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Senate Confirms Obama Nominee To Ninth Circuit, Ginny Laroe

Articles About GGU Law

Morgan Christen, an Alaska Supreme Court Justice nominated by President Obama to the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, won Senate confirmation on Thursday. Christen is the first Golden Gate University law school graduate to join the Ninth Circuit.

Politics In The Non-Political Branch, Justin L. Swanson

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Professional Projects

Across the country there exists a patchwork of legal systems by which judges are appointed retained. In some states, like Illinois, it is a fully political process where judges actively campaign for election to the bench. But a majority of states, including Nebraska, have adopted the Merit Selection System, which attempts to remove politics from these processes. Nevertheless, politics can enter into the retention votes. And when they do, it can be extremely difficult for judges to overcome.

The Judicial Power And The Inferior Federal Courts: Exploring The Constitutional Vesting Thesis, A. Benjamin Spencer

Scholarly Articles

The third branch of our federal government has traditionally been viewed as the least of the three in terms of the scope of its power and authority. This view finds validation when one considers the extensive authority that Congress has been permitted to exercise over the Federal Judiciary. From the beginning, Congress has understood itself to possess the authority to limit the jurisdiction of inferior federal courts. The Supreme Court has acquiesced to this understanding of congressional authority without much thought or explanation.

It may be possible, however, to imagine a more robust vision of the Judicial Power through closer …

The Judicial Duty To Give Reasons: Thong Ah Fat V Public Prosecutor [2011] Sgca 65, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The accused was charged under the Misuse of Drugs Act after being found with 142.41 grams of diamorphine at the Woodlands Checkpoint. The High Court Judge found the accused guilty and sentenced him to death in a brief judgment of five paragraphs. The Court of Appeal, however, ordered a retrial as it was of the view that the Judge’s reasoning was “unclear” and the “judicial duty to give reasoned decisions” was not discharged

Third Annual Chief Justice Ronald M. George Distinguished Lecture: Justices Of Color At The Top: Great Responsibility, Unique Challenges, Lisa Lomba

Press Releases

No abstract provided.

Judge Not - Why Won’T Progressives Fight For Federal Judges?, Sonja R. West

Popular Media

Democrats have taken their eye off the ball on judicial appointments for far too long. It took decades for Republicans to build the court system now in place, and it may take many years to rebalance it. But the time to start is yesterday. Until Democrats start slapping “It’s the courts, stupid!” stickers on their rear bumpers, their elected officials aren’t going to change. Until progressives say, “I’m not going to stop writing my senator until Paul Watford gets a hearing,” Obama judges will be slow-walked through hearings and wait months for a floor vote that might never come. We …

Coming Off The Bench: Legal And Policy Implications Of Proposals To Allow Retired Justices To Sit By Designation On The Supreme Court, Lisa T. Mcelroy, Michael C. Dorf

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

In the fall of 2010, Senator Patrick Leahy introduced a bill that would have overridden a New Deal-era federal statute forbidding retired Justices from serving by designation on the Supreme Court of the United States. The Leahy bill would have authorized the Court to recall willing retired Justices to substitute for recused Justices. This Article uses the Leahy bill as a springboard for considering a number of important constitutional and policy questions, including whether the possibility of 4-4 splits justifies the substitution of a retired Justice for an active one; whether permitting retired Justices to substitute for recused Justices would …

Lochner V. New York (1905) And Kennedy V. Louisiana (2008): Judicial Reliance On Adversary Argument, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist called Lochner v. New York (1905) “one of the most ill-starred decisions that [the Supreme Court ever rendered.” The Justices’ deliberations preceding the 5-4 decision demonstrate the courts’ reliance on advocacy in the adversary system of civil and criminal justice. The stark imbalance between the state’s “incredibly sketchy” brief and Joseph Lochner’s sterling submission may have determined Lochner’s outcome, and thus may have changed the course of constitutional history, by leading two Justices to join the majority on the central question of whether New York’s maximum-hours law for bakery workers was a reasonable public health …

Third Annual Chief Justice Ronald M. George Distinguished Lecture: Chief Justices Of Color, Lisa Lomba

Ronald M. George Distinguished Lecture Series

2011 Event Program.

Share Transfer Restrictions In Close Corporations As Mechanisms For Intelligible Corporate Outcomes, Stephen J. Leacock

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Samantar And Executive Power, Peter B. Rutledge

Scholarly Works

This essay examines Samantar v. Yousuf in the context of broader debate about the relationship between federal common law and executive power. Samantar represents simply the latest effort by the Executive Branch to literally shape the meaning of law through a process referred to in the literature as “executive lawmaking.” While traditional accounts of executive lawmaking typically have treated the idea as a singular concept, Samantar demonstrates the need to bifurcate the concept into at least two different categories: acts of executive lawmaking decoupled from pending litigation and acts of executive lawmaking taken expressly in response to litigation. As Samantar …

Supreme Court Of The United States, October Term 2011 Preview, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute

Supreme Court Overviews

No abstract provided.

Pliva V. Mensing And Its Implications, Brian Wolfman, Dena Feldman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in PLIVA Inc. v. Mensing will immunize generic drug manufacturers facing failure-to-warn claims from state-law liability, and may also have implications for preemption jurisprudence more generally, says attorney Brian Wolfman and co-author Dena Feldman in this BNA Insight. The authors analyze the ruling, and offer their views on the questions that PLIVA raises about the ongoing vitality of the presumption against preemption, the standard for determining ‘‘impossibility’’ preemption, and the propriety of deference to an agency’s views on preemption.

The Antislavery Judge Reconsidered, Jeffrey M. Schmitt

School of Law Faculty Publications

It is conventionally believed that neutral legal principles required antislavery judges to uphold proslavery legislation in spite of their moral convictions against slavery. Under this view, an antislavery judge who ruled on proslavery legislation was forced to choose, not between liberty and slavery, but rather between liberty and fidelity to his conception of the judicial role in a system of limited government. Focusing on the proslavery Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, this article challenges the conventional view by arguing that the constitutionality of the fugitive act was ambiguous; meaning that neutral legal principles supported a ruling against the fugitive act …

Response To Reasonable Expectations In Sociocultural Context, David G. Epstein

Law Faculty Publications

The Article starts 6 (and ends)7 with the premise that contract law should enforce the reasonable expectations of the parties. This is a hard premise to challenge.8 And an even harder premise to apply.9 The Article recognizes the two problems with applying this premise: (1) how does a court decide what expectations are “reasonable,”10 and (2) what does a court do when the contracting parties have different reasonable expectations.11 The Article then uses two cases to illustrate how “sociocultural dissonance between a judge and contracting party”12 exacerbates these problems.

Sequencing The Issues For Judicial Decisionmaking: Limitations From Jurisdictional Primacy And Intrasuit Preclusion, Kevin M. Clermont

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

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, although the parties can control which issues they put before a judge, the judge gets to choose the decisional sequence in light of those various interests.

The law sees fit to put few limits on the judge's power to sequence. 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 …

Comments On [Israeli] Proposal For Structuring Judicial Discretion In Sentencing, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

In this essay, Professor Robinson supports the current Israeli proposal for structuring judicial discretion in sentencing, in particular its reliance upon desert as the guiding principle for the distribution of punishment, its reliance upon benchmarks, or “starting-points,” to be adjusted in individual cases by reference to articulated mitigating and aggravating circumstances, and the proposal’s suggestion to use of an expert committee to draft the original guidelines.

India And Pakistan: A Tale Of Judicial Appointments, Shubhankar Dam

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Recent judicial appointments in India and Pakistan have led to battles between their respective judicial and executive branches. In a moment of remarkable constitutional coincidence, two appointments were set aside in India and Pakistan last week. First, India's Supreme Court invalidated the appointment of P. J. Thomas to the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC). Days later, Pakistan's Supreme Court invalidated Deedar Shah's appointment to the National Accountability Bureau (NAB).

Listening To Victims, Jayne W. Barnard

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

May It Please The Senate: An Empirical Analysis Of The Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings Of Supreme Court Nominees, 1939-2009, Lori A. Ringhand, Paul M. Collins Jr.

Scholarly Works

This paper examines the questions asked and answers given by every Supreme Court nominee who has appeared to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee since 1939. In doing so, it uses a new dataset developed by the authors. This database, which provides a much-needed empirical foundation for scholarship in emerging areas of constitutional law and political science, captures all of the statements made at the hearings and codes these comments by issue area, subissue area, party of the appointing president, and party of the questioning senator. The dataset allows us to quantify for the fist time such things as which …

Citizens United, Stevens And Humanitarian Law Project: First Amendment Rules And Standards In Three Acts, William D. Araiza

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Dean Emeritus E. Donald Shapiro Memorial Service, Roger J. Miner '56

Memorials and Eulogies

No abstract provided.

David Trager: Jurist, Jeffrey B. Morris

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Hot Crimes: A Study In Excess, Steven P. Grossman

All Faculty Scholarship

Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic. . . . [I]ts nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) restored to; . . . sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten . . . at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such as those in legal and social policy or even …

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 …

Judicial Opinion Writing: An Annotated Bibliography, Ruth C. Vance

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Electing Our Judges And Judicial Independence: The Supreme Court's "Triple Whammy", Martin Belsky

Akron Law Faculty Publications

In this article, Martin Belsky makes the case for judicial selection based on merit, as opposed to popular elections. Belsky cites Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Company and the recent defeat of three Iowa supreme court justices because of their opinion in a controversial gay marriage case for the proposition that judicial elections can, and do, yield unjust results. Belsky asserts the need for judicial independence, but concludes that this goal is not achievable through elections because of the "triple whammy" of constitutional limitations: (1) the First Amendment protection of the right of judges and judicial candidates to give specific, …

Judicial Interference With Effective Assistance Of Counsel, Bennett L. Gershman

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

A lawyer’s ineffective representation of a client may be attributable to a lawyer’s own personal failings. However, impairment of the right to effective assistance of counsel may also come from a trial judge’s conduct, and can takes many forms, and occur in varying circumstances. It is therefore difficult to formulate clear principles to cover all of the various situations in which a judge can undermine effective representation. The Borukhova and Mallayev case is only the most recent illustration of the way a ruling of a judge – forcing the lawyer to sum up his case without giving the lawyer adequate …

A Unique Bench, A Common Code: Evaluating Judicial Ethics In Juvenile Court, Michele Benedetto Neitz

Publications

Recent cases involving ethical scandals on the juvenile court bench have caught the interest of legal scholars, judges, practitioners, and the public. This article proposes a new theoretical framework for assessing these problems and articulates a series of vital ethical reforms.

Despite their distinct role in an atypical court, juvenile court judges are not subject to unique ethical standards. Most jurisdictions have adopted the ABA Model Code of Judicial Conduct as the ethical code guiding juvenile court judges. However, this Model Code, intended to apply to any person in a decision-making capacity, was created for a more conventional type of …

Supreme Court Institute Annual Report, 2010-2011, Georgetown University Law Center, Supreme Court Institute

SCI Papers & Reports

During the 2010-2011 academic year--corresponding to the U.S. Supreme Court’s October Term (OT) 2010--the Supreme Court Institute (SCI) provided moot courts for advocates in over 93% of the cases heard by the Court this Term; sponsored a range of programming related to the Supreme Court; and hosted delegations of lawyers and judges visiting from Britain, Rwanda, Kosovo, Korea, China, and Germany. A list of all SCI moot courts held in OT 2010, listed by sitting and date of moot and including the name and affiliation of each advocate and the number of student observers, follows the narrative portion of this …