Law Commons^™

Materials For Presentation: The Disappearing Colorado River, Lawrence J. Macdonnell

Navigating the Future of the Colorado River (Martz Summer Conference, June 8-10)

7 pages.

"Western Economics Forum, Fall 2010"

Seeing The Forest Through The Trees: Thinking Critically About Mental Health Courts, John A. Bozza

John A Bozza

The almost universal acceptance of the problem-solving court concept by both the courts and the academic community provides a good example of the hazards of the bandwagon effect on the de-velopment of public policy. The proponents of therapeutic juris-prudence have successfully promoted the adoption of these pro-grams by repeating and then having others repeat a mantra of success that grossly belies reality and ignores the compelling is-sues they raise. Not surprisingly, this has led to the develop-ment of an extensive bureaucracy fueled almost entirely by fed-eral money and encouraged by cheerleaders entrenched in the self-serving subculture of therapeutic jurisprudence. Unfortunately, …

Legal Ethics And Campaign Contributions: The Professional Responsibility To Pay For Justice, Keith Swisher

Keith Swisher

Lawyers as johns, and judges as prostitutes? Across the United States, attorneys (“johns,” as the analogy goes) are giving campaign money to judges (“prostitutes”) and then asking those judges for legal favors in the form of rulings for themselves and their clients. Despite its pervasiveness, this practice has been rarely mentioned, much less theorized, from the attorneys’ ethical point of view. With the surge of money into judicial elections (e.g., Citizens United v. FEC), and the Supreme Court’s renewed interest in protecting justice from the corrupting effects of campaign money (e.g., Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co.), these conflicting currents …

Allocating Power Within Agencies, Elizabeth Magill, Adrian Vermeule

All Faculty Scholarship

Standard questions in the theory of administrative law involve the allocation of power among legislatures, courts, the President, and various types of agencies. These questions are often heavily informed by normative commitments to particular allocations of governmental authority among the three branches of the national government. These discussions, however, are incomplete because agencies are typically treated as unitary entities. In this essay, we examine a different question: How does administrative law allocate power within agencies? Although scholars have sometimes cracked open the black box of agencies to peer inside, their insights are localized and confined to particular contexts. We will …

On The Study Of Judicial Behaviors: Of Law, Politics, Science And Humility, Stephen B. Burbank

All Faculty Scholarship

In this paper, which was prepared to help set the stage at an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Indiana (Bloomington) in March, I first briefly review what I take to be the key events and developments in the history of the study of judicial behavior in legal scholarship, with attention to corresponding developments in political science. I identify obstacles to cooperation in the past – such as indifference, professional self-interest and methodological imperialism -- as well as precedents for cross-fertilization in the future. Second, drawing on extensive reading in the political science and legal literatures concerning judicial behavior, …