Law Commons^™

Jimmy Hoffa's Revenge: White-Collar Rights Under The Mcdade Amendment, John G. Douglass

Law Faculty Publications

I begin the Essay with a bit of comparative history. In Part I, I describe the death and burial of the Sixth Amendment no-contact rule espoused by Jimmy Hoffa. In Part II, I contrast the birth and expansion of an extra-constitutional no-contact rule under Model Rule 4.2 and the McDade Amendment. I begin with these contrasting histories because I believe they illustrate two critical points about the no-contact rule in criminal investigations. First, despite its place in codes of ethics, the no-contact rule in criminal investigations has little to do with ethics. Instead, today's debate over Rule 4.2 is simply …

Marine Collisions In The Vertical: Submarines Surfacing, John Paul Jones

Law Faculty Publications

Discussion of liabilities arising from maritime collisions involving surfacing submarines.

Colorblindness, Race Neutrality, And Voting Rights, Henry L. Chambers, Jr.

Law Faculty Publications

The Reconstruction Amendments' guarantee of civil rights and political equality for racial minorities means that with respect to voting and representation, raceneutral results should be as much a constitutional imperative as colorblind process. As such, a colorblind electoral rule that unintentionally lessens the ability of a minority group to vote or to choose its candidate of choice should be deemed unconstitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment, not merely unlawful under the Voting Rights Act, unless the jurisdiction can provide a strong justification for the rule focused on why such a rule is reasonably necessary to safeguard the electoral process. This change …

A Preferable Approach For The Ninth Circuit, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

United States Senators Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) recently introduced Senate Bill 2184, which would split the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit into two circuits. This measure differs from Senate Bill 253 that embodies the recommendations submitted to Congress by the Commission on Structural Alternatives for the Federal Courts of Appeals after its one-year study. The Commission found "no persuasive evidence that the Ninth Circuit ... is not working effectively" and clearly rejected bifurcation. However, the Commission recommended that Congress impose a divisional restructuring on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and authorize the …

Anastasoff, Unpublished Opinions, And Federal Appellate Justice, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

In Anastasoff v. United States, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit recently invalidated the court's local rule of appellate procedure providing that "unpublished opinions are not precedent and parties generally should not cite them." Eighth Circuit Judge Richard S. Arnold authored the opinion, holding that this local requirement violates Article ill of the United States Constitution. Regardless of whether the provocative decision in Anastasoff is constitutionally sound, the opinion trenchantly emphasizes the critical significance of a public policy issue that has remained essentially untreated for too long.

The three-judge panel, thus, threw …

A Civil Discovery Dilemma For The Arizona Supreme Court, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

The drafters of the 1938 Federal Rules of Civil Procedure hoped to establish those rules as a model that the states could adopt, thus fostering national and intrastate procedural uniformity. This objective was not realized generally or by very many specific jurisdictions. Observers of the increasingly fractured procedural regime in the federal arena have voiced concerns about the mounting numbers of strictures, the accelerating pace of procedural change and the growing inconsistency of the requirements imposed. Illustrative are the major 1983 and 1993 federal discovery amendments, which new discovery provisions further revised in December 2000. The Civil Justice Reform Act …

Youngstown Revisited, Carl W. Tobias, Christopher Bryant

Law Faculty Publications

One half century ago, President Harry S. Truman promulgated an Executive Order that authorized federal government seizure and operation of the nation's steel mills to support United States participation in the Korean conflict.1 The president relied on his power as commander-in-chief of American armed forces, other executive authority provided by Article II in the United States Constitution, the need for sustaining the American military effort, and temporal exigencies. Eight weeks later, the United States Supreme Court held that Truman lacked any power to seize the property of American steel companies in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer.

On November …

Dear Chief Judge Schroeder, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Dear Judge Schroeder: Congratulations on becoming the Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Judge Procter Hug, Jr., transferred that office to you on December 1, 2000, during a quiet period in the tribunal's life, affording several months of relative calm m which to assume the daunting responsibility for Ninth Circuit operations. Your twenty-one-year service as an active court member will promote the felicitous discharge of your new duties as chief judge and will ease resolution of the difficulties that the tribunal will invariably encounter.

You have entered the pantheon of leaders whose century …

Modern Tort Law Demystified, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Review of Peter Bell & Jeffery O'Connell, Accidental Justice: The Dilemmas of Tory Law (1997).

A Note On The Neutral Assignment Of Federal Appellate Judges, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Response to J. Robert Brown, Jr. & Allison Herren Lee, Neutral Assignment of Judges at the Court of Appeals, 78 Tex. L. Rev. 1037 (2000).

Dear President Bush, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

Professor Tobias offers advice on judicial selection philosophy for the newly-elected President George W. Bush.

Intentional Infliction Of Mental Distress In Nevada, Carl W. Tobias

Law Faculty Publications

The independent cause of action for the intentional infliction of mental distress (IIMD) is the only modern intentional tort for physical injury to persons. State court judges in the United States initially recognized the freestanding cause of action during the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, considerable confusion has attended the judicial recognition, articulation, and application of this tort in a substantial number of American jurisdictions. The jurisprudence of IIMD that members of the Nevada Supreme Court as well as attorneys and litigants in Nevada have developed has remained rather clear, although the justices have decided comparatively few cases in which they have …

Book Review: The Mormon Question: Polygamy And Constitutional Conflict In Nineteenth-Century America, Terryl Givens

English Faculty Publications

Polygamy makes for fascinating social history and for best-selling potboilers as well. This study by Sarah Barringer Gordon, who teaches both law and history at the University of Pennsylvania, is the first attempt to write a full-length legal history of “the Principle.” It turns out that even in this dry-as-dust genre, polygamy fuels a very dynamic story indeed, one that reveals the rich malleability of the Constitution, the endless resourcefulness of determined guardians of public morality, and the resilience of a peculiar people committed to the practice of plural marriage.

Can Paralegals Replace Corporate Lawyers?, Porcher L. Taylor Iii

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

I predict that by 2010, expense will force many of the nation's largest law firm radically to alter the lawyer-paralegal ratio. Hundreds of corporate clients intent on controlling high legal fees will drive this change. Consequently, we may see a new kind of law firm gain popularity: firms with more paralegals than lawyers. Even today, the law of paralegal economics sing a soothing tune to corporate America.

Museletter: January 2002, Gail F. Zwirner

Museletter

This Issue:

Law School Expands Wireless Network Access by Timothy L. Coggins

Reference Source of the Month: West's Annotated Code of Virginia by Gail Zwirner

Recent Faculty Publications

One-L Lexis and Westlaw Training Schedule (Required for Law Skills) (Weeks of January 21 and January 28)

OP/ED: Will a National Tragedy Force U.S. Supreme Court to Join Other Courts and Accept Electronic Filings?

The Judicial Transformation Of Social Security Disability: The Case Of Mental Disorders And Childhood Disability, Jennifer L. Erkulwater

Political Science Faculty Publications

A full account of the judicial influence on Social Security disability programs would require a book-length, perhaps even encyclopedia-length, treatise and would take us far afield from our present concern. This article focuses narrowly on the activities of Legal Services attorneys, mental health reformers, and children's advocates. Although mental health reformer groups are only one of many antipoverty organizations involved in advocacy efforts on behalf of the disabled poor, they have been among the most persistent, the most active, and the most successful in using a litigation strategy to achieve their larger policy goals. According to one Social Security official, …

Indigenous Peoples, American Federalism, And The Supreme Court, David E. Wilkins

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

As America breathes a sigh of relief in the afterglow of the pyrotechnics associated with the first post-September 11 July 4, pondering its global status as as the leading agent in its self-­proclaimed "War on Terrorism," and its domestic situation with a "War on Federalism" raging between the Supreme Court's redefined notion of states' rights and federal authority, it seems a propitious time to ask where indigenous nations fit in this warlike atmosphere, given that the history of Indian/U.S. relations involved a fair amount of war-related activities.

The Legislative Response To The Evolution Of Computer Viruses, Mark R. Colombell

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

On July 19, 2001, and again on July 31, 2001, the United States Government was attacked by a worm. The Code Red worm, a malevolent computer program, spread across the Internet impacting thousands of computers globally. The initial target of the Code Red worm was the White House website. Just days after the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania on September 11, the Nimda virus was unleashed on the Internet. By consuming up to ten percent of the Internet's capacity, Nimda quickly received the distinction as the worst computer infestation to date.

Letter From The Editor, John Joseph Meadows

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

Welcome, readers, to the ninth year of publication at the Richmond Journal of Law and Technology. The entire Journal Editorial Board and Staff are pleased to report that our inundation with submissions since last Spring has permitted us to be quite choosy in selecting articles for this Issue and we hope you will enjoy them and find them to be insightful and current.

In Search Of A Balance Between Police Power And Privacy In The Cybercrime Treaty, D.C. Kennedy

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

Imagine that you wake up one morning, turn on your computer, and open an e-mail message with a catchy phrase in the subject line. Immediately after opening the e-mail’s attachment, your personal computer is severely damaged. Obviously having a bad day, you head to your job as an attorney for a multinational corporation. By the time you arrive at work, there has been damage to company computers across the globe. The monetary costs of the damage, coupled with the downtime, are astronomical. The CEO of your company is furious. You hope to diffuse the situation by informing your boss that …

Wills, Trusts And Estates (Annual Survey Of Virginia Law, 2001-2002), J. Rodney Johnson

Law Faculty Publications

The General Assembly enacted legislation dealing with wills, trusts, and estates that added or amended a number of sections of the Virginia Code in its 2002 Session. In addition, there were ten Supreme Court of Virginia opinions and two United States District Court opinions raising issues of interest to the general practitioner as well as the specialist in wills, trusts, and estates during the period covered by this review. This article reports on all of these legislative and judicial developments.

Erie Railroad V. Tompkins, Wendy Collins Perdue

Law Faculty Publications

Erie Railroad v. Tompkins 304 U.S. 64 (1938), limited the power of federal courts to create judge-made law that would displace state law. Jurists view the Supreme Court's decision both a modern cornerstone of American judicial federalism and an example of legal realism's influence.

Denied Visitation, Its Impact On Children's Psychological Adjustment, And A Nationwide Review Of State Code, Adrienne Volenik

Law Faculty Publications

Denied visitation occurs when one parent prevents the other parent from court mandated visitation allowances with the child. This complex issue affects many families of divorce, but unfortunately is an understudied topic. Additionally, the literature that is available on denied visitation suffers from methodological challenges that are inherent to the complexity of the subject. Denied visitation is not a homogeneous event, but one that is conceptualized into two major categories: appropriate (i.e., concerning safety of the child) and inappropriate (i.e., involving interparent hostility). These two types of denied visitation are further divided into subcategories based on a review of the …

Force And Colonial Development In Eastern Uganda, Carol Summers

History Faculty Publications

This article explores why and how administrators and missionaries in Eastern Uganda came to associate progress and development with the need to whip, coerce, and imprison women, developing new institutions for the violent control of wives that went far beyond more common patterns of informal patriarchal control. New Native Courts took over from husbands in arranging for troublesome wives to be whipped. New mission associations of church, teachers’ and evangelists’ groups, and church men’s groups worked to establish Christian patriarchal control over wives who rejected husbands and Christ. Both officials and missionaries understood clearly that the government and missions needed …

Class Of 2005, University Of Richmond

Class Photos 1998-Current

This facebook contains photographs of the Class of 2005 at the T. C. Williams School of Law.

Digital Handshakes In Cyberspace Under E-Sign: "There's A New Sheriff In Town!", Michael H. Dessent

University of Richmond Law Review

Without doubt, electronic commerce has increased the efficiency of businesses and consumers seeking to purchase goods, services, or intangibles by placing these objects just a keystroke away. If you already enjoy buying lingerie and foie gras over the Internet, you will love the new Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act ("E-SIGN") Want to borrow $10,000 at four in the morning over the Internet to buy a car? E-SIGN allows it. Or how about entering a "cybersigning chat room," extending a "digital handshake," and then buying that cherished wedding gown? E-SIGN allows this to happen. In this era of …

Civil Procedure By Contract: A Convoluted Confluence Of Private Contract And Public Procedure In Need Of Congressional Control, David H. Taylor, Sara M. Cliffe

University of Richmond Law Review

There is great appeal to the notion that parties to a contract may provide in their agreement for how certain aspects of any dispute that may subsequently arise will be resolved. The appeal is so great, in fact, that both parties and courts have embraced the use and enforcement of pre-litigation agreements ("PLAs"). These agreements take a variety of forms. Parties may agree to the forum in which their dispute will be resolved. They may designate the law that will be applied to the resolution of the dispute. Parties may designate what evidence may or may not be presented as …

The Signaling Model Of Social Norms: Further Thoughts, Eric A. Posner

University of Richmond Law Review

One of the most notable trends in legal scholarship is the explosion of writing on social norms. Just a few years ago one might have argued that the scholarship was marginal, of interest to only a handful of law professors, but expressions of skepticism about the value of this scholarship have become rare. At the same time, it would be wrong to say that "law and social norms" ("LSN") is a movement or school within legal scholarship: the writings about this topic are too diverse, and there is little of that sense of forward movement that is characteristic of more …

The Strategic Alternative: How State Takings Statutes May Resolve The Unanswered Questions Of Palazzolo, Michael A. Culpepper

University of Richmond Law Review

In a world of "Hobbesian stick[s]" and "Lockean bundle[s]," analytical confusion should be expected. Indeed, critics describe the world of federal takings jurisprudence as "an unworkable muddle," as "a jumble of confusing holdings," and as a body of law existing in "doctrinal and conceptual disarray." Since the United States Supreme Court first considered the regulatory takings issue in Mugler v. Kansas, the Court's inconsistent application of the doctrine has largely conformed to criticism. Governed by abstruse metaphors' and ad hoc analysis, the Court acknowledges its imprecision 9 and often relies upon it.

Redistricting In A Post-Shaw Era: A Small Treatise Accompanied By Districting Guidelines For Legislators, Litigants, And Courts, Katharine Inglis Butler

University of Richmond Law Review

Legislators in jurisdictions with even modest minority populations will find adopting a challenge-resistant redistricting plan to be more difficult than ever before. The problem is how much consideration to give to race. Too little consideration may produce a plan subject to challenge under the Voting Rights Act (the "Act"). Too much consideration may produce a plan subject to challenge on constitutional grounds.