Law Commons^™

Capital Defense Lawyers: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, Sean O'Brien

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No abstract provided.

The Logic Of Legal Remedies And The Relative Weight Of Norms: Assessing The Public Interest In The Tort Reform Debate, Irma S. Russell

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This article explores the background principles of consistency and proportionality in legal rules and remedies. It identifies the relative strength of the interests of individuals and the public as the key to justifying the remedies available in different areas of law. Understanding the normative guidance of particular legal rules reveals the strength of society's judgment of the interests at stake in different remedies. For example, the principle of consistency generally means that a legal doctrine applying an objective measure of one's interest must apply a like-kind measure to all interests considered, absent some explicit and justifiable basis for different formulations. …

Supreme Court Report 2006-2007: Closing Of The Courthouse Doors?, Julie M. Cheslik, Andrea Mcmurty, Kristin Underwood

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This article reviews the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court for the 2006-2007 term focusing on decisions of particular relevance to state and local government. In reviewing those decisions, we focus on the shifts in the Court over time on those issues.

The expectation that the Supreme Court would shift to the right came to fruition in the 2006-07 term by the sheer lack of clear decisions on the merits. Time and again, the Court decided cases on the standing issue, never reaching the merits and frustrating litigants and citizens attempts to define their rights. Yale law professor Judith Resnick …

Caring Too Little, Caring Too Much: Competence And The Family Law Attorney, Barbara Glesner Fines

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No abstract provided.

The Power Structure: Energy, Politics, And The Public Interest In The Lng Debate, Irma S. Russell

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No abstract provided.

What's Good For The Goose Is Not Good For The Gander: Sarbanes-Oxley-Style Nonprofit Reforms, Lumen N. Mulligan

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In this article, I contend that these Sarbanes-Oxley-inspired, state, nonprofit reforms, particularly the costly disclosure requirements, will be of little value in the effort to improve ethical nonprofit board governance. The article proceeds as follows. Part II provides a primer on the oversight of nonprofit organizations. Part III reviews the recent Sarbanes-Oxley-like nonprofit reforms introduced in seven states. Part IV contends that the disclosure-focused reforms, which form the bulwark of these acts, will not foster ethical nonprofit board governance. Part V argues that this failure stems from the inappropriate application of a stockholder-based, normative perspective in the nonprofit sector. The …

Venue In Missouri After Tort Reform, David J. Achtenberg

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Venue matters. Anyone who doubts it need only look to the venue wars waged in the Missouri Supreme Court during the last decades. Understandably, plaintiffs prefer unrestrictive venue rules so that they can file and try their cases in counties with plaintiff-friendly jury pools. Just as understandably, defendants prefer rules that restrict plaintiffs' ability to choose between multiple venues and, to the extent possible, rules that permit the defendant to select the counties in which they can be forced to defend their actions.

The passage of Missouri's 2005 Tort Reform Act represented an important legislative victory for defendants in this …

Presumed Guilty: Innocence And The Death Penalty, Sean O'Brien

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DNA has really changed the way that defense lawyers and prosecutors think about wrongful convictions and about the criminal justice process. But it has not changed it enough.

There are two distinct sets of prisoners who have been declared innocent and released from prison. One consists of DNA exonerees that was developed through the efforts of the innocence projects. The other consists of people who have been on death row who have been exonerated. Only relatively few of the death row exonerations were accomplished with DNA technology. This article examines both lists and discusses a few lessons that we are …

The Earp-Holliday Trial: An Account, Douglas O. Linder

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The Old West's most famous gunbattle lasted all of about thirty seconds, but it left three men dead, three other men shot, and enough questions to occupy historians for more than a century. The gunfight also led to criminal charges being filed against the three Earp brothers (Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan) and Doc Holliday who, near the O. K. Corral on October 26, 1881, decided to enforce the law against four notorious cowboys. The hearing that followed the shoot-out considered the question of whether the Earps and Hollidays killed out of a justifiable fear for their own lives or simply …

The Treason Trial Of Aaron Burr, Douglas O. Linder

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The high-stakes treason trial of Aaron Burr came at an unstable time, both in Europe and in America. The American and French revolutions worried traditional European powers, Great Britain and Spain, who were determined to keep the radical new doctrine from undermining the power of their royalty. Meanwhile, Napoleon's empire-building produced sustained military conflict on the Continent. The United States seemed on the verge of a war with Spain, even as the Administration struggled to preserve neutrality. Americans west of the Alleghenies rejoiced in President Jefferson's acquisition of the Louisiana Territory, but boundary disputes and Spanish prohibitions on Louisiana residents' …

The Trial Of Charles Guiteau: An Account, Douglas O. Linder

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A sense of having been wronged, together with a warped idea of political duty, brought Charles Julius Guiteau to the Baltimore and Potomac Station in Washington on July 2, 1881. On that same Saturday morning, President James Abram Garfield strode into the station to catch the 9:30 A.M. limited express, which was to take him to the commencement ceremonies of his alma mater, Williams College - and from there, Garfield planned to head off on a much-awaited vacation. He never made the 9:30. Within seconds of entering the station, Garfield was felled by two of Guiteau's bullets, the opening act …

The Trial Of John Brown: A Commentary, Douglas O. Linder

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The arrest, trial, and execution of John Brown in the fall of 1859 came at a critical moment in United State history. According to historian David S. Reynolds in his biography, "John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights" (2005), Brown's actions and statements following his failed attempt to begin a slave insurrection near Harper's Ferry, Virginia so polarized northern and southern opinion on the slavery issue as to ensure Abraham Lincoln's election and cause the Civil War to occur perhaps two decades earlier than it might have otherwise. Reynolds is quick …

The Trial Of John W. Hinckley, Jr., Douglas O. Linder

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The verdict of not guilty for reason of insanity in the 1982 trial of John Hinckley, Jr. for his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan stunned and outraged many Americans. An ABC News poll taken the day after the verdict showed 83% of those polled thought justice was not done in the Hinckley case. Some people - without much evidence - attributed the verdict to an anti-Reagan bias on the part the Washington, D. C. jury of eleven blacks and one white. Many more people, however, blamed a legal system that they claimed made it too easy for juries to …

The Trials Of Alger Hiss: A Commentary, Douglas O. Linder

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No criminal case had a more far-reaching effects on modern American politics than the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers spy case which held Americans spellbound in the middle of the twentieth-century. The case catapulted an obscure California congressman named Richard Nixon to national fame, set the stage for Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious Communist-hunting, and marked the beginning of a conservative intellectual and political movement that would one day put Ronald Reagan in the White House. Even without its important influence on American political debate, the trials of Alger Hiss for perjury have the makings of a great drama. They featured two men …

The Black Sox Trial: An Account, Douglas O. Linder

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The players on Charles Comiskey's 1919 Chicago White Sox team were a fractious lot with plenty to complain about. The club was divided into two gangs of players, each with practically nothing to say to the other. Together they formed the best team in baseball -- perhaps one of the best teams that ever played the game -- yet they were paid a fraction of what many players on other teams received. Comiskey's contributions to baseball were beyond question, but he was both a tightwad and a tyrant. The White Sox owner paid two of his greatest stars, outfielder Shoeless …

The Existentialist And The River: An Essay In The Memory Of Robert Popper, Dean Of The Umkc Law School, John W. Ragsdale Jr

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No abstract provided.

To Live In In-‘Fame’-Y: Reconceiving Scandalous Marks As Analogous To Famous Marks, Jasmine C. Abdel-Khalik

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In 1905, Congress enacted a revised trademark registration act, which included a prohibition on registering marks containing or consisting of scandalous or immoral material. Because Congress failed to provide any further guidance either in legislative history or in the statutory language, administrative bodies and the courts have struggled to define this standard. Over the past century, decisions applying this prohibition have been inconsistent. The general public and potential trademark owners are unable to predict accurately if a mark will be accepted or refused for federal registration, which has some significant benefits. Perhaps because of this uncertainty, some estimate that hundreds …

(Mis)Understanding A Banking Industry In Transition, William K. Black

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The U.S. financial system is, again, in crisis caused by huge numbers of defaults among subprime mortgage borrowers and mortgage derivatives; and, massive losses for the holders of new-fangled investments comprised of bundles of loans of varying risk, including many of those subprime mortgages. The largest financial institutions have followed business practices that were certain to produce massive losses - so imprudent that they have created a worldwise financial crises. To even begin to understand events in the U.S. and global banking industries, you have to look back at the seismic shifts in the industry over the past 30 to …

The Oklahoma City Bombing And The Trial Of Timothy Mcveigh, Douglas O. Linder

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A bomb carried in a Ryder truck exploded in front of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City at 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995. The bomb claimed 168 innocent lives. That a homegrown, war-decorated American terrorist named Timothy McVeigh drove and parked the Ryder truck in the handicap zone in front of the Murrah Building there is little doubt. In 1997, a jury convicted McVeigh and sentenced him to death. The federal government, after an investigation involving 2,000 agents, also charged two of McVeigh's army buddies, Michael Fortier and Terry Nichols, with advance knowledge of the bombing and participation …

An Introduction To The My Lai Courts-Martial, Douglas O. Linder

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Two tragedies took place in 1968 in Viet Nam. One was the massacre by United States soldiers of as many as 500 unarmed civilians - old men, women, children - in My Lai on the morning of March 16. The other was the cover-up of that massacre. On March 14, a small squad from C Company ran into a booby trap, killing a popular sergeant, blinding one GI and wounding several others. The following evening, when a funeral service was held for the killed sergeant, soldiers had revenge on their mind. After the service, Captain Medina rose to give the …

The Amistad Case, Douglas O. Linder

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The improbable voyage of the schooner Amistad and the court proceedings and diplomatic maneuverings that resulted from that voyage form one of the most significant stories of the nineteenth century. When Steven Spielberg chose the Amistad case as the subject of his 1997 feature film, he finally brought it the attention the case had long deserved, but never received. The Amistad case energized the fledgling abolitionist movement and intensified conflict over slavery, prompted a former President to go before the Supreme Court and condemn the policies of a present Administration, soured diplomatic relations between the United States and Spain for …

The Leonard Peltier Trial, Douglas O. Linder

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The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in Minnesota in 1968 to promote traditional Native American culture and instill pride in the Native American community. AIM's targets included both the federal government, with whom it had a long list of grievances (especially focused on its record of many broken treaties) and progressive Indians, who they believed undermined native traditions and solidarity. In February 1973, AIM instigated a seventy-one day takeover of the site of a famous 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The massacre had resulted in the deaths - at the hands of the United States Calvary - …

The Trial Of Sacco And Vanzetti, Douglas O. Linder

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Sacco and Vanzetti: for a generation of Americans, the names of the two Italian anarchists are forever linked. Questions surrounding their 1921 trial for the murders of a paymaster and his guard bitterly divided a nation. As the two convicted men and their supporters struggled on through appellate courts and clemency petitions to avoid the electric chair, public interest in their case continued to grow. As the end drew near, in August 1927, hundreds of thousands of people - from Boston and New York to London and Buenos Aires - took to the streets in protest of what they perceived …

The Trial Of Susan B. Anthony For Illegal Voting, Douglas O. Linder

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More than any other woman of her generation, Susan B. Anthony saw that all of the legal disabilities faced by American women owed their existence to the simple fact that women lacked the vote. When Anthony, at age 32, attended her first woman's rights convention in Syracuse in 1852, she declared that the right which woman needed above every other, the one indeed which would secure to her all the others, was the right of suffrage. Anthony spent the next fifty-plus years of her life fighting for the right to vote. She would work tirelessly: giving speeches, petitioning Congress and …

Trial Of The Rosenbergs: An Account, Douglas O. Linder

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The Rosenberg Trial is the sum of many stories: a story of betrayal, a love story, a spy story, a story of a family torn apart, and a story of government overreaching. As is the case with many famous trials, it is also the story of a particular time: the early 1950's with its cold war tensions and headlines dominated by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his demagogic tactics. The Manhattan Project was the name given to the top-secret effort of Allied scientists to develop an atomic bomb. One of the Manhattan Project scientists working in Los Alamos was a British …

The Story Of The Court-Martial Of The Bounty Mutineers, Douglas O. Linder

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The true story of the 1789 mutiny on the Bounty is far more complicated than suggested by film versions of the event, which have emphasized the gratuitous cruelty of the ship's captain, William Bligh. The psychological drama that played out in the South Seas starring Bligh, the efficient disciplinarian, and his mate, the sensitive and proud Fletcher Christian, led to, among other things: one of the most amazing navigational feats in maritime history, the founding of a British settlement that continues to exist today, and a court-martial in England that answered the question of which of ten captured mutineers should …

Scholarship Advice For New Law Professors In The Electronic Age, Nancy Levit

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The article suggests that the legal academy is in a time of transition between promotion and tenure rules based on traditional methods of publication and contemporary electronic and interdisciplinary possibilities for publication. While a number of articles contain recommendations for newer law professors about the process of scholarship, most of those articles are between five and twenty years old and do not address publishing in the age of blogs, expedited reviews, electronic submissions, and open-access databases.

The substance and length of what law professors write, the formats in which they do so, and the fora in which they publish are …

Law And Heidegger’S Question Concerning Technology: Prolegomenon To Future Law Librarianship, Paul D. Callister

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Following World War II, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger offered one of the most potent criticisms of technology and modern life. His nightmare is a world whose essence has been reduced to the functional equivalent of a giant gasoline station, an energy source for modern technology and industry. "This relation of man to the world [is] in principle a technical one . . . [It is] altogether alien to former ages and histories. For Heidegger, the problem is not technology itself, but the technical mode of thinking that has accompanied it." Such a viewpoint of the world is a useful …

The Haymarket Riot And Subsequent Trial: An Account, Douglas O. Linder

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When an anarchist - whose identity remains a mystery even today - tossed a homemade bomb into a great company of Chicago police at 10:20 P.M. on the night of May 4, 1886, he could not have appreciated the far reaching consequences his reckless action would have. His bomb, thrown in a light drizzle as the last speaker at a labor rally climbed down from the speaker's wagon, set off a frenzy of fire from police pistols that would leave eight officers and an unknown number of civilians dead, and scores more injured. It led to the nation's first Red …

The Massie (Honor Killing) Trials 1931-32, Douglas O. Linder

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Two dramatic criminal trials, one for rape and one for murder and both involving multiple defendants, forever changed the nature of Hawaiian race relations and politics. Filled with twists and turns and unanswered questions, the trials have all the elements of a good mystery. The second of the so-called Massie Affair trials also closes out the courtroom career of America's greatest defense attorney, Clarence Darrow. No trials ever had a more significant effect on a state's history than those that shocked and shook Hawaii in 1931 and 1932.