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Full-Text Articles in Law
“Who Will Judge The Many When The Game Isthrough?”: Considering The Profound Differencesbetween Mental Health Courts And “Traditional”Involuntary Civil Commitment Courts, Michael L. Perlin
“Who Will Judge The Many When The Game Isthrough?”: Considering The Profound Differencesbetween Mental Health Courts And “Traditional”Involuntary Civil Commitment Courts, Michael L. Perlin
Seattle University Law Review
For forty years, we have known that involuntary civil commitment hearings are—in most jurisdictions—“charades.” When the Supreme Court noted, in Parham v. J.R., that the average length of a civil commitment hearing ranged from 3.8 to 9.2 minutes, the reaction of many who had done these cases was, “What? So long?!” The characterization of such hearings as being a “greased runway” to a state institution has never been disputed. Lawyers representing these individuals were bored or contemptuous; judges simply wanted to get cases moving; opposing counsel looked at their wrist watches to see when the cases would be done. This …
#Sowhitemale - Federal Civil Rulemaking, Brooke D. Coleman
#Sowhitemale - Federal Civil Rulemaking, Brooke D. Coleman
Faculty Articles
116 out of 136. That is the number of white men who have served on the 82-year old committee responsible for creating and maintaining the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The tiny number of non-white, non-male committee members is disproportionate even in the context of the white-male-dominated legal profession. Were the rules simply a technical set of instructions made by a neutral set of experts, perhaps these numbers might not be as disturbing. But that is not the case. The Civil Rules embody normative judgments about the values that have primacy in our civil justice system, and the rulemakers—while expert—are …