Law Commons^™

Dickinson Law Approved By American Bar Association, Pamela G. Smith

Perspectives on Law School History

No abstract provided.

Plus Ça Change: A Century-Old Removal For Cause, Michael E. Herz

Online Publications

Lots of ink has been spilled over when Congress can give federal officials for-cause protection. One would think that a necessary antecedent to that discussion would be a determination of exactly what for-cause protection entails. What is “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office”? Yet no one knows; the debate over the permissibility of that restriction proceeds in blissful uncertainty as to its scope.

The Depravity Of The 1930s And The Modern Administrative State, Gary S. Lawson, Steven Calabresi

Faculty Scholarship

Gillian Metzger’s 2017 Harvard Law Review foreword, entitled 1930s Redux: The Administrative State Under Siege, is a paean to the modern administrative state, with its massive subdelegations of legislative and judicial power to so-called “expert” bureaucrats, who are layered well out of reach of electoral accountability yet do not have the constitutional status of Article III judges. We disagree with this celebration of technocratic government on just about every level, but this Article focuses on two relatively narrow points.

First, responding more to implicit assumptions that pervade modern discourse than specifically to Professor Metzger’s analysis, we challenge the normally unchallenged …

The War(S) On Christmas In The Law Books, Kurt Metzmeier

Faculty Scholarship

This piece takes a reference to a December 25, 1823, session of the Kentucky Senate as a starting point to discuss the legal history of Christmas in America and specifically Kentucky from the Puritan era when it was banned, to the early 1800s when it was officially ignored, to the late 19th century when it was raised to a legal holiday (and when many of the day's tradition were created).

Amazing Facts About The Jfk Assassination, Donald E. Wilkes Jr.

Popular Media

During the past half century, resourceful scholars, journalists and private researchers within the JFK assassination research community, to their enormous credit, repeatedly have uncovered relevant evidence unavailable or overlooked during the official investigations. The members of this research community are the persons who have been the most active in examining the millions of pages of previously secret government documents relating to the assassination that have been declassified and released to the public since 1992.

While many key factual questions about the JFK assassination remain answered, we now, in 2018, know more of the facts surrounding the assassination than ever before. …

Law & Laundry: White Laundresses, Chinese Laundrymen, And The Origins Of Muller V. Oregon, Emily Prifogle

Articles

This article uses the historian’s method of micro-history to rethink the significance of the Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon (1908). Typically considered a labor law decision permitting the regulation of women’s work hours, the article argues that through particular attention to the specific context in which the labor dispute took place — the laundry industry in Portland, Oregon — the Muller decision and underlying conflict should be understood as not only about sex-based labor rights but also about how the labor of laundry specifically involved race-based discrimination. The article investigates the most important conflicts behind the Muller decision, namely …

From Sagebrush Law To A Modern Profession, Kristina J. Running

Articles

No abstract provided.

Securities Law In The Sixties: The Supreme Court, The Second Circuit, And The Triumph Of Purpose Over Text, Adam C. Pritchard, Robert B. Thompson

Articles

This Article analyzes the Supreme Court’s leading securities cases from 1962 to 1972—SEC v. Capital Gains Research Bureau, Inc.; J.I. Case Co. v. Borak; Mills v. Electric Auto-Lite Co.; Superintendent of Insurance v. Bankers Life & Casualty Co.; and Affiliated Ute of Utah v. United States—relying not just on the published opinions, but also the Justices’ internal letters, memos, and conference notes. The Sixties Court did not simply apply the text as enacted by Congress, but instead invoked the securities laws’ purposes as a guide to interpretation. The Court became a partner of Congress in shaping the securities laws, rather …

The Canon Wars, Anita S. Krishnakumar, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Canons are taking their turn down the academic runway in ways that no one would have foretold just a decade ago. Affection for canons of construction has taken center stage in recent Supreme Court cases and in constitutional theory. Harvard Dean John Manning and originalists Will Baude and Stephen Sachs have all suggested that principles of “ordinary interpretation” including canons should inform constitutional interpretation. Given this newfound enthusiasm for canons, and their convergence in both constitutional and statutory law, it is not surprising that we now have two competing book-length treatments of the canons—one by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner, …

Texas Gulf Sulphur And The Genesis Of Corporate Liability Under Rule 10b-5, Adam C. Pritchard, Robert B. Thompson

Articles

This Essay explores the seminal role played by SEC v. Texas Gulf Sulphur Co. in establishing Rule 10b-5’s use to create a remedy against corporations for misstatements made by their officers. The question of the corporation’s liability for private damages loomed large for the Second Circuit judges in Texas Gulf Sulphur, even though that question was not directly at issue in an SEC action for injunctive relief. The judges considered both, construing narrowly “in connection with the purchase or sale of any security,” and the requisite state of mind required for violating Rule 10b-5. We explore the choices of the …

The Draft Restatement (Third) Of Conflict Of Laws: A Response To Brilmayer & Listwa, Kermit Roosevelt Iii, Bethan R. Jones

All Faculty Scholarship

This Essay responds to Lea Brilmayer and Dan Listwa’s criticisms of the Draft Restatement (Third) of Conflict of Laws. We appreciate their engagement. As a general matter, we disagree about the nature and purpose of restatements. More specifically, we disagree about the history and aims of the Restatements of Conflict of Laws. Brilmayer and Listwa’s main criticism—that the drafters of the Restatement (Third) are not authoritatively interpreting any single state’s law and therefore can be only persuasive authority as to the content of a state’s law—could apply to all restatements. But since this Draft Restatement, like other …

Women In Robes 10/04/2018, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Women's Law Society

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Roger Williams University School Of Law And The Women's Law Society Present Women In Robes 10-4-2018, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Centering Women In Prisoners' Rights Litigation, Amber Baylor

Faculty Scholarship

This Article consciously employs both a dignity rights-based framing and methodology. Dignity rights are those rights that are based on the Kantian assertion of “inalienable human worth.”29 This framework for defining rights spans across a number of disciplines, including medicine and human rights law.30 Disciplinary sanctions like solitary confinement or forced medication might be described as anathema to human dignity because of their degrading effect on an individual’s emotional and social well-being.

This Article relies on first-person oral histories where possible. Bioethics scholar Claire Hooker argues that including narratives in work on dignity rights “is both a moral and an …

An Analysis Of St. Thomas Aquinas’S Position On The Relationship Between Justice And Legality, Wei Yao, Kenny Chng

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This paper is directed at a deep investigation of Thomas Aquinas's position on the relationship between justice and legality, a perennial debate in legal philosophy - are unjust laws laws at all? Modern natural law theorists taking contradictory positions all claim to be faithful to Aquinas's ideas on the matter. Yet, they cannot all be correct. This paper aims to discern Aquinas's true position on the matter by undertaking a detailed study of Aquinas's Treatise on Law, the broader context of the Summa Theologiae within which the Treatise is situated, and Aquinas's methodological and definitional approaches.

State Action And The Constitution's Middle Band, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

On conventional accounts, the state action doctrine is dichotomous. When the government acts, constitutional limits take hold and the government action is invalid if those limits are exceeded. When the government fails to act, the state action doctrine leaves decisions to individuals, who are permitted to violate what would otherwise be constitutional constraints.

It turns out though that the modern state action doctrine creates three rather than two domains. There is indeed a private, inner band where there is thought to be insufficient government action to trigger constitutional constraints, but often there is also a public, outer band where there …

The Security Court, Matt Steilen

Maryland Law Review Online

The Supreme Court is concerned not only with the limits of our government’s power to protect us, but also with how it protects us. Government can protect us by passing laws that grant powers to its agencies or by conferring discretion on the officers in those agencies. Security by law is preferable to the extent that it promotes rule of law values—certainty, predictability, uniformity, and so on—but, security by discretion is preferable to the extent that it gives government the room it needs to meet threats in whatever form they present themselves. Drawing a line between security by law and …

The Security Court, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

The Supreme Court is concerned not only with the limits of our government’s power to protect us, but also with how it protects us. Government can protect us by passing laws that grant powers to its agencies or by conferring discretion on the officers in those agencies. Security by law is preferable to the extent that it promotes rule of law values—certainty, predictability, uniformity, and so on—but, security by discretion is preferable to the extent that it gives government the room it needs to meet threats in whatever form they present themselves. Drawing a line between security by law and …

The Changing Landscape Of 19th Century Courts, Nancy Marder

All Faculty Scholarship

Book Review of:Amalia D. Kessler. Inventing American Exceptionalism: The Origins of American Adversarial Legal Culture, 1800–1877. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. 449 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

Law Library Blog (September 2018): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Kentucky Criminal Law Reform In The Age Of Aquarius, Kurt Metzmeier

Faculty Scholarship

In Kentucky criminal law, it is useful to divide legal history into two broad eras: the years before the 1970s and those after that pivotal decade of reforms. The 1970s brought a new court system, a dramatic bail reform law which criminalized the hated bail-bondsmen and even a new court house. However, for the modern case law researcher the most significant change was the adoption of a statutory penal code—a code that marked a break between the two centuries of common-law crimes that preceded 1974 and the four decades afterwards.

Building A Regime Of Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1840-1945, Felice Batlan

All Faculty Scholarship

H-Pad is happy to announce the release of its sixth broadside. In “Building a Regime of Restrictive Immigration Laws, 1840-1945,” Felice Batlan traces a century of U.S. government laws, policies, and attitudes regarding immigration. The broadside explores how ideas about race, class, religion, and the Other repeatedly led to laws restricting the immigration of those who members of Congress, the President, and the U.S. public considered inferior and/or a threat.

The Lost & Found Game Series: Teaching Medieval Religious Law In Context, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context. The Lost & Found project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy. The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & Found …

Unfit For The Constitution: Nativism And The Constitution, From The Founding Fathers To Donald Trump, Jared Goldstein

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Study In Sovereignty: Federalism, Political Culture, And The Future Of Conservatism, Clint Hamilton

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis confronts symptoms of an issue which is eroding at the principles of conservative advocacy, specifically those dealing with federalism. It contrasts modern definitions of federalism with those which existed in the late 1700s, and then attempts to determine the cause of the change. Concluding that the change was caused by a shift in American political identity, the author argues that the conservative movement must begin a conversation on how best to adapt to the change to prevent further drifting away from conservative principles.

Spring 2018 Magazine

Ergo

No abstract provided.

Fiction In The Code: Reading Legislation As Literature, Thomas J. Mcsweeney

Faculty Publications

One of the major branches of the field of law and literature is often described as "law as literature." Scholars of law as literature examine the law using the tools of literary analysis. The scholarship in this subfield is dominated by the discussion of narrative texts: confessions, victim-impact statements, and, above all, the judicial opinion. This article will argue that we can use some of the same tools to help us understand non-narrative texts, such as law codes and statutes. Genres create expectations. We do not expect a law code to be literary. Indeed, we tend to dissociate the law …

Hipster Antitrust: New Bottles, Same Old W(H)Ine?, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Although the debate over hipster antitrust is often portrayed as something new, experienced observers recognize it as a replay of an old argument that was resolved by the global consensus that antitrust should focus on consumer welfare rather than on the size of firms, the levels of industry concentration, and other considerations. Moreover, the history of the Federal Trade Commission’s Section 5 authority to prevent unfair methods of competition stands as a reminder of the dangers of allowing enforcement policy to be guided by vague and uncertain standards.

Hls 200: A Latina's Story About The Bicentennial, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

This essay sketches an arc from my childhood to being an Harvard Law School student to my academic work and professional commitments as a law professor and an alumna of Harvard Law School, working to increase access and success in the legal and medical professions for students and faculty of color. I compare aspects of legal and medical education using demographic data as well as some observations about how diverse faculty have transformed the two professions in their respective approaches to and rationales for diversifying the professions and examine the work being done by diverse faculty in law and health. …

Unframing Legal Reasoning: A Cyclical Theory Of Legal Evolution, Larry A. Dimatteo

UF Law Faculty Publications

This article draws from legal history to inform a part of legal theory. The legal history examination focuses on two theories of legal development - Henry Sumner Maine's "progression thesis" and Nathan Isaacs's "cycle theory." After examining these two theories of legal development, the analysis shifts to how legal history informs theories of legal reasoning. There are numerous long-standing debates on how "law" should be interpreted. These debates are replicated in the question of how "contracts" should be interpreted. Contract law and contract interpretation will be the focus in examining how history informs legal theory, and more specifically, legal reasoning. …