s summary still echoes today: “More than anyone else he looked the great man. Tall, broad-shouldered, and proudly erect, . . . he was a …

Coasean Markets, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Coase’s work emphasized the economic importance of very small markets and made a new, more marginalist form of economic “institutionalism” acceptable within mainstream economics. A Coasean market is an association of persons with competing claims on a legal entitlement that can be traded. The boundaries of both Coasean markets and Coasean firms are determined by measuring not only the costs of bargaining but also the absolute costs of moving resources from one place to another. The boundaries of a Coasean market, just as those of the Coasean business firm, are defined by the line where the marginal cost of reaching …

Decisional Sequencing: Limitations From Jurisdictional Primacy And Intrasuit Preclusion, Kevin M. Clermont

Cornell Law Faculty Working Papers

This Article treats the order of decision on multiple issues in a single case. That order can be very important, with a lot at stake for the court, society, and parties. Generally speaking, by weighing those various interests, the judge gets to choose the decisional sequence, although the parties can control which issues they put before the judge.

The law sees fit to put few limits on the judge’s power, and properly so. The few limits are in fact quite narrow in application, and even narrower if properly understood. The Steel Co.-Ruhrgas rule generally requires a federal court to decide …

American Needle And The Boundaries Of The Firm In Antitrust Law, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

In American Needle the Supreme Court unanimously held that for the practice at issue the NFL should be treated as a “combination” of its teams rather than a single entity. However, the arrangement must be assessed under the rule of reason. The opinion, written by Justice Stevens, was almost certainly his last opinion for the Court in an antitrust case; Justice Stevens had been a dissenter in the Supreme Court’s Copperweld decision 25 years earlier, which held that a parent corporation and its wholly owned subsidiary constituted a single “firm” for antitrust purposes. The Sherman Act speaks to this issue …

Philip Hamburger's Law And Judicial Duty: The Origins Of Judicial Review, Robert J. Steinfeld

Book Reviews

No abstract provided.

Professor's Paper Targets Klan Reference On University Of Texas Dorm... And Gets Action, Thomas D. Russell

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Ten weeks ago, my 48-page legal history paper started a Texas-sized controversy about a University of Texas dormitory named for a Klan leader. UT first admitted African-American students in 1950 after the NAACPʼs Legal Defense Fund lawyers beat Texas before the US Supreme Court in Sweatt v. Painter. Four years later, the great NAACP lawyers won Brown v. Board of Education. Just a few weeks after the Brown decision, UT put a Klansmanʼs name on a brand-new dormitory for law and graduate students.

"Our Cities Institutions" And The Institution Of The Common Law, Bernadette Meyler

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

The audiences of early modern English drama were multiple, and they intersected with the legal system in various ways, whether through the cross-pollination of the theaters and the Inns of Court, the representations of the sovereign’s justice performed before him, or the shared evidentiary orientations of jurors and spectators. As this piece written for a symposium on “Reasoning from Literature” contends, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure addressed to these various audiences the question of whether the King should judge in person. In doing so, it drew on extant political theories suggesting that the King refrain from exposing himself to public censure …

Roll Over Langdell, Tell Llewellyn The News: A Brief History Of American Legal Education, Stephen R. Alton

Faculty Scholarship

The origin of this essay is a presentation the author made at the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Texas on December 10, 2008. This essay is derived from the author's presentation, which originally was entitled "A Brief and Highly Selective History of American Legal Education and Jurisprudence. " In this essay, the author provides an overview of the history and development of legal education in America, emphasizing the establishment and evolution of the case method of instruction in American law schools and focusing on the influence of American jurisprudence on the development of legal education in …

The Twist Of Long Terms: Judicial Elections, Role Fidelity, And American Tort Law, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The received wisdom is that American judges rejected strict liability through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To the contrary, a majority of state courts adopted Rylands v. Fletcher and strict liability for hazardous or unnatural activities after a series of flooding tragedies in the late nineteenth century. Federal judges and appointed state judges generally ignored or rejected Rylands, while elected state judges overwhelmingly adopted Rylands or a similar strict liability rule.

In moving from fault to strict liability, these judges were essentially responding to increased public fears of industrial or man-made hazards. Elected courts were more populist: they were …

The Case Against Taxing Citizens, Reuven S. Avi-Yonah

Articles

The bipartisan tax reform bill recently introduced by Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Judd Gregg, R-N.H., proposes to abolish IRC section 911. That section, which exempts U.S. citizens living overseas from tax on the first $80,000 of earned income, is indeed anomalous in the context of a tax on all income "from whatever source derived," and has been subjected to criticism. However, there is a reason section 911 has been in the code since the 1920s: In its absence, citizenship-based taxation becomes completely unadministrable. Rather than continuing the long argument over section 911, Congress should therefore reexamine the basic premise: …

Book Review (Paul Frymer's Black And Blue: African Americans, The Labor Movement, And The Decline Of The Democratic Party)., Sophia Z. Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Unsung Empathy Of Justice Stevens, Sonja R. West, Dahlia Lithwick

Popular Media

Justice John Paul Stevens' announcement of his retirement this morning has his many admirers at a loss: Liberals are already bemoaning the absence of a true liberal leader at the court—a man who could still manage to "count to five" to forge a majority on the sometimes fractious center-left of the court.

Book Review. Joan Biskupic, An American Original: The Life And Constitution Of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Jeffrey C. Tuomala

Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Beyond Rules, Larry A. Dimatteo, Samuel Flaks

UF Law Faculty Publications

Our article, in contrast to the predominant scholarly view, contends that the influential Legal Realist Movement of the 1930s was actually two movements—radical legal realism and conservative legal realism (CLR). CLR is best understood through the works of Nathan Isaacs. This article will investigate the legitimacy and determinacy of the legal order through the lens of CLR as represented by Isaacs.

Isaacs and CLR are especially worthy subjects for study given the current economic crisis. It is a crisis, much like the Great Depression, that has spurred many people to question core capitalistic premises, such as the superiority of minimal …

Dilemmas Of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters With Law And Liberalism (Book Review), Jan Hoffman French

Sociology and Anthropology Faculty Publications

Recent scholarship on Bolivia has focused primarily on indigenous rights, multiculturalism, political and cultural issues surrounding the growing of coca, and the election of Evo Morales. Mark Goodale's project is different. By taking a "telescopic" view, Goodale steps away from ethnographic detail in a remote district of Bolivia to examine the sweep of "liberal legality" since independence in 1825. Setting the stage, Goodale takes the position that neither neoliberal economic policies of the 1980s nor the election of Morales are breaks with the past. Rather, the "patterns of intention" initiated with the early constitutions of the new republic, the ethos …

"Undead" Wartime Cases: Stare Decisis And The Lessons Of History, Harlan G. Cohen

Scholarly Works

References to the “lessons of history” are ubiquitous in law. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in recent debates over U.S. counterterrorism policy. In response to the Bush Administration’s reliance on World War II-era decisions - Johnson v. Eisentrager, Ex Parte Quirin, Hirota v. MacArthur, and In re Yamashita - opponents have argued that these decisions have been rejected by the “lessons of history.” They argue that the history of wartime cases is one marked by executive aggrandizement, panic-driven attacks on civil liberties, and overly quiescent courts - none of which should be repeated.

But what does it really …

John Paul Stevens And Equally Impartial Government, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

This article is the second publication arising out of the author's ongoing research respecting Justice John Paul Stevens. It is one of several published by former law clerks and other legal experts in the UC Davis Law Review symposium edition, Volume 43, No. 3, February 2010, "The Honorable John Paul Stevens."

The article posits that Justice Stevens's embrace of race-conscious measures to ensure continued diversity stands in tension with his early rejections of affirmative action programs. The contrast suggests a linear movement toward a progressive interpretation of the Constitution’s equality guarantee; however, examination of Stevens's writings in biographical context reveal …

Law And Development: The Way Forward Or Just Stuck In The Same Place?, D. Daniel Sokol

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Essay does three things. First, it provides an overview of Law and Development issues. Second, it responds to other pieces in the symposium "The Future of Law and Development". Third, it suggests that to measure success, Law and Development needs clearer goals.

Getting Right Without Lincoln, Daniel W. Hamilton

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Origin Of Citizen Genet’S Projected Attack On Spanish Louisiana: A Case Study In Girondin Politics, Jud Campbell

Law Faculty Publications

In 1792 the Girondin ministry decided to send Edmond Genet to the United States with plans to recruit western frontiersmen and invade Spanish Louisiana. The episode is well known in American history, but the literature on its French origin is sparse and overemphasizes the contribution of revolutionary leader Jacques- Pierre Brissot. This essay contextualizes the French decision within the debate between Brissot, Minister of Foreign Affairs Pierre Lebrun, and General Charles-François Dumouriez over whether France should send troops against Spanish colonies in South America. The essay argues that Lebrun promoted the western scheme in order to attack Spanish interests without …

Crowdsourcing And Open Access: Collaborative Techniques For Disseminating Legal Materials And Scholarship, Timothy K. Armstrong

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This short essay surveys the state of open access to primary legal source materials (statutes, judicial opinions and the like) and legal scholarship. The ongoing digitization phenomenon (illustrated, although by no means typified, by massive scanning endeavors such as the Google Books project and the Library of Congress's efforts to digitize United States historical documents) has made a wealth of information, including legal information, freely available online, and a number of open-access collections of legal source materials have been created. Many of these collections, however, suffer from similar flaws: they devote too much effort to collecting case law rather than …

Wittgenstein Tests Mr. Justice Holmes: On Holmes's Proposal To Separate Legal Concepts From Moral Concepts, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Social Justice Feminism, Kristin (Brandser) Kalsem, Verna L. Williams

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

For the past three years, women leaders from national groups, grassroots organizations, academia and beyond have gathered to address dissonance in the women's movement, particularly dissatisfaction with the movement's emphasis on women privileged on account of their race, class, or sexuality. At these meetings of the New Women's Movement Initiative (NWMI), advocates who no longer want to do feminism have articulated a desire for social justice feminism. This article analyzes what such a shift might mean for feminist practice and legal theory.

Drawing on history, specifically the work of the women behind the Brandeis brief in the Muller v. Oregon …